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      Review: In ‘sandblasted,’ Seizing the Day. Also the Nose.

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      When their body parts start falling off, two women go on a spiritual journey with an Oprah-esque guru in Charly Evon Simpson’s new play.As the lights go up, we discover two women half-buried in sand — which is one more woman than stingy Samuel Beckett offered in “Happy Days.” But Beckett’s semi-subterranean Winnie faced only the terrors of eternity. For Angela and Odessa, the main characters in Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which had its world premiere Off Broadway on Sunday, the problem is closer to home.A lot closer: not even arm’s length, you might say. Because less than a minute into the action, it is that appendage that falls off Odessa’s body like an overripe fruit from a tree.Kudos to the prosthetic designer, Matthew Frew, for the lifelike limb, and to Simpson for the bolt of surreal humor at the start of a play that wants to be a Beckettian comedy about Black women in extremis. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not for lack of trying.For me, it tries too hard. The central metaphor — that Black women are literally falling apart — is assiduously explored, but the issues that might give it heft are left, like Angela and Odessa, buried in the sand. Random racist violence and the increased rate of infant mortality are name-checked only.Which is not to say that every play about Black women must be a tragic news bulletin. In some ways it’s a relief that when Angela and Odessa do rise from the sand, there’s some enjoyable interplay between them. There’s not much development, though, unless you count the further shedding of body parts. Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) loses her nose and a toe; Odessa (Marinda Anderson) reglues her arm but drops the occasional finger.The women are, at first, strangers, having come to the same beach seeking the sand and fresh air they have heard might “slow the process” of their apparently epidemic condition. They both fit the at-risk demographic: stressed-out Black women, especially those living in big cities. Though joined by common disaster, they are meet-cute opposites: Odessa blingy, fatalistic and cool; Angela nerdy, anxious and eager to please. She calls herself a “safety cat” as opposed to a “scaredy cat.”Marinda Anderson, left, as Odessa, and Brittany Bellizeare, right, as Angela, join Rolonda Watts, as a guru named Adah, on a spiritual quest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut with the beach treatment more or less a bust, they nevertheless set out together on a mad mission to seek the advice and care of an Oprah-like wellness guru named Adah. Adah, who says she is “somewhere below 100” in age, has not been afflicted by the disease, and has thus become a popular source of inspiration about it, writing books, giving lectures (“Girl, Stop Falling Apart!”) and preaching the murky gospel of self-help.Yet “sandblasted” is not a satire of Oprah or Oprah-ism; especially as played by the former newscaster and talk show host Rolonda Watts, Adah is at least as warm as she is sententious. You can’t help but like her even though she’s oblivious to the way her privilege provides insulation and her prescriptions turn out to be riddling and fickle. As she joins Angela and Odessa on a journey that seems more spiritual than medical, she suggests they travel east. Oh wait, no, west. Well, somewhere.The play is similarly wayward: its path sometimes random, its chronology scrambled for no reason. Angela and Odessa seem scrambled, too; they exchange positions in their arguments, perhaps to maintain the semblance of conflict where little exists. Lively disagreement comes into the picture only when Angela’s playboy brother does; Jamal (Andy Lucien) attends an Adah lecture so he’ll “seem more understanding when I go on dates” and tries to pick up the not-having-it Odessa, whom he meets too coincidentally at the bar where he works.The actors, under the direction of Summer L. Williams, are all enjoyable, making the most of characterful writing when it’s provided, and doing what they can with the big gulps of self-conscious poetry Simpson has otherwise asked them to deliver.And “sandblasted” — a coproduction of the Vineyard and WP theaters — looks handsome, too, its surreal landscape represented in Matt Saunders’s set by heaps of sand, a cotton-ball sky and doors and windows cut into the cycloramic horizon. The witty costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and alfresco lighting (by Stacey Derosier) help counter the vagueness of time and locale. Despite those felicities, the play, with 18 scenes totaling an hour and 40 minutes, is too long for its own good, a problem not ameliorated by stodgy pacing and shaggy transitions.Not everyone will feel that way. Some people in the audience on the night I attended were signifying with murmurs and finger snaps their appreciation for the well turned phrases and tender encomiums about caring for one another and seizing the day. And though I found the pileup of metaphors oppressive, I have to admit they were eye-opening. An especially elaborate one introduced me to the phenomenon of fulgurites: tubes of glass formed underground when lightning hits sand.In the context of “sandblasted,” they are clearly meant to symbolize Black women themselves, the lightning strike of disaster having fused with their own nature to make something beautiful and precious — and, all too often, buried.sandblastedThrough March 13 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      What to See and Experience Live in New York This Spring

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      ‘Funny Girl’ and ‘A Strangle Loop’ on Broadway, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s dances, Olivia Rodrigo’s pop takeover: what our critics and writers are looking forward to this season.Broadway‘TAKE ME OUT’ Peanuts and crackerjacks may not be available at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, but anyone who thinks that live theater is the ultimate spectator sport should root for the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s comedy. Set in the locker room of a professional baseball team, the play stars Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as a big-shot player who wants to come out as gay. Openly queer athletes are somewhat more common than when Greenberg wrote the play, which debuted at the Public Theater in 2002 and later won three Tony Awards. But they remain a rarity in team sports. So the play’s conversations around excellence, sexuality and the boundaries between public and private lives, should still make it around the bases. Scott Ellis directs, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Patrick Adams (“Suits”) co-star. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin March 10; opens April 4 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan.‘FUNNY GIRL’ It’s hard to think of another Golden Age megahit that hasn’t had a Broadway revival. Surely it’s not the fault of the terrific songs, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, including “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “People.” And though the original book isn’t top-notch, it gets the job done, telling the story of the comedian Fanny Brice from teenage years to stardom by way of romantic catastrophe. No, the reason is simple: Barbra Streisand. Nearly 60 years after creating the role, she essentially still owns it. So let’s just say for now that the delightful Beanie Feldstein, who heads this revival, is borrowing it. Whether she can make the production, directed by Michael Mayer and with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, as memorable as the first — well, check back in 60 years. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 26; opens April 24 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan.Daniel Craig will star as Macbeth in Sam Gold’s production at the Longacre Theater.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesRuth Negga will be his Lady Macbeth. Previews begin March 29.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times‘MACBETH’ Is it ever not “Macbeth” time? “The Scottish Play,” as superstitious theater folk call it, has had nearly 50 Broadway productions since 1768, each age no doubt finding in it an echo of its own. In ours, the toxic brew of ambition and credulousness seems to resound most clearly. Will the director Sam Gold, whose takes on “King Lear” and “The Glass Menagerie” were so divisive, draw the modern parallels? All I can say for sure is that with Daniel Craig (a memorably blasé Iago in Gold’s downtown “Othello” in 2016) and Ruth Negga (a riveting Hamlet in 2020) as the suggestible Macbeth and his suggestive Lady, this revival should be a deep dive into cold water. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 29; opens April 28 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.‘FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF’ The year before her death in 2018, the playwright Ntozake Shange went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to see a program by the choreographer Camille A. Brown. It was the first time they met, but they soon saw each other again — and Brown found herself in the startling position of hearing Shange, the revered author of the landmark choreopoem “For Colored Girls,” ask to interview her about her work, because she so enjoyed Brown’s movement language. Dance is elemental to “For Colored Girls,” which first opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for nearly two years, with Shange herself as the Lady in Orange, one of the rainbow of women of color who tell their stories in the play. Revived at the Public Theater in 2019 with Brown (“Once on This Island”) as choreographer, it comes to Broadway this spring with Brown both directing and choreographing. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin April 1; opens April 20 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan.From left, Jeff Still as Mr. Assalone, Tracy Letts as Mayor Superba and Cliff Chamberlain as Mr. Breeding in the play “The Minutes” at the Cort Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘THE MINUTES’ Tracy Letts kills with laughs. In his 2007 breakthrough, “August: Osage County,” the victim was the American family. In “Linda Vista,” which hit Broadway in 2019, men took the blade of his scythe. In those plays, and in many others, he gets you rooting for the worst people until you realize you are then complicit in their destructiveness. “The Minutes,” directed by Letts’s frequent collaborator Anna D. Shapiro, is a 90-minute comedy satirizing the workings of a self-satisfied bureaucracy in a fictional Midwestern city called Big Cherry. It features a cast of Letts experts, including Ian Barford, Blair Brown, K. Todd Freeman, Sally Murphy and, as Mayor Superba, Letts himself. But if it looks like he’s wielding his usual weapons, the target is even bigger than before: America’s idea of its own goodness. JESSE GREENPreviews begin April 2; opens April 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan.‘A STRANGE LOOP’ Since it premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, Michael R. Jackson’s searingly funny and heartbreakingly frank musical “A Strange Loop,” in which he reflected on his experience as a young, queer Black man, has gone on to earn critical raves and a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Now, Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth are bringing the acclaimed production to Broadway, with Jaquel Spivey in the central role of a musical theater writer working as an usher at “The Lion King” and whose thoughts come to blistering life as a sort of Greek chorus. Jackson dismantles orthodoxies with verve and bite, and reserves some of his most pointed barbs for such institutions as church and Tyler Perry. You may never think of that Atlanta mogul the same way again. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 6; opens April 26 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan.Martin McDonagh’s play “Hangmen” will return to the Golden Theater after being canceled at the start of the pandemic. Performances begin April 8.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘HANGMEN’ After Martin McDonagh’s slow-burn thriller was forced to close with the rest of Broadway in March 2020, its producers declared that it couldn’t come back. But McDonagh (“The Pillowman,” “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”) has a way with a plot twist. So here is one more: This 1960s-set work of psychological suspense will return to the same theater, with a somewhat altered cast. Gone is Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as a magnetic London lowlife; in his place is Alfie Allen (“Game of Thrones”). Mark Addy, who played an executioner turned pub owner in the North of England, has also been replaced, by David Threlfall. What remains in this production, which originated at the Royal Court in London, are McDonagh’s shocking gifts: for taut plotting, sharp dialogue and a theatrical style that balances each play on a knife’s edge of comedy and terror. Matthew Dunster directs. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 8; opens April 21 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Off Broadway‘CONFEDERATES’ Dominique Morisseau, one of the most exciting playwrights working today, is best known for her Detroit cycle, which feels like the magnificent progeny of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. She makes magic with language: Her characters are real, her metaphors are sharp, and her dialogue reads like poetry. Morisseau’s work was on Broadway earlier this season with “Skeleton Crew,” and she follows that with the New York premiere of “Confederates,” which tackles institutional racism as it’s experienced by two Black women who live over a century apart. Stori Ayers directs. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin March 8; opens March 27 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘SUFFS’ There’s a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!” in which the camera pans a silent assembly of musical theater writers: essential composers and lyricists of the 21st-century New York stage. Blink and you miss her, but Shaina Taub is in there. So don’t blink, and definitely don’t miss her work. The subject of her latest musical, “Suffs,” is the fight, just over a century ago, for American women’s right to vote. The topic might sound potentially dry as dust, or doctrinaire to a fatal degree. But Taub, a musical magpie with a wholly distinctive voice, has a genius for storytelling that’s smart and political but also playful and funny; for proof, see her tuneful adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” And while she’s lately teamed up with Elton John to write the Broadway-bound musical “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Suffs” is all hers. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin March 10; opens April 6 at the Public Theater, Manhattan.Puppetry is featured in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s “Book of Mountains & Seas,” a choral theater piece based on Chinese myths. It will have a short run in March at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Olafur Gestsson‘BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS’ The composer-librettist Huang Ruo and the director-designer Basil Twist are calling their new work choral theater, but it’s also puppetry on an operatic scale — bold, elegant, monumental. Adapted from Chinese myths and delayed from its American premiere when the Omicron variant shut down the Prototype Festival in January, “Book of Mountains & Seas” arrives for its brief run at St. Ann’s Warehouse with 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and a half dozen nimble puppeteers. First performed last year in Copenhagen, it’s a sensory immersion of sound, light and movement that feels sometimes as if elements of Twist’s most famous puppet piece, “Symphonie Fantastique,” had escaped the water tank to soar majestically in the open air. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESMarch 15-20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.‘HARMONY’ Back in 2019, The New York Times trumpeted that after taking off at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997 and spending more than two decades circling the runway, Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s labor-of-love musical “Harmony” — about the German vocal sextet the Comedian Harmonists, which was immensely popular between the two world wars — was going to have its Off Broadway premiere. In the spring of 2020. Now, the show is finally arriving, with the choreographer-director Warren Carlyle overseeing a cast led by Chip Zien and Sierra Boggess. If nothing else, this is another sign that after its Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” and its recent collaboration with New York City Opera on “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” the producing National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene has become a force on the New York musical landscape. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin March 23; opens April 13 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan.‘CYRANO DE BERGERAC’ There is no shortage of variations on Edmond Rostand’s 19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which the brilliant but big-nosed Cyrano writes beautiful love poems that his handsome but — let’s say, less brilliant — comrade Christian passes off for his own to impress Roxane, a woman whom Cyrano himself loves. Next up is the Jamie Lloyd Company’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” adapted by Martin Crimp and directed by Lloyd, which will come to Brooklyn from a critically acclaimed run in London. It’s a slick, modern version, with Cyrano using rap and spoken word as his means of seduction. Starring as Cyrano is James McAvoy, who often seems to alter his very foundations — his voice and mannerisms, his energy, his whole physical presence — for a role. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 5; opens April 14 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music.‘A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD’ Samuel D. Hunter has built a rich oeuvre from fertile ground: the Idaho landscapes of his youth. His deceptively quiet plays (“Lewiston/ Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise,” “Greater Clements”) explore faith, desire, sex and loss, in dialogue attuned to the rhythms of ordinary speech. The MacArthur Foundation acknowledged his ability to create “dramas that explore the human capacity for empathy and confront the socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.” This new play, directed by David Cromer, is again set in Idaho — and is perhaps the most intimate he has written. It has just two characters, men working to understand what the world does and doesn’t owe them. Though Hunter often prefers characters on what he calls “the losing end of American life,” he has promised that this new play is hopeful. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 12; opens May 2 at Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ The vagaries of postponements and rescheduling now give us two nearly simultaneous opportunities to discover the world of Sanaz Toossi, a young first-generation Iranian American playwright from Orange County, Calif. Hot on the heels of “English” (at the Atlantic Theater Company), which looks at a small group of Iranians preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, “Wish You Were Here” follows five young women in Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. (The actress Marjan Neshat appears in both shows.) They are about 20 when the play begins, in 1978, and we stay with them until 1991 as they navigate not only their friendship, but also their sense of home and belonging. A revolution is unfolding, followed by war with Iraq; life-changing decisions must be made. Toossi reunites with Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who directed last year’s audio version from the Williamsburg Theater Festival and Audible. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 13; opens May 2 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan.‘WEDDING BAND’ Alice Childress was a force to be reckoned with in the theater, even if she didn’t always get her due. After all, she would have been the first Black female playwright on Broadway if she hadn’t refused to compromise on her work. That would-be first was her play “Trouble in Mind,” which finally premiered on Broadway last fall. How fortunate we are to get her follow-up to “Trouble,” “Wedding Band,” a rarely produced play about an illicit interracial relationship in the South during World War I. Awoye Timpo directs this, only the second New York production, with modern race politics — including the Black Lives Matter movement — as the trouble in mind. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 23; opens May 1 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn.‘THE BEDWETTER’ Sorry, “Urinetown,” you’re not the only musical about a certain bodily function anymore. Subtitled “Stories of Redemption, Courage, and Pee” Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir is frank, vulnerable and, of course, brutally funny. Chances are good these qualities will be present in this musical adaptation, since Silverman herself wrote the book with the playwright Joshua Harmon (“Prayer for the French Republic”), as well as the lyrics, with the composer Adam Schlesinger. The show is bound to be bittersweet: Schlesinger, who is best known for his scores for Broadway’s “Cry-Baby” and the TV series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of coronavirus complications in April 2020, around the time “The Bedwetter” was originally scheduled to premiere. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 30; opens May 23 at the Linda Gross Theater, Atlantic Theater Company.Édouard Louis in “Who Killed My Father,” which will arrive at St. Ann’s Warehouse in May.Jean-Louis Fernandez‘WHO KILLED MY FATHER’ At the intersection of memoir, sociological study and call to arms, the French writer Édouard Louis’s books, which often dissect his working-class upbringing, have become an unlikely inspiration for successful plays. Two of them, “The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence,” even opened in New York the same week in 2019. Now, Louis is even more directly involved in the theatricalization of his own life: He is starring in a stage version of “Who Killed My Father,” in which he intermingled a look at the destructive impact of physical work on his father’s body with a takedown of France’s class structure. The production reunites Louis with the brilliant German director Thomas Ostermeier, who also staged “History of Violence.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin May 18; opens May 22 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.PopBURNA BOY Nigerian Afrobeats has gathered a worldwide audience through sleek understatement: an insinuating basic beat that’s equal parts syncopation and silence, productions that conjure bassy depths and open spaces, singers who offer calm confidence rather than histrionics. The pandemic derailed international touring for Afrobeats stars, postponing their chances to claim their ever-expanding American audience. It’s fitting that Burna Boy, the songwriter who won the 2021 Grammy Award for best global music album with “Twice as Tall,” will be the first Nigerian musician to headline Madison Square Garden, with a show billed as “One Night in Space.” With his amiable, husky baritone and the assistance of some of Africa’s most innovative producers, Burna Boy has delivered a steady flow of international hits like “Question,” “Kilometre” and “Want It All” from 2021, and his catalog features cultural messages along with party tunes. He has already headlined arenas in Africa, Europe and England; the United States can soon catch up. JON PARELESApril 28 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.Burna Boy performs at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in October 2021.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressALABASTER DEPLUME Performing as Alabaster dePlume, the U.K.-based saxophonist, vocalist and activist Gus Fairbairn draws equally, and a bit cautiously, upon Indian raga, western New Age music, Hailu Mergia’s late-70s recordings with the Dahlak Band and the psych-folk appropriations of the Incredible String Band. He knows that most of the ideas in his music — musically, lyrically, critically — originated somewhere else; they’re a historical inheritance, and they’re here through colonial encounter.But just knowing doesn’t count for much, and dePlume’s real appeal (as an auteur, a philosopher, a saxophonist) comes from listening to him push through the anxieties of influence into sincerity. More and more, the music wears humane intentions on its sleeve: On “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” from his latest album, “Gold,” due April 1, he admonishes a listener in a purring first-person: “​​I remember my pin number/I remember my ex’s email address/But I forget I’m precious.”Those intentions come through strongly in performance, where dePlume encourages his side musicians to “bring your whole self,” as he said in an interview with The Quietus. He avoids playing consistently with the same group so that every show is guided by intuition. When he arrives in Brooklyn, he’ll be joined by the violist Marta Sofia Honer and the electronic musician Jeremiah Chiu, in a band he pulled together with help from Jaimie Branch, a trumpeter and his International Anthem label mate. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarch 19 at Public Records in Brooklyn.DUA LIPA Released in the surreal and cursed March 2020, Dua Lipa’s nimble, disco-sleek second record, “Future Nostalgia,” was one of the first blockbuster pop albums put out during the Covid-19 pandemic. That it has taken her nearly two years to tour it, though, does not mean its sound has become a distant, early lockdown memory: “Future Nostalgia” has had such a long tail in the usually mercurial pop world that you’d still be hard pressed to scan the radio dial and not come across one of its many smash hits. (Its fifth single, “Levitating,” has been on the Billboard Hot 100 for 66 weeks and counting.)This also means that Lipa’s star wattage has increased considerably since she last toured the United States, for her 2017 self-titled debut album. Consider that the last venue she headlined in New York was the 2,500-seat Hammerstein Ballroom; the Future Nostalgia Tour will come to two local arenas. If her effervescent, impressively calisthenic performance at last year’s Grammys was any indication, Lipa will have no trouble commanding such a huge stage. And given the fact that Lipa’s buoyant tunes were the soundtrack of so many people dancing on their own during those long, lonely months of lockdown, the prospect of grooving to them in a communal setting promises to be extra cathartic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 1 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan; March 4 at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.Dua Lipa earlier this month at FTX Arena.Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Permanent Press MediaOLIVIA RODRIGO Most musicians — even the ones who appear to be overnight sensations — have to pay their dues on small stages first. Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout year happened while the pandemic paused live music, so while she’s a front-runner for a best new artist Grammy, she’s still barely played in front of live audiences at all, save for a few performances on late night TV and at award shows. And so the sold-out Sour Tour will be a proving ground for Rodrigo, whose alternately punky and wrenching debut album, “Sour,” was one of the best and most talked about of last year. Rodrigo’s recent eight-song appearance at “Austin City Limits,” taped for a crowd of giddy fans, was a better showcase for the quieter, more introspective side of her songwriting, like the world-stopping ballad “Drivers License” or the scorched post-breakup note “Traitor.” But her tour will likely provide an opportunity for pop-punk anthems like “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” to connect with a more kinetic audience — plenty of people have been waiting far too long to scream along with Rodrigo’s every word. ZOLADZApril 26-27 at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.Olivia Rodrigo performing at the American Music Awards last fall in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWILCO Vindication doesn’t get much purer, or better deserved, than the fate of Wilco’s 2002 album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” After making three albums of rootsy indie-rock, full of 1960s and 1970s echoes, Jeff Tweedy steered Wilco toward studio experimentation, incorporating unexpected instruments, random noises and surreal mixes. Its opening song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” was a frontal assault on naturalism, savoring loops, glitches and distortion. Wilco’s label, Reprise, told Tweedy the album was horrible and “career-ending,” refused to release it and dropped the band. But Wilco then streamed the songs online to a hugely enthusiastic response. Nonesuch (part of the Warner Music Group along with Reprise) picked up “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”; it reached the Top 20 and sold more than half a million copies. Wilco has endured as a shape-shifting band, with songs that can be transformed onstage. It will mark the 20th anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” by performing the whole album for five nights in New York City and three in Chicago. The sonic palette may seem slightly less radical two decades later, but the songs remain sturdy, full of private yearnings and insights about America. PARELESApril 15-17 and April 19-20 at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan; April 22-24 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago.Classical‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’ There have been all kinds of updatings at the Metropolitan Opera in recent years. “Rigoletto,” set in the Renaissance, has been moved to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, then Weimar Germany. “Carmen,” which the libretto places in the early 19th century, was pulled forward to the time of the Spanish Civil War.But rarer — particularly in a core repertory still dominated by Italian-language classics — are Met productions set in a realistic present day. That can be a step too far for conservative opera aficionados who have grudgingly dealt with (and sometimes booed) the company’s mildly modernized takes on some of their favorites.The Met’s new staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” is therefore a likely flash point. The Australian director Simon Stone (“Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory and “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is setting the work not in its original 18th-century Scottish Highlands, but in a struggling Rust Belt town today.For Stone, both of those milieus are ones in which society’s denial of the power and prosperity that men had assumed was theirs translates to the abuse of women. Living in what he calls a “wasteland of free-market capitalism,” pockmarked by pawn shops, liquor stores and boarded-up houses, Stone’s title character — forced, with tragic results, into marrying against her will — is an opioid addict who meets her secret lover at a motel.The 2007 Mary Zimmerman staging being replaced by this one was also updated, to the Victorian era, but retained a sumptuousness that satisfied traditionalists. Abandoning that, Stone is under pressure to render his fresh vision through his cast, led by Nadine Sierra as Lucia, Javier Camarena as her beloved Edgardo, and Artur Rucinski as her cruel brother. Riccardo Frizza conducts what promises to be a very interesting premiere. Opens April 23. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe Metropolitan Opera is transposing “Lucia Lammermoor” from its original 19th-century Scottish setting to a 21st-century American Rust Belt town.Met OperaJOHNNY GANDELSMAN The violinist Johnny Gandelsman doesn’t take on projects lightly. In addition to his work with the quartet Brooklyn Rider, and with the Silkroad Ensemble, he maintains a robust solo career that has unfolded with one ambitious undertaking after another.With feather-light and fiddling bow strokes, he recorded a novel account of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which he programmed as a breathless marathon instead of the usual assortment of selections. Then he transcribed Bach’s six cello suites for his instrument, again presenting them all together, and justified what might have seemed like a gimmick with an illuminating re-evaluation of music that could hardly be better known.His latest project, “This Is America,” is a swerve from the Baroque, but no less daunting and even more enterprising.In the spirit of another restless violinist, Jennifer Koh, Gandelsman has gone on a commissioning spree, ordering more than 20 new pieces from a group of composers who collectively demonstrate the possibilities of truly diverse programming. What emerges, he hopes, is an argument for the impossibility of capturing the United States in any straightforward or reductive way, as well as for the benefit in aspiring instead to a prismatic portrait of place.He has started rolling out the premieres in a tour whose stops include two evenings at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Both programs open with Bach cello suite transcriptions, but spread between them are also 10 “This Is America” works. On the roster are excellent known quantities, such as Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), Rhiannon Giddens (“New to the Session”) and Angélica Negrón (“A través del manto Luminoso”); as well as Olivia Davis, Nick Dunston, Christina Courtin, Marika Hughes, Adele Faizullina, and Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin. March 16 and 17. JOSHUA BARONEThe violinist Johnny Gandelsman performing last spring at Barge Music in Brooklyn.Mary Inhea Kang for The New York TimesCARNEGIE HALL Scan the schedule at Carnegie Hall, and it’s painfully apparent that it’s still impossible for major overseas orchestras to appear on these shores as they once could — at least unless they are led by the conductor Valery Gergiev, who brings his Mariinsky Orchestra to town (May 3, May 4) after an initial visit with the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of February.One of the few to cross the ocean is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, whose concert with the immaculate pianist Mitsuko Uchida (March 25) would be a highlight of any season, let alone this necessarily sparse one. Together, they will play two Mozart concertos, the repertoire in which Uchida has for so long excelled: the genial, graceful No. 23 in A, and the No. 24 in C minor, one of the composer’s darkest pieces.But if the Mahler ensemble’s appearance is the exception that proves the rule, Uchida’s is something like the opposite: Pianists dominate at Carnegie this spring. Uchida herself will preface her Mozart by appearing with the tenor Mark Padmore, an ideally penetrating pairing for Schubert’s troubled “Schwanengesang” (March 13).Daniil Trifonov (March 3), Beatrice Rana (March 9), Gabriela Montero (March 18) and Andras Schiff (March 31) all arrive in March, with Montero offering an intriguing Carnegie debut putting Schumann, Shostakovich and Chick Corea suggestively together with her own pieces and improvisations. Yuja Wang (April 12), Emanuel Ax (April 28) and Evgeny Kissin (May 20) take their place on the piano bench later; if their programs look a little same-old, Yefim Bronfman (April 18) adds to his repertory with a sonata by the uncompromising Galina Ustvolskaya. And if that’s not enough, Igor Levit returns after his January recital to perform Brahms with the New York Philharmonic (May 6). DAVID ALLENANTHONY DAVIS The composer and pianist Anthony Davis’s operas have been absurdly difficult to seek out this century. But that’s about to change.Portland Opera will present “The Central Park Five” — which earned Davis the 2020 Pulitzer Prize — in March. And Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit will bring Davis’s first operatic triumph, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from 1986, to its stage in May, in a new production by the Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara.New Yorkers may want to keep an eye on this “X,” which is bound for the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2023. A concert presentation will also be on offer from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in June. In both Boston and Detroit, the title role will be sung by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, whose fleet, complex characterizations have proved dazzling in New York — including his lead appearance in Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.” (The baritone Will Liverman is scheduled to take the part at the Met.)Even if the production weren’t headed to New York, Davis’s score would make “X” a destination opera. Just as in his orchestral music and compositions for smaller jazz ensembles, his approach in this opera merges modernism with a wide-angle appreciation of swing and the blues. Although “X” made a strong impression on a 1992 recording, now out of print, Davis is taking this opportunity to revise the score. This spring will be our first opportunity to hear his latest vision of it. SETH COLTER WALLSDanceMOVEMENT RESEARCH AT JUDSON CHURCH This weekly series, which dates to 1991, is an ever-shifting bill of experimental dance. Each program, free on Monday nights, is a stand-alone adventure — the chance to see an imagination blossom on a bare-bones stage. Where is dance going? How is the art form developing in a new generation, and how have choreographers continued to work through the pandemic? Now, more than ever, Judson is critical to the ecosystem of downtown dance.When Movement Research, dedicated to the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, resumed its Judson performances last fall, the idea was to celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, but cancellations were unavoidable; the same thing happened in early winter as yet another wave of the pandemic hit. When, finally, the show did go on one night in February, it felt like a beam of light.This spring, Judson gets another shot at celebrating its anniversary beginning with Lai Yi Ohlsen and Brendan Drake on March 21 and continuing with Benjamin Akio Kimitch and the mesmerizing duo of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith the following week.The season wrap-up is organized by Maria Hupfield, through Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council, a group addressing issues of equity and cultural diversity. The lineup features Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC (KIN), Emily Johnson and Rosy Simas, dance artists very much in tune with the urgency of our time. Dance may have been put on hold, but it has a future. Movement Research proves it. GIA KOURLASThrough May 23 at Judson Church, Manhattan.SARA MEARNS The ballet dancer is just one part of the dancer that is Sara Mearns. In this Joyce Theater production, she explores other sides of her artistry in a collection of collaborations, including a crucial one with the choreographer and dance artist Jodi Melnick. It is through Melnick that Mearns, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, delved into a new way of moving, a new way of thinking about dance and about the intricacies of the body.Together, their contrasts and similarities create, strange as it may sound, a minimalism of excess rooted in delicate, powerfully subtle, liquid dancing. They have spent hours in the studio together; it shows. A highlight will be Melnick’s “Opulence,” a duet that was originally part of a program at Jacob’s Pillow in 2019.The program also includes a short film — shot in Long Island City in March 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown — directed and choreographed by Austin Goodwin for Mearns and Paul Zivkovich, as well as new duets by Vinson Fraley, a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Guillaume Côté, of National Ballet of Canada.In other words, this isn’t another ballerina-in-the-spotlight kind of situation. Not only will Mearns debut a solo by the esteemed choreographer Beth Gill — so curious to see this! — but she has also programmed a Cunningham MinEvent, staged by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, featuring live music by John King. Cunningham isn’t new to Mearns; she performed in “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event,” which celebrated that choreographer’s legacy in 2019. She’s assembled a stellar cast: She will be joined by Taylor Stanley, Jacquelin Harris, Chalvar Monteiro, Burr Johnson and Melnick. It’s star power done right. KOURLASMarch 8-13 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan.STORYBOARD P Storyboard P is an incredible dancer in the most literal sense, the kind who makes it hard to believe your eyes. His name alludes to film, and many people (including him) have likened his style to stop-motion animation and special effects. Gliding and floating in liquid relation to music or flickering to register noise in the signal, he’s a master of illusion whose sophistication and subtlety reward the closest attention. But even more astonishing than his skill is the freedom of his improvisatory imagination. It follows unpredictable twists into deep and strange channels, the territory of dreams.In the Crown Heights neighborhood where he grew up and in the community that developed the street dance known as flex, he was recognized as exceptional at least by the mid-2000s, when he started winning competition after competition, even if he never quite fit in. Around 10 years ago, news began to spread more widely. Appearing in his own clips, in short films by Khalil Joseph and Arthur Jafa and in music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, he became a YouTube star. In profiles — in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The Wire — he talked about forging a new kind of career for a dancer, as “a visual recording artist.”Instead, apart from a cameo in another Jay-Z video (the Arthur Jafa-directed “4:44”), he largely disappeared from the public eye. But he’s resurfacing at Performance Space New York for two freestyle performances called “No Diving 2.” Who knows what might happen. BRIAN SEIBERTApril 7-8 at Performance Space New York, Manhattan.Kouadio Davis, left, and Alexandra Hutchinson of Dance Theater of Harlem in Robert Garland’s “Higher Ground.”Theik SmithROBERT GARLAND AT DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM Dance Theater of Harlem was founded in 1969 with two braided missions: to create a place for Black dancers in ballet and to extend the tradition of George Balanchine and New York City Ballet, where Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theater’s mastermind, got his start. These missions have been carried into the present in the work of the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland.In “Return” (1999), set to recordings by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, and “New Bach” (2002), Garland found a way to combine neoclassical ballet with Black vernacular dance and what he has called “Harlem swag.” His “Gloria” (2013), set to Poulenc and incorporating students, movingly encapsuled the troupe’s phoenixlike rebirth after a nine-year hiatus. In their excellence, these pieces to old music showed how values from the past still had relevance.In 2020, when the pandemic shut down theaters, Garland was about to debut “Higher Ground,” set to some of the more politically sharp tracks from Stevie Wonder’s genius streak of the 1970s. The work finally gets its New York premiere in April, as part of the City Center Dance Festival. The music comes from Garland’s youth but is freshly topical in the age of Black Lives Matter. Even more significant, the dance is an intensely affecting response to that music that could be done only by a ballet company — this ballet company. It feels like the kind of work that Dance Theater of Harlem was made to do. SEIBERT.April 5, 8-10, at New York City Center, Manhattan.Ashwini Ramaswamy in her “Let the Crows Come.”Jake ArmourASHWINI RAMASWAMY Two years after its originally scheduled New York premiere, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s “Let the Crows Come” finally lands at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Ramaswamy, who lives in Minneapolis, grew up steeped in the tradition of the South Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam, and her work often explores the in-betweenness of her cultural identity, the experience of being from both India and the United States.In “Let the Crows Come,” she is joined by two other Minneapolis dancers with different areas of expertise: Alanna Morris, who has a background in contemporary and Afro-Caribbean forms, and Berit Ahlgren, a practitioner and teacher of Gaga, the movement language developed by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Each dancer offers an interpretation of the same Bharatanatyam solo, refracting its rhythmic footwork, sculptural postures and intricate gestures through her own lens. Ramaswamy likens the structure to “a memory that’s experienced differently from person to person.” In the live music, along similar lines, the composers Jace Clayton (also known as DJ Rupture) and Brent Arnold take inspiration from an original Carnatic score by Prema Ramamurthy.New York audiences might know Ramaswamy, a dancer of vibrant clarity and warmth, from the Ragamala Dance Company, the Bharatanatyam troupe led by her mother and sister, with whom she still trains and performs. In a phone interview, she said her work remains intimately tied to theirs.“I wouldn’t say I’m branching out on my own,” she said, “but figuring out my method and my voice within that aesthetic and that lineage.”The title “Let the Crows Come” alludes to a flow between past and present, referring to a Hindu ritual of honoring ancestors through offerings of rice. When crows come to eat the rice, Ramaswamy said, “it means your ancestors are telling you, ‘I’m OK. Keep living your life, but I’m always there with you.’” SIOBHAN BURKEApril 13-15 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan.OKINAWAN DANCE AND MUSIC It’s not often that dance from Okinawa makes its way to New York; when it does, you want to clear your calendar. That’s one lesson I learned from the Japan Society’s exquisite presentation, back in 2015, of Okinawan dance and music. As part of a five-city American tour, a new program, “Waves Across Time: Traditional Dance and Music of Okinawa,” comes to the Japan Society in March. The tour — also stopping at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.; the Kennedy Center in Washington; Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; and the University of Chicago — marks the 50th anniversary of the return of Okinawa to Japan, following the American occupation of the islands after World War II.Assembled by Michihiko Kakazu, the artistic director of the National Theater Okinawa, the two-part evening includes court dances from the classical repertory of kumiodori, a kind of Noh-inspired theater, dating to Okinawa’s era as an independent kingdom, Ryukyu, from the 15th to 19th centuries. Stately, slow and lavishly costumed, these contrast with the program’s other half: more recent, upbeat popular and folk dances, zo-odori. A lecture on the histories of these forms precedes each performance, and interactive workshops invite a closer look at their rhythmic and physical structures. BURKEMarch 18-20 at the Japan Society, Manhattan. More

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      ‘The Daughter-in-Law’ Review: Sons and Wives

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      In this D.H. Lawrence play, a production by the Mint Theater, men are trouble, “pure and simple.”In the darkness before dawn, a sleepless woman and her daughter-in-law keep each other company.There is no love lost between these two — Mrs. Gascoyne, a miner’s widow who keeps her miner sons close in their small English town; and Minnie, a former governess who, just weeks earlier, had the gall to marry one of them. But late in D.H. Lawrence’s play “The Daughter-in-Law,” the women are gentle enough with each other to have a heart-to-heart.“A child is a troublesome pleasure to a woman,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie, “but a man’s a trouble, pure and simple.”If that’s unfair as a generalization, it certainly applies to Mrs. Gascoyne’s Luther, who has passed 30 without exhibiting the slightest twinge of ambition.An enduring mystery of the play is why Minnie, a go-getter with some money of her own, elected to marry him. As a spousal choice, he seems a distant second even to his aimless brother Joe, who still lives with their mother and, in the play’s opening minutes, sits down to a supper that she cuts up for him.In Martin Platt’s diverting revival for the Mint Theater Company, at New York City Center Stage II, the men are not what’s captivating about this play. Rather, it’s Lawrence’s women, drawn with a capacious, conflicted sympathy that recognizes how frustrating it is for a keen-minded person to try to carve satisfaction from a stifling domestic world.Portrayed with a fine ferocity by Sandra Shipley, Mrs. Gascoyne nurtures a bitterness about Luther’s “hoity-toity” new wife — a resentment that’s about class and clannishness, but also about loss of control, because what if her boy doesn’t need her anymore? When an acquaintance, Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie), breaks the news that her daughter is four months pregnant with Luther’s child, Mrs. Gascoyne’s desiccated heart swells in anticipation of the humiliation this will bring to Minnie.The gentle-mannered Minnie, in a beautifully nuanced performance by Amy Blackman, has trouble enough already. Her new marriage has descended into bickering, and Luther (Tom Coiner) is a self-pitying grump. Still, when she says in the heat of anger that she would have preferred “a drunken husband that knocked me about” to a mama’s boy, it seems a stretch.Written in a thick, distinctive dialect of the East Midlands, where Lawrence grew up, the text leaves room for Luther to have some appealing qualities, but here he is all roughness and no complexity. There’s not even a sexual spark that would make sense of Minnie’s choice to be with him — which is a problem, because we are meant to have a stake in their relationship’s success.His brother Joe (Ciaran Bowling) is at least kind to her, mostly; when he isn’t, the change of tenor is more confusing than anything.As with many Mint productions, the play’s back story is part of the allure. Lawrence’s father was a miner; his mother, to whom he was exceptionally close, came from a slightly higher class. He wrote the script in the years after her death in 1910, around the time he wrote his novel “Sons and Lovers,” which has similar themes.Not staged in Lawrence’s lifetime (and previously directed by Platt for the Mint in 2003), “The Daughter-in-Law” feels at times like a purgation — a 20-something playwright rebelling at last against the beloved mother who demanded too much of him emotionally. When Minnie blames Mrs. Gascoyne for hobbling Luther, as if he had no agency, she can sound like she is channeling the playwright’s own wounded outrage. Rebellion, though, is not the same as revenge.“The world is made of men for me, lass,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie.But in the world of Lawrence’s play, the women are the stars.The Daughter-in-LawThrough March 20 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: Conversation and Conflict, as Warhol Meets Basquiat

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      Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as the odd couple artists in Anthony McCarten’s new play, “The Collaboration.”Jeremy Pope, left, and Paul Bettany will also star in the forthcoming film version of “The Collaboration.”Marc BrennerLONDON — Opposite art world titans attract in “The Collaboration,” a new play that opened Thursday at the Young Vic Theater here. Chronicling the creative partnership between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat during the 1980s, Anthony McCarten’s play offers bravura performances from Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope as the two cultural icons.And if the writing isn’t fully the equal of its star turns, well, a film version of this play is already planned. A movie should give McCarten the opportunity to sharpen a script that, as of now, only begins to deliver on its promise in the second act.This writer’s track record with biopics certainly bodes well for Bettany and Pope when they transfer to the screen: The movies McCarten wrote about Stephen Hawking (“The Theory of Everything”), Winston Churchill (“The Darkest Hour”) and Freddie Mercury (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) brought Oscar wins for each of their leading men. His 2019 film, “The Two Popes,” earned nominations for the co-stars Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins and is the closest of those movies in structure to “The Collaboration.”Like that film, with his new play McCarten imagines a duo’s conversations and conflicts. At the beginning, Bettany’s lean, languid Warhol isn’t sure about the commingling of talent that the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (an excitable Alec Newman) has in mind for him and Basquiat: a joint exhibition to decide which of the two is the world’s greatest artist. Bischofberger has an eye on publicity and regards painters, he says, as boxers.Bettany’s Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature.Marc Brenner“Gee,” Warhol objects to the gallerist, “you make it sound so macho, like a contest.” Pope’s initially indrawn, pouty Basquiat, 30 years Warhol’s junior, isn’t any more certain that he wants to be part of a double act: “He’s old hat. Does anyone really care about Warhol now?” One man traffics in brands and pop culture iconography (we see Warhol’s signature Marilyn Monroes on the walls of Anna Fleischle’s flexible, white-walled set), the other sees logos as the enemy. Art, Basquiat maintains, “has to have a purpose.”The material follows a dramatically predictable course from mutual wariness to admiration, leading eventually to love. In fact, that very word is voiced in the penultimate line. Dismissive of Warhol’s attraction to surfaces at the expense of substance, Basquiat comes to adore him as a protective rival turned father figure, of sorts.“I hope you don’t die, Jean,” Warhol cautions, insisting that the addiction-prone Basquiat clean up his act. The younger artist’s reply is to insist on his own immortality, unaware, of course, that both men would die not long after, within 18 months of each other. When they do actually collaborate — on a sequence of paintings — it’s given surprisingly little stage time; you miss the specific attention to the artistic process that fueled a play like John Logan’s Tony-winning “Red,” about Mark Rothko.The director Kwame Kwei-Armah gets up close and personal with Warhol and Basquiat as the duo move beyond some fairly labored exposition (like when Basquiat, on cue, details his Haitian-Puerto Rican parentage) to achieve real power. The two actors manage to find something primal beyond the boilerplate writing.As Basquait, Jeremy Pope is a springy, restless stage presence.Marc BrennerPope, an Emmy and two-time Tony Award nominee, fills with fury as we see Basquiat at work on “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart),” a painting created in response to the police brutality that resulted in the death of a young graffiti artist in 1983. The canvas inevitably chimes with the Black Lives Matter movement Basquiat never got to see, and lends “The Collaboration” a wrenching topicality.A springy, restless stage presence, that sweet-faced actor communicates the heightened edginess of a man hurtling toward disaster. It’s a shame, therefore, that the belated arrival into the play of Basquiat’s girlfriend Maya (Sofia Barclay) seems perfunctory, as if McCarten weren’t sure quite how to broaden the story beyond the artist duo.Bettany, in turn, is a marvel in his first stage role in several decades. The Englishman, a longtime U.S. resident, has starred in Marvel movies and recently impressed as a forbidding Duke of Argyll in the BBC TV show “A Very British Scandal,” which will come to the United States in April.A figure of white-wigged insouciance still reeling from having been shot by Valerie Solanas some years before the play starts, this Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature. Survival, you sense, is no less precarious for him than it is for Basquiat. The two legends are hellbent on self-laceration, reminding us that, no matter how great our cultural legacy, we’re all mortal.The Collaboration.Through April 2 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      Musical Comedy ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ to Open on Broadway Next Fall

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      The new musical, by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, will star Victoria Clark as a teen girl who ages too quickly.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical comedy about a young girl with a medical condition that causes rapid aging, will transfer to Broadway next fall.The show, based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, had an initial Off Broadway run that opened late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it ran through the peak of the Omicron surge of the coronavirus and was greeted with strong reviews. Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “funny and moving.”The musical stars Victoria Clark, a 62-year-old actress playing a 15-year-old girl who is managing not only her affliction — a condition that limits her life expectancy — but also life with a ludicrous family.“It’s a coming-of-age story, but an unusual one because the clock is ticking from the get-go,” Clark said in an interview. “She has a limited amount of time left, and what draws me to her is her joie, and watching how someone can triumph who you least expect to succeed.”Clark, who stars alongside a company of much younger actors, said playing an adolescent had deeply affected her.“There is a boldness and a rawness to adolescence, and at the same time a balance between holding back and going for it that is so beautiful,” said Clark, who won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.” “This character has taught me the beauty of impulse, and the beauty of being present, and not just accepting one’s fate. After the show I just wanted to run and find everyone I loved and tell them how much they meant to me.”The show features music by Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Fun Home,” and a book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Rabbit Hole.” It is directed by Jessica Stone, a longtime actress making her Broadway directing debut, and choreographed by Danny Mefford (“Dear Evan Hansen”).The Broadway cast will feature the same actors as the Off Broadway production, including Steven Boyer (“Hand to God”) and Alli Mauzey (“Cry-Baby”) as the protagonist’s parents, Bonnie Milligan (“Head Over Heels”) as her aunt, and Justin Cooley making his debut as one of her classmates.“Kimberly Akimbo” is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 12 and to open on Nov. 10 at an unspecified Shubert theater. The lead producer is David Stone, who is also the lead producer of “Wicked”; other producers include the actress LaChanze and the theater owner James L. Nederlander, as well as Patrick Catullo, Aaron Glick and the Atlantic Theater Company. More

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      Why Is ‘Cyrano’ Still So Potent? Ask Anyone Who’s Loved at All.

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      The 19th-century French play is quite adaptable, as numerous stage and film versions have shown, including the latest musical starring Peter Dinklage.When the French playwright Edmond Rostand penned “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the late 19th century, he couldn’t have imagined its durability — translations into countless languages, stage productions across the world and several high-profile film adaptations. The newest of those, “Cyrano” (opening in theaters Feb. 25), supplements Rostand’s beloved story with musical numbers by members of the rock band the National — a decidedly contemporary touch. But this is nothing new; Rostand’s has proved a malleable text, and its film adaptations tell us much about the kind of stories audiences were responding to when they were made.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” (streaming on Paramount+) starred José Ferrer, who had played the title role on Broadway in the mid-1940s, winning a Tony for his turn. It’s a classical approach, presentational (the proscenium arch of the stage isn’t visible, but it may as well be), with little attempt at realism in its playing or setting.Though greatly abridged, the script is quite faithful to the story beats of the original play. Cyrano de Bergerac is, we are told, a “soldier, poet, philosopher, magician, playwright … and the best swordsman in Paris.” He is also blessed (or, he believes, cursed) with an enormous, lengthy nose. He’s boisterously self-confident, except in matters of love. Self-conscious of his appearance (“Me, whom the plainest woman would despise”), he keeps his affections hidden from his beloved cousin, Roxane (Mala Powers), and his fears are confirmed when she asks him to set her up with the handsome Christian (William Prince), “because you have always been my friend.”But when Cyrano discovers that Christian is clueless in the ways of romance and hopelessly tongue-tied in the company of the fairer sex, Cyrano comes up with a solution: He’ll write love letters for Christian, providing an outlet for his own affection while giving Roxane the perfect man she desires. “Together we could make one mighty hero of romance,” Cyrano assures Christian, writing a flurry of letters and even standing in for him (vocally, that is) when Christian stands under Roxane’s balcony late one night, barely out of her sight, to woo her.The film and the original play end in tragedy. Christian and Roxane are wed just before he and Cyrano are sent to war, and when Christian dies in battle, his secret dies with him; Roxane enters a convent in mourning, and Cyrano only confesses to authoring the letters just before his own death years later.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” was mainly a showcase for the performance of José Ferrer (opposite Mala Powers as Roxane). John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe film won Ferrer an Oscar for best actor but scored no other nominations, which sounds about right: Michael Gordon’s direction is competent and Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is inspired, but this “Cyrano” serves mostly as a record of a masterful performance. (A 1990 film version, starring Gérard Depardieu, is a more satisfying “traditional” take.)Yet the film was striking enough to make an impression on Steve Martin, who saw it on television at the age of 12 and never forgot it, spending the next several decades quietly harboring a desire to play the role.“I had no intention of writing the script myself,” he told The Times in 1987; at that point, he had only penned “The Jerk” and other broad comedies. “I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.”So Martin spent four years writing it himself, soliciting suggestions for updates and modifications from everyone from former collaborators Carl Reiner and Herbert Ross to the author Gore Vidal. In “Roxanne,” released in 1987 (and streaming on Hulu), Cyrano de Bergerac has become C.D. Bales (Martin), a firefighter, a wit, an “encyclopedia,” an acrobat, a chef and (obviously) a writer. The movie is filled with markers of the era: a saxophone-heavy jazz score, copious casual drug references, a gender flip for our hero’s best friend. Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), now spelled with another “n,” is a brainy astronomer; Christian is now “Chris” (Rick Rossovich), a hunky firefighter.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Daniel Isaac, 'Billions' Actor, Cedes the Spotlight While Quietly Commanding It

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      Daniel K. Isaac, a theater actor with a steady gig on the series “Billions,” is appearing at the Public in Lloyd Suh’s play “The Chinese Lady.”“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.“It’s a big chair,” he said.Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.Isaac, left, and Shannon Tyo in Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady” at the Public Theater, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Chinese Lady” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.Isaac with Tyo. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIsaac was born in 1988, in Southern California, the only child of a single mother who had immigrated from South Korea. At her megachurch, his mother heard a story of a pastor who suffered from stage fright. And because she imagined that Isaac might one day become a preacher — or a lawyer, or a doctor, who might have the occasional lecture — she signed him up for the church’s drama troupe.In high school, he participated for the first time in secular theater, playing a gambler in “Guys and Dolls.” He loved it. “There’s nothing like the community of theater, or what I still call the church of theater,” he said. This was also a time when he was struggling with his attraction to men and voluntarily undergoing conversion therapy. Theater, by contrast, allowed him to experiment with his identity, to try on different ways of being.“It became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more,” he said.He finished high school at 16 and went on to study theater at the University of California, San Diego, where he accepted his sexuality, which led to an estrangement from his mother. (They’re still working on it.) After graduation he moved to New York City and found restaurant work. He had set his sights on classical theater because peers had told him that, as an actor of color, he might find more parts there.“I was trying to imagine, could I be the token Asian in a project?” he said. “And would that be enough?”Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)Dhruv Maheshwari, left, and Isaac in “Billions.”Christopher Saunders/ShowtimeThe showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.There’s a sweetness to his “Billions” character, which contrasts with the macho posturing of his colleagues at an asset management company. And that sweetness, as his co-star Kelly AuCoin said during a recent phone conversation, is all Isaac. “He could not be a more lovely or positive person,” he said. “He emanates love.” AuCoin broke off, worrying that his praise sounded fake. Which it wasn’t, he assured me. Then he broke off again. Isaac had just texted to wish him a happy birthday.For Isaac, who tries to do theater in between “Billions” shoots, taking on the role of Atung felt personal. And it felt important, not only as a way to explore who these characters were, but also as a means to reclaim their history.“Daniel understands the sacrifices made to get him where he is, and it imbues his work with a sense of purpose,” Ralph B. Peña, the play’s director, wrote in an email.Isaac says that theater “became the safe space that allowed me to grow up, mature, open up more.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn 2018, playing Atung, and reckoning with the weight of what men like him had suffered, felt painful. “I think I took it a lot more personally,” Isaac said. In the intervening years, anti-Asian prejudice, fueled by misinformation around Covid-19, seemed only to increase, which has made the work feel even more necessary.“If art has any capacity to make space for understanding, or empathy, or can be more than just entertainment, which I hope and live by, then I want to share that,” he said.Isaac has a way, in conversation and seemingly in his life, of taking the emphasis off himself and putting it onto the work, his colleagues, the world. That’s why he started writing plays.“Because then I could literally give the spotlight to others,” he said. “And sit in the shadows and still experience something and the joy of creation.” Ma-Yi will produce his first play in the fall, “Once Upon a (Korean) Time,” which explores the Korean War through the medium of Korean fairy tales.Tyo, his “The Chinese Lady” co-star, would like to see him find his light. They often help each other film auditions, so she has seen the range of what he can do. “I just want somebody to give him the chance to be like, a small town hero cop,” she said. “He’s very good at it. He’s very good at surfer bro. There is a range of people I would love to see him take center stage doing.”He is trying, he said. And at the risk of sounding what he called “extra woo-woo,” he thanks theater for helping him to try. “I credit the theater community because that’s where I felt safest and saw people being fearlessly themselves,” he said. “That gave me permission to try to step toward that in my own journey. And I’m still doing that.” More

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      Is There Such a Thing as Black Thought?

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Tariq Trotter — the rapper who fronts the legendary hip-hop band the Roots — pulled up to the Pershing Square Signature Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, where he was rehearsing for the new Off Broadway musical “Black No More.” He drove a black sedan that reminded me of the Batmobile — suitable for an artist who goes by the nom de guerre Black Thought, the name of a bearded Negro superhero if ever there was one. Five minutes earlier, Trotter had sent me a text: “Stay around. I have some music I want to play for you.” The city was dark and quiet, and I climbed into a car whose make I didn’t know.Trotter didn’t speak as we pulled into traffic. I imagined we were headed to the famed Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street to hear this new music. Instead, we stopped for gas. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: Trotter drives an hour from his home in suburban New Jersey to the theater and then back every day; why wouldn’t he pump his own gas? As I waited for him to finish, someone shouted, “Nice AMG!” referring to the car. When he hopped back in, we stayed parked and bumped the music like two teenagers in a hooptie in the late ’90s, rap taking us somewhere else. Trotter turned his speakers to ear-bleed level and played songs from four albums of unreleased music, songs with a sonic landscape best described as jazz meets Motown meets funk. The music’s most persistent subject was what it means to be Black. The thesis could be captured succinctly: Blackness is not a monolith. Every other lyric was dedicated to demonstrating the truth of that idea. Astonished at the amount of music I was hearing — music he’d kept hidden from hungry fans — I asked Trotter if he’d just played his entire oeuvre or if he was like Prince, who was famed for hiding away decades’ worth of unreleased music, only presenting a narrow sliver to the public.“Like Prince,” he told me. “The Roots, we got albums and albums upon albums worth of work in the vault.”In other words, he has creative gears he hasn’t deigned to show us yet. Now, Trotter, an M.C. who rapped in one of those unreleased songs that he was “Black as a Renaissance Harlemite,” is helping to reimagine the 1931 satirical novel “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler, a Harlem Renaissance novelist, journalist and critic, as a musical. Both the novel and the musical tell the story of the dubious doctor Junius Crookman, who invents the Black No More treatment, guaranteeing that he can transform the darkest Negro to the whitest alabaster. When the protagonist Max Disher, a Harlem resident who feels perpetually burdened by all the ways society uses his Black skin to deny him the future his talents and ambition might secure, learns of this cure, he rushes to undergo Dr. Crookman’s treatment. Soon after that, nearly all of Black America follows Disher through the Black No More machine, upending the American racial order. Schuyler’s book grew out of his incendiary ideas about American race relations. “The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” he wrote in his 1926 essay “The Negro-Art Hokum.” Schuyler viewed Black racial identity as a scam perpetuated by racists and race men like W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and James Weldon Johnson, all of whom he lampoons in “Black No More.” He believed that, if they could, Black people would abandon their Blackness for whiteness the first chance they got.In the musical, Trotter and his collaborators — the director Scott Elliott, the screenwriter John Ridley and the choreographer Bill T. Jones — are trying to turn Schuyler’s thesis on its head. Trotter has written the musical’s lyrics, penning words for rap songs, ballads, some blues, gospel, reggae and even pop tracks. In a strange twist, he also plays Dr. Crookman. Trotter’s commitment to a distinct Black artistic and intellectual tradition make him the antithesis of Schuyler, who once argued that there is no such thing as Negro art and, consequently, no such thing as Black thought; but in taking on the project, Trotter was interested in crafting a rejoinder to Schuyler’s arguments.Thinking about “Black No More,” I wondered how he and his collaborators were going to make contemporary a book premised on the literal erasure of Trotter’s commitment to Blackness as a way of living. “I do a lot of ‘defining Blackness,’” Trotter told me. The impulse puts him in existential conversation with Schuyler. “Whatever that definition is, it drives the entire scope of my work,” he said. That work “might be the quest for that definition.” Unlike Schuyler, Trotter argues that Blackness “goes above and beyond racial identity. It’s an experience. It’s lived.”The rapper Tariq Trotter escaped the orbit of violence that claimed family and friends in his native Philadelphia.Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont for The New York TimesTrotter told me that he hadn’t read “Black No More” until Ridley introduced him to the book during a 2015 meeting at NBC studios, where the Roots work as the house band for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” He thought the meeting would result in him acting in one of Ridley’s films. “I immediately began preparation for my ‘13 Years a Slave’ audition,” he joked to me. Instead, Ridley wanted to discuss Schuyler’s novel, which he believed covered topics that were urgent in their relevance to American culture. Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group, thought the novel would work as a piece of musical theater. The two men arranged to meet with Trotter, the Roots drummer and producer Questlove and the Roots manager Shawn Gee. “We agreed to be a part of the project on the same day I saw ‘Hamilton’ for the first time, Off Broadway, at the Public Theater,” Trotter says. “Hamilton” was its own riff on American history, using hip-hop as the vehicle to narrate a familiar story about the founding of the United States of America and Alexander Hamilton’s life. But Schuyler’s “Black No More,” and his broader ideas about race, differ radically from the more optimistic framing of race in “Hamilton.”Trotter wants to offer a divergent vision of how Black people think about their existence in this country. This makes sense for an M.C. who cites Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon as influences. Trotter is a thinker whose work is in conversation with the Black literary tradition, especially the work of the Harlem Renaissance, with its prescient inquiry into the question of what constitutes Blackness. This musical is a chance for Trotter to have his say — to talk back to a thinker he disagrees with.“Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,” he told me. “Ours is an essay on that essay. A critique of a critique.”Tariq Trotter is a 50-year-old artist in a genre where youth is an asset and middle-aged rappers are rare. His voice is gravelly, though wildly flexible when rhyming. He is noticed in every room he walks into. A brother who pays attention to the way the fedora on his head cuts against his face and has been wearing sunglasses inside since his high school years. At 5-foot-8, he has been mistaken for the 5-foot-11 Rick Ross and the 6-foot-5 James Harden. Some would say it’s the beard. When asked if he straightens out those who mistake him, he says: “I’d rather not correct them. I let people have that moment, because for them it’s just as special.”Trotter, who once called himself “the invisible enigma,” has always been reluctant to speak about his past. He was born in Philadelphia, in 1971, less than two years before and a hundred miles away from hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx. His family belonged to the Nation of Islam, and he came of age during the years when crack cocaine ravaged American streets. He was 13 when, in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped an improvised bomb on the Black-liberation group MOVE, destroying 61 houses and killing 11 people. For Trotter, the bombing had the same effect that the Rodney King beating had on those who came of age during the 1990s, giving him a sudden awareness of anti-Black violence. He remembers how he “felt the gravitational pull of the propaganda,” recognizing a current in the media that suggested the bombing was justified. “It felt way too one-sided to be believable,” he said. “Like these were people who looked like people I knew.”Amid a backdrop of a tragedy — his father, Thomas Trotter, was murdered when Trotter was 2 — Trotter came up in a house of music. His mother, Cassandra, would buy those best-of-the-decade collections of ’60s and ’70s music and ensconced Trotter in a home full of James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire. And, of course, the sounds of Philly — from Hall & Oates to Patti LaBelle — permeated his childhood. When they moved to South Philly and were closer to his grandmother, he got nothing but gospel in her house. Years later, his grandmother would get a healthy dose of the Roots: “For a long time she’d be right there — side of the rear of the stage in a chair.”He was influenced by a song called “The Micstro,” a 1980 jam that featured the M.C. RC LaRock rhyming for almost 10 minutes without cease. And once Run-DMC came out, rocking sweats with fedoras and leather jackets, looking like people from his block, the young Trotter was hooked. By age 9, he had already given himself a rap moniker: Double T. He and a fellow Philadelphia native and classmate, Dwight Grant, formed the Crash Crew for an elementary school talent show; Grant went on to become the platinum-selling M.C. Beanie Sigel. It’s a bit like imagining the future N.B.A. Hall of Famers LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony playing on the same youth basketball team, honing their craft together. At the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, Trotter met Ahmir Thompson, later known as Questlove, a fellow student whose Casio keyboard turned him into a roving beat maker with whom Trotter would found the hip-hop band the Roots.Those were tough years for Trotter. When he was a junior in high school, his mother was murdered. For some things, there is no solace, and I asked if he’d ever confronted the failure of art to do the thing you wanted it to do. “That’s one way to look at it,” he told me. “Another way to look at is everybody I know, damn near all the people I grew up with, they all dead, they all in jail. For me, art has been my saving grace, that’s my salvation.” It’s not only that music has taken him around the world and been the foundation of so many of his longest friendships, but that it has been the lifeline for a man that knows full well what could have been. As Trotter’s friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, tells me, “Trotter is a voice that knows social ills and violence, but he chose art.”Trotter enrolled in Millersville University, 75 miles away from Philly, but the music called him back to the city: He met fellow rapper, Malik B., who would join the Roots crew; a year later they were doing shows in Europe, freestyling to sax and trumpet solos. Back in Philly, Trotter lived in an apartment with books and musicians as his companions. “I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a TV,” he has said. “I hardly had furniture at my place at that time. There was just books, lots of books and CDs.” Trotter became an autodidact, Ghansah told me. “He was the reader,” she said. “He takes everything in. Everything is a reference, a possible citation. And then it is all wrapped up in his Philadelphia Negro uplift thing — he loves his Blackness.”Around this time, Trotter discovered the music of the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, whose example became another lasting influence on his style. “Finding Fela was like finding my spiritual animal,” he told me. He was in Tower Records with his childhood friend, the singer Santigold, who was buying a Fela record for her father’s birthday. Intrigued, Trotter listened along when Santigold’s father played the music, which was a revelation. “I was blown away by how regal all the music sounded, the political message, how free he was onstage,” he said. Fela’s work ethic — he tended to perform regularly and intensely — and big-band sensibility gave Trotter a sense of what it meant to be a performer.“Felt like James Brown meets Bob Marley with a Nigerian funk sensibility,” Trotter said. Trotter’s gift as a lyricist is his penchant for turning observation of the world around him into social commentary. When Trotter’s verse turns to the streets, it adds complexity to the narratives of violence that some rappers tend to glorify. Foretelling an argument that the legal scholar James Forman Jr. would make in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own,” Trotter, in the song “Panic!!!!!” from the Roots’s 1996 album (their second full-length release), “Illadelph Halflife,” rhymes that while “police levels increase,” there’s “still crime on the street.” The lyric points to Trotter’s awareness that in Black communities, the presence of police does not guarantee protection. Another song from that album, “Section,” has Trotter rapping of his shared experience with those who run the streets: “We congruent, lay on the corner with the traum’ unit.” While Trotter presents his familiarity with street life and its prevalence in communities like his, he doesn’t lose sight of the violence that often accompanies that life. In an era in which gangster rap dominated the charts, Trotter could have woven tales of street woe and disaster. But, he told me: “I came up in a family of gangsters and people who were in the street life. Both my parents, that’s what they got off into, they were involved in. My extended family, my brother. And it never ends well. It’s always short-lived. I didn’t want the career version of that.” Trotter and the Roots crew insisted that Black life include more than the narratives of violence and street life.In part, this vision of a socially engaged and intellectually curious hip-hop was inspired by the Roots’ longtime manager, Richard Nichols. “That was Rich, man,” Trotter told me. “Rich would put us on to a concept, like the concept of nuclear half-life, nuclear fallout,” an idea that inspired the title “Illadelph Halflife.” Nichols, who died in 2014 at 55 from complications of leukemia, was a Philadelphia native and student of Black culture whose thinking became central to Trotter’s intellectual development and the band’s identity. “He’d throw you a book — Chinua Achebe, check this out. Check this Malcolm Gladwell out,” Trotter remembered. Nichols was a student (literally) of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, architects of the Black Arts Movement and literary inheritors of the Harlem Renaissance. Nichols brought Trotter into that tradition. “Rich was the brains of this operation in more ways than one,” Trotter told me. “He was a visionary. He was an artist. He went above and beyond the role of management or producer. He was our oracle. He was Obi-Wan Kenobi.”Put another way, Nichols envisioned the group as an example of hip-hop’s relationship to a wider Black culture. Because of Nichols, the Roots crew knew Black Arts Movement poets like Baraka and Ntozake Shange personally. Sonia Sanchez, the Philadelphia poet who helped pioneer Black-studies programs, was “Sister Sonia” to Trotter. Often, his lyrics foregrounded his relationship to this lineage. “I’m just as dark as John Henrik Clarke’s inner thoughts at the time of the Harlem Renaissance,” he once rapped, name checking the trailblazing historian of the Black experience. Maybe it isn’t surprising, then, that Trotter found his way to “Black No More.” Schuyler’s original novel is a classic of the Harlem Renaissance, even if it does diverge from the period’s complicated love affair with Blackness. Schuyler mocked his contemporaries as race-obsessed fools, but “Black No More” is a book no less caught up in the Renaissance’s incessant inquiry into the substance of this thing we call “Black experience.” And while Schuyler’s novel says that Black America hungers to be white, Black Thought’s remix asserts the Black experience can be interrogated independent of whiteness.Trotter at a jam session in Philadelphia in 1993, during the early days of the Roots. The group later became a fixture on late-night TV.Photograph from the estate of Mpozi TolbertWhen I showed up for a tech rehearsal of “Black No More” in January, the choreographer Bill T. Jones walked central actors through a pivotal moment. In the novel, Max’s best friend Bunny is a Black man who follows him through the Black No More machine, but the musical’s Bunny (renamed “Buni”) is a Black woman who demands more of him. When the newly whitened Max — who now goes by Matthew Fisher — abandons Harlem for Atlanta, Buni and another friend, Agamemnon, show up at the train depot, hoping to convince him to stay. “I see a world of possibility, and all you see is Black … and white,” Max tells Agamemnon. Disgusted, Agamemnon declares that “Harlem is better off without him.” But Buni won’t abandon her friend. Watching Max leave, she retorts that “we’re never ‘better off’ without each other.” It’s a powerful assertion of Black solidarity — an enduring community extending even to those who would deny their Blackness, one based in a commonality of experience.The distinct difference between this production and Schuyler’s novel is the belief in cultural, rhetorical and physical ties that bind Black people into a shared heritage that isn’t at all related to white people or white supremacy. Jones’s choreography is key to this idea. During tech rehearsal, Jones walked dancers through the moment just after the whitened Max arrives in Atlanta. In the scene, Max tentatively approaches a group of white people dancing before he is welcomed into their ranks, his white skin finally giving him the entry he desires. But Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor who plays Max, is not wearing make up; he is still Black. In that moment, Jones’s choreography convinces the audience that these are four Southern white country dancers, including the brown-skinned Dixon as Matthew Fisher. Scenes like this, which present a racialized art form only to subvert notions of who can perform it, both reinforce the notion of distinct racial cultures while undermining the idea that those cultures are fixed in stone. Unlike Schuyler’s book, it holds two truths at once: race is constructed, and no less real for being so. In this sense, Trotter and his collaborators force viewers into a complex and sometimes even uncomfortable conversation about the substance of racial identity.Nowhere is this more obvious than in Trotter’s lyrics.One song features the “whitened” Max in his guise as Matthew — now, improbably, the leader of a white-supremacist organization — singing about Black people as the equivalent of flies. As Trotter described it to me, the song slaps but is immensely ignorant; it had me rocking in my seat, but made me fear what a dope beat can do. As beautiful women twerked onstage to a crescendo of keys, Matthew unleashed the song’s hateful chorus, referring to Black people with a racial epithet and glorifying anti-Black violence. Still, my head bopped.The song presents us with a set of questions: Is cringing and turning away from a work of art that depicts persistent truths of American racial politics the most radical thing that we might do? How can Black art provide the background for anti-Blackness? Trotter’s lyrics don’t provide answers. They let us sit in that formal and ethical difficulty.Trotter’s interest in presenting these hard questions isn’t new. You have to look no further than to Dec. 14, 2017, for proof. That day on DJ Funkmaster Flex’s show on the New York radio station Hot 97, he dropped a freestyle that put the internet on notice. “I like to answer people’s demands,” Funk said by way of introduction. “Black Thought is here.” And then Trotter delivered something singular — a relentless amalgamation of story and poem that becomes more cogent as it becomes more discursive. “Einstein, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Tesla, recording artist slash psychology professor,” Trotter raps, suggesting the scope of his thinking. He weaves together literary tradition, social critique, his interest in world history and reflections on his own oeuvre and family history into an epic that could never have taken place within the tight strictures of a Roots album. “The mic I spray resembling the sickle of death/It ain’t strenuous to come from a continuous breath.” This was the reintroduction of the Talented Mr. Trotter as a solo artist who challenged listeners with his breadth of knowledge and sharp skills as an M.C. He soon began releasing solo albums that “gave people, some of whom have been lifelong Roots fans at this point, an opportunity to not even become reacquainted, but to finally become acquainted with me personally as an artist,” he told me. This version of Black Thought had big things on his mind. “How much hypocrisy can people possibly endure?/But ain’t nobody working on a cure my young bull,” he proclaimed in that freestyle.Trotter at the Pershing Square Theatre.Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont for The New York TimesI was interested to see how the musical played to audiences — specifically, audiences of the kind that would gather at Black Theater Night, Broadway’s attempt to bring in more diverse crowds. As Bill T. Jones reminds me, “One of the most transgressive things Schuyler does in this transgressive novel is to imply that secretly we all want to be white.” What would Black theatergoers make of that notion? Dr. Crookman introduces the Black No More device with an in-joke that might only get laughs out of a Black audience: “How is it, Dr. Crookman, you ask, are you able to accomplish what the Lord Himself cannot? The answer is simple. The Good Lord is not a Howard Man.” At the show I attended, the audience laughed together. Such moments felt typical — choral call and response and inside jokes gave the show the feel of a summer cookout. But when Dr. Crookman explained the Black No More treatment, the laughter slowly subsided and the tension rose. The device used to conduct the treatment resembled a barber’s chair and sat center stage. Max’s transformation — signaled by him constantly running his fingers along his arms, which are still brown — elicited discomfort.In contemplating how exactly to pull off this transformation to whiteness, Trotter told me that the show’s creators considered it all — make up, different clothing, lighting — but decided on simple physical gestures. If the audience was any indication, those gestures worked, strangely conveying the way warped reality gives rise to warped desires. In the musical, Max — who becomes white in part to pursue Helen, a white lover who initially rejected him — constantly looks at his skin to remind himself and the audience of his change and of the moral quandary it provokes. “What a fine mess I’ve gotten into, after everything that I had been through,” Max sings. But that mess isn’t Max’s alone. The show foregrounds that ethical quandary, forcing the audience to deal with the aftermath of Max’s yearning as well.Schuyler himself tried to play down the messiness of identification by writing “Black No More.” He married Josephine Cogdell, an heiress from Texas and a white liberal, in 1928. During the 1930s, she published journalism in the Black press under various names and even, according to Carla Kaplan’s book “Miss Anne in Harlem,” wrote an advice column for Negro women under the name Julia Jerome. And she was more complex than the depiction of any white character in the satire her husband published three years after they married. While Helen is a vulgar racist in the novel, the musical’s version of Helen is reminiscent of Schuyler’s wife. She becomes a reminder that, even in 1931, race relations and the contradictions that roiled beneath them were far more tangled than the satirical depiction of race hustlers and Black people clamoring for ways to straighten their hair and skin-cream their way to whiteness.The vast range of music, lyrics and dance that the musical juxtaposes is an argument for the existence of a Blackness independent of whiteness, a Blackness that is also the confounding of easy racial categorization. Because of this, the show insists on frustrating the audience: You laugh and then stop to question if laughing was appropriate. The original “Black No More” is written with the unflinching belief that the author knows what Blackness is and is not. The musical, though, is more searching, less certain of what Blackness is, though far more secure in the belief that Black folks’ singular desire is not to run from it but rather to survive in America.There is a refrain in the musical that struck me: “If my body is my home, and it’s built of blood and bone, and survives on, even thrives on love alone, it’s not hard to understand how the measure of a man, is to show more than the love that he’s been shown.” And if you listen closely to the lyrics and music of “Black No More,” you know that the arguments all become a case that Trotter is making, capturing so much of what it means to have Black thoughts in this world and the sheer tragedy of running from them.Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer and contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the actor Michael K. Williams. Racquel Chevremont is a curator, an art adviser and a model who works under the name Deux Femmes Noires along with Mickalene Thomas. Mickalene Thomas is an artist known for her paintings of African American women that combine historical, political and pop-culture references. More