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      Review: ‘Caroline, or Change’ Makes History’s Heartbreak Sing

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      An electrifying revival of the 2003 musical, featuring a titanic performance by Sharon D Clarke, follows the money to the source of American inequality.Difficult, even painful stories are no impediment to great musicals. Maybe the opposite is true. Pogroms, suicides and revolutions have all been turned into transcendent shows.Still, few have dared to tell as many such stories as “Caroline, or Change” does. But of the subjects “Caroline” grabs in the meaty fist of its ambition — civil rights, economics, mourning, the Mississippi floodplain — the most radical is also the most traditional: the anguish of troubled love.I speak not of love like Tony and Maria’s, nor even Porgy and Bess’s, but of the love, more honored in the breach, between Blacks and Jews. No musical has ever faced its country’s history, its creators’ history and the history of its genre — which has often caricatured both groups — as unblinkingly as “Caroline.”That was true when it premiered at the Public Theater in 2003 and feels truer now in the electrifying Broadway revival that opened on Wednesday at Studio 54. Not because much has changed in the show itself. Tony Kushner’s book and lyrics, no less than Jeanine Tesori’s flood of ’60s-style music, remain models of thematic concision, wonders of imagery, daring pileups of incompatible emotions.But the world around “Caroline” has changed in ways that make it seem more prescient, more painful and — despite a performance of tragic grandeur in the title role by Sharon D Clarke — more hopeful now than it did back then. As if to acknowledge that, the first thing we see in Michael Longhurst’s shrewd staging for the Roundabout Theater Company, based on his 2018 British production, is a Confederate statue called “that ol copper Nightmare Man.” By evening’s end, at least that nightmare will be over.Others will remain to prickle your conscience and your politics; the premise almost seems designed to make you squirm. Caroline Thibodeaux is a 39-year-old Black woman who, in 1963, works for the Gellmans, a Jewish family in Lake Charles, La. Cleaning, doing laundry and minding 8-year-old Noah after school, she earns $30 a week; on that paltry salary, lacking the help of her absent husband, she must sustain her children. With tyrannical self-discipline that leaves little time for warmth, she very nearly manages.As the leading character in a musical, Caroline is unique: Titanically dour, she seeks to repel all sympathy her circumstances might invite. Noah, too, is a complex character, mourning his mother’s death from lung cancer and fixating on Caroline as a substitute parent. (In this production, three young actors alternate in the role.)Despite their twinned sadnesses, Noah’s love thaws Caroline only to the point of allowing him to light her daily cigarette. Otherwise, she treats him as she might an untrained puppy, shooing him out of the basement where she works, “16 feet below sea level,” in the oppressive heat and humidity of the appliances of her trade.The equilibrium of this precarious system is carefully set up in the opening scenes, as is the musical’s stylistic daring. Instead of a chorus, Kushner provides a pantheon of singing allegorical figures: the bubbly washing machine (Arica Jackson), the infernal dryer (Kevin S. McAllister), the sexy radio (Nasia Thomas, Nya and Harper Miles, wearing aerial tiaras), and the serene moon (N’Kenge). (Later, there’s also a bus, wonderfully voiced by McAllister.) Around these companions she can be herself, as she daren’t around Noah or his despised new stepmother, Rose.Clarke, center, in the musical in which the emotional underpinnings of the household are equated with economics, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCaroline’s imperviousness at first tips the balance of the show’s sympathy toward Noah, whose fantasy of being centrally important in her life is excused by his youth and his grief. (If he is something of a martyr, perhaps it is not insignificant that Kushner sets the semi-autobiographical story at 913 St. Anthony Street.) In a more typical musical, the fulfillment of his needs would fulfill Caroline’s as well.Instead, Noah (Jaden Myles Waldman on the night I attended) precipitates the show’s crisis, unwittingly egged on by Rose (Caissie Levy). Recently married to Noah’s feckless father, and trying to assert authority in the awkward situation, she imposes a new rule: Caroline should keep any change she finds in Noah’s dirty clothes. When Noah, in response, starts leaving money deliberately, Caroline must fight with herself about taking it; the emotional underpinnings of the household, which Kushner equates with economics, very quickly collapse. Change causes change.And that’s barely the half of it. “Caroline” is as full of incident as Kushner’s “Angels in America,” but hugely condensed and then heightened by song. The wonder is that it is never less than thrilling to experience. This being a musical, the music is part of that; Tesori’s wondrous score is like the search function on a car radio, picking up snippets of every genre on the dial. The sounds of klezmer, blues, Broadway, Motown, Mozart and girl-group pop, among many others, pinpoint each character but also serve as expressive vehicles for the larger ideas the story is assembling.Those ideas start small. It seems merely an irritating infraction, for instance, that Rose mispronounces Caroline’s name as Carolyn — until you notice Clarke wincing as if struck when it happens.And Noah’s fantasies, which at first seem merely sweet, soon grow ridiculous and grandiose. He imagines Caroline’s children — teenage Emmie (Samantha Williams) and her younger brothers Jackie and Joe (Alexander Bello and Jayden Theophile on the night I attended) — praising him over dinner for his largess: “Thank God we can eat now!” In reality, they do not think of him at all.Caroline does, if no longer as a pitiful boy then as an ethical dilemma, an heir to the exploitative ways of even liberal whites. Nor does she see Rose as anything more than a tightfisted employer. I’m afraid I almost did, too; it’s a rare miscalculation that she is made the villain of a piece that doesn’t need one. (Surely Noah’s father, Stuart, a musician who in John Cariani’s performance is as mournful as the clarinet he plays, is just as culpable.) In any case, the force of the characters’ needs, once set in motion, is more than enough to do the damage.From left, Adam Makké, Caissie Levy, John Cariani, Chip Zien, Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn at a Hanukkah dinner that sets up the oncoming collision.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLonghurst best dramatizes the oncoming collision in his acute staging of the Gellmans’ Hanukkah dinner. At the middle of the stage, the family — now expanded to include Rose’s lefty father visiting from New York (Chip Zien) and Stuart’s don’t-rock-the-boat Southern parents (Stuart Zagnit and Joy Hermalyn) — sing and dance and argue. Rose’s father offers Noah a marvelously compact sermon along with a fateful $20 bill:Money follows certain laws,it’s worth how much it’s worth becausesomewhere, something’s valued less;it’s how our blessings come, I guess.Meanwhile we see Caroline, her friend, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), and Emmie hustling to prepare and serve the holiday meal as they circumnavigate the Gellmans on a turntable. Though the whites are literally centered, the image nevertheless decenters whiteness, with the Black characters often obscuring them. Thus we are well prepared, though we may still gasp, when late in the second act Noah asks if he and Caroline can ever again be friends.Her answer is crushing: “Weren’t never friends.”That huge lesson in the boy’s life, a lesson the actual boy evidently took to heart, is but a moment in Caroline’s. The story does not end with him but with her and her family. If this is an admirable insight from white authors, keep in mind that the musical was strongly shaped by Black artists as well, among them the original director, George C. Wolfe, and his Caroline, Tonya Pinkins. Their imprint is everywhere.Now Clarke, who won an Olivier award for her performance in the British production, adds hers. She makes of the maid an almost Shakespearean figure; even at the depths of the character’s despair, in the scarifying 11 o’clock number “Lot’s Wife,” she commands attention without begging for it, and does not allow herself, because Caroline wouldn’t, the luxury of collapse.The result of that restraint is more painful than cathartic, leaving the story’s emotional release to those who can afford it: Caroline’s children. The chance to believe in change is her hard-won bequest to them — and, in this devastating, uncomfortable, crucial musical, to us.Caroline, or ChangeThrough Jan. 9 at Studio 54, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Tour the Old Steel Town at the Center of ‘Lackawanna Blues’

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      In his Broadway play, Ruben Santiago-Hudson revisits the Lackawanna, N.Y., of his youth. A lot has changed since the late 1950s and ’60s, reflected here in recent photographs of the area.Today, it’s Tifft Nature Preserve, a 264-acre refuge in Buffalo, just north of Lackawanna, N.Y. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was an industrial site of train tracks, grain elevators and a handful of small ponds. That area is where Ruben Santiago-Hudson — the writer, director and star of “Lackawanna Blues,” on Broadway through Nov. 12 — went fishing as a child. It is also one of the many places that he fondly reminisces about in his autobiographical show.Santiago-Hudson’s play takes place in and around a boardinghouse at 32 Wasson Avenue owned by a big-hearted landlady, Ms. Rachel Crosby (affectionately known as “Nanny”), who took him in and raised him. While the 90-minute autobiographical one-man show is an ode to Nanny, it includes at least 25 neighborhood figures (all artfully played by Santiago-Hudson in various postures, accents and cadences).An aerial view of Lackawanna, including the site of Bethlehem Steel.via Lackawanna Historical AssociationAmong the lost souls, petty hustlers and philosophers waxing poetic was Ol’ Po’ Carl, a would-be chef and former baseball player. At a rehearsal of the play in mid-August, Santiago-Hudson recounted a conversation the pair had about fishing. (Ol’ Po’ Carl called him “doc” because there was always a chance Santiago-Hudson would be a doctor someday.)“He’d say to me, ‘Hey, doc! You little curly-headed, raggedy-headed rascal. You going the fishing?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, I might go the fishing.’ Not ‘going to fishing,’ ‘going the fishing.’“He’d say, ‘You’d better get on out there before they caught up all the fish.’ And I’d be like — I was 11 years old — I’m like, ‘He might be right, they caught all the fish!’ And I’m thinking, as I got older, I’m like, ‘How you going to catch all the fish?’”Recently, Malik Rainey, a photographer based in Buffalo, toured Lackawanna to capture the area during dusky evenings. Those images — along with archival photographs from the ’50s and ’60s that include photographs of Santiago-Hudson as a boy and Nanny with her husband, Bill — tell the story of a town’s rich past and present.Text excerpts from “Lackawanna Blues” 1956 Lackawanna, New York, like all Great Lakes cities, was thriving! Jobs everywhere, money everywhere. Steel plants, grain mills, railroads, the docks.Everybody had a new car and a conk. Restaurants, bars, stores, everybody made money.The smell of fried fish, chicken and pork chops floating in the air every weekend. In every bar the aroma of a newly tapped keg of Black Label, Iroquois, or Genesee beer, to complement that hot roast beef-on-weck with just a touch of horseradish.These snowbound cities that kissed the shores of the Great Lakes tried to live up to that privilege. And they were jumping; Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago, Erie, Toledo, Detroit, Gary, Lackawanna!After-hour joints were jumping, sisters from Alabama frying pork rinds, brothers from Tennessee slopping sauce on freshly smoked slabs of ribs and shots of Black Velvet or Canadian Club whisky overrunning the shot glasses.You could get to town on a Monday and by Wednesday have more jobs than one man can take. These were fertile times.The 2020 census counted 19,949 people in Lackawanna. In the late ’50s and ’60s, when “Lackawanna Blues” is set, the town was thriving, courtesy of the Bethlehem Steel mill.In 1983, the steel mill closed its doors. Today, wind turbines spin where steel was once manufactured.The play, Santiago-Hudson said during an interview in August, allows him to revisit and remember where he came from.“People say things like, ‘Well, how did you escape? How did you get out?’ I didn’t want to escape,” he said. “I didn’t want to go nowhere. I’d have never left. If Nanny didn’t make me go to college, I’d have never left. It’s the honest to God truth. I’d rather take a job in the steel plant and stay in Lackawanna, and be with these people.”Bethlehem Steel closed in the early 1980s.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesSome of the current residents of Wasson Avenue.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesTifft Nature Preserve, and grain elevators in the distance.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesHouses as seen from Albright Court.Malik Rainey for The New York Times

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      Review: ‘The Mother’ Rises Up Again in the Name of Revolution

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      The Wooster Group’s production will prompt discussions about the company’s vision for Brecht’s “learning play.”There’s a bit of an echo when the actors in the Wooster Group’s production of “The Mother” speak. At first I assumed that their voices were being digitally filtered. This would have been par for the course for the company, whose longstanding affinity for technological wizardry is well known. And it would have been an ingenious idea for a Bertolt Brecht play, reinforcing the alienation effect the playwright sought by subtly reminding us we were watching a show.Soon, though, I realized it was wizardry of another kind: For much of the time the actors were miming their own recorded lines. Unlike Deirdre O’Connell’s performance in “Dana H.” on Broadway, where lip-syncing never gets in the way of a devastating emotional realism, the Woosters go for an arch theatricality in the service of the story’s agitprop roots. Since they mostly sing the show’s brief numbers live, I found myself looking out for the transitions between what was recorded and what was not.In Brecht’s “The Mother” — not to be confused with his own “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which it predates by seven years — an apolitical woman named Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk, magnetic as ever) is pulled into communist activism after her son (Gareth Hobbs) is jailed for fighting on behalf of factory workers.The show, first produced in Germany in 1932, was inspired by a 1906 Russian novel by Maxim Gorky and Brecht conceived it as a “learning play.” A narrator (Jim Fletcher) helpfully fills us in on the historical and literary background in a prologue, and pops up again at regular intervals to essentially provide footnotes. It’s as if we are watching a play and reading its CliffsNotes at the same time, extending the learning process to the directing style.The Wooster Group, now in its 46th year, has acquired a reputation for cerebral, often opaque productions, and it’s true that the company’s shows can be puzzling. This one, directed, like most of them, by Elizabeth LeCompte, is no exception. (It premiered in June at the Vienna Festival.)But the process often has a degree of transparency because the company is not shy about listing its sources and regularly uploads to its website a variety of informative videos, including excerpts from rehearsals, that help contextualize what audience members end up seeing. In one of the videos for “The Mother,” for example, Valk says that the company was attracted to the story of a woman who becomes radicalized in her 60s. It is hard not to think of LeCompte, 77, and Valk, 65, who continue to explore theater with an energy and inquisitiveness people a third of their age might envy.It might be fair to say (warn?) that some of the Wooster Group shows, like its head-scratching “Hamlet,” in which they repurposed Richard Burton’s performance from 1964, can be less involving to experience than to discuss with your friends in a doomed attempt to figure out what the company was trying to do.And so it goes with “The Mother.” The production both hews to the original text and honors the theatrical traditions that birthed it, and then it tweaks them. Hanns Eisler’s original score is sometimes juxtaposed with a new one by Amir ElSaffar, for example, and in some scenes ElSaffar’s jazzy music combines with the actors’ staccato delivery to create something akin to a 1930s Warner Bros. noir about the workers’ struggle. Why the Woosters went for that effect — well, we could meet over a drink and talk about it for a few hours.The MotherThrough Nov. 6 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Martha Henry, a Leading Stage Actress in Canada, Dies at 83

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      For decades her performances at the Stratford Festival drew acclaim. She gave her last performance just days before her death.For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.She died of the disease on Thursday at her home in Stratford, the festival announced. She was 83.The effort Ms. Henry put into her final role — A is a dying woman, mean and prone to bursts of both laughing and crying — was, by all accounts, something to see. The performance “shows the veteran actor at her monstrous best,” J. Kelly Nestruck, the chief theater critic for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, wrote in August.“It’s unforgettable — which I mean both as praise and as a warning,” he added. “You might not want the woman she plays stuck in your head.”Ms. Henry had been known for memorable performances at Stratford for decades. She first appeared there in 1962 in a production of “The Tempest,” and her association with the festival continued, with a few gaps, to the present. She acted in more than 70 productions and directed 14 others.“Her sense of responsibility to the theater was so profound that it enabled her to endure pain and face down her terminal disease to complete an astoundingly truthful performance as a dying woman in ‘Three Tall Women,’” Antoni Cimolino, Stratford’s artistic director, said in a statement. “Her life became art.”Ms. Henry with Brian Bedford in “Much Ado About Nothing,” a Stratford Festival production staged at New York City Center in 1998. She acted in more than 70 Stratford productions and directed 14 others.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMartha Kathleen Buhs was born on Feb. 17, 1938, in Detroit. Her parents, Lloyd and Kathleen (Hatch) Buhs, divorced when she was 5. Her mother was a pianist who played cocktail lounges and was often working at night, so Martha was raised by her grandparents until she was 14. She was interested in acting at a young age.“I joined a Brownie troop because they were doing a play,” she told The Pittsburgh Press in 1968.As a teenager she rejoined her mother, who had become part of a traveling entertainment troupe. She would often go on the road with her, enjoying the company of the other performers.“On the same bill there’d be a comic — my mother would fill in as the straight woman — a ventriloquist, a snake charmer, a tap dancer,” Ms. Henry told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta in 1996, when she was playing the same role in “Three Tall Women” in an Edmonton production. “I grew up with show people. They were so good to me.”She enrolled at what is now the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama in Pittsburgh, choosing it over several other colleges because, as she told The Press, “it was the only one that held auditions, to see what you could really do.”The drama department did four Shakespeare plays while she was there, she said, but this future star of numerous Shakespeare productions didn’t get into any of them. After graduating in 1959, she did summer stock in Ontario and worked with the Crest Theater in Toronto. Then she enrolled in the National Theater School in Montreal when it was established in 1960, and went on to become its first acting graduate: Halfway through the three-year course, as she told The Press, the directors told her that she was ready for a professional career.Six weeks later she was a member of the Stratford troupe; her debut there was as Miranda in “The Tempest.” One critic called her “the find of the season.”She had married a fellow student at the theater school, Donnelly Rhodes Henry. The marriage didn’t stick, but the last name did (though not for him — he performed professionally as Donnelly Rhodes). A later marriage, to the actor Douglas Rain in 1968, ended in divorce in 1988. In 1989 she married the actor Rod Beattie, who survives her, along with a daughter from her second marriage, Emma Rain.At Stratford, Ms. Henry’s Isabella in “Measure for Measure” in 1975, her Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1998 and her Mary in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1994 were among her most acclaimed performances. She was also artistic director of the Grand Theater in London, Ontario, from 1988 to 1994.Ms. Henry made the occasional film or television appearance and performed on many stages beyond Stratford, including some in New York. But she said she was never tempted, as a young actress, to try to make it in Manhattan.“I knew exactly what would happen there,” she told The Journal. “I wasn’t exactly shy, but I wasn’t pushy. I was no great beauty. I could see myself getting an apartment and just staying in it.”Canada offered what she wanted, she said.“I just wanted to work, and I felt that any country that could produce a Stratford had to be the most wonderful place. And I was right.” More

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      A Playwright Has a Message: Anti-Asian Hate Isn’t New

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      Lionelle Hamanaka wrote “Covid Crime” to bring the conversation surrounding such attacks to her neighbors in Manhattan.On Sunday afternoon, a pigeon flew through a performance of “Covid Crime,” a one-act play taking place at a Manhattan intersection, where yellow taxis whizzed by against the backdrop of a halal food cart.The show, written by Lionelle Hamanaka and directed by Howard Pflanzer, was unfolding in Richard Tucker Park, a tiny cobblestone triangle on the Upper West Side. It was more of a reading than a staging — its seven actors sat in metal folding chairs, as did the audience of about 50 people.“I saw this TV coverage of a woman being assaulted on a bus with an umbrella. She was an older woman, an older Asian American,” Hamanaka said last week, before the play. “I thought it would be interesting to see how the community’s affected by it. Because we see the outside story, but we don’t necessarily see every case.”At the start of the pandemic, the coalition Stop AAPI Hate — AAPI stands for Asian American Pacific Islander — formed and began its own tally of such attacks. From March 19, 2020 to June 30, 2021, the group received 9,081 reports of hate crimes against Asian Americans across the United States. That number was not just a mere statistic to Hamanaka, who is Japanese American.“My parents were in the concentration camps, and of course that caused a great deal of hardship for our family,” she said, referring to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “My grandparents both had businesses, and they had to sell them in one week. They had to pack up all their things and leave. And that leaves a scar in your mind.”The playwright Lionelle Hamanaka spoke to the crowd ahead of her show, “Covid Crime.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesSo Hamanaka, a playwright and onetime jazz singer who describes herself as a senior, funneled her frustration into art. She’s written a series of plays about Covid-19, including “Covid 10,366,” about the April 2020 spike in Covid-19 deaths, and “The Spitter,” about a supermarket dispute over mask wearing. But this is the first time she has addressed the recent rise in anti-Asian American hate crimes in her work.Hamanaka noticed that much of the organizing surrounding the #StopAsianHate movement in New York was taking place in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where about 33 percent of the population identified as Asian in 2019, according to the N.Y.U. Furman Center, which studies housing and urban policy.She wanted to bring the movement to her neighborhood, the Upper West Side, where about 10 percent of the population identified as Asian. “Then the people who are there have to look around and look at Asian Americans in a slightly different way,” Hamanaka said. “‘Like, ‘Have I excluded them? Do I treat them as a foreigner?’”“Covid Crime” was presented by Crossways Theater, a group formed in 2018 by Hamanaka and Pflanzer. It aims to develop playwrights that reflect the diversity of their neighborhood.“The idea is to bring the audience closer to these issues,” said Pflanzer, 77. “Get them to engage and participate in understanding and being aware of this very important issue of anti-Asian hate in our communities.”In the play, the character Dr. Leo Chan (John Bernos) arrives home from a shift at Bellevue Hospital. He lives with his mother, Chunhua (Hamanaka), who is asleep on the couch in the living room.“It’s just me, Ma,” Leo says. Chunhua grunts, and he notices a bandage on her head.“What’s that?” he asks. “What happened?”“Woman hit me with umbrella,” Chunhua says.“Where?” Leo asks.“On a bus,” Chunhua replies. “She say I bring Chinese virus to New York. Now everybody dying.”Bernos, a Filipino American actor from Ann Arbor, Mich., drove nine hours to New York for “Covid Crime.” After the performance, an audience member asked him about the hardest part of the role.About 50 people attended the performance, which was followed by a community forum.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“I’ve had my share of having a person tell me to go back to China,” Bernos said. “It wasn’t cool. So I think the hardest part is having to dig back into that memory and face that again. It’s always tough.”Though the play revolves around Chunhua’s assault, it also features Dylan Omori McCombs as Corky Lee, the only character in the play based explicitly on a real person. Lee was a Chinese American photographer, journalist and activist from Queens. (He died in January at age 73 after Covid-19 complications.).css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“The sad part is that, the more I researched him as much as I could, the more I really wished that he was someone that I had learned about in my history textbooks,” said McCombs, wearing a hoodie that read “Not Your Model Minority.” “He obviously is of the caliber of someone that would be very much worthy of that.”“Covid Crime” ends on a rally set in Chinatown’s Columbus Park.“We’re here today because of the attacks against Asian Americans,” Lee says. “That’s been news in the pandemic, and the news is my business. My photos are proof that we exist — that we do a lot of things.”The performance was followed by a community forum. Shirley Ng, a community organizer at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Jacqueline Wang, the head of marketing and communications at Welcome to Chinatown, both spoke to the small crowd.“Just like the play, many seniors will come home and not know what to do,” Ng said. “They could’ve gone to the police precinct or called 911, but there’s always this fear that they may get turned away, because they don’t have someone who speaks their language, or there’s just this fear of stepping in and not knowing — what is the process?”“Covid Crime” was presented by Crossways Theater, which aims to develop playwrights that reflect the diversity of the Upper West Side.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe fund, a 47-year-old national organization based in New York, works to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans — including encouraging seniors to report any hate crimes that may occur. Welcome to Chinatown, founded last year, is a grass roots initiative that supports Chinatown’s businesses and amplifies its voices.“Another thing covered by this play is that, when you don’t know someone — you don’t look like them, you don’t speak their language, you don’t know their culture, you don’t eat the same things — it’s really easy to just label them as ‘other,’” Wang said. “That’s something not new to the pandemic, but something that was exacerbated and highlighted.”In the last act of “Covid Crime,” Dr. Leo Chan speaks a common Chinese phrase. “We have a saying, ‘Swallow bitterness.’ Leave that behind. Won’t work these days!” More

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      How to Decorate Your Apartment Like an Artistic Director

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      When Charlotte Moore moved into John McMartin’s Upper West Side co-op, it was ‘not pretty.’ Nearly five decades later, that’s been fixed.In 1971, Charlotte Moore auditioned for “A Little Night Music” on the stage of the Winter Garden Theater, where the musical “Follies” was playing. (Readers will soon see that this is not an irrelevant detail.)Ms. Moore, who tends toward the dramatic, a trait that has likely served her well as a founder and the artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theater, insists to this day that her tryout, in front of the director Harold Prince, was “a disaster, a complete disaster — I was in tears and ruins, absolute ruins, embarrassed and humiliated.”But maybe not such a disaster. A year later, Mr. Prince phoned her with an invitation to join the fledgling New Phoenix Repertory Company. “When I decided to throw everything away and come here without knowing anyone at all, it was a ridiculous idea,” said Ms. Moore, whose adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York,” originally staged by her at the Irish Rep in 2001, begins performances there again, under her direction, on Dec. 4.“I knew nothing. But I just did it,” continued Ms. Moore, who grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, the granddaughter of Irish immigrants, and studied theater at Washington University in St. Louis.“I wanted very much for Jack to be comfortable,” said Charlotte Moore, who shared a one-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side with her partner, the actor John McMartin, for more than 40 years.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesShe rented an apartment on Riverside Drive and began to settle in. Not long after signing the lease, Ms. Moore met John McMartin, one of the stars of “Follies,” which had recently closed. Now he, too, was part of the New Phoenix troupe.“I was madly in love with him on Day 1, although I didn’t know anything about him and hadn’t seen him in anything. I didn’t see ‘Follies,’ to my horror,” said the now 80-ish Ms. Moore.That lapse was apparently forgiven. A bit more than a year later, she moved in with Mr. McMartin, a divorcé who owned a large one-bedroom co-op with a private entrance on West End Avenue.She is still there. Mr. McMartin, who died in 2016, bequeathed the apartment to his two children, Ms. Moore said, “but he said specifically in his will that I am to be here as long as I want, and I would never leave.”During her first days in residence, she took the measure of her new home and found it wanting. “Jack had been living the bachelor’s life there since his divorce, and it was not pretty,” she said. “When I say, ‘Not pretty,’ that’s a gross understatement.”There was, for starters, a bed in the living room, mounted on two-by-fours. “Oh, my God, I was stunned,” she said. “I was stunned.”Charlotte Moore, 80-ishOccupation: Actor, co-founder and artistic director of the Irish Repertory TheaterMaking room: “We never did any structural work on the apartment. All I did was kind of refurnish the place, and arranged the spaces the way they were supposed to be.”Forty-five years on, the apartment is structurally as Ms. Moore found it. But she has determinedly changed it from crash pad to adult home.When outfitting the living room, she took her cues from her mother. “She hated modernity and loved classic rooms,” Ms. Moore said. Thus, the pale-green-and-gray velvet sofa with leaf patterning, the accent chair in a floral print, the nicely faded Persian rug and the four high-backed dining chairs that she inherited from her grandmother. Ms. Moore cleverly turned the foyer into a cozy TV room — she disapproves of televisions in living rooms, never mind beds — with a pair of chocolate-brown leather club chairs.Dark wood bookcases in the living room and TV room hold Ms. Moore’s many books about Napoleon (“I don’t know why, but I’m a Napoleon freak”); her books on Ireland (“Obviously, I have lots of books about Ireland”); and a mass of tiny glass and plastic pigs.Ms. Moore converted the foyer of the apartment to a TV room.Katherine Marks for The New York Times“I collect pigs, and Jack McMartin bought me a pig every birthday,” she said. “Napoleon and pigs — I don’t know why they go together.”While Ms. Moore summarily chucked some offending pieces when she moved in — goodbye to the hulking cabinet in the middle of the kitchen — she didn’t completely clean house. A much-loved breakfast table that was surrounded by a pair of rattan chairs and a curved banquette is still there. So is a hutch that holds her substantial cache of delft pitchers, vases, platters, cups and plates. Hanging above is a framed trio of Beatrix Potter illustrations featuring a rabbit, a gift from Mr. McMartin.Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of Ms. Moore’s favorite pieces in the apartment — the two flowered cushions on the banquette, the large, square wood coffee table in the living room and the vintage baby grand — are from stage sets. The piano has a particularly winning provenance: It was part of the scenery in the 1983 touring production of “Private Lives” that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and featured John Cullum and Ms. Moore.“I’m not swearing to this, but I might have said, ‘You know, Richard, the only thing I hate to leave in this show is the damn piano. I love it so much. I think it’s so beautiful,’” said Ms. Moore, who composed the songs for “The Streets of New York” on that very instrument. “Well, one day, there it was, at the door of my apartment.”“All I did was kind of refurnish the place,” Ms. Moore said.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesMr. McMartin is very much a presence. He smiles from photographs. His books, many inscribed, still line the shelves. The gloves that were part of his costume in a Broadway production of “Chemin de Fer” hang in a frame near the living room. On a recent morning, Ms. Moore reached behind a bookcase and pulled out the cane that Mr. McMartin wielded during the shattering “Live, Laugh, Love” production number at the end of “Follies.”“Jack Cassidy came in here one time,” Ms. Moore said, referring to the Tony-winning actor. “And he said, ‘John, it’s time you did something with this place, because it’s a special place.’ I felt that way about it, too.”“I wanted very much for him to be comfortable and live in a pretty place,” she continued. “No, that’s not it. I wanted to live in a pretty place. I grew up in a nice house — a lovely house, actually — and I wanted this apartment to be wonderful. For both of us.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      Broadway’s ‘Is This a Room’ and ‘Dana H.’ to Close Early

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      The two experimental works will end their runs on Nov. 14. They had been scheduled to close Jan. 16.A pair of short experimental dramas that made an unlikely journey to Broadway this fall will close early, reflecting a tough climate for new plays as the industry seeks to recover from the lengthy pandemic shutdown.“Is This a Room” and “Dana H.” will end their runs on Nov. 14. They had been scheduled to close Jan. 16.“While we would’ve loved to run through our original end date, we recognize that we are in a challenging landscape for live performance and we’re grateful to have had a chance to share this work,” the producers, Dori Berinstein, Sally Horchow and Matt Ross, said in a statement Monday.The plays were jointly capitalized for up to $3.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped by investors.The reviews were strong for both works. “Is This a Room,” which is a verbatim re-enactment of the F.B.I. interrogation of Reality Winner, began previews Sept. 24 and opened Oct. 11. The play was conceived and directed by Tina Satter and stars Emily Davis.Deirdre O’Connell in Lucas Hnath’s play “Dana H.” at the Lyceum Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Dana H.,” in which an actress, Deirdre O’Connell, lip-syncs a series of audio interviews in which the playwright’s mother describes being abducted by a man she had been counseling, began previews Oct. 1 and opened Oct. 17. The author is Lucas Hnath, and the play is directed by Les Waters.The plays, which are running at the Lyceum Theater, are the first casualties of the uncertain climate on Broadway this fall. The industry is concerned enough about its economic state that it is not disclosing box-office grosses — a break with decades of practice — so it is hard to know how shows are doing. Producers say that several big musicals, and even some plays, are doing well, but that new plays, long a challenge on Broadway, are struggling. More

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      Review: In ‘Fairycakes,’ the Woods Are Campy, Dark and Daft

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      Douglas Carter Beane’s winky fantasia finds Pinocchio, Puck and other unlikely characters meeting cute in a storybook setting.Did you ever want to see a fairy-tale mash-up, set amid the magic of nature, offering clever rhyme and delightful song, with a powerful theme to bring it all home?Well, this isn’t that.“Fairycakes,” the laborious new comedy by Douglas Carter Beane that opened on Sunday at the Greenwich House Theater, dares to enter the precincts of “Into the Woods,” upping the ante and losing the bet. Written mostly in ear-scraping doggerel, it throws characters from the fairy-world subplot of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into the mixer with Cinderella, Peter Pan, Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, then presses the button marked “beat to death.”I say this with no glee; I went in needing and fully expecting an old-fashioned good time from the author of “The Little Dog Laughed,” “As Bees in Honey Drown” and many other hilarities. Beane’s always palpable love of theater, and satirical eye for its self-dramatizing denizens, suggested a lighthearted romp in the metaphysical woods.And for a moment, when familiar cutups like Jackie Hoffman and Ann Harada started the show by singing one of Lewis Flinn’s Shakespeare settings in sparkly, diaphanous drag, I thought we were heading in the right direction. (The perfect found-in-the-attic costumes are by Gregory Gale.) In her trademark cat-eye glasses, with her bitter-lemon moue, Hoffman, as Moth, is comedy just standing there; Harada, as Mustardseed, a warmth machine. Completing the set of Queen Titania’s attendant daughters are the witty Z Infante as Cobweb and the winning Kristolyn Lloyd as Peaseblossum, as the name is rendered here.Yet once their opening number ends and the plot begins, the poetry of the premise starts leaking out. That’s especially true in Beane’s singsong dialogue, mostly rendered four feet to a line with a few extra left feet thrown in. It scans like an ice cream truck with a flat tire.Jamen Nanthakumar, far left, in “Fairycakes,” by Douglas Carter Beane, which opened on Sunday at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs for the rhymes, often stressed on the wrong syllable, one can only assume they are designed to make you cringe. There is no world in which “fairy” and “ordinary” align without damage to one of them. And when Titania (Julie Halston) explains the parentage of the young man she dotes on — an offstage boy in Shakespeare, here the handsome Jamen Nanthakumar — she has this mouthful to spit out: “She was a princess her husband a king/But when she died, she did leave this changeling.”If it were only the verse that limped so badly, “Fairycakes” might still make viable comedy. But the story is lumpy too, its mechanical interweaving of Shakespeare and Disney somehow both predictable and holey. Each of the immortals is involved in the lives of one of the mortals: Peaseblossum encouraging Geppetto (Mo Rocca) to carve a son (Sabatino Cruz); Cobweb helping Cinderella (Kuhoo Verma) win her prince (Jason Tam); Mustardseed trying to wake Sleeping Beauty (Infante again); and Moth dumping Peter Pan for the pirate Dirk Dead-eye (Arnie Burton).I doubt we’re meant to think much about Dirk’s provenance. (He apparently comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore,” by way of Cap’n Crunch.) Nor are we meant to think much about anything else; Beane’s run-here-then-there direction on the very small set by Shoko Kambara and Adam Crinson almost always chooses distraction over information. But distraction only works for a while, and watching the novelty expire well before the play does makes each of these scenes seem less like a comedy vignette than a condolence call.From left, Chris Myers and Kristolyn Lloyd,whose relationship is complicated by both Shakespeare and Disneyfication.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThings are somewhat more interesting in the Shakespearean part of the plot, where a prophecy suggests that the impending divorce of Titania and Oberon (Burton again) will result in the deaths of their daughters. Now Puck (Chris Myers) enters the story, hoping to undo the curse and win the love of Peaseblossum, who disdains him for giving her the nickname that is also the show’s title. How Cupid, a large cricket and Queen Elizabeth are dragged in as well, I leave for you to discover.At a baggy 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s all too much, and too little. Or it was for me; others seated nearby seemed to be having a better time. One of them explained to me, later, at home, that he’d always enjoyed camp on its own terms, excusing its longueurs and illogic as the price, or even the source, of the entertainment. He name-checked the Ridiculous Theatrical Company and the old days of Wigstock, both of which featured amateur performers among the professionals.But amateurism as an aesthetic is a tricky proposition. Charles Ludlam, the Ridiculous star, and the better drag queens at Wigstock had in common painstaking precision. Even celebrating too-muchness, they knew the value of a tight fit and a tight edit.“Fairycakes” does share some of the anarchic, insider energy of that genre, thumbing its nose at the usual theatrical necessities of coherence and critics. But it is, for the most part, too uncareful for its unsophistication. And editing does not seem to be in Beane’s vocabulary, at least when it comes to actors. He perpetually indulges rather than cures his hams’ tendency to overdoneness.What makes these over-the-top shortcomings especially apparent are the few moments that beguile with (relative) subtlety. Beane gets off some of his finely honed zingers, and Flinn’s songs, especially the setting of Sonnet 23 that opens the second act (“As an imperfect actor on the stage”), are truly lovely. (So is Lloyd, who sings the sonnet, accompanying herself on the guitar.) Tam, dashing in tails as Prince Charming — and no less so in gold diapers as Cupid — gets the generic suaveness of a royal on the make in a few strokes, almost as if he had built his performance on the far more detailed version of the character in “Into the Woods.”Kuhoo Verma, center left, dancing with Jason Tam in “Fairycakes.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd then there’s Halston, who as always manages to pull the rabbit of real humanity out of the hat of caricature. Even while delivering a moral, she’s funny.That moral may not amount to much in “Fairycakes” — it’s something about embracing the human “capacity for change” — but in the hands of an old pro like Halston, it sounds like news. Now if only the play itself would listen.FairycakesThrough Jan. 2 at the Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; fairycakestheplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More