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      'For Colored Girls' Broadway Revival Opening March 2022

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      Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem begins performances in March at the Booth Theater, home to the original 1976 production.The previously announced Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” directed by Camille A. Brown, now has an opening date. After beginning previews on March 4, 2022, the show will open on March 24 at the Booth Theater, producers announced Monday.Brown, who will be making her Broadway directorial debut, choreographed the director Leah C. Gardiner’s well-received 2019 revival of Shange’s choreopoem for the Public Theater. But this Broadway production, which Brown will also choreograph, will be fully reimagined.“Of all the shows to be given as an opportunity to debut as a first-time Broadway director and choreographer, “for colored girls …” feels like a gift,” Brown said in a news release Monday. “I’m thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to combine all the parts of myself — dance, music and theater arts — to shape and share this timeless story again with the world.”Shange’s landmark work incorporates poetry, song and dance to tell the stories of seven women who are identified only by the hues of the dresses they wear. In his review of the recent Off Broadway revival, Ben Brantley detailed some of the show’s history as it made its way from bars and clubs to become “one of the most unexpected theater hits to emerge from the chaotic 1970s.” He added: “Shange’s free-form text was neither linear nor literal in its depiction of Black women struggling to claim their own voices from a society that had either ignored or actively silenced them.”Shange has inspired many, and her death in 2018 prompted a renewed interest in her work. The playwright Keenan Scott II has credited Shange’s “for colored girls” as an initial inspiration for his debut Broadway production, “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” He recently said that in college, a class screening of the Shange work was his first — and essentially his only — exposure to theater by Black playwrights at the time.Brown is a Tony Award nominee for her choreography in “Choir Boy.” She most recently choreographed and co-directed the Terence Blanchard opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in September. The Times’s dance critic Gia Kourlas said Brown’s step number for the opera “stops the show in its tracks.”Casting will be announced at a later date. More

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      Review: This Revival of Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Misses Its Mark

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      The production lacks the power to unsettle despite a fine cast of killers and wannabes who changed, or at least made, history gunning for presidents.The one reliably blood-chilling moment in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Assassins” comes courtesy of a killer who is, at best, a footnote in American history: Charles J. Guiteau, the lawyer who shot President James A. Garfield in 1881.Guiteau aims his gun at the audience, panning over us slowly, deliberately, in tension-filled silence. The music is stopped. The menace is visceral.“Facing the barrel of a gun, even when it’s just in a musical, is the kind of shock that can exist only in live theater,” Sondheim wrote in his 2011 book “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which he called this lingering, life-or-death moment in “Assassins” his favorite in a show rife with gun-waving murderers and murderers manqué.I’d wondered how that confrontation would land in John Doyle’s current revival at Classic Stage Company, not so much because of the state of our armed-to-the-teeth nation but because of the shooting last month on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” where a real gun fired a real bullet that killed a real person, when it was all meant to be pretend.The surprising answer is that it doesn’t land at all, because Doyle has defanged the moment, speeding it up to a manic pace. His jittery Guiteau, played by a creepily unnerving Will Swenson, swings the gun left, right and center so fast that there’s no time for us to feel endangered, no time for the threat to lodge inside us and turn to fear.Granted, maybe we’re all too freaked out right now anyway to have a prop gun pointed at us. But I wish that Doyle had plastered the lobby with unmissable posters explaining, as the digital program does, that the show’s guns “are replicas that were provided, checked, and rendered inoperable” by a weapons specialist. I wish he’d had leaflets printed with the same message, and handed to each person on the way in.I wish he’d kept that long, scary moment. Because racing through it undermines the potency of the show, Classic Stage’s first since the shutdown.Even with a powerhouse cast, this stripped down, off-balance production — originally slated for spring 2020 as part of the Sondheim 90th-birthday festivities — never does find a way to make the audience feel the stakes of its characters’ actions. That’s true whether we view the assassins purely as historical figures or also as metaphors for an aggressive strain of lethal discontent as American as Old Glory.From left: Tavi Gevinson, Kuhn, Will Swenson, Uranowitz, Andy Grotelueschen, Adam Chanler-Berat, Wesley Taylor and Pasquale.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show’s vaudevillian patchwork of stories about volatile 19th- and 20th-century misfits who murdered a president, or tried to, makes us laugh and leaves us humming. But we are ultimately unperturbed.And maybe that, too, is a sign of the times: that we have lately lived through such virulent, brutal threats to our democracy that this motley bunch (John Wilkes Booth! Lee Harvey Oswald! Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme!) hardly seems ominous. What risk they posed, what damage they did, is past.But there are also plenty of parallels to the present in Sondheim’s sharp-eyed song cycle of the ostensibly dispossessed and in Weidman’s often casually violent dialogue. Doyle, a Sondheim veteran who staged the 2017 revival of the Sondheim-Weidman “Pacific Overtures,” infers one contemporary correlation outright with his final stage image, which I will not spoil.“No one can be put in jail for his dreams,” Booth — the alpha assassin, played by Steven Pasquale as a smooth Southern shark — sings to the others in the delusion-packed opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.”Gathered at a fairground shooting gallery, they are encouraged to kill a president to win a prize. On Doyle’s set, above a bare thrust stage painted with the Stars and Stripes, a giant round target flashes with projections (by Steve Channon) of the various presidents’ faces.That same screen, bordered with lights that shine red, blue and — peculiarly — not white but pale yellow, is pretty much all the scenery the show gets, which is in keeping with Doyle’s pared-back aesthetic. But the storytelling would have benefited from more visual cues. Many projections are too coldly literal and too far removed from the action to aid it properly.When Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor), the would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, is executed, an image of an electric chair is projected above him. When Guiteau ascends to the gallows for his hanging while singing, with increasing franticness, “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,” Swenson has no stairs to dance on; there’s merely a distant projection of an empty noose.From left, Swenson, Rob Morrison (rear) and Ethan Slater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSimilarly, when Booth is in hiding, having shot Lincoln, there is no visual indication that he himself is injured, his leg broken. Pasquale is darkly charismatic, though: singing softly, beguilingly of “blood on the clover” from the Civil War in “The Ballad of Booth,” before the mask of romance slips and he spits a racist slur about Lincoln at venomous volume.The three-piece orchestra, led by Greg Jarrett, is supplemented in trademark Doyle style by some of the cast, notably Ethan Slater as the appealing Balladeer, who strolls the stage in a blue jumpsuit, playing an acoustic guitar. (Costumes are by Ann Hould-Ward.) Later he transforms into Oswald, a despondent young man with a powerful gun that — like many things here — comes wrapped in the flag.Heretical as it sounds, comic dialogue, not song, is this production’s strongest suit. But aside from a curiously underwhelming rendition of “Unworthy of Your Love,” the pretty, poppy duet between Fromme (Tavi Gevinson) and John Hinckley Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat, who is suitably skin-crawling as the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981), it’s not that the musical performances are lacking.It’s that the lighter book scenes really shine, especially the hilariously mercurial ramblings of the wannabe Richard Nixon killer Samuel Byck (Andy Grotelueschen) and the terrifically lively scenes between Gerald Ford’s foiled assassins, Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Judy Kuhn, handily transcending the role’s scatterbrained-broad stereotype).“Assassins” has been faulted since its premiere three decades ago for a supposed failure to make its disparate parts cohere. It’s also proved many times that they can, yet Doyle’s staging never manages to harness that cumulative power. Faithful though it is to the show’s sung and spoken text, it’s missing some vital connective tissue.Of course, the same could be said of the country. This is a musical with a deep, warning sense of something frighteningly wrong in the fabric of the United States — a nation where, as the song goes, “Something just broke.”You can still hear that alarm in this production. But don’t expect to feel it more than distantly.AssassinsThrough Jan. 29 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Review: Theater Professors Are Under the Gun in ‘Preparedness’

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      In this workplace comedy, beleaguered colleagues struggle to come together for an active-shooter training exercise.Theater people and academics share two traits: They are convinced of their calling’s moral importance to the world, which can provide a feeling of superiority, but they also often feel misunderstood and beleaguered, which makes them defensive. As members of a university’s theater department, the characters in Hillary Miller’s new comedy “Preparedness” — presented by the Bushwick Starr and HERE — belong to both constituencies, which means that their shoulders slump under boulder-size chips.That wariness is warranted, though, as their department is under attack from the university’s brass, which wants not just to cut their budget, but eliminate the program altogether.Figurative and literal survival become entangled when an irrepressibly chirpy H.R. representative, Kath (Alison Cimmet), turns up in the department’s shabby — and decidedly not chic — conference-slash-break room. If the teachers undergo state-mandated training on how to handle a potential mass shooting, they will have a better chance of surviving both a gunman and the dean’s delete button.An assistant professor in the English department at Queens College and the author of books on theater, Miller is fluent in academia’s quirks and jargon, as well as interdepartmental rivalries — don’t get the theater professors started on their brethren in film and digital tech. She also nails bureaucracies’ love for acronyms, deployed here in a dizzying alphabet soup that includes MeRP (Mutual Respect Pledge), ACOST (Active Campus Operations Shooter Training) and GOHOHOF (Get Out, Hide Out, Help Out, Fight), as well as references to “FERPP requests” and “FULAP forms.”Miller and the director Kristjan Thor neatly sketch certain types that turn up in pretty much every group of educators. Most memorable are the beleaguered chairman, Jeff (Lou Liberatore), doing his darnedest to save his department, and Laurette (the wonderful Nora Cole, master of the haughty side eye), a grande dame prone to statement shawls and imbued with the authority that comes from charisma, experience and lofty ideals about her vocation. “We’re theater artists,” she says. “We create sacred spaces for a living!”Just as familiar is the high-strung, humorless Haydée García-Shelton (Tracy Hazas), who seems to have a hard time gelling with her colleagues — she casually informs them that she got married over the weekend, as if it were no big deal — and shows disdain for musicals and their fans. “If you ask these people about my work, they’ll pretend to care, and then they’ll go right back to pushing their GoFundMe for bouffant wigs,” she says. One guess as to who will eventually use pepper spray.Getting this motley bunch to agree on anything, especially an administrative injunction perceived as an imposition, is akin to herding cats — real ones, unlike Cat Blanchett, the department’s new robotic “Resilience Mascot,” a gesture meant to help improve the sinking morale.Liberatore (with Hazas at right) shows off the department’s “Resilience Mascot,” a robot named Cat Blanchett.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUltimately, though, Miller can’t resolve a central issue: Some of the professors’ refusal to undergo training is mystifying. It’s easy to understand resistance to H.R., but a quick training session that both covers a very real concern — mass shootings in schools — and saves your funding feels like a gimme. And yet they bicker.Having painted herself into a corner, Miller can’t figure out how to end the play. So she gives Laurette, who is retiring, the last word in the form of an address to her students. It is a good speech, and a dodge.PreparednessThrough Dec. 11 at HERE Arts Center, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Be Nice to Tourists’: New York’s Arts Scene Needs International Visitors

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      The United States now allows vaccinated international travelers into the country. It’s welcome news for arts institutions that lost revenue and cut jobs during the pandemic.When many readers in Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong open their newspapers on Monday, they will be greeted with a full-page advertisement from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.“We reopened in August 2020, but have been missing one critical thing — you, our international visitors,” the ad will say. “The Met is only The Met when it is being enjoyed daily by visitors from around the world.”The unusual display — museum officials say they do not believe they have ever run a global marketing campaign of this scope aimed at visitors so far from their Fifth Avenue home — is a signal of the thirst among New York arts institutions for foreign visitors to return. American borders reopened to international tourists this week for the first time since the early months of 2020. Their return represents another milestone in New York’s reopening, and few sectors of the city’s economy are more of a draw to foreign travelers — or lean more heavily on them for revenue — than the arts.“It’s crucial that we recover this segment,” said Chris Heywood, a vice president for global communications at the city’s tourism agency, NYC & Company. “Arts and culture are going to lead our recovery. That is the backbone.”Indeed, billions of dollars and many thousands of jobs are at stake. Employment in New York City’s arts, entertainment and recreation sector plummeted by 66 percent from December 2019 to December 2020, according to a state report. Even as things reopen, and workers are hired back, challenges remain: The tourism agency forecasts that visitor spending in 2021 will be about $24 billion, roughly half of what was spent in 2019.Few sectors of the city’s economy are more of a draw to foreign travelers — or lean more heavily on them for revenue — than the arts.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInternational visitors typically make up about a fifth of the city’s visitors, but they tend to stay longer and spend more than domestic visitors: what they spend accounts for roughly half of all tourism dollars.On Broadway, tourists from outside the United States comprise about 15 percent of the audience during a traditional season, said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. (There is a reason that the website of “The Lion King” is lined with flags indicating where to click for translations of its sales pitch in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese and Spanish.)The Metropolitan Opera said that international ticket sales have accounted for about 20 percent of total box office revenues during the last five seasons. And more than half of New York’s international visitors go visit an art gallery or museum during their trip, according to data from NYC & Company. One in four go to some kind of live performance when they are in the city — be it a concert, play, musical, a dance performance or opera.So New York has been missing them.“This is a big step forward,” said Victoria Bailey, the executive director of Theater Development Fund, the nonprofit organization that operates the TKTS booth, where about 70 percent of the tickets are bought by tourists and roughly half of those sales are to foreign travelers.Groups catering to tourists from overseas are gearing up. Broadway Inbound, a subsidiary of the Shubert Organization that is responsible for the wholesale distribution of show tickets, recently restarted a marketing program that helps highlight more than 20 partnering shows to group buyers, tour operators and the travel industry.The Metropolitan Museum of Art has moved some of its marketing dollars overseas in part because the it has hit something of a “ceiling” on attendance, Ken Weine, a spokesman for museum, said. Before the pandemic, international travelers accounted for about a third of the museum’s visitors; these days, the number of people who come to the museum daily is about half of what it was before March of 2020.The newspaper ad from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will run in Toronto, London, Paris and Hong Kong. Museum officials say they do not believe they have ever run a marketing campaign of this scope aimed at visitors so far from their Fifth Avenue home.Metropolitan Museum of ArtMusicals like “The Phantom of the Opera,” which have leveraged the interest of tourists who want to see a long-running show that they are familiar with, have purposefully invested advertising dollars during this holiday season and placed their displays in high-traffic, touristy areas. That is why there is an imposing three-dimensional statue of the Phantom’s mask strategically plopped next to the TKTS booth and outdoor advertising for “Chicago” all over Times Square.Foreign travelers have not yet begun buying tickets to “Phantom” in material numbers, said Aaron Lustbader, the general manager of the show. But officials hope that will change soon.“Typically, January and February are two of the very weakest months of the year and this has certainly been true for ‘Phantom,’” he said. “Our hope is that due to pent-up demand of nearly two years and assuming it would take most people at least a few weeks to put together plans, that the city sees a far higher number of international tourists in these otherwise lean months.”Barry Weissler, a producer of “Chicago,” said the show typically partners with online travel sites to serve ads and try to spark the interest of inbound, foreign tourists ahead of their flights to New York.And for their part, tour operators and ticket vendors overseas say they have started to see their New York business bounce back — somewhat.Eric Lang, who runs an Amsterdam-based travel and information website that helps vacationers plan trips to New York, said his ticket sales in October were up to about 5 percent of normal. This month, sales are closer to 15 to 20 percent of what he had come to expect for this period, before the pandemic. “Growth from zero,” he said.Lee Burns, a product manager for AttractionTickets.com, which sells event tickets to people and travel agents in the United Kingdom, said he thought the timing of the American reopening might have come “a bit too late” to capitalize on the 2021 holiday season. So far, he said, his company’s New York sales are at only about 10 percent of what is normal for the holiday season.“People are booking now for next Thanksgiving and next Christmas,” he said. Nonetheless, he said he and his team are trying to figure out if there is any sort of deal they can offer for this Black Friday.Those who come to New York from overseas will need to navigate and adhere to the rules and vaccine requirements set by the state, the city and individual venues.They will find that many venues and presenters, including Broadway theaters, the Met Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, will admit travelers who show proof of having received one of the vaccines approved by W.H.O. — a list that includes AstraZeneca, Sinopharm and Sinovac, vaccines that have not been authorized for use in the United States.To help theatergoers prepare for their visit to “Come From Away,” the show recently released a health and safety video outlining what patrons should expect when they show up at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. An official with Broadway Inbound said it had touched base with the creators of the video to help ensure it would be educational to both domestic and foreign visitors.Heywood, meantime, had a plea for New Yorkers already here. “Be nice to tourists,” he said. “This is important.” More

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      Review: In ‘Nollywood Dreams,’ a Star and an Industry Are Born

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      Jocelyn Bioh’s new comedy about making movies in Nigeria throws some side-eye on Hollywood as well.Producing more than 1,000 movies a year each, Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry, and Nollywood, the Nigerian version, have long outpaced the California dream-makers who think they rule the world in Hollywood.It is against this shift in the shaping of global culture that “Nollywood Dreams,” a giddy if wobbly comedy by Jocelyn Bioh, plays out.But the template is pure MGM: Our sweet heroine, Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), works, along with her tart sister Dede (Nana Mensah), in their parents’ travel agency in Lagos. When the rising film director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) announces open auditions for the title role in his latest project, “The Comfort Zone” — yes, there’s a title role — Ayamma sees a chance to “be like the women in all of those Hollywood films I spent my life watching” and become a star herself.There are complications, of course, but this being a 90-minute comedy, not many. Gbenga has all but promised the role of Comfort to his former lover, Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), a somewhat tarnished star known as “the Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner Legs.” And what of Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), Nigeria’s “Sexiest Man Born,” slated to play the hero in the movie and perhaps in Ayamma’s life as well? What, indeed!If this sounds more like a soap opera than a film, that’s because Nollywood in the early 1990s, when the play is set, was still in its artistic infancy. (Bioh writes in an introduction to the script that movies of that period, which she watched as a child, were low budget, “shot with very limited takes” and heavily dependent on improvisation.) Half the fun of Saheem Ali’s staging for MCC Theater, which opened on Thursday night, is in seeing how those drawbacks, when borrowed by West Africans, become selling points of a new aesthetic.Or perhaps an old one: “Nollywood Dreams” is spirited and casual, with the knockabout rhythms and narrative shortcuts of Hollywood in its early years, before flickers became films. On Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set, the action cuts between three locations: the travel agency, Gbenga’s office and a television studio where the beloved talk-show host Adenikeh, “the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey,” conveniently interviews the other characters so they can provide bald updates on the plot.Sandra Okuboyejo, left, and Nana Mensah as sisters in the play, a production of MCC Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs played by the one-named actor Abena, who was a lovely Anne Page in Bioh’s adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” this summer, Adenikeh exemplifies the play’s twinned pleasures. While translating Oprah’s American mannerisms into florid Nigerian ones, she also offers a warped fun-house reflection on the original. That’s a neat double flip Bioh sticks throughout the play: In having her characters worship American brands (Steven Spielberg, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” N.Y.U.) she pokes gentle fun at both.That’s by now a Bioh trademark. “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” a hit for MCC in 2017, wrings all possible laughs (and a few impossible ones) out of its Ghanaian variation on familiar mean-girl tropes — while also offering, underneath the genre trappings, a critique of American cultural imperialism. “Merry Wives” is similarly complex, finding doubles for Shakespeare’s characters among the African diasporic community of South Harlem.If “Nollywood Dreams” is not quite as successful as those previous works, it’s at least in part because Bioh set out to keep the new play as light as possible. Like Gbenga, told by producers in the United States to “write movies about what they assumed was my experience” — which is to say, war and poverty — she was determined in “Nollywood Dreams” to focus on what’s “funny and wild and silly.” In a recent profile in The New York Times, she recalled a literary manager who despite admiring the play expressed surprise at its happy characters; hadn’t she read about Boko Haram?I am grateful that Bioh declined to interpolate that Nigerian terrorist group into the action. Too few playwrights have a gift for comedy, and she is the rare one who not only provides zingers but also the structures in which they make sense.A play about the enjoyable makeshiftness of early Nollywood films therefore gets an enjoyably makeshift treatment: Form follows dysfunction. Ali’s direction emphasizes color and comfort over snap and discipline. (Dede Ayite’s costumes nail all four.) The downside is occasional bagginess, as in the overlong audition scenes; “The Comfort Zone,” a love triangle in which a man must choose between his haughty American wife and his humble Nigerian sweetheart, is so deliberately bad that we cannot register, as we’re evidently meant to, Ayamma’s skill in performing it.Ade Otukoya as the magnetic leading man Wale and Abena as a beloved talk-show host known as the “Nigerian Oprah Winfrey.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut then Ayamma is the only character not forcibly enlisted in Bioh’s fun-at-all-costs agenda; Okuboyejo grounds her with warmth and common sense. The others are all over-the-over-the-top caricatures, hardly distinguishable from those in the films they make. (Even in movies, people are rarely as magnetically smooth as Otukoya’s Wale, who can seduce just by draping his arm on a couch.) To bring the point home, Bioh buttons the play with a spoof trailer for “The Comfort Zone” that’s both sincere and hilarious, a kiss and a kiss-off.Fair enough, but the best comedy nevertheless plants its feet in the same ground as tragedy. “Nollywood Dreams” evidently means to do so as well; Bioh sees in “The Comfort Zone” the “sad duality” of a country in which people have the choice to “live like the rich” by participating in the unjustness of society “or suffer like the poor” by refusing. “There is,” she writes, “no middle.”How “The Comfort Zone” — let alone the play that contains it — represents that idea I was unable to fathom. As subtext it’s in any case too sub to provide adequate ballast for the comedy. If only against the high standard of “School Girls,” that makes “Nollywood Dreams” feel slightly unmoored — which wouldn’t matter if American comedy were more like Nigerian film. In that case there would be 999 more productions like it, coming soon to a theater near you.Nollywood DreamsThrough Nov. 28 at the MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘I Don’t Know What a Carrie Is’: Candace Bushnell Works It Out Onstage

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      The writer maps her life in a one-woman show, “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” beginning previews this weekend at the Daryl Roth Theater.I must tell you that after a long day of rehearsal in five-inch heels and a photo shoot at which she had posed atop, bestride and semi-supine on a corner banquette, Candace Bushnell, the woman who made the cosmopolitan the most famous drink of pre-Y2K New York, slipped into a chair in the gallery of the Carlyle Hotel and ordered an unglamorous pot of Earl Grey tea. With slices of lemon to soothe her throat.Bushnell, 62, broke out in the mid ’90s as a sex and relationship columnist for The New York Observer, centering her columns on a character named Carrie Bradshaw, a chic stand-in for Bushnell herself. She collected those pieces into a spiky 1996 book, “Sex and the City,” autofiction before it was cool. HBO premiered a series adaptation two years later. It ran for six seasons. Two movies followed, as did licensed fragrances, bus tours and candy.Bushnell’s life diverged from Carrie’s. She turned her talents to fiction. Her marriage to the ballet dancer Charles Askegard, whom she nicknamed Mr. Bigger, ended in divorce. After fleeing Manhattan for the Hamptons and despairing of dating, she wrote another novel, “Is There Still Sex in the City?”I couldn’t help but wonder: Has Bushnell adapted that novel into a one-woman show? She has. In “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” which begins previews at the Daryl Roth Theater on Saturday, Bushnell makes her stage debut, tracing her life — like a fever chart plotted in tasteful pink lipstick — from her Connecticut childhood to her party girl pinnacle to marriage, divorce and beyond. Is this fiction, autofiction, memoir?Bushnell at a rehearsal for “Is There Still Sex in the City?” in Midtown Manhattan. She hired an acting coach and a voice coach, and is doing Pilates to build up her core strength for the show. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m not trying to play a character,” she told me. “But I have a feeling that maybe I am a character. Like kind of naturally.”Bushnell arrived at the Carlyle, a few blocks from her Upper East Side apartment, in a sensible gray sweater dress and a fresh pair of absolutely senseless shoes — red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles — that she walked in with impossible ease. (A line I’d heard during the rehearsal for the show earlier that day: “Do I have a shoe obsession like Carrie Bradshaw? No. Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me.”) In person, she has the wide-set eyes and porcelain poise of a Meissen figurine and conversation as polished as the Carlyle’s silverware.As a child in Glastonbury, Conn., Bushnell acted sporadically, though she spent most of her free time scribbling short stories and riding her horses. When she moved to New York at 19 — “wild and full of philosophies,” she said — she flirted with acting (that’s her frisky verb), studying at HB Studio.“I didn’t think I was really very good at it, which I probably shouldn’t say,” she said.Besides, she never loved it the way that she loved writing. “I really felt like, I’ve got to be a writer, or I’m going to die,” she said. So she wrote, signing away the theatrical rights to each new book. But a few years ago, when apportioning the rights to “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” she decided to hold onto the theatrical rights for herself.She wasn’t sure what to do with them. But then she met a talent manager, Marc Johnston, at the Carlyle, which Bushnell seems to treat as a bonus living room. He had helped to create a touring show for his client, the composer and accidental reality TV star David Foster. He thought that he could do the same for her.So again she wrote, this time in monologue form, repurposing stories from her books, her life, her lecture tours. That first draft ran about 200 pages. To shape up the script, Johnston and his fellow producer, Robyn Goodman, introduced Bushnell to the director and choreographer Lorin Latarro.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said of preparing for the role.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn June, the show had a tryout at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Penn. Set in a near-replica of Bushnell’s apartment, which includes her actual sofa, her actual carpet and her actual poodles, it unfurls as a chatty girl’s night.And though Bushnell is a practiced hostess, those first performances were unnerving. “It was like, Oh, God, this is really acting,” Bushnell said. Gradually the script shortened and Bushnell relaxed and improved.“She’s really miraculous,” Goodman told me in a phone interview. “She was determined to understand acting and she’s done it.”Understanding meant hiring an acting coach and a voice coach, and committing to Pilates three times a week to build up her core strength for the show. Which is to say that Bushnell takes the work of rehearsal and performance seriously — hence the afternoon Earl Grey — comparing it to the dressage drills she practiced as a girl, repeating the same small moves over and over until she gets them right.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said.I joked that this made her seem not entirely like a Carrie. “I don’t even know what a Carrie is,” she said.HBO is busy reviving Carrie with a new series, “And Just Like That…,” which follows most of the original “Sex and the City” characters into their 50s, but Bushnell is not involved. In several places, her stage show emphasizes differences between Bushnell and Carrie, but those differences pertain to matters of men and fashion, not ideology or temperament. Carrie is flighty; Bushnell has her feet, if not her heels, firmly on the ground. While Carrie’s story ultimately became a romance, Bushnell maintains extreme ambivalence about romantic relationships.Bushnell in red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles. “Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me,” she quips in her one-woman show. Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesHer feminism, which lurks at the margins of her books, emerges cogently and unashamedly in conversation. She speaks persuasively about the deforming effects of patriarchal power and the need for, as she put it, an equality of “mind, body and earning potential” — a nice surprise from a woman once known for table dancing at Da Silvano.A Page Six darling, Bushnell has rarely received much credit for her politics, her obvious intelligence, her psychological acuity. (Let’s just say that when I read her most recent book I found a few pages that described my foundered marriage so entirely that I had to text them to half a dozen friends and then lie down for a while.) And this is just ever so slightly on purpose.She recalled that as a child, angry about the inequities of gender, her father sat her down and told her that while she had ideas that people would need to hear, no one would listen if she yelled them. “So I learned very early on to coat everything in a candy-colored, sugarcoated message. Because that’s how you move society,” she said.Latarro, during a pre-rehearsal chat, agreed. “She writes feminism in a way that makes it palatable for a lot of women who have internalized misogyny and a lot of men who think everybody looks great in their sexy dresses.”The stage show, rich in quip and pop song snippet, is candy-colored, too — a chocolate martini with a sugared rim. Bushnell is recognizably herself, at least in the hour of rehearsal I saw, but buffed and glossed: a person repurposed as a fun and fabulous character. I asked her why she hadn’t attempted something sharper, more bitter. Earlier drafts had darker elements, she said. But those were cut.“The message that I’m delivering is probably risky enough as it is. I sit there and say, ‘I’m not married, I don’t have kids. And I’m grateful.’”Not that she wants to bother her audience with too many messages, which is probably why the producers have created a post-show nightspot, the Candi Bar, in the basement of the Daryl Roth.“Cosmos all night!” Johnston had enthused in a phone interview.Bushnell, as she drank her tea, put it more practically. “People just want to feel good,” she said. “And I want to give them a good time.” More

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      A Rare ‘Othello’ Puts the Spotlight on Race

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      With a Black-led production of Shakespeare’s play, an Austrian theater hopes to jump-start a conversation about racism and the need for diversity on the country’s stages.ST. PÖLTEN, Austria — “Speak of me as I am,” Othello urges in the wrenching final scene of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Yet for centuries, those words — a plea for accurate representation — were spoken, by and large, by white actors.Nicholas Monu, who stars in a new production of “Othello,” running through Dec. 4 at the Landestheater Niederösterreich here, is pretty sure that he is only the second Black performer to play the role in Austrian theater history. The last time was nearly 170 years ago, in 1853, when the pioneering African-American actor Ira Aldridge held Viennese audiences spellbound as the Moor of Venice.As directed by the young Black British director Rikki Henry, this new “Othello” breaks ground in a country where artists of color remain a rarity onstage.The majority of Austria’s population of around nine million is white and was born here, although the percentage of foreigners and people with migration backgrounds has been rising steadily in recent years. Like its larger and more ethnically varied neighbor Germany, Austria has a robust system of state-funded theaters that employ full-time acting ensembles; these, like the country at large, are overwhelmingly white.From left: Michael Scherff, Tim Breyvogel, Laura Laufenberg, Nicholas Monu, Marthe Lola Deutschmann, and Tilman Rose in “Othello” at the Landestheater Niederösterreich.Alexi PelekanosWith its new “Othello,” the Landestheater is jump-starting a conversation about racism in Austrian society and the need for diversity on the country’s stages. According to the theater, there has never been a German-language production of “Othello” with both a Black director and star before, and it seems significant that the first is taking place not in a major cultural metropolis, but in St. Pölten, a small city 40 miles outside Vienna.“It’s often said that innovation comes from the provinces,” Marie Rötzer, the Landestheater’s artistic director since 2016, said in an interview. Recently, her playhouse has been punching above its weight, with productions including a stellar 2019 staging of the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s allegory of the Trump presidency, “Am Königsweg,” and a 2020 “Hamlet” that was Henry’s house debut, and which won a Netroy, the prestigious Austrian theater award.“With this ‘Othello,’ we’re addressing wounds,” said the Landestheater’s director, Marie Rötzer. “The wounds of racism, hostility towards refugees, xenophobia and the isolationism that you often find in Austria.” David Payr for The New York TimesAlthough Shakespeare has long been venerated in the German-speaking world, “Othello” is a comparative rarity on its theater programs.“Normally, nobody here wants to touch it,” said Tim Breyvogel, the German actor who plays Iago, in an interview after a recent matinee performance. In the wrong hands, he said, an “Othello” production can legitimize stereotypes about Black men. And then there’s the issue of casting, he added: Even in Austria, most theaters now realize that presenting the title role in blackface was unacceptable.Rötzer said she knew her theater’s “Othello” must have a Black actor in the title role. After Henry’s success with “Hamlet,” she approached him about directing the show. Henry and Monu’s experiences as Black men helped the theater to “develop an awareness about how to treat topics that are part of the Black community,” she said.“With this ‘Othello,’ we’re addressing wounds: the wounds of racism, hostility towards refugees, xenophobia and the isolationism that you often find in Austria,” Rötzer said.Henry, 33, said in an interview that it was “a challenge to try to work out what the story would now tell in Austria — because, of course, race relations are different in Austria than they are in England.”Monu, left, and Tim Breyvogel, playing Iago. The production is set in the world of professional boxing.Alexi PelekanosHis strikingly contemporary production is set in the world of professional boxing, where Othello is a heavyweight prizefighter. “My idea was of someone who was incredibly lonely and someone who was isolated,” Henry said.That sense of exclusion and alienation, the director said, was something that everyone, regardless of their skin color, could relate to. The boxing frame also helped to motivate Iago’s machinations and reveal the character’s racism, he added. “Iago’s manipulations and reasonings became more alive, because boxing is so competitive and relies on intrigue,” Henry said.The Black Lives Matter movement was heating up as he worked on the show last year, but Henry said he was careful not to take the production in an overtly political direction. “We didn’t want to say to the audience, ‘You’re racist!’” Henry said. “Theater isn’t supposed to be accusing anyone. It’s supposed to be supporting and maybe ennobling them in some way.”Rikki Henry, the production’s British director, said it was “a challenge to try to work out what the story would now tell in Austria,” adding, “race relations are different in Austria than they are in England.”Michael Obex“Maybe it just sparks some interesting questions that you haven’t asked before, like, ‘How do I treat that brown person who delivers my mail every morning?’” he added.Monu, 56, who was born in Nigeria but lives in Salzburg, Austria, said that racism in Austrian society largely lay beneath the surface. “People don’t give it a lot of thought. There hasn’t been that journey that America has been forced to make, because of slavery, Jim Crow, etc. — or that Germany has been forced to make, because of the Second World War,” he said.“It’s not an aggressive form of racism,” he added. “You’re just not taken seriously or not seen as on quite the same level as a human being.”Monu, who began his acting career in England, is a former ensemble member of two of the most significant theaters in the German-speaking world: the Schaubühne in Berlin and the Burgtheater in Vienna. Yet despite having benefited from the ensemble system, he said it would need updating if it hoped to reflect the increasingly multiethnic reality of Europe today.Europe’s ensemble system, in which theaters have a troupe of permanent actors, was “a fantastic system, designed for brothers like this,” said Monu, right, referring to Breyvogel, left.David Payr for The New York Times“It’s a fantastic system, designed for brothers like this,” he said, gesturing toward Breyvogel, who sat next to him during the interview, “to be able to go from here to Berlin to Vienna, and be able to fit straight in, because the system is pretty much the same everywhere.”In order for things to change, Austrian theater administrators and audiences will need to become more familiar with seeing actors of color and hearing different accents onstage, Monu said. He saw some encouraging signs, he added: When he joined the Burgtheater in the early 2000s, he was the only Black actor in the ensemble; today, there are three.“If you’re going to be truly diverse, then you’ve got to open up your doors towards people who don’t sound like you, look like you,” Monu said. “Sometimes the journey’s going to be unpleasant or uncomfortable.”Monu said he hoped that this “Othello” might inspire local audiences take that journey. “I can try my best to touch as many people as I can, just by saying, ‘Hey, you know what, I’m the first Black guy you’ve ever seen onstage — and speaking German.’” More

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      On Paris Stages, Black Directors Forge a New Course

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      Representation for dramatic artists of color is improving, but few Black creators get to be their own bosses. Two recent productions show what France’s mainstream theater is missing.PARIS — On a recent Sunday evening, Paris played host to a theater troupe that had come a long way. The Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane traveled from French Guiana, nestled north of Brazil on the Atlantic coast of South America, with its latest production: “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” staged by the company’s director, Odile Pedro Leal.Yana, here, means Guiana. In this shrewd adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” the repressed sisters at the heart of the Spanish play speak Creole and dream of men who farm sugar cane. And for the first time I can recall in over a decade of theatergoing in Paris, the audience around me was predominantly Black — a situation that shouldn’t be so rare in such a racially diverse city.Yet “Bernarda Alba From Yana” was performed only once, and not in a major Paris playhouse. Instead, it was presented at the Maurice Ravel Conservatory, a training institution, as part of Le Mois Kréyol (Creole Month), a festival dedicated to promoting artists from France’s numerous overseas territories, which include once colonized islands and regions dotted around the world, from the Pacific to the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.Since these territories are home to many people of color, Le Mois Kréyol, which was created in 2017 by the Caribbean-born choreographer Chantal Loïal, also celebrates French Blackness — and is a reminder of what the country’s mainstream theater is missing. Broadway’s power players signed a sweeping diversity pact in August; in France, overseas theatermakers and their peers of African origin remain shut out of leadership positions.Of France’s five national theaters and 38 “national dramatic centers,” none has a Black director — not even the national dramatic center in La Réunion, a multicultural French island near Madagascar. Although representation is slowly improving onstage, with more diverse drama school cohorts and regular instances of colorblind casting, it has yet to translate to Black creators being their own bosses.The dancer and activist Josephine Baker, who will be interred in the Panthéon, France’s storied tomb of heroes, on Nov. 30, is the subject of two productions this winter; neither of them is directed by a Black artist. Just this season, the lives of Nelson Mandela and Angela Davis made it to the stage in similar fashion; and in a country that prides itself on being colorblind, asking why Black directors weren’t considered is taboo.From left, Irène Bicep, Jean-Marc Lucret and Ophélie Joh in “Bernarda Alba From Yana.”Peggy FarguesAll of these shows may turn out to be good, but “Bernarda Alba From Yana” and a new production by the Guinea-born playwright Hakim Bah, “Out of Sweat” (“À Bout de Sueurs”), point to a richer way forward. It was obvious that both were steeped in an intimate knowledge of the cultures at hand. The acting palette also departed from French norms to embrace local accents, which tend to be erased elsewhere in favor of a “neutral” delivery, as well as a greater range of body language.In Pedro Leal’s hands, this makes “Bernarda Alba” a warmer proposition than usual. In lieu of the strait-laced grief often associated with García Lorca’s play, in “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” the women sing and dance through their pain. The mourning scene for Bernarda’s second husband, early in the play, is a vivid ritual, set to a Guianese song: The matriarch’s five daughters assemble around her, chanting, clapping and writhing on the floor. Later, two of the sisters, bored by the complete isolation that the domineering Bernarda has forced on them, shimmy and sway their hips in a dance-off.In that scene and elsewhere, Sarah Jean-Baptiste makes a mercurial Adela, and there is a delightful sense of mischief to many of the actors’ performances. Micheline Dieye and Pedro Leal shine as the family’s willful servants, as does Jean-Marc Lucret in a cross-dressing take on the role of Martirio. Far from altering the play’s dynamics, the contrast between the characters’ impetuous physicality and the atmosphere of repression is made all the more acute.Pedro Leal made subtle tweaks to the text to emphasize the Guianese setting. (García Lorca’s frequent references to heat offer built-in help.) Creole is so rarely heard onstage that it’s a treat to listen to performers getting lines in the language, with enough context that their meaning is clear to non-Creole speakers. Since French was imposed as the official language on many overseas territories, there is something slightly meta about hearing Bernarda (Maïté Vauclin) repeatedly berating her daughters when she hears them slipping into Creole, with the angry demand: “French in my house!”The set was presumably designed for ease of touring: curtains, some wire fence and a few seats, including a crescent-shaped Saramaka stool, must do the job from start to finish. Nevertheless, “Bernarda Alba From Yana” is a milestone for such a young company. While Pedro Leal has worked as a director in mainland France and in Guiana since the 1990s, the Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane was founded only in 2017, and it is now supported by public funding. It is a part of French culture, and deserves to be seen.From left, Diarietou Keita, Vhan Olsen Dombo and Claudia Mongumu in “Out of Sweat,” directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet.Raphaël KesslerThe same could be said of the work of Bah, 34, who lives alternately in France and Guinea, where he co-founded a theater festival, Univers des Mots (Universe of Words). Bah’s plays have earned him several distinctions; “Out of Sweat,” the latest, won the 2019 Laurent Terzieff-Pascale de Boysson prize, which comes with a spot in the lineup at the Lucernaire theater.The pandemic delayed the premiere twice, but “Out of Sweat,” directed by Bah and Diane Chavelet, has now found its way to the smallest of the Lucernaire’s three stages. It is masterfully, economically built around just a handful of scenes and characters, who are from an unspecified African country. Fifi, who has immigrated to France, returns home for a fleeting visit. There, she convinces Binta, an old friend saddled with an unfaithful husband, to seduce a Frenchman online, in the hope of securing a better future.Even though the end of the play was inspired by a real-life tragedy, Bah’s approach is more poetic than realistic. What drives “Out of Sweat” is the inner logic and musicality of each scene. When Fifi and Binta are reunited, they repeat each other’s names again and again, with a mix of surprise, growing recognition and suspicion, truncating sentences in ways that build up to an intriguing rhythm.Diarietou Keita (Fifi) and Claudia Mongumu (Binta) play up both the comedy and the pathos in their relationship with vivid physicality. As Binta’s unfaithful husband, Bachir, on the other hand, Vhan Olsen Dombo is withdrawn, then suddenly destructive. In a monologue set in an airport lounge, his performance morphs into spoken word and ends in stomping and piercing cries of frustration, his pace closely mirrored by a live guitarist and electronic musician accompanying the action, Victor Pitoiset.Yet even when their behavior is extreme, all the characters in “Out of Sweat” feel rooted in a nuanced understanding of the two worlds they inhabit. Like Pedro Leal and her company, Bah is obviously ready for bigger stages. When will French theater give them, and other Black directors, a permanent seat at the table?Le Mois Kréyol. Festival directed by Chantal Loïal. Further productions around France through Nov. 28.À Bout de Sueurs. Directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet. Le Lucernaire, through Dec. 5. More