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      Andrew Garfield Can’t Remember Who He Was Before ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’

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      In the movie musical, Garfield plays the creator of “Rent,” who died unexpectedly at 35. Making the film helped Garfield process a death in his own life.Jon (Andrew Garfield) is throwing a party, though there’s hardly a reason to celebrate. He’s riven with anxiety, his cramped apartment is overpacked with people, and he’s just spent money he doesn’t have, a down payment on success that will not come within his lifetime. But still, with a wide grin, Jon toasts his friends, leaps on his couch and sings, “This is the life!”Jon is Jonathan Larson, the composer and playwright who died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996 just before his new musical, “Rent,” would become a global smash. The new film “Tick, Tick … Boom!” portrays Larson struggling to find success in his late 20s, as he frets about whether he should pack it in and choose a more conventional path than scripting musical theater.Larson originally created “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a solo show, “Boho Days,” starring himself in 1990; after his death, it was reworked by the playwright David Auburn into a three-person production that the “Hamilton” creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, saw in 2001, when he was still a senior in college.“Here’s this posthumous musical from the guy who made me want to write musicals in the first place,” said Miranda, who’s now made his feature directorial debut with the film.Miranda saw Garfield in the 2018 Broadway production of “Angels in America” and thought he was “transcendent” in that show. “I just left thinking, ‘Oh, that guy can do anything,’” the director recalled. “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything. So I cast him in my head probably a year before I talked to him about it.”Miranda put Garfield through his paces, sending him to a vocal coach and ensuring that the actor would be able to play enough piano so the camera could pan from his fingers to his face throughout the film. But those are just the technical aspects of a performance that is impressively possessed: Garfield plays the passionate, frustrated Larson with enough zealous verve to power all the lights on Broadway.Garfield as Jonathan Larson in a scene from “Tick, Tick … Boom.”Macall Polay/NetflixIt’s all part of a very busy fall for the 38-year-old actor, who recently appeared in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” as the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and, it’s rumored, will suit up alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” out in December. (Of that supersecret superhero team-up, Garfield can divulge nothing.) Still, it’s clear that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” meant much more to him than he initially expected.“It’s a strange thing when there’s someone like Jon that you didn’t have any relationship to before, and then suddenly now there’s this mysterious forever connection that I am never, ever going to let go,” Garfield told me on a recent video call from Calgary, Canada, where he’s shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a limited series. “I just feel so lucky that Jon was revealed to me, because now I don’t remember who I was before I knew who Jon was.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.How did “Tick, Tick … Boom!” originally come to you?One of my best friends in New York is Gregg Miele, and he’s the great body worker and massage person of New York City — he works on all the dancers and actors and singers on Broadway and beyond. Lin was on his table one morning and asked, “Can Andrew Garfield sing?” And Gregg, being the friend that he is, just started lying, basically, and said, “Yes, he is the greatest singer I’ve ever heard.” Then he called me and said, “Hey, go and get some singing lessons because Lin’s going to ask you to do something.”Lin and I had lunch, and he told me briefly about “Tick, Tick” and Jon. I’m not a musical theater guy in my history — it’s not something that I’ve been introduced to until the last few years, really. So Lin left me with a copy of the music and lyrics, and he wrote at the front of it, “This won’t make sense now, but it will. Siempre, Lin.”Garfield hadn’t done much singing when he was cast in “Tick, Tick … Boom” opposite musical theater veterans. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to die.’”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesYou’ve performed in plays like “Angels in America” and “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway, but in this film, Lin surrounded you with a lot of musical-theater ringers, and even some of the smallest roles and cameos are filled by major players from that world. That had to have been a daunting space to step into.I remember a very specific moment where we were in music rehearsal. Alex Lacamoire was at the piano walking us through the songs — he’s Lin’s musical arranger and producer — and I was with [“Tick, Tick” co-stars] Robin de Jesus and Vanessa Hudgens and Josh Henry and Alex Shipp. You can imagine how I’m feeling! They’re all just pros, they know exactly what they’re doing, they’re making notes. I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”Then it comes time for me to get into the song and I’m just trying to get through it. I remember Alex Lacamoire going, “Woo, Andrew!” And then everyone behind him, like Josh and Vanessa and Alex and Robin, were like, “Yeah baby, that’s it baby! You got it, baby!” I go beet red and five minutes pass, and I’m just like, “Hey guys, sorry.” I start crying, and I say, “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy in my entire life, to be surrounded by the most supportive liars I have ever known.”Garfield working with his director, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who cast him after seeing the actor in “Angeles in America.” Miranda recalled, “I didn’t know if he could sing, but I just felt like he could do anything.”Macall Polay/NetflixJonathan spends the movie anxious about this ticking that only he can hear. How did you interpret that?There was a line in the original one-man show “Boho Days”: “Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to explode.” It was too on-the-nose for people after he passed away, and they had to cut it, but he spends the story trying to figure out what this ticking is: “Is it turning 30? Is it that I haven’t succeeded? Is it some unconscious idea of my girlfriend’s biological clock combined with the pressure of my career? Or is it all of my friends who are losing their lives at a very young age because of the AIDS epidemic?”It could even be a musical metronome. The way you play Jonathan, as this theatrical person who feels so deeply and urgently, it’s almost like he needs to break into song because normal life just doesn’t cut it.Everything is up at an 11. Even when he’s making love, it’s at 11! Somehow he knows that this is all going to end, that this is all so ephemeral, and I think he was acutely, painfully aware that he wasn’t going to get all of his song sung. And I think he was also agonizingly aware that he wasn’t going to get the reflection and recognition that he knew he was supposed to have while he was still breathing.On the last day of shooting, what I understood is that Jon had it figured out. He knew that this is a short ride and a sacred one, and he had a lot of keys and secrets to how to live with ourselves and with each other and how to make meaning out of being here. Once he accepted that, he could be fully a part of the world, and then he could write “Rent.” I don’t think there’s an accident in that. That very visceral knowing of loss and of death, that’s what gives everything so much meaning. And without that awareness, we will succumb to meaninglessness.So what kind of meaning did this story give to you?Every frame, every moment, every breath of this film is an attempted honoring of Jon. And, on a more personal level, it’s an honoring of my mom. She is someone who showed me where I was supposed to go in my life. She set me on a path. We lost her just before Covid, just before we started shooting, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. So, for me, I was able to continue her song on the ocean and the wave of Jonathan’s songs. It was an attempt to honor him in his unfinished song, and her in her unfinished song, and have them meet.I think that’s part of the reason I didn’t want this movie to end, because I got to put my grief into art, into this creative act. The privilege of my life has been being there for my mother, being the person that gave her permission when she was ready. We had a very amazing connection, and now an audience will know her spirit in an unconscious way through Jon, which I just find so magical and beautiful.“I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing,” Garfield said, adding, “Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm.”Alana Paterson for The New York TimesStill, that’s a lot to deal with while you were shooting this movie. It can’t have been easy.I was hesitant whether I was going to share that, but I feel like it’s a universal experience. In the best-case scenario, we lose our parents and not the other way around, so I feel very lucky that I got to be with her while she was passing, and I got to read her favorite poems to her and take care of her and my dad and my brother. I’ve lost people before, but one’s mother is a different thing. It’s the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm. For me, everything has changed: Where there was once a stream, there’s now a mountain; where there was once a volcano, there’s now a field. It’s a strange head trip.You put parts of yourself in other people, almost like they’re the stewards of who you are. And when you lose those people, suddenly you become their steward.As you say, it’s like my mother now lives in me in a way that maybe is even stronger than ever when she was incarnate. I feel her essence. For me, it only comes when one can accept the loss, and it’s so hard for us to do that in our culture because we’re not given the framework or the tools to. We’re told to be in delusion and denial of this universally binding thing that we’re all going to go through at some point, and it’s fascinating to me that this grand adventure of death is not honored.Actually, the only thing that gives any of this meaning is if we walk with death in the far corner of our left eye. That’s the only way that we are aware of being alive in this moment. I think that was the legacy that Jon leaves and the legacy that my mom leaves for me personally, is just to be here. Because you’re not going to be here for long.It reminds me of what was written on your script before all of this happened: “You don’t understand now, but you will.”“You don’t understand now, but you will.” I’m still reeling from the download of understanding what Jon’s life was about, what my mother’s life was about, what all of this is about. Oh God, how lucky to explore that in one’s work! More

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      In London, Musicals That Stay True to a Brand

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      “Frozen” and “Back to the Future: The Musical” are sure to please fans of the original screen works, without offering much more of interest.LONDON — There’s a human story embedded within the shiny toy that is “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opened Monday night at the Adelphi Theater here. But you pretty much know from the start that a revved-up audience is saving its greatest roar of recognition for a certain prop.That would be the whiz-bang car so beloved from the 1985 blockbuster film that it’s the calling card for the Tony-winning director John Rando’s transcription of the film on the West End. (A run in Manchester in March 2020 was cut short by the pandemic.)And so it proves. Scarcely has the vaunted DeLorean made its way onto a set by Tim Hatley — which itself resembles a mammoth LED-framed computer console — before the theater erupts in cheers that back in the past, so to speak, might have been reserved for legends of the stage. Its gull-wing doors all but ready to take flight, the vehicle later soars into the auditorium, doing a somersault in the process. “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” eat your heart out.The result honors a hard-working array of lighting, sound and video designers — not to mention Chris Fisher’s illusions — and recalls the era of the 1980s mega-musical and its dependence on visual effects: the falling chandelier in “The Phantom of the Opera” and the whirling helicopter in “Miss Saigon,” to cite just two examples.What about the actors? “Back to the Future”’s opening performance, as it happened, suffered a last-minute cast replacement when its (terrific) co-star, Roger Bart, was sidelined that day by a positive Covid-19 diagnosis. The role of the wild-haired Doc Brown — immortalized by Christopher Lloyd onscreen — has been given over temporarily to Bart’s understudy, Mark Oxtoby. I caught Bart’s gleeful performance, manic and unexpectedly touching, at the final preview.Still, can you imagine the mayhem that might ensue were the show’s mechanized capabilities to shut up shop? That would bring to grief a stage venture that, as with so many films turned stage musicals, exists essentially to honor the brand. As with “Frozen,” the Disney extravaganza that opened on a newly bustling West End a mere five days earlier, the creators must give obsessives a reasonable facsimile of the movie while attempting to find something uniquely stage-worthy to what, after all, is a franchise. (Both musicals go heavy on the merchandise.)Olly Dobson as Marty McFly in “Back to the Future: The Musical.”Sean Ebsworth BarnesThe need to think outside the celluloid box explains the 16 new songs from the Grammy winners Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard currently overburdening a story known onscreen in musical terms for Huey Lewis and the News rocking out “The Power of Love.” That ever-welcome rouser shows up just in time to fuel a clap-happy finale.The new songs, by contrast, feel largely like filler, though Bart lands the appealingly plaintive “For the Dreamers,” and Olly Dobson brings boundless energy and a strong voice to that wannabe rocker Marty McFly — the teenage time-traveler played in the movie by Michael J. Fox. “Something About That Boy” has an up-tempo catchiness appropriate to the era of “Grease” to which the material pays homage, and several numbers reference time specifically, as befits a sci-fi narrative in which the skateboard-happy Marty is forced to repair nothing less than the space-time continuum.And yet it’s the DeLorean again that prompts a double-page program spread explaining such vehicular specifics as temporal field stabilizers, a Tachyon Pulse Generator and, most crucially, a Flux Capacitor. That last item gets a workout as the engine — you’ll forgive that word choice — that drives the plot when an anxious Marty hurtles back to 1955 in an effort to bring his parents together so as to ensure that his own existence isn’t erased.Because 1985 is by now itself long ago, the book by Bob Gale (a co-author, with Robert Zemeckis, of the film) has sensibly jettisoned the Libyan terrorists who figure in the movie. Instead, we get a rather desperate-seeming reference to the current appetite for kale, and a tongue-in-cheek allusion to 2020 as a time without war, crime or disease.I hadn’t recalled the degree of Oedipal depth to a story that finds Marty resisting advances from his own mother, Lorraine (a clear-voiced Rosanna Hyland), in order to bring her under the romantic 1950s sway of the geeky George (an immediately appealing Hugh Coles). This slow-blooming charmer, given in song to rhyming “myopia” and “utopia,” is the one who belongs in Lorraine’s arms, not her own son.A bromance develops along the way between Marty and Doc, a mentor of sorts who in this iteration breaks the fourth wall more than once to express dismay at finding himself surrounded by choreographer Chris Bailey’s high-stepping chorus line. The surprise, in context, is understandable. After all, it can’t be easy folding dance into a scenario in which the car gets all the best moves.Samantha Barks, left, as Elsa and Stephanie McKeon as Anna in Disney’s “Frozen,” directed by Michael Grandage at the Theater Royal Drury Lane.Johan Persson“Frozen” induces gasps of its own when the vast stage of the Theater Royal Drury Lane gives itself over to a shimmering icescape against which the magic-endowed Elsa can belt out “Let It Go” — the Oscar-winning power ballad from the 2013 animated film that sends the audience into the intermission on a high. But for all the transformations wrought by Christopher Oram’s set, the emphasis remains firmly on the characters, not least the reined-in Elsa (Samantha Barks) and her comparatively harebrained younger sister, Anna, whose bumptious peppiness is meant to seem endearing but, I’m afraid, left me cold onscreen and again onstage. (A perky Stephanie McKeon, it should be said, delivers what the part requires.)It’s Barks’s superbly realized Elsa who benefits most from this reconsideration of a show that was the first Broadway title forced by the pandemic to call it quits. Having had time to look at the material afresh, the director Michael Grandage and his team have beefed up the fraught emotional state of a snow queen at savage odds with her own powers and given the siblings a duet, “I Can’t Lose You,” that places this show on a continuum set by “Wicked” and centered around a literal or figurative sisterhood.The plotting is still peculiar: Anna and Elsa’s parents die at sea, a loss that seems barely to register, and a lot of the shifts in behavior look decidedly arbitrary. Oh, and how else to explain that second-act opener, “Hygge,” involving the ensemble emerging semi-clad from a sauna, beyond giving the choreographer Rob Ashford something to do?A definite bonus to the London production is the restoration for a reported 60 million pounds of the theater itself, which now looks sufficiently luxuriant that I, for one, might be cautious about inviting many thousands of people through such elegantly appointed portals. “Frozen” is sure to attract innumerable families throughout its run. Let’s just hope these hungry and thirsty patrons treat their newly ravishing surroundings with respect.Back to the Future: The Musical. Directed by John Rando. Adelphi Theater.Frozen. Directed by Michael Grandage. Theater Royal Drury Lane. More

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      Jean-Claude van Itallie, ‘America Hurrah’ Playwright, Dies at 85

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      He was a central figure in the experimental theater movement for decades. His best-known work, a trilogy of one-acts, opened in 1966 and ran for more than 630 performances.Jean-Claude van Itallie, a playwright, director and performer who was a mainstay of the experimental theater world and who was especially known for “America Hurrah,” a form-bending trio of one-acts that opened in 1966 in the East Village and ran for more than 630 performances, died on Sept. 9 in Manhattan. He was 85.His brother, Michael, said the cause was pneumonia.Beginning in the late 1950s, Mr. van Itallie immersed himself in the vibrant Off Off Broadway scene, where playwrights and performers were challenging theatrical conventions. He joined Joseph Chaikin’s newly formed Open Theater in 1963, and his first produced play, “War,” was staged in the West Village. He was a favorite of Ellen Stewart, who had founded La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in 1961.Mr. van Itallie’s early works, including components of what became “America Hurrah,” were generally performed in lofts and other small spaces, but for the full-fledged production of “America Hurrah,” in November 1966, he moved up to the Pocket Theater on Third Avenue. The work caused a sensation.“I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on ‘America Hurrah,’” Walter Kerr began his rave review in The New York Times. “There’s something afoot here.”The first play in the trilogy, “Interview,” looked at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. In the second, “TV,” a commentary on mass media’s ability to trivialize, three people in a television ratings company watch a variety of shows; gradually the ones they’re watching take over the stage, and the three “real” people are absorbed into them.The third piece was “Motel,” which was first performed in 1965 at La MaMa E.T.C. and which the script describes as “a masque for three dolls.” (Robert Wilson, still early in his groundbreaking career, designed the original set.) Writing about a London production of “America Hurrah” for The Times in 1967, Charles Marowitz called it “a short but stunning masterpiece.”In it, a monstrous doll, the “Motel-keeper,” presides over a motel room and emits a stream of increasingly arcane patter. Two other dolls arrive at the room and proceed to trash it, scrawling vulgar graffiti on the wall and eventually dismantling the Motel-keeper.In 1993, when the Dobama Theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, mounted a revival of “America Hurrah,” Marianne Evett, theater critic for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, reflected on its original impact.“When it opened,” she wrote, “it rocketed to fame, announcing that a new kind of American theater had arrived — deliberately experimental, savagely funny, politically aware and critical of standard American life, its institutions and values.”Mr. van Itallie continued making new work for more than half a century, and also founded Shantigar, a retreat in western Massachusetts, where he nurtured aspiring theater artists. Just two years ago, La MaMa staged the premiere of his new play, “The Fat Lady Sings,” about an evangelical family.“Jean-Claude van Itallie was an artist who was constantly questioning and digging into the deeper realms of our human existence and spirit,” Mia Yoo, artistic director of La MaMa, said by email. “In this moment of change it is artists like Jean-Claude whom we must look to.”Mr. van Itallie in 1999 in his one-man show, “War, Sex and Dreams,” at La Mama E.T.C. It related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. Peter MacDonald/La MamaJean-Claude van Itallie was born on May 25, 1936, in Brussels to Hugo and Marthe (Levy) van Itallie. The family left Belgium as the Nazis advanced on the country in 1940, and by the end of the year they had reached the United States. They settled in Great Neck, on Long Island. Hugo van Itallie had been a stockbroker in Brussels and resumed that career on Wall Street.Jean-Claude’s parents spoke French at home, something that influenced his later approach to theater, he said.“I had the good fortune to grow up in a couple of languages,” he said, “and I think that makes you realize that no single language contains reality, that words are always an approximation of reality, that language and even thought are perspectives on reality, not reality itself.”He was active in the drama club at Great Neck High School and in student productions at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he spent his senior year. In 1954, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he continued to study theater and wrote his first one-act plays before graduating in 1958. His honors thesis was titled “The Pessimism of Jean Anouilh,” the French dramatist.Mr. van Itallie settled in Greenwich Village. He worked for several years adapting and writing scripts for television, particularly for “Look Up and Live,” a Sunday morning anthology program on religious themes broadcast on CBS. It was a period when many TV shows had corporate sponsors that had to be appeased, but his wasn’t one of them; “Look Up and Live” gave the writers a measure of freedom.“All you had to do was please God and CBS,” he said.He was continuing to write plays on his own. “Motel,” the third piece of the “America Hurrah” trilogy, was actually the first to be written, in 1961 or ’62.“I was about three years out of Harvard, living in Greenwich Village and knocking on the door of Broadway theater,” he told The Plain Dealer decades later. “And I wasn’t getting in. I think that ‘Motel’ grew out of my anger — partly at that situation, but probably a much deeper anger at the way my mind had been conventionalized and conditioned. It just rose up out of me.”The success of “America Hurrah” in New York spawned other productions, though they sometimes ran into resistance, including in London, where the graffiti scrawled in “Motel” offended censors. In Mobile, Ala., a production by the University of South Alabama at a city-owned theater in 1968 was shut down by the mayor, Lambert C. Mims, after two performances.“It is filth, pure and simple,” the mayor said, “and I think it is a crying shame that Alabama taxpayers’ money has been used to produce such degrading trash.”Among Mr. van Itallie’s other works with Open Theater was “The Serpent,” a collaborative piece inspired by the book of Genesis that he shaped into a script. It was first performed in Rome during a European tour in 1968 and later staged in New York.In the 1970s Mr. van Itallie became known for translations.“I did my work as a playwright backwards,” he once said, “creating new theatrical forms in the ’60s, and in the ’70s going back to study masters like Chekhov.”Later still he did some acting, including performing a one-man autobiographical play called “War, Sex and Dreams,” which related his childhood escape from the Nazis, his life as a gay man and how he coped with sudden fame in the 1960s. D.J.R. Bruckner reviewed a performance of the work at the Cafe at La MaMa in 1999 for The Times, calling it the “often amusing and often sad confession of a man in his 60s whose heart is lonely and who teases one into wondering what, despite his remarkable candor, he is leaving out.”Mr. van Itallie split his time between a home in Manhattan and the farm in Rowe, Mass., which is home to his Shantigar Foundation. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his stepmother, Christine van Itallie.In remembering Mr. van Itallie, Ms. Yoo called to mind her predecessor, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2011.“I think of Ellen Stewart and him looking down at us and insisting that we move and make change,” she said. More

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      Broadway’s Biggest Shows Open 🎭

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      Broadway’s Biggest Shows Open ��Adam Nagourney��Reporting from N.Y.C.’s Theater DistrictJeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt the Ambassador Theater, the crowd gave Walter Bobbie, “Chicago” director, an ovation that lasted two minutes.Ovations were repeated, again and again, through the whole first act. “Isn’t this an amazing way to celebrate a 25th anniversary? Oh, my God!” Bobbie said. More

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      'Hamilton' Reopens on Broadway to Giddy Crowds

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      Kristin and Matt Collins, a couple from Annapolis, Md., were standing in line at the Richard Rodgers Theater on the reopening night of “Hamilton” with two extra tickets to give to anyone who wanted them.A few feet away, Chris Graham and Addie Trivers, two musical theater students, were standing watching all the opening-night excitement, wishing they could afford tickets for the show inside.Then Collins approached the two college juniors and asked if they might want to see “Hamilton” tonight. Yes, in fact, they did.“Either he’s telling the truth or we’re being kidnapped,” said Trivers, who used to go from theater to theater asking for cheap tickets before the pandemic, “and either way I’m going with him.”Those two tickets were among the most sought after on Broadway’s night of big reopenings.At the start of the show, the creator of “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, walked onstage to a standing ovation. “I don’t ever want to take live theater for granted ever again, do you?” he said. “You can mouth along, all you like, no one can see your mouth moving.”The musical sensation, which opened on Broadway in 2015, was the industry’s highest grossing show when the pandemic hit. The week before Broadway shut down, “Hamilton” grossed $2.7 million, more than any other show by far. That week, more than 10,700 people scored the sought-after tickets — and then the production, with the rest of live theater, was forced to a sudden halt.The musical, which won 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, managed to find an even wider audience during the pandemic. In July 2020, Disney+ started streaming a film of the musical with Miranda in the title role. Its release reignited interest in the musical and revived debate on some of the controversies it had sparked, including its treatment of slavery.Judging by the energy of the crowd on Tuesday night, “Hamilton” fever seemed ready to pick up right where it left off.The television personality Al Roker stood on the sidewalk pumping up the crowd, shouting, “Are you ready?”“We had just watched Al Roker walk by and I thought that was the peak of the night,” said Graham. The one downside of getting impromptu free tickets to “Hamilton”: He was worried that he was underdressed in his T-shirt and shorts.Farther down the line to enter the theater, Lauren Koranda, 20, was far from underdressed. She was wearing the floor-length shimmering gown that she had worn to senior prom. On the day the “Hamilton” tickets went on sale, she and her best friend, Maura Consedine, had used about six devices to make sure they got a pair.“It’s such a big night for New York City,” Consedine said. “The city truly feels alive again.” More

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      ‘Wicked’ Returns With a Surprise Guest: Kristin Chenoweth

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      “Ladies and gentleman,” a disembodied voice announced from the stage, bringing the crowd, which had gathered for the reopening of “Wicked,” to its feet: “Kristin Chenoweth.”That brought an even louder roar from the audience, as Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda when the show opened on Broadway in 2003, strode out onto the stage of the Gershwin Theater.“Things like this don’t just happen,” Chenoweth, wearing a glittering dress, said. “It takes a lot of people.”“My personal favorite relationship is probably between the actors and the audience,” she continued, “which is probably why I’m in therapy.”The audience burst into laughter.Chenoweth brought a little star power to the return of “Wicked,” which chronicles the frenemy-ship between Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. It is a revisionist back story for “The Wizard of Oz.”Even witches needed to show proof of vaccination. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe musical, which opened on Broadway in 2003, has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. It also became the first touring Broadway production to reopen since the pandemic, beginning on Aug. 7 in Dallas. More

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      Ruben Santiago-Hudson Brings ‘Lackawanna Blues’ to Broadway

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      About six months ago, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the creator of the play “Lackawanna Blues,” asked a friend to open a vacant theater for him.“I just needed that — to sit in the seats, to walk on the stage,” Santiago-Hudson said in an interview this week. “For the past 50 or so years, I’ve had some time every year in the theater: to see a play, to be in a play, to direct a play, to write a play. All of a sudden that was taken away.”On Tuesday, Santiago-Hudson got to return to theater in a big way: “Lackawanna Blues” — which he wrote and directed, and in which he plays every part — began previews on Broadway, in a Manhattan Theater Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on West 47th Street.The play, which was first presented Off Broadway in 2001, and adapted into a television movie in 2005, is a reminiscence of Santiago-Hudson’s youth near Buffalo, and is centered on the character of Nanny, who ran a boardinghouse and imparted strength and morality to generations around her.At a ribbon ceremony outside the theater on West 47th Street, where ticketholders and gawkers dodged rush-hour traffic, Representative Carolyn Maloney offered an unabashed New Yorker’s defense of Broadway. “What would New York be without Broadway?” she asked. “Seriously, it’s what makes the city feel so great. If we didn’t have Broadway we might as well be in Chicago or some other big city.”S. Epatha Merkerson, who played Nanny in the television movie of “Lackawanna Blues” (and was a longtime fixture on “Law & Order”), was on hand for the preshow festivities.“We’re baaaack!” she said, referring to Broadway.A Broadway production of “Lackawanna Blues” by Manhattan Theater Club had been planned for a couple of years. Lynne Meadow, the company’s longtime artistic director, said in an interview she saw it as a celebration of “heroism,” which she said is even more apt now. The play was presented with music by Bill Sims Jr., as performed by the blues guitarist Junior Mack.“This is a play about healing,” Santiago-Hudson said. “This is a play about community, about how we help each other, about what generosity means. This is what we need.” More

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      Lin-Manuel Miranda Sings ‘New York, New York’ Outside ‘Hamilton’ Theater

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      Three hours before showtime, Lin-Manuel Miranda — the “Hamilton” creator who wrote the music, book and lyrics for the hit musical — burst out of the front doors of the Richard Rodgers Theater with a bullhorn and was met with the shrieks and applause of a crowd gathered on West 46th Street.He was there to lead a group of Broadway performers in a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Theme From ‘New York, New York,’” creating a sort of mood-setting overture for the night ahead.New York New York!!!! pic.twitter.com/iEW3tUxL0H— Luis A. Miranda, Jr. (@Vegalteno) September 14, 2021
      “Get a mask, get vaccinated and come see live theater!” said Miranda, who also played Alexander Hamilton in the original Broadway cast.The appearance was not publicized until about 4 p.m., when Miranda tweeted a photo from inside the theater and announced a so-called Ham4Ham, which, before the pandemic, was a performance by “Hamilton” cast members outside the theater that accompanied a lottery for tickets to see the show. (There would be no free tickets today, Miranda said.)Passers-by and Broadway superfans rushed to the scene as soon as they saw the social media announcement.Eva Ferreira, a 10-year-old “Hamilton” fan who has memorized nearly every word of the musical, watched with her parents, who had taken her to New York City for her birthday.Four teenagers — all aspiring Broadway performers who had spent the day in class at Steps Conservatory — sprinted to the theater from the subway after they saw Miranda’s tweet. They stood in the crowd in awe of the group of performers — the kind that they hoped to be one day.Jessica Payne and her husband ran down from their hotel room to catch Miranda and the other performers. Their spring 2020 trip was canceled because of the pandemic, so they had flown in from Colorado recently to see eight Broadway shows in six days after “a year and a half of heartbreak” while the industry was on pause.“We both cried when the plane landed,” Jessica Payne said, listing the shows the couple was planning to see (“Wicked” is on the schedule tonight). “We’re so happy to be here.” More