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      'Wicked' Is First Broadway Tour Since Coronavirus Shutdown

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      DALLAS — Talia Suskauer knows what it’s like to be green. She remembers the feel of pigment and powder on her arms, neck, and face; how the color seemed to seep into her pores and linger behind her ears; what it was like to see a strange but familiar self staring back from a mirror.She didn’t know that, on a hot July afternoon in Dallas, getting painted once again would make her cry.Sixteen months after the touring production of “Wicked” in which Suskauer stars as the green-skinned witch Elphaba was forced to close, the cast and crew have reassembled in Dallas for a high-stakes effort to start again. The show’s first performance here on Tuesday, the first by any touring Broadway production since the coronavirus pandemic shut down shows across the nation, will be a sign of hope for a battered theater industry, but also a test at a time when the spread of the Delta variant has Americans once again on edge.Talia Suskauer is back as Elphaba, and she has two veterans to help her get into character: Joyce B. McGilberry, left, a makeup supervisor who has been with the show since 2006, and Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, a hair supervisor, who joined in 2003.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Each show is going to be someone’s first time back at the theater, so each show is going to be emotional,” Suskauer said. She had her own emotions to draw on, tearing up as she eased back into the makeup chair for the first time since the tour’s March 13, 2020, shutdown in Madison, Wis. “I felt like our purpose was being stripped away,” she said, “and now, to come back, it’s overwhelming.”Touring is a huge part of the commercial theater ecosystem. It’s big money — in the most recent full theater season, 18.5 million people attended touring shows in North America, and those productions grossed $1.6 billion.The resumption of touring will once again allow people who live far from New York to see Broadway titles. And it will provide much-needed income for actors, musicians and other theater workers left unemployed by the pandemic.“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, the Tony winner who is playing the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, who in 1982 won a Tony Award for his role in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and who now plays the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour. “You’re going from state to state, meeting different people, seeing different aspects of the country, and each night applause comes your way. How can you beat something like that?”A revisionist back story for “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked” is a musical theater juggernaut that opened on Broadway in 2003, has sold more than $5 billion worth of tickets and has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. The show, which revolves around a fraught friendship between the witches Elphaba and Glinda, has been running so long that Suskauer and her co-star and fellow Floridian, Allison Bailey, both saw it as children..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-uf1ume{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;}.css-wxi1cx{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-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-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 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:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” said Bailey, who plays Glinda. “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”The show, which has been touring since 2005, travels from city to city with 13 trucks that carry the set, costumes and a lot of equipment and supplies.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Wicked,” with songs by Stephen Schwartz, a book by Winnie Holzman and direction by Joe Mantello, has been touring North America since 2005. The tour now travels from city to city in 13 trucks that transport the set, the sound and light equipment, more than 300 costumes and about 100 wigs.The touring company includes 33 actors, an 18-person crew, six musicians, three stage managers, two company managers and a physical therapist, plus the 16 dogs, one cat and three ferrets brought along for companionship. The traveling company is then supplemented at each stop by 32 local crew members and nine local musicians, as well as dozens of stagehands to help load the set in and out.The resumption of the “Wicked” tour, which comes a month before the first musicals are scheduled to restart on Broadway, will soon be followed by others: Beginning in mid-August, touring productions of “Hamilton” will resume in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tempe, Ariz., and in September tours of “Frozen” and “My Fair Lady,” as well as the play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” will hit the road.In New York, ticket holders to Broadway shows will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks, at least through October. In Dallas, the touring production of “Wicked” is requiring vaccines for cast and crew, but not for the audience, which will be instructed to wear masks. Actors will be barred from interacting with the audience, meaning no stage-door autographs or selfies, and no backstage tours.The cast was masked for rehearsals, except when singing or speaking. During performances, the actors will be unmasked.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesEarly indicators are that audiences are eager to return: The five-week Dallas run has sold strongly, and prices have held steady, ranging from $25 for a lottery ticket to $169 for the best seats.When the pandemic forced the tour to close last year, the crew packed the set and costumes into boxes and left them in the Madison theater, imagining they’d be back in a few weeks. Then, as the shutdown dragged on, the crew went back to load those boxes into trucks. Ten of the trucks spent nearly a year parked in a Wisconsin truck yard, while three, containing temperature-sensitive electronics, wigs and wardrobe, were sent to a climate-controlled warehouse in Pennsylvania.The crew was worried about how the show’s approximately 100 wigs, many of which are made of human hair, would fare during the lengthy shutdown, but they turned out to be in good condition.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesSome members of the company went home, but some had no homes — they are usually on the road so much, they don’t need them — so they stayed with family, or rented something somewhere.“Since I’ve been married, I’ve never been home this long, ever,” said the tour’s hair supervisor, Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, who has been with “Wicked” off and on since 2003. “I went to Fort Lauderdale — my husband is there — and we actually still love each other, so it worked out!”“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” Allison Bailey, the actress playing Glinda, said of “Wicked.” “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”Cooper Neill for The New York TimesReuniting was fun, but restarting was complicated, and the show set aside three weeks to get ready at Dallas’s Music Hall at Fair Park, the 3,420-seat venue “Wicked” was returning to for the sixth time. The cast was rusty, and needed to re-rehearse the show, while the crew needed to assess each piece of equipment for possible damage after months of disuse.“We were worried about what was going to come out of the trucks,” said David O’Brien, the tour’s production stage manager. “Opening these boxes of clothes, what are we going to find, and what’s it going to smell like?”There were minor problems — a dimmer rack that needed to be reprogrammed, and a warped board in the set floor that caused a sliding statue to jam — but for the most part, the crew was delighted with how well the equipment held up.While the crew reassembled the Tony-winning set, the cast rehearsed in the lobby, working on a sprung floor rented from the Texas Ballet Theater. “It’s been 16 months of singing in your shower, which is different than singing with multiple people,” said Evan Roider, the tour’s music director, “but they came back ready to go.”There were jokes about expanded waistlines and forgotten dance steps. “It’s a little more snug this time around!” Suskauer said of her costume when a button popped as she rehearsed.“Look, it’s Glinda!” Bailey rehearses her entrance in a floating bubble.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesBy the time they were working in the theater, underneath a proscenium featuring the show’s red-eyed dragon, the cast was polishing details. “Careful with your wand!” the associate director, Lisa Leguillou, instructed Bailey as she rehearsed her entrance in a floating bubble. “It’s covering your face!”Onstage, the show hasn’t changed. But backstage, there are many new precautions, including air scrubbers.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThere are, of course, new safety protocols, which the “Wicked” team is sharing in video meetings with crews from other tours as they, too, prepare to restart. Some measures are now familiar: plentiful hand sanitizer, plus masks and gloves and air scrubbers. But there are also more theater-specific strategies. Ultraviolet wands are being used to clean mask interiors, lest too much disinfectant give actors headaches. Actors now scan QR codes for their daily check-ins, in lieu of the traditional sign-in sheet on a clipboard. And partitions are being installed in the orchestra pit to try to contain any aerosols emitted by reed and brass instruments.“Our biggest concerns have been how to reinvent things we do in a Covid world,” said Steve Quinn, the tour’s company manager, who has been touring with “Wicked” for 16 years. “We’re the guinea pigs, and we’re just trying to navigate this.”Among the new safety measures: The cast’s daily sign-in is now digital, replacing the traditional pen-and-paper system. Marie Eife, a member of the ensemble, scanned the QR code as she arrived for rehearsal one morning.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe company’s excitement about being back together, and making a show, is tempered by some anxiety, particularly among the crew. “I want to make sure I have covered all my bases, so not by my hands would anybody become sick or injured by something I didn’t think of,” said Joyce B. McGilberry, the tour’s makeup supervisor. “I wanted to come back, but I can’t deny my concerns.”The tour company has a wide range of experience. Rebecca Gans Reavis had been playing a flying monkey for just a week before the tour shut down, while Laurel Parrish, the advance wardrobe supervisor, has been with “Wicked” since it opened on Broadway.Reavis, heartbroken, spent the pandemic in Wichita, Kan., where she and her husband took jobs teaching at her mother’s dance studio; Parrish, in northern Manhattan, worked for a cheesemonger while taking on passion projects in embroidery and sewing.“I don’t think I knew how much I missed it until we started back,” Parris said. “Seeing the clothes was like seeing old friends.”When two of the show’s cast members opted not to return after the pandemic, that created openings for the return of an alumnus, Clifton Davis, who at 75 is the oldest member of the tour cast, and a newbie, Anthony Lee Bryant, a Los Angeles-based dancer who had auditioned for the show six times before landing a spot.“Theater is being resurrected, thank God,” said Davis, who is relishing a second go as Doctor Dillamond, an erudite goat who taught at Shiz University when Glinda (then known as Galinda) and Elphaba were students there. Davis previously played the same role in 2012.Anthony Lee Bryant, right, is the only brand-new member of the tour cast, and during rehearsals he took careful notes as he watched other ensemble members dance.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesAs Bryant scrupulously took notes on dance moves, and Davis practiced his bleat, some moments seemed sure to land differently, even though they were crafted years ago. Chief among them: Glinda’s opening line, which Bailey utters as she floats in on her bubble.“It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”“I think I’m going to say it the same, but it’s going to feel different,” Bailey said. “I feel like I’m saying it on behalf of theater itself.” More

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      Review: In Carl Hancock Rux’s ‘Vs.,’ the Jury Is Out

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      Where justice is virtual, crimes have no names and audience members step up to the dock to examine anonymous witnesses.Since the pandemic began, American courts have moved millions of hearings online, a development known as “virtual justice.” Carl Hancock Rux’s elliptical “Vs.” adapts virtual justice as virtual theater. In this court, the crime remains unnamed and the identity of the accused a mystery. The interrogator? That would be you. Or at least, a silhouette of you, with some mild technological wizardry superimposing someone else’s deep voice atop your blacked-out outline. Anyway, choose your Zoom background with care.At the top of “Vs.,” a digital experience directed by Mallory Catlett and produced by Mabou Mines, a court clerk gathers its participants into an online chamber. A man (David Thomson) is called as a witness. A witness to what? The interrogator — the role is divided, seemingly randomly, among audience members — asks only two questions: If the witness would like a drink and if the witness was born in November. The witness responds to each with contempt, questioning the court’s values and taste. Here’s part of his answer on the birthdate issue: “Not if we are to consider an opposition to phallogocentricism and the hegemonic ideals contained in patriarchal culture uniting theory and fantasy, challenging such discourse within the frameworks of a constitution blown up by law.” Pity the stenographer.Following this first sequence, the questioning repeats three times, with different audience members as the interrogator and other performers — Becca Blackwell, Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Perry Yung — playing witnesses. The dialogue remains mostly the same, with a few variations, as though these are four musicians, each soloing on the same tune. The details never become more definite.Becca Blackwell appears in Carl Hancock Rux’s Zoom play.Onome EkehA cryptic trial pursuing a nameless crime will of course bring the works of Franz Kafka to mind. Though “Vs.” is more of a reverse Kafka, with the witnesses disdaining the court’s authority. “It’s your court,” each says. “Do as you wish. I’m not in it. I never was.” The court seems confused. Me, too, if I’m honest.Rux, a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist, made a thrilling entrance about 20 years ago with “Talk,” an impressionistic puzzle box of a play about art, race, memory and power. “Talk” took a panel discussion as its form, inhabiting and deconstructing its rituals. So there was reason to hope that “Vs.” would bring that same ingenuity to a Zoom courtroom. But the show meshes with the medium only glancingly, mostly through a manipulation of speaker view and camera feed. It hasn’t fully considered what kinds of narrative, imagery and speech inhabit this space successfully. A text this dense, spoken by performers viewed from the chest up, their faces and bodies awash in visual effects, suffers without the mutual entanglement of actors and audiences both present in the same space. Via an online platform, my ability to absorb and parse the language seemed to recede with each repetition. Engagement was virtual, not actual.I don’t take any pride in this inattention. It can represent an ugly kind of privilege. Because if your life or body or lived experience were really on the line, you wouldn’t have the luxury of distraction. But the abstraction of “Vs.” has a deadening effect. In that Zoom window, my face a void, I didn’t feel especially accountable or implicated, just anxious about whether or not any fidgeting (I’m an inveterate fidgeter) would upset the illusion.Even as live performances return, I’m eager for theater artists to experiment with digital tools, discovering new possibilities and new transmedia forms. Nevertheless, “Vs.” feels like a mistrial.Vs.Through Aug. 8; maboumines.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Broadway Audiences Will Need Proof of Vaccination and Masks

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      Children under 12, who cannot be vaccinated, can show a negative test to attend. But the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall plan to bar them for now.Broadway’s theater owners and operators, citing the ongoing dangers of the coronavirus pandemic, said Friday that they have decided to require that theatergoers be vaccinated against Covid-19 and wear masks in order to attend performances.The policy, announced just days before the first Broadway play in more than 16 months is to start performances, allows children ineligible for vaccination to attend shows if tested for the virus. Some performing arts venues in New York say they will go even further: the Metropolitan Opera, which hopes to reopen in late September, and Carnegie Hall, which is planning to reopen in October, are not only planning to require vaccinations, but also to bar children under 12 who are not yet eligible to be vaccinated.The new vaccination requirements for visitors to New York’s most prominent performing arts venues were imposed as the highly contagious Delta variant has caused Covid-19 cases to rise, leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that vaccinated Americans in virus hot spots resume wearing masks indoors. Several major businesses, local governments and the federal government have recently decided to require their employees to get vaccinated or submit to frequent testing.The safety protocols come at a fraught time for Broadway, which is attempting to rebound after the longest shutdown in its history. Because tourism, which traditionally accounts for about two-thirds of the Broadway audience, remains down, it was already unclear whether there would be sufficient demand to support the 45 shows that plan to start performances on Broadway this season. Now the industry is hoping that there will be more people comforted than put off by the vaccination and masking measures. “We have said from Day 1 that we want our casts, our crews and our audiences to be safe, and we believe that this is a precaution to ensure that,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. “We’re doing everything we can to open safely and protect everyone.”The rules, which will be in place at least through October, apply to all 41 Broadway theaters, and require that audiences wear masks except when eating or drinking in designated areas.The Broadway vaccination mandate will apply not only to audiences, but also to performers, backstage crew and theater staff. There will be limited exceptions: “people with a medical condition or closely held religious belief that prevents vaccination,” as well as children under 12, can attend with proof of a recent negative coronavirus test.A vaccine mandate is already in place for Bruce Springsteen’s concert show, which began performances in June, and for “Pass Over,” the play that aims to start performances on Aug. 4. The latest rules will mean that they will now require masks as well, and will govern all of the shows that follow: Twenty-seven, including many of the blockbuster musicals, intend to get underway in September and October, starting with “Hadestown” and “Waitress” on Sept. 2, followed by “Chicago,” “Hamilton,” “The Lion King,” “Wicked” and the play “Lackawanna Blues” on Sept. 14.“I am overjoyed that the theater owners and the Broadway League have made the decision that is best for the community at large,” said Brian Moreland, the lead producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” a play that is to start performances in October. “We committed to doing what the science told us to do, and this is what the science tells us.”Deciding what to do about young children has proved particularly vexing, given that no vaccine has yet been approved for pediatric use. Although Broadway, which has a number of shows that depend on ticket buying by families with children, has decided to allow those under 12 to attend if tested, the Met Opera, which draws fewer young children to most of its productions, is taking a more restrictive approach.“Children under the age of 12, for whom there is no currently available vaccine, are not permitted to enter the Met regardless of the vaccination status of their guardian,” the company declares on its website.“Obviously, it’s painful to me personally and to the company not to have young people coming into the theater,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, who said that the company’s vaccination policies were designed to protect its roughly 3,000 employees and to make audiences feel comfortable about coming back and sitting in close quarters. The Met is also requiring all visiting artists and the members of its orchestra and chorus, as well as its staff, to be vaccinated.Barring children under 12 for now had been a difficult decision, Gelb said: “They are our future audience.”Gelb said that he hoped children would become eligible for vaccines by December, when the Met has two holiday presentations aimed at families and children: the company’s shortened, English-language version of “The Magic Flute,” and “Cinderella,” an English-language adaptation of Massenet’s “Cendrillon.”Both Broadway and the Met say they will open at full capacity, meaning no social distancing. The Met, unlike Broadway, says that masks will be optional. Broadway theaters range in size from 600 to 1,900 seats, while the Met can seat 3,800..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-uf1ume{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;}.css-wxi1cx{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-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-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 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:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Broadway will provide additional safety measures backstage: An agreement announced Thursday between the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers as well as theater owners, and Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union representing performers and stage managers, requires weekly testing for employees, as well as the vaccine mandate.The Metropolitan Opera will not initially allow children 12 and under, since they are not eligible to be vaccinated. But the company hopes that vaccines will be approved for them by December, when it is planning several operas aimed at families. Vincent Tullo for The New York Times There are some venues staging work in New York without requiring vaccinations, but others have implemented mandates, including Madison Square Garden, which in June required vaccination for patrons at a Foo Fighters concert. The Park Avenue Armory, which had accepted proof of vaccination or a recent negative test for its first dance show this summer, has been getting stricter; all attendees must be fully vaccinated for its next show, a work by the choreographer Bill T. Jones called “Deep Blue Sea” that is scheduled to start performances in September.There are also performing arts vaccine mandates emerging beyond New York: The San Francisco Opera announced Wednesday that it will require proof of vaccination for all patrons ages 12 and up, and on Friday the Hollywood Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, where a tour of “Hamilton” is set to begin Aug. 17, said it would require ticket holders to be fully vaccinated.Broadway theaters are especially high visibility, and especially challenging, since they draw audiences of all ages and from all over to sit side-by-side in tightly packed buildings with small lobbies and bathrooms and cramped backstage areas. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York had suggested in May that Broadway should consider a vaccination mandate, but some producers were worried that such a step could dampen attendance at a time when consumer readiness to return to theatergoing remains uncertain. The recent rise in cases persuaded the industry’s leadership to set aside those concerns and embrace the vaccination mandate, at least for the next few months.The details of how the new Broadway policies will be implemented are up to individual theater owners, and are still being worked out, but ticket holders will be expected to present proof of vaccination when they arrive at a theater. Among the forms of proof that have been accepted at “Springsteen on Broadway” are vaccination cards, images of those cards stored on a phone, and, for New York residents and others vaccinated in New York, the state’s Excelsior Pass.For those who have already purchased tickets and are unwilling or unable to comply with the new policies, there are likely to be options: most shows have adopted liberal refund and exchange policies for the fall.The League said that in September it would reassess safety protocols for performances in November and beyond.Javier C. Hernández contributed reporting. More

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      New York City Awards $3 Million for Latino and Puerto Rican Theater

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      The Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater will use the funds, along with $7 million from the city over the last eight years, for an expanded South Bronx space.The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs announced on Friday that the city had awarded $3 million to Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, which champions Puerto Rican and Latino artists and produces original bilingual plays and musicals.The new funding, provided by the mayor, the City Council and the Bronx borough president, is in addition to about $7 million from the Department of Cultural Affairs already devoted to the theater company in the last eight years — bringing the total to $10.2 million. The funds will be used to build a new cultural and administrative headquarters in the South Bronx.“Arts and culture will be at the heart of this city’s recovery,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. “And this theater will give young Bronxites more opportunities than ever to build a more inclusive cultural future for our city.”An addition to one of the company’s existing theaters, on Walton Avenue between 149th and 150th Streets, will serve as the headquarters for the organization. (The theater also has a space in Midtown and shows will continue to be produced at both locations.) The expanded space will allow for more education and other programming, said Rosalba Rolón, the founding artistic director of Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.“I can’t tell you the excitement our neighbors have,” Rolón said in an interview on Friday. “This is the kind of service Bronx artists need. The community might be able to use the space in other ways as well, for town halls and community meetings.”A large portion of the building, in the Mott Haven neighborhood, will also be used for pre-professional training for performing artists, she said.The project, which is the organization’s first major capital one since its theater in the Bronx opened in 2005, had been in the works for eight years. The $3 million in new city support added as part of the budget for fiscal year 2022 put the project over its finish line. It does not yet have a target opening date.Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater was created in 2014 in a merger of the Pregones Theater in the Bronx and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in Manhattan. The Pregones was founded in 1979 by a group of artists led by Rolón to create new works in the style of Caribbean and Latin American “colectivos” or performing ensembles. The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater was founded in 1967 as one of the first U.S. bilingual theater companies.For a theater that has nurtured the development of Latino artists and long been invested in community engagement in Mott Haven, the new home is an exciting next step.“It is meaningful that we come to full funding at the exact same time when New Yorkers are taking bold steps toward recovery from pandemic, and when enduring inequities in arts funding are an ongoing conversation,” Arnaldo J. López, the organization’s managing director, said in a statement. More

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      Onstage, the Pen Is Usually Duller Than the Sword

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      Plays about writers, including “Mr. Fullerton,” a new potboiler probing Edith Wharton’s love life, too often undermine the real brilliance of their subjects.GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Writing is boring. I should know. I just spent a half-hour revising that first sentence.Playwrights nevertheless like to write about writers, perhaps because of their shared tolerance for tedium. Yet beyond that, what is there really to say? Anything that fleshes out the person beneath the words tends to diminish the artistry; anything that sticks to the unfiltered words is dull.Or so it seems to me from shows made about writers I treasure. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, E.M. Forster, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison have all been put through the dramatic wringer recently, many of them emerging as wet rags.The latest to become something of a drip in the process is Edith Wharton. To be fair, it’s clear that in writing “Mr. Fullerton” — a play about Wharton, Henry James and their mutual inamorato, Morton Fullerton — Anne Undeland was as besotted as I am by the steely author of classic novels including “The Age of Innocence,” “Ethan Frome” and “The House of Mirth.”It’s also true that Wharton had an eventful existence away from her pens and notebooks, including the extramarital affair with Undeland’s title character and the quasi-pornography she secretly wrote later. But from the play — and I might argue from any play — you could never guess that a brilliant person was living Wharton’s brilliant life.“Mr. Fullerton,” which was given its premiere last week by Great Barrington Public Theater, introduces the novelist, in her mid-40s, as a buttoned-up spinster; though she has been married for two decades, her marriage is sexless, childless and nearly loveless. After being seduced in 1907 by Fullerton, a somewhat younger and caddish journalist, she opens herself to passion while, the play implies, closing herself to art. The first thing we see in the Great Barrington production, which runs through Sunday, is the Paris apartment Wharton (Dana M. Harrison) rents from the Vanderbilts; the writing desk is under a dust cover but the big brass bed gleams with promise.I will not attempt to prosecute a play deliberately written as a fantasia for its factual improbabilities. (That said: I can’t really see Wharton flipping pages of fresh prose all over the room for her maid, Posy, to pick up and paginate — even if she was known to leave papers to be sorted by her secretary.) My problem with “Mr. Fullerton” has to do with its fictional improbabilities. Fullerton, in real life apparently a magnetic, equal opportunity Lothario — James called him “magically tactile” — is written here (and played by Marcus Kearns accordingly) as more of a puppy than a hound, making campy references to Wharton by her childhood name, Pussy Jones, and proleptically quoting Mae West. When he ghosts her, you’re relieved.Harrison, with Glenn Barrett as Henry James, in “Mr. Fullerton.”Tristan Wilson/Great Barrington Public TheaterWell, no one cares about Fullerton anyway, but the portraits of Wharton and James (Glenn Barrett) as giggling, snarking, gobsmacked adolescents undermine their enormous stature as writers, which the play nevertheless depends on as the foundation of its interest. I wouldn’t have minded that with James, whose fussbudget pomposity is always worth some deflation.But keep your satirical hands off my Edith! Her achievement is in many ways greater than James’s, given the hostility to women writers of her vintage; certainly, she outsold him. More than that, her actual feelings about the Fullerton affair speak to a far greater seriousness and acuity than the play can dramatize. Though she vacillated on whether her brief experience of physical passion helped her as a human being — she wrote that Fullerton woke her “from a long lethargy” in which “all one side of me was asleep” but also that her life was “better before” she knew him — there’s no confusion from a literary standpoint. Coming out of the affair she produced “Ethan Frome.”That superlatively grim novel provides “Mr. Fullerton” with one of its best moments, which the playwright sets up perfectly. When a newspaper reports that a high school girl back home has been killed in a sledding accident, Posy (Myka Plunkett) immediately bursts into tears and explains that the girl is the daughter who “could have been” hers. Instead, she was the child of a man Posy once loved but rejected because being in service to Wharton offered a better life.Though Posy is an invention, readers of “Ethan Frome” will immediately recognize the story of the sledding accident from the climax of the novel. In this, Undeland and “Mr. Fullerton” get something very right about writing: the ruthlessness of a writer’s thievery, robbing reality (even someone else’s) for material.It’s that ruthlessness that is otherwise missing here, and also in other basically sympathetic portraits of literary artists. In Sarah Ruhl’s play “Dear Elizabeth,” based on Bishop’s correspondence with Lowell, the poets simply read at each other, which is sometimes lovely but almost never dramatic. In Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” E.M. Forster is reduced to a gentle grandpa to new generations of gay men. The opposite problem undoes Poe in several plays about him, including one called “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace”: He is so exhaustingly mad that you cannot imagine his having the spare energy to find even one rhyme for “nevermore,” let alone 18.Reggie D. White as James Baldwin and Crystal Dickinson as Nikki Giovanni in an episode of “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments produced by the Vineyard Theater.via The Vineyard TheaterIn all these works, the actors, designers and directors have conspired to support the portraiture with approximately accurate accents, diction, costumes and hairstyles. “Mr. Fullerton” also has the amusing verisimilitude of being produced, on the campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock here, just 13 miles south of Wharton’s grand home, the Mount, in Lenox. (A line about the late arrival of spring in the Berkshires received a knowing chuckle the night I attended.) But in the end, all those details are unimportant, and maybe even distracting — or at least Mr. Fullerton’s mustache was.I say that thinking that the best portrait of writers I’ve seen in a theatrical production recently involved no such imitation. The opposite, really. In “Lessons in Survival,” a series of historical re-enactments conceived and performed by the multigenerational members of the Commissary collective and produced by the Vineyard Theater last year, there was no attempt whatever to match the physical characteristics of the actors, or even their gender, with those of the writers they played: Baldwin, Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou and others. Nor was sonic verisimilitude attempted; it didn’t need to be because the actors lip-synced the writers’ recorded words while embodying them in their expressions and postures.It was that disjuncture, that refusal to locate genius within the limitations of the body, that made the episodes so effective and convincing. Leaving affairs and drinking problems out of the picture, they honored what really makes writers dramatic: their muscly ideas, duking it out in words.Mr. FullertonThrough Sunday at the Daniel Arts Center, Great Barrington, Mass. greatbarringtonpublictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      After a Winter of Discontent, a Glorious Summer in Salzburg

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      The theater offering at the Alpine festival features reworked classics by Shakespeare and one of the event’s founders.SALZBURG, Austria — “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” Those lines, perhaps the most famous opening in all of English drama, go unspoken in the Salzburg Festival’s new production “Richard the Kid and the King,” a cradle-to-grave chronicle of the Bard’s most ruthless monarch. Yet the monologue was ringing in my ears as I left the theater after four hours of greed, betrayal, hypocrisy, infanticide, decapitation and disembowelment.As Salzburg warmed up in late July, the arrival of “Richard” was an electrifying theatrical jolt to jump-start the event’s second pandemic-era installment, which features four new dramatic productions, six fully staged operas and scores of concerts. Forsooth, the winter of our discontent has been made glorious summer by the Salzburg Festival.The acclaimed German theatermaker Karin Henkel was originally onboard to direct “Richard III” in 2020. Postponed a year by the coronavirus pandemic, the production has been enlarged and expanded for this year’s edition. Henkel and her creative team have incorporated portions from “Slaughter!,” a 12-hour compression of Shakespeare’s eight War of the Roses plays that was first performed in Salzburg in 1999.In the evening’s first half, “Richard the Kid,” which largely deals with the adolescent sons of York, the production uses the “Slaughter!” mix of German and profanity-laden English gangster slang.Much of the colorful patois is rendered with vulgar hilarity by Kate Strong, a British actress and dancer who has been a fixture in German-language theater for the past 25 years. She is one of only four actors onstage before intermission, who divide nine roles among themselves. The heroic Bettina Stucky (as Clarence and Elizabeth) and the fearless Kristof Van Boven (as the entire house of Lancaster) show similar nimble dexterity in bringing this most dysfunctional and tragic of royal families to life.Kristof Van Boven and Lina Beckmann in “Richard the Kid and the King,” directed by Karin Henkel.Monika RittershausEven if the show’s busier and more populous second half, “Richard the King,” is less riveting than the beginning, the glue that holds the grim production together is Lina Beckmann’s astounding performance as Richard. It is as much an interpretation of the charming psychopath as it is a treatise on the nature of acting itself, as Beckmann slips into Richard’s misshapen body and mind, allowing us to watch with uncanny intimacy the dissembling, scheming and feral ambition that animate the arch-villain.Witnessing Beckmann’s brazen performance put me in mind of another captivating Richard III of recent memory: Lars Eidinger.In 2015, the prolific Berlin-born stage and screen actor — best known internationally for his role in the hit TV series “Babylon Berlin” — first performed the conscienceless king at the Berlin Schaubühne, where he has worked since 1999. Thomas Ostermeier’s shattering production, which bored inside the murderous monarch’s blood-soaked brain with upsetting perversity, has been performed everywhere from Avignon, France, to Adelaide, Australia, and came to New York in 2017.Now Eidinger, 45, has become the latest in a long line of German and Austrian acting greats to tackle the main role in “Jedermann,” Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 version of a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition and possibly its strangest.In August 1920, the first Salzburg Festival opened with an outdoor performance of this “Play About the Death of the Rich Man” in a production by Max Reinhardt, who, along with Hofmannsthal, was one of the event’s founders. It has been performed almost every summer since, with the likes of Maximilian Schell, Klaus Maria Brandauer and, most recently, Tobias Moretti in the title role of a hedonistic rich man visited by death, who offers his victim a last shot at salvation.The local enthusiasm for the play is difficult to explain to outsiders. To say that “Jedermann” lacks the popular appeal of “The Sound of Music,” another famous Salzburg cultural export, is putting it mildly.For a tradition as deeply entrenched as “Jedermann,” productions here tend to be, well, traditional. Given this fact, the new production, by the director Michael Sturminger, is practically avant-garde, or at least tries to be: There is a largely abstract set and eclectic costumes, comic-surreal moments, including an expertly choreographed boxing match, and interpolated texts and songs. But the production fails to establish a consistent tone, and Sturminger’s varied theatrical effects are ill suited to Hofmannsthal’s lofty and archaic rhyming couplets.I don’t mean to suggest that a ritualized parable like “Jedermann” resists daring approaches, just that many of this production’s ideas seem tentative or not fully thought through.“Richard the Kid and the King” delivered an electrifying jolt to the Salzburg Festival.Monika RittershausEidinger approaches the lengthy role with focused sobriety that seemed intended to invest the character with unexpected psychological shadings, but the performance seemed to ignore, rather than engage with, the inherent naïveté of Hofmannsthal’s text and the archetypical nature of its protagonist. (It seems misguided to treat Jedermann as a character as richly drawn as Richard III or Hamlet.)The “Jedermann” premiere was supposed to take place outside, but persistent rain forced the show indoors, to the Grosses Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest opera house, which is where I saw the third of 14 planned performances. That cavernous venue seemed to have something to do with the loss of up-close-and-personal immediacy: I found myself wondering how different my experience of the show would have been from the stadium-style bleachers set up on Cathedral Square, watching the performers strut and fret their hour on a stage whose vastness did not threaten to dwarf them.Eidinger is a distinctive actor whose ferocity and intensity come through in performances that are as grippingly psychological as they are dazzlingly physical. His pugilistic and choreographic feats notwithstanding, much of his Jedermann had a note of studied, at times ironic, understatement. From my seat in Row 15, 100 or so feet from the stage, I felt that the subtlety of his performance failed to transmit.Initially, Salzburg Festival organizers said they would leave it up to the audience whether to wear masks during the performances, as was the policy last year, during the festival’s socially distanced installment. Last year, the festival venues were filled at half capacity. In 2021, I sat elbow to elbow with my fellow theatergoers.The new production of “Jedermann,” a medieval morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition.Matthias HornBut after one of the 2,179 audience members who had attended the “Jedermann” premiere tested positive for the coronavirus, the organizers reversed course and mandated face coverings for all indoor performances. (My impression from the opening week is that festivalgoers are mostly complying, although I’ve seen unusual ways to wear a mask: A bald man sitting in front of me at “Richard” wore his mask on his head like a birthday hat.)The “Jedermann” infection, and the festival’s swift response, was a sobering reminder for Salzburg, which has now successfully opened not one but two pandemic-era installments against staggering odds, of the health emergency that continues to ravage the world outside this sheltered oasis in the Alps.The Salzburg Festival continues through Aug. 30. More

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      Sunday in the Trenches With George

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      James Lapine’s book shows how he and Stephen Sondheim invested two years of work to burnish their musical from an avant-garde near-disaster to a mainstream classic.As someone then working in a menial capacity on musicals, I was lucky enough to see the original production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” several times: once during its ragged, unfinished Off Broadway workshop at Playwrights Horizons in 1983 and repeatedly during its gleamingly polished Broadway run at the Booth Theater starting the next year. Either way, I thought it was a work of beauty and genius, especially after getting to study the music up close as I proofread parts of the score for the show’s copyist. What I didn’t know was how close, and how often, “Sunday” had come to not working at all.In “Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created ‘Sunday in the Park With George,’” Lapine, who directed and wrote the book for the show, relates the history of the work through memories, memorabilia and interviews with more than 50 people connected with it. They include Sondheim, of course, but also the original stars (Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters), ensemble members (including the as-yet-unknown Kelsey Grammer, Brent Spiner and Christine Baranski), producers, designers, stage managers and grunts.The composer Stephen Sondheim, right, was collaborating for the first time with James Lapine, left, who wrote the book and directed “Sunday in the Park With George.”Gerry GoodsteinFar from being a nostalgic ego trip, though, Lapine’s book is astonishingly frank about the show’s troubles and his own shortcomings. His background in experimental theater was central to the new work’s innovations but did not prepare him, especially as a novice director, for the mainstream pressures that inevitably came to bear once Sondheim was involved, even if Sondheim himself was trying to escape them.That division is recapitulated in the plot, which in the first act concerns the pointillist painter Georges Seurat, his fictional lover, Dot, and the creation of his masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” In the second act, it leaps ahead 100 years to focus on a contemporary artist who might be the couple’s great-grandson. Some audiences were unwilling to make that leap. Even Emanuel Azenberg, one of the show’s commercial producers, found it “intimidating and baffling.”The same phrase applies to the many personality clashes, technical problems and existential threats that seemed to pop up constantly during the show’s development. So even as Lapine traces the painstaking process of creating and directing something fundamentally new, he also reveals the role of chance and adversity in the making of a musical that’s now considered a classic.The unexpected flip side of that insight is the realization that even the greatest works, as they come together, are always just a few decisions shy of coming apart.Below, a timeline, with quotations from the book (out on Aug. 3), of the portents, miscalculations and disasters that over the course of two years led — utterly unpredictably — from the postcard of the painting that Lapine first showed Sondheim to a musical that may be, as one lyric puts it, “durable forever.”June 12, 1982With Sondheim, 52, in “a pretty dark place” after the failure of “Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981 — he’s considering giving up theater to make video games — Lapine, 33, a downtown up-and-comer, anxiously heads to their first meeting “through a huge antinuclear march that seemed to have taken over the city.” As the two men share a joint and talk, Lapine realizes they come from different artistic worlds; he has seen only one of Sondheim’s shows — “Sweeney Todd” — and has the thinnest possible knowledge of musical theater in general.Sondheim’s indication in Lapine’s script of where the opening number should go in “Sunday in the Park.”via Stephen SondheimSeptember 1982Sondheim, who typically begins by looking for places to put songs in the book writer’s text, finds one in Lapine’s first pages, as Dot poses for Seurat on a hot Sunday. Lapine expands the moment into a monologue beginning with the words “First a dribble of sweat,” but Sondheim thinks: “Dribble — I can’t do dribble.” He changes it to “trickle.” A good start, yet Lapine waits so long to hear the result, or any result, that he begins to fear Sondheim will leave him “at the altar.” The delay is in part the result of Sondheim’s fundamental concern: “I didn’t think the show needed songs.”Nov. 1, 1982At the first reading of the first act, Sondheim plays the entire score so far, which consists of four arpeggios — about 10 seconds of music.Early 1983The Off Broadway workshop at Playwrights Horizons has been financed mostly by grants and “wealthy widows,” says André Bishop, the theater’s artistic director. But at least one isn’t on board. Dorothy Rodgers, the widow of Richard Rodgers and an éminence grise in New York State arts funding, argues that Sondheim, as a “commercial” composer, doesn’t merit public funds. Bishop recalls writing to her: “If you think this musical that is barely half-written, about a pointillist painter, is commercial, you’ve got to be nuts!” Instead of cutting funding, he adds, “what I think you should do is get down on your knees and kiss my feet.” Rodgers replies: “Dear André. Point taken.”April 1983Lapine receives a letter from Edward Kleban, the lyricist of “A Chorus Line,” suggesting that “Sunday,” as yet unperformed, appropriates elements of Kleban’s unproduced musical “Gallery.” The implied threat of a lawsuit hovers all the way to Broadway, as does Kleban, seen scribbling notes during previews, but a suit never materializes.May 31, 1983On the first day of rehearsal, Peters gets an emergency call: “Your father is sick.” But it’s just her stalker. Other problems are not so easily dismissed. One cast member quits after a week, and several who remain resist what they call Lapine’s “sophomoric” theater games and directing style. Spiner, who plays a chauffeur, complains, “I don’t have a character. Where is my character?” When Lapine answers, “You’re not a character, you’re a color,” Spiner retorts: “Would you mind telling me what color?”Mandy Patinkin as Georges Seurat and Bernadette Peters as his fictional love, Dot, in the Broadway production.Martha Swope, via The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsJuly 1983Patinkin, later describing himself as “terrified” by the demands of the role, storms out of the theater during the first week of performances at Playwrights, with Lapine chasing him down 42nd Street. Though Patinkin’s wife and agent talk him out of quitting, Lapine isn’t sure he’ll ever trust his leading man again. But trust is a problem all around. After Lapine confuses upstage and downstage and gives inappropriately harsh notes, Grammer, who plays several small roles, reams the director out in front of the company.Late July 1983Near the end of previews, Sondheim finishes “Finishing the Hat,” a song for Seurat that makes the first act gel. Not gelling: the skeletal second act hastily added for the final three performances at Playwrights, introducing the contemporary George as a wacky performance artist. Audiences are mystified, as is Sondheim: “It was really terrible.”Fall 1983To everyone’s surprise, the Shubert Organization decides to produce the unfinished, highbrow show in one of its Broadway theaters by the end of the new season; Lapine selects the Booth, nearly the smallest and thus the least financially feasible option. (The pit is so small that the bass drum has to be sliced in half to fit.) Patinkin almost decamps to play one of the sons in the Dustin Hoffman “Death of a Salesman.” Peters does not immediately sign on for Broadway either, noting that Dot still lacks a major moment in the first act like George’s “Finishing the Hat.” (This isn’t narcissism; she has already declined top billing, pointing out that the show is called “Sunday in the Park With George” — not Dot.) Sondheim, agreeing, fills the emotional gap with “We Do Not Belong Together.”The poster for the Broadway production, which played the small Booth Theater.1984 Fraver April 2, 1984At the first Broadway preview, Lapine writes, the theater is “sweltering” and the first act runs an hour and 40 minutes. “Many people walked out at intermission and more during the second act. By the end of the show, people were so desperate to get out of the theater that if I’d stood in their way, I’d have been trampled.” The crew, who call the show “Sunday in the Dark and Bored,” think it will close on opening night — or maybe before; they joke about kidnapping Patinkin and dumping him “in the middle of the Bronx.”Later that AprilA big technical problem during previews is Dot’s trick dress, which she must step out of during the title song as if it were an exoskeleton. The Off Broadway dress was problematic enough, but the fancier Broadway version, operated by a stage manager with a garage-door opener, is even buggier. The shell does not always open, forcing Peters to fight her way out of it manually, using the “emergency exit.” On one occasion, the opposite happens: The dress suddenly shuts before Peters can get back inside; she grabs it under her arm and walks off with it, getting a huge, unintended laugh.A costume rendering of the trick dress worn by the character Dot and controlled with a garage-door remote.Patricia Zipprodt, via Billy Rose Theatre Division/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsEven later that AprilWith two crucial second act songs still unwritten, the opening night is postponed by two weeks and Michael Bennett, an in-demand play doctor ever since he staged “A Chorus Line,” is brought in for advice. But there are also improvements and good omens. The first act has been cut down to 75 or 80 minutes and more people (even Johnny Cash!) are staying through the second. In the week before opening, when Sondheim finally finishes the last two songs — “Children and Art,” which Lapine says “explained the show,” and “Lesson #8,” which “explained George” — the contemporary story suddenly hangs together, even though the songs aren’t yet orchestrated.May 2, 1984“Sunday in the Park With George” opens to mixed reviews, is nominated for 10 Tony Awards (nabbing only two) but runs for 604 performances and, in April 1985, wins the Pulitzer Prize.On April 24, 1985, from left, Sondheim, Peters and Lapine celebrate the news that the show has won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times More

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      Little Island Unveils Free Monthlong Festival With Over 450 Artists

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      The festival, which runs from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5, features a flurry of music, dance, and comedy performances from both established and emerging artists.Little Island was dreamed up as a haven for the performing arts on the Hudson River, and in its first months, it is also being put forward as a playground for artists who have been kept from the stage for far too long.The operators of the island announced on Tuesday that it would host a free monthlong arts festival starting in mid-August that would feature more than 450 artists in more than 160 performances.There will be dance, including works curated by Misty Copeland, Robert Garland and Georgina Pazcoguin. There will be music, including the pianists Jenny Lin and Adam Tendler, the composer Tyshawn Sorey and the saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and her band. And there will be live comedy, with television stars like Ziwe and Bowen Yang in the lineup.The festival — which is being produced by Mikki Shepard, formerly the executive producer of the Apollo Theater — is another major effort by New York’s performing arts community to revive the arts after the pandemic darkened theaters and concert halls for over a year. For the performers, it is an opportunity to get paid to create new work and explore where their art is heading after months of pandemic restrictions, and in the wake of racial justice protests that swept the country.“We wanted artists to have a voice in terms of, where are they now?” Shepard said. “Coming out of this pandemic, where do they want to be?”By offering free performances, the festival’s objective is to host an audience that combines typical arts patrons with people who might not normally buy tickets to see live music or dance. The performances in Little Island’s 687-seat amphitheater will be ticketed, but shows located elsewhere on the island will not be, allowing tourists and other park visitors to stumble upon them as they’re walking around the 2.4-acre space.“Nothing about it is refined,” said George C. Wolfe, a senior adviser working on the festival, which is called NYC Free. “It’s to give people a place to play.”Copeland and Garland are co-curating a performance on Aug. 18 that features eight Black ballet dancers from three major companies: American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and the Dance Theater of Harlem, where Garland is resident choreographer. During the performance, Copeland will read aloud from American history texts on top of hip-hop, soul and funk music.Other dance performances include Ballet Hispánico performing an evening of new works by Latina choreographers on Aug. 18, an evening of dance curated by the choreographer Ronald K. Brown on Aug. 25 and a performance by the tap dancer Dormeshia on Sept. 1.As for music, the first day of the festival on Aug. 11 will feature John Cage’s work “4’33”” — in which the score instructs that no instruments be played. It will be performed by students of the Third Street Music School Settlement, led by Tendler. Other musicians include the jazz duo Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner; Flor de Toloache, an all-women mariachi band; and Ali Stroker, the Tony-winning “Oklahoma!” performer, who will sing and tell stories onstage. The final night of the festival includes an all-women jazz performance, curated by the drummer and composer Shirazette Tinnin.The comedy lineup features a stand-up show hosted by Michelle Buteau and a live show called “I Don’t Think So, Honey!,” hosted by Yang and Matt Rogers, that grew out of a segment on their podcast.The festival is funded by Barry Diller, the mega-mogul who paid for Little Island and whose family foundation will bankroll the first two decades of the park’s operations. It will run from Aug. 11 to Sept. 5. More