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      Following Theater Graduates Who Were Left Without a Stage

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      The Times’s theater reporter tracked drama students who emerged from a well-regarded North Carolina conservatory into a world with performance on pause.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times. But for more than a year, there was very little theater.So what have I been doing? Well, at least in part, I’ve been writing about the people whose lives, and livelihoods, have been upended by the pandemic-prompted shutdown.That means actors, of course, and fans, too. But I’ve also been intrigued, almost since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, by what the widespread layoffs and absence of productions would mean for aspiring theater artists,. That’s what led me to report the article that appeared in Sunday’s paper about a group of drama students who graduated last year from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.Over time, I was able to talk to 22 of the 23 drama students in the class of 2020, and they reminded me of so much that I love about journalism, and about artists — they were open and generous and self-aware, and sometimes uncertain about how to think about what this strange and unexpected time would mean for them. And it seems like the article has resonated with readers, for which I am grateful.I started pitching the story to The Times’s culture editors last summer. Then, in January, prompted by the annual what-do-we-want-to-do-this-year meetings, I moved it to the top of my wish list.But how to proceed? I started by reaching out to a number of leading drama programs in New York and around the country, and by talking with educators and students about what was happening with the class of 2020. I was just trying to get my head around what a story might look like.As I gathered reporting, my editors and I resumed a debate we have over and over: breadth versus depth. Was the best way to proceed to write in a sweeping fashion about the most interesting graduates from a variety of programs, or to go deep on a single program that could stand in for the larger universe?Once we decided to focus on one class, it was time to select a school. This is the kind of multiple-choice question for which there is no single right answer. We wanted a well-regarded program, but maybe not one of the schools right in our backyard, and we wanted a group of students with a variety of back stories and a range of pandemic experiences.The University of North Carolina School of the Arts appealed because it met those criteria, and I just had a gut feeling, after talking with the program’s dean, its communications director and a few of the students, that I would find the level of candor that might make a story succeed.As has been true for much of my work over the last year, the reporting was largely by phone — the students have scattered, with one in England, one in Australia and the others all over the United States and often on the move. But I did get to meet some of them.In May, I took my first reporting flight since the pandemic began, to Winston-Salem, to tour the campus and attend the 2021 commencement, which members of the class of 2020 were invited to attend, and two did. (One bonus: I got to see what a Fighting Pickle, the school’s mascot, looks like.)I visited with three members of the class. David Ospina, who is now working as a real estate photographer, met me for cold brew coffee on a very hot North Carolina morning; Lance Smith showed me around his mom’s apartment, where he’s been making music and self-taping auditions during the pandemic; and Sam Sherman joined Mr. Smith and me at a picnic table on campus to debrief the morning after commencement. And over dinner with the dean and several faculty members, I learned more about the school’s programs and how it had weathered the pandemic.It’s been great to start reporting in person again. It just leads to better conversations and richer material, and I’m so grateful to all the students for their thoughtfulness. As I sat with Mr. Smith and Mr. Sherman, one memory prompted another — the student production of “Pass Over” they worked on, the alumni panels they attended, the books they’re reading and the survival jobs they’re taking and the dreams they’re trying to hold on to. “I’m starving to be in a room with people, playing with each other, having fun and goofing off and seeing what works and maybe having a breakthrough one day,” Mr. Sherman said. Mr. Smith agreed. “I miss being in it,” he added. “I miss doing it.” More

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      New Playwrights Horizons Season Includes Will Arbery World Premiere

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      Arbery’s “Corsicana” was added to the theater’s slate for next summer, along with four plays previously announced for 2021.Nearly a year ago, Playwrights Horizons’ new artistic director Adam Greenfield unveiled a four-play season for 2021, with all the titles directed by women and written by nonwhite authors.All four titles — Aleshea Harris’s “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul,” Dave Harris’s “Tambo & Bones,” and Sanaz Toossi’s “Wish You Were Here” — now have opening dates as part of Playwrights Horizons’ 2021-22 season, which is set to begin in September. And the lineup has an exciting addition: Next summer, the nonprofit theater on West 42nd Street will present the world premiere of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Will Arbery’s “Corsicana,” directed by Sam Gold.“I wanted to make good on the plays we had already scheduled and show that I was committed to these writers,” Greenfield, who is now in his second year as artistic director, said in a phone conversation on Tuesday. “Each of these pieces demands to be heard.”Arbery, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” his depiction of contemporary conservatism that premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, is set to return to the nonprofit Off Broadway theater in June 2022 with “Corsicana.” The play tells the story of a woman with Down syndrome and her younger half brother as they grapple with their mother’s death in a small city in Texas and become entangled with a reclusive local artist. It will be directed by Gold, who won a Tony Award for helming “Fun Home” on Broadway and will also direct a staging of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at New York Theater Workshop in its 2022-23 season that had originally been planned for 2020, and whose starry cast includes Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac.The rest of the 2021-22 season is set to start in September with “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” a ritual-as-play by the Obie winner Aleshea Harris that honors Black lives lost to racialized violence. A co-production with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the show recently concluded a run at BAM Fisher under the direction of Whitney White (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”), who will stay on when the production moves to Playwrights. The New York Times critic Maya Phillips praised “What to Send Up” as “a series of cathartic experiences” for audience members of color at BAM.Next up in November is Khoury’s “Selling Kabul,” a thriller set in Afghanistan that examines the human cost of immigration policy, and which will be directed by Tyne Rafaeli. The play was initially slated for the 2019-20 season and was in rehearsals when the pandemic closed theaters in March 2020.“It tracks the experience of those Afghans who were left behind as we’ve been leaving Afghanistan,” Greenfield said. “That is a subject that has been in the news increasingly over the last year.”Then in January comes the world premiere of Dave Harris’s “Tambo & Bones,” which is being billed as a “hip-hop triptych” about two characters trapped in a minstrel show. It will be directed by Taylor Reynolds. In April, the theater will stage Toossi’s dramatic comedy “Wish You Were Here,” which follows best friends who grapple with cultural upheaval amid the Iranian Revolution. It will be directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch.Greenfield said that a new show by the “Slave Play” writer Jeremy O. Harris — “A Boy’s Company Presents: Tell Me If I’m Hurting You,” which was originally scheduled to open in May 2020 before being scuttled by the pandemic — will not be part of the 2021-22 season.“There was a backlog of plays that had been discussed, and some just made more sense to reopen with,” Greenfield said, adding, “It’s still in discussions.”(After this article was published, Harris wrote on Twitter that he had told Greenfield he had “no interest” in staging his play at Playwrights Horizons any longer, and that his treatment by the theater had been “disrespectful.” “We’re not discussing anything,” he said.)Along with its main productions, Playwrights offered details about its other projects. Eleven writers have been commissioned to produce work for the second season of the theater’s scripted fiction podcast series, “Soundstage.” The company is also continuing its new performance series, Lighthouse Project, that aims to fill the periods between scheduled productions with installations, performances and events by in-house artists rather than renting space to outside groups. More

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      Review: ‘Schmigadoon!’ Has a Song in Its Heart, and Everywhere Else

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      The Apple TV+ series both mocks and embraces the glories of classic musicals like “Brigadoon,” “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel.”Welcome to Schmigadoon, “where the men are men, and the cows are cows,” a magical musical land where Melissa and Josh (Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key) find themselves stranded during a trip meant to rehabilitate their romance. At first they think it’s like Colonial Williamsburg, or a warped Disney experience, but they quickly buy into their new reality: They’re trapped in this wholesome, old-timey parallel universe until they learn the lessons about true love it is meant to impart. More

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      Covid Surge Shuts Down West End Shows

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      Many London theaters are canceling performances, and people in the industry fear that more productions will have to close when England ends distancing and mask-wearing requirements next week.LONDON — The cast and crew of “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner,” an experimental play at the Royal Court, were just two weeks into their run when they received some bad news: One member of the company had tested positive for the coronavirus, and everyone had to quarantine.On July 4, the theater canceled performances for a week.The next day, the producers of “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum announced that they were canceling nine days of shows, because a member of the production team had tested positive, and later that week the Globe called off a performance of “Romeo & Juliet,” because an actor in the show had, too.This Monday alone, “The Prince of Egypt” at the Dominion Theater; another “Romeo & Juliet,” at the Regent’s Park Theater; and “Bach and Sons,” at the Bridge were all canceled for at least five days because of confirmed or potential cases.The spate of abandoned shows comes at what was supposed to be a celebratory moment for British theater. Starting Monday, playhouses in England will be allowed to open at full capacity for the first time since the pandemic began, as the country ends restrictions on social life in an effort to restore normalcy while living with the virus. Audience members will no longer have to wear masks inside theaters, although many are encouraging patrons keep them on.Yet with coronavirus cases soaring in Britain because of the more contagious Delta variant, theaters fear more cancellations, given that many young actors and crew members are not yet fully vaccinated. “We are all ready for it to happen again,” Lucy Davies, the Royal Court’s executive producer, said in a telephone interview. “It’s going to be fragile all summer.”“The Prince of Egypt,” at the Dominion Theater, shut down on Monday along with two other London shows.Matt CrockettCalled-off shows will cause further financial stress on cash-strapped theaters, Davies said, especially because no commercial insurers in Britain offer cover for coronavirus-related cancellations. And producers say the British government’s coronavirus rules are part of the problem. When people test positive here, they are required to quarantine for 10 days, as must all of their “close contacts” — defined as anyone who has been within about six feet of an infected person for 15 minutes.In Britain, more than 42,000 new coronavirus cases were recorded on Wednesday, a number last seen in January when the country was in lockdown to prevent its health system from being overwhelmed. Sajid Javid, the health minister, said on Monday that daily numbers were likely to rise to over 100,000 a day during the summer, although hospitalizations and deaths are expected to be much lower than in previous waves of infection, because two-thrids of adults have been fully vaccinated.In the first week of July, more than 520,000 people in England were told to quarantine as close contacts, according to official figures. They have to isolate even if they test negative for the virus or have had two vaccination shots.Eleanor Lloyd, a producer who is the president of the Society of London Theater, said that most of the cancellations were because of close contacts who were told to isolate, rather than positive cases.The Regent’s Park Theater said in an emailed statement that several of its staff members had been told to stay at home and were still in quarantine, despite later testing negative. “We do need an alternative to automatic self-isolation for our acting company and crew, as the current situation is simply unsustainable,” the statement said.Starting Aug. 16, fully vaccinated close contacts will no longer need to quarantine. “It’ll be better from then,” Lloyd said. But that is still a month away, and the risks may continue longer. So she is considering employing more understudies for a forthcoming production of Agatha Christie’s “Witness for the Prosecution.” That would have a cost, too, she said.London theaters have adopted safety measures to try to limit the risk of outbreaks. In most, casts and crew are tested several times a week, and masks and distancing are typically required offstage. But “people are traveling to and from the theater, and that is a risk, however safe our environment is,” Davies said.Joel MacCormack and Isabel Adomakoh Young in the title roles of the Regent’s Park Theater production of “Romeo and Juliet.” The show’s producers also had to call off performances.Jane HobsonThe safest productions seem to be those created especially for these pandemic times, with social distancing among the players both onstage and behind the scenes. The Globe has used this approach for shows like its “Romeo & Juliet.”Even so, last Saturday, Will Edgerton, who is playing Tybalt, learned that he had the virus after performing a home test.The Globe canceled that afternoon’s show so that a new actor could rehearse the role, then went ahead with the evening performance. “We are unique, as Shakespeare’s plays can be presented with distancing,” Neil Constable, the theater’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “But when you’ve got a major musical like ‘The Prince of Egypt,’ which costs millions of pounds and has lots of people onstage, you don’t have that option.”He said the British government should underwrite theaters’ risks, a sentiment that echoes calls by other leaders from Britain’s theater industry for a state-run insurance program. Last year, the government introduced a similar initiative for TV and movie shoots, but it has not announced anything for other forms of cultural life, as European governments like those of Germany and Austria have done.“We understand the challenges live events have in securing indemnity cover and are exploring what further support may be required,” a spokeswoman for Britain’s culture ministry said in an email.Davies, the Royal Court executive, said a safety net was badly needed, especially for commercial theaters that don’t receive public subsidies.She had a recent experience of the benefits of insurance, she said. On Monday, the cast and crew of “Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner” were scheduled to return to the stage for their first performance since completing their quarantines — but then a severe storm flooded the theater’s basement and the show was canceled again.“It was devastating — it was their comeback,” Davies said, before adding that the theater’s insurers had covered some of its losses that night. “We’re insured for flooding,” she said, “just not Covid.” More

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      In ‘Bach & Sons,’ a Composer Stares Down Death

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      The new play at the Bridge Theater in London and two other productions on the city’s stages examine characters facing the end.LONDON — Few actors could stare down mortality better than Simon Russell Beale in “Bach & Sons,” a problematic new play at the Bridge Theater that benefits from a piercing central performance. Telling of the often testy relationship between the composer Johann Sebastian Bach and two of his 20 children, both sons who were musicians as well, the writer Nina Raine has come up with a research-heavy play that could be described as “Amadeus” lite. Like that play, Peter Shaffer’s celebrated take on Mozart, “Bach & Sons” features extended discussions of the nature of mediocrity, and also leans toward the scatological. Amid an expletive-heavy script, one character makes a passing reference to “a turd in the tureen.”Nicholas Hytner’s production boasts an evocative design from Vicki Mortimer, with cascading keyboards hanging above the stage; as in “Amadeus,” the dialogue often cuts off to make way for excerpts from the composer’s output. Beale with Racheal Ofori as Anna Magdalena Wilcke in another scene from “Bach & Sons.” Manuel HarlanOver time, Bach Sr. loses his sight and cedes ground to his son Carl (a vivid Samuel Blenkin), whom the father derides as musically “efficient” — a decided slight from a visionary who likes his art messier and more inspiring. Yet all Carl wants is simply to be loved. (Another son, Wilhelm, is played by Douggie McMeekin as an artistic prodigy doomed to failure.)The family chat consists largely of extolling the power of music, when you can’t help but feel that, really, they would have gotten on with making it. A climactic discourse on dissonance reminded me of Georges Seurat’s quest for harmony in the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” to cite a more moving depiction of the creative process than “Bach & Sons,” with its boilerplate pronouncements about the value of art. Even so, Beale commands attention as the aging and worn Bach fades away. The composer’s canon, we’re told, can be characterized as a meditation on “the variety of grief,” and Beale communicates a man who has lived that grief himself: The actor cuts against the sentimentality of the writing to catch directly at the heart. “You can’t go on living and living and living,” says a character at the start of Nick Payne’s “Constellations” — and so it’s not altogether surprising when this 70-minute play turns toward confronting death in its second half.Payne’s one-act two-hander was first seen at the Royal Court in 2012 before transferring to the West End and then Broadway. The elegant staging from the director Michael Longhurst is now being revived at the Vaudeville Theater through Sept. 12, with the designer Tom Scutt’s buoyant cloudscape of balloons intact.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in Nick Payne‘s “Constellations,” directed by Michael Longhurst at the Vaudeville Theater.Marc BrennerThis time, there are four casts rotating across the run, and London theatergoers have so far had the opportunity to see two of them. (Among those still to come is a gay coupling that will feature the TV and stage name Russell Tovey.) The changing players reveal wildly contrasting takes on a tricky if accessible text in which events, large and small, are replayed with different outcomes, in accordance with Payne’s interest in the existence of a “multiverse.” That notion of alternate worlds coexisting alongside ours fuels a play that explores the infinite variability of life’s every moment, except the final one, which is always death.Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker, the oldest duo of the four, are also the more actorly of the two seen so far: You feel Wanamaker, especially, standing outside her character, Marianne, a Cambridge brainiac who holds forth on quantum mechanics and string theory. The parts don’t feel like a natural fit for either performer, though Capaldi, a onetime Doctor Who on TV, compensates with an abundance of charm. A much younger company brings together Sheila Atim (who won an Olivier for her role in “Girl From the North Country”) and Ivanno Jeremiah, who have a visceral connection onstage. Jeremiah is immediately likable as Roland, a beekeeper who meets Marianne at a barbecue and engages with her in a strange conversation about licking your elbow — to be honest, such exchanges work much better with the younger cast. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in “Constellations.”Marc BrennerAnd when Marianne confronts her possibly foreshortened life, the astonishing Atim communicates the gravitas of the situation even as Payne’s play makes clear that her fate can be rewritten with a happier ending in a parallel universe. These two are so good that, on a fourth viewing of the play, I felt as if I were seeing “Constellations” afresh: Atim and Jeremiah replay familiar material so it seems new — a virtue in a play that makes so much of repetition.If “Constellations” is late in raising the specter that its leading woman will die too soon, we know from the start that this is what will happen to the heroine of “Last Easter,” the 2004 play by Bryony Lavery at the intimate Orange Tree Theater through Aug. 7. (The show will be livestreamed on the theater’s website on July 22 and 23.) The director Tinuke Craig’s nimble production finds surprising levels of comedy in this story of June (the excellent Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer with terminal cancer who goes on a pilgrimage with three friends to Lourdes, France, because — well, why not? Maybe a miracle will happen.June, it seems, is especially fond of the painter Caravaggio, and the first act veers away from anything maudlin toward lessons in art history one minute, a jaunty snatch or two from the song “Easter Parade” the next. The tone is unexpectedly breezy, and the camaraderie between June and her pals, also theater practitioners, is nicely done. These friendships keep June’s spirits buoyant, even as her body starts to let her down.From left, Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Jodie Jacobs and Peter Caulfield in Bryony Lavery’s “Last Easter,” directed by Tinuke Craig at the Orange Tree Theater.Helen MurrayYet after the intermission, as June’s condition worsens, the writing turns more self-conscious. June’s devoted buddy Gash (Peter Caulfield) twice calls out “cliché alert,” and several events are described as “undramatic,” an unusual choice of adjective for a dramatist. (The quartet also includes the character of a heavy-drinking actress who soon wears out her welcome, both as written and performed.)The imminence of death seems to defy this gifted writer, who goes for the sort of deathbed scene that has been seen onstage and in movies many times over. Whatever the reason for “Last Easter’s” prosaic closing scenes, they share with “Constellations” a sense that mortality comes best in good company.Bach & Sons. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Sept. 11.Constellations. Directed by Michael Longhurst. Vaudeville Theater, through Sept. 12.Last Easter. Directed by Tinuke Craig. Orange Tree Theater, through Aug. 7. More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto on Life, Nature and ‘Time’

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      The musician and artist, currently undergoing cancer treatment, unveils a music-theater work about dreams, reincarnation and humanity’s struggle.Ryuichi Sakamoto is in Tokyo for the summertime rainy season. A New York resident for over 30 years, the Oscar-winning composer has been in Japan since last November — not because of the pandemic, but because of a diagnosis of rectal cancer, discovered just after he went into remission after several years of treatment for throat cancer.Despite his health problems, Sakamoto has been as prolific as ever, participating in concerts, exhibitions and most recently an opera, “Time,” which premiered last month at the Holland Festival.“Time” is part of Sakamoto’s ongoing exploration of “asynchronism,” music arranged outside traditional time structures. Introduced on his 2017 album “async,” the concept was conceived as he recovered from his first bout with cancer — an experience that he has said newly honed his ear to the beauty of everyday sounds, both natural and man-made, sun showers and singing bowls.Without conductor or tempo markings, “Time” is a “Mugen Noh,” a subset of Noh theater based on dreams. Created in collaboration with the visual artist Shiro Takatani, this dreamscape unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.“Time” unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.Sanne PeperCrossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature. The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail symbol of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water. Summoning visions of rising sea levels, “Time” — like our new century — presents a premonition that also feels like a memory: At the end of time, we all return to the same sea.Sakamoto spoke about the piece on a recent video call. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.At what point in the production of “Time” did you find out your cancer had returned?I worked on “Time” for four years after “async,” and I was diagnosed with rectal cancer last year. It’s a long treatment. I’m in the middle right now, and will go back to the hospital for surgery in the fall. It’s been a year since I left New York; I don’t know when I can come back.Were you originally planning to perform in the opera?I was thinking of making an original instrument for it. I still have this idea for the future.I was using the word opera in the beginning, but I’ve stopped using it. It’s a combination of installation and performance — a theater piece.It seems quite deeply connected to “async.”The conceptual idea behind “async” was my doubt about synchronization, and that led me to think about time itself. If you know my work from the past, I zigzag. But the things I got from making “async” were so huge that I didn’t want to lose them. I really wanted to develop them. The album was so spatial, like music for an installation, so the development would be an installation of performers together. That was the original idea for “Time.”“Time” is a Mugen Noh — it has no tempo — so it does seem like the perfect landscape to explore these ideas.Time is so natural to our society that we don’t doubt it. But because I’m a musician, I deal with time all the time. When we compose, we have to think about how to manipulate sounds in time.Crossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature.Sanne PeperThere are no instruments onstage, except the sho.Only the sho, which I have been fascinated by since I was a university student. I disliked all other Japanese traditional music, and even other traditions, like kado [flower arrangement] or sado [tea ceremony]. I hated it all, except gagaku [court music], which is like aliens’ music to me.Miyata, who represents nature, crosses the water so easily, while Tanaka — “mankind” — is so feeble.Woman and sho, they represent nature. Tanaka wants to create a straight road in the water — in time — to get the other side, but he fails. He goes insane and dies in the water at the end.What is humanity trying to reach at the end of the road?That’s mankind’s nature. A bit like Sisyphus: just a natural passion to make a road, to conquer nature.The road-building scenes interrupt a series of stories: a dream from the work of the writer Natsume Soseki; a traditional Noh play; the butterfly dream from the text Zhuangzi. How did you choose these?In our dreams, all properties of time are destroyed. In the Noh story “Kantan,” a man is looking for enlightenment and takes a nap. It just takes five minutes, but in his dream, 50 years has passed. Which is reality? The five minutes or the 50 years? And then in the butterfly dream, we have the philosopher Zhuang Zhou. Does the butterfly dream he is Zhuang Zhou, or does Zhuang Zhou dream he is a butterfly? We cannot tell.The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail vision of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water.Sanne PeperBy freeing time musically, do you feel it slow down?The theme of “Time” is to insist that time doesn’t exist, not that it’s passing slowly. Watching the streaming premiere, I sensed that one hour ago was just a minute ago, or some moments were repeated. At least I could feel another kind of time.You’ve also been painting on ceramic pieces (“2020S”), using found objects, and making installations (“Is Your Time”), and you currently have a large retrospective in Beijing, with a lot of visual work. What provoked this turn toward the visual arts?Maybe the big moment was the opera I composed in 1999, “Life.” It included visual images, moving images and some texts — all those visual elements were the main characters of that opera.And that was your first collaboration with Takatani?Yes, and the next thing we did was to deconstruct “Life.” We deconstructed all the visual images, and the sound, too, to create an installation in 2007. That was a big moment.I guess you’ve always worked in the visual arts — you’ve worked so closely with filmmakers on soundtracks.Strange, you know, I didn’t think about films. Films are more narrative, more linear. Unfortunately, a linear structure is in time; it has a beginning, middle and end. I don’t want to go back to that. This is why I’m fascinated by installation. Installation doesn’t have to have a beginning or end. The best installation, I think, is just listening to rain.And you have a tremendous rainstorm at the end of “Time,” followed by the crashing of a wave in slow motion. What sea were you thinking of?Man wants to conquer nature — the water — but he must fail, so he must die by water. I needed a huge flood, maybe a tsunami, to represent the violent power of water. Also, almost all ethnic groups have some memories of a big flood. Maybe we all have some deep memory about surviving a flood.I think a lot of people will wonder if this opera is primarily about climate change.Climate change is the most vivid conflict between mankind and nature so of course it is included. But it’s not the main focus. I wanted to create a myth about mankind and nature.It’s very similar to Soseki’s dream, in which a woman returns as a flower growing from her own grave. I’ve read a few interpretations. To some it represents Soseki’s struggle with the modern world.It is my belief about reincarnation. Because she promises she will be back in 100 years, and she’s back as a flower. You know, I always wanted to be buried in the ground, so that my body would become the nutrition of other living things. And in Soseki’s story, the woman becomes a flower. It’s so beautiful.I love your interpretation.Very romantic, no? More

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      in Television

      Charlie Robinson, Actor Best Known for ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 75

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      Mr. Robinson became a fan favorite as Mac, a levelheaded clerk surrounded by oddballs, on the long-running NBC courtroom comedy.Charlie Robinson, the veteran actor whose best-known role was Mac, the good-natured and pragmatic court clerk, on the long-running NBC sitcom “Night Court,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 75.His family confirmed the death, at the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, in a statement. The family said that the cause was a heart attack and organ failure brought on by septic shock, and that Mr. Robinson also had adenocarcinoma, a cancer of the glandular cells.Mr. Robinson’s acting career spanned six decades and included roles in television and film and onstage. His first credited onscreen appearance was in Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, “Drive, He Said,” in 1971.In 1984, he was cast in the role for which TV viewers would come to know him best: Macintosh Robinson, better known as Mac, on “Night Court,” then in its second season.“Night Court,” which aired on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m., after “Cheers,” was set in a Manhattan courtroom that played host to a parade of oddballs and misfits in the dead of night. It was built around Harry Anderson as Harry Stone, a quirky, kindhearted judge, but it was really an ensemble show.John Larroquette became the breakout star as Dan Fielding, a bawdy, lascivious prosecutor, but Mr. Robinson became a fan favorite as Mac, a levelheaded Vietnam veteran turned court clerk who favored cardigan sweaters, plaid shirts and knit neckties. He played the role for the rest of the show’s nine-season run and directed three episodes.Mr. Robinson was born in Houston on Nov. 9, 1945. He served in the Army and briefly attended the University of Houston before leaving to pursue an acting career.He attended the Studio 7 workshop at the Houston Music Theater in the late 1960s and also trained at the Alley Repertory Theater there before moving to Los Angeles, where his family said he studied at the Actors Studio, the Mark Tapper Forum and the Inner City Cultural Center. Mr. Robinson, right, with Wendell Pierce in the play “Some Old Black Man,” which was streamed online this year.Doug CoombeIn addition to “Night Court,” Mr. Robinson was seen on numerous TV shows, including “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Key and Peele,” “This Is Us,” “Malcolm & Eddie,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “How I Met Your Mother” and “NCIS.” Before joining the cast of “Night Court” he was a regular on “Buffalo Bill,” the Dabney Coleman sitcom that lasted only two seasons but developed a cult following. His film credits include “The Black Gestapo,” “Gray Lady Down” and “The House Bunny.”Mr. Robinson won the 2006 Ovation Award for best actor in a play for his performance as Troy Maxson in a production of August Wilson’s “Fences” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. More

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      in Movies

      Paul Huntley, Hair Master of Broadway and Hollywood, Is Dead at 88

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      The many famous heads he worked on included those of Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Channing. Some actors requested him in their contracts.Paul Huntley, the hair stylist and wig designer who gave Carol Channing her expansive bouffant in “Hello, Dolly!,” Alan Cumming his plastered curl in “Cabaret” and Sutton Foster her golden bob in “Anything Goes,” died on Friday in London. He was 88. His death was confirmed by a friend, Liz Carboni, who said he had been hospitalized for a lung infection.Mr. Huntley left New York for London, his native city, in February, and made clear in an interview with The New York Times that his work on “Diana: The Musical,” which is to begin performances on Broadway in November, would be his last. The pandemic, he said, had dried up opportunities, and his fractured hip was hurting.In a 60-year career, Mr. Huntley styled hair and created wigs for more than 200 shows, including “The Elephant Man,” “Chicago” and “Cats.” He was so respected that Betty Buckley, Jessica Lange and others had contracts specifying that he would do their hair.“He put wigs on my head for every show except ‘Les Miz’ in London. He was the master,” the actress Patti LuPone said. “When I put on a Paul Huntley wig, I never felt anything but my character.”The costume designer William Ivey Long called him “by far the premier hair designer on the planet, hands down.”Mr. Huntley tried a wig on Sutton Foster in 2002 for her role in “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” for which he sought to evoke New York City in 1922 with bangs, spit curls and finger waves.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Huntley’s output was prodigious, and he typically worked on several shows at once. In 2014 alone, he turned out 48 wigs for “Bullets Over Broadway” and more than 60 wigs and facial pieces for the Shakespeare Theater Company’s two-part “Henry IV” in Washington.In 2002, when he designed the hair for the Broadway musical “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” he also worked on “Morning’s at Seven,” “Hairspray” and the Off Broadway comedy “Helen.”For the show “Diana” — a version of which, filmed without an audience during the pandemic, is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on Oct. 1 — he created four wigs for the actress Jeanna de Waal to portray how the style of the Princess of Wales changed over time, from mousy ingenuousness to windswept sophistication.Paul Huntley was born on July 2, 1933, in Greater London, one of five children of a military man and a homemaker. He was fascinated at an early age by his mother’s movie magazines. After leaving school, he tried to find an apprenticeship in the film industry, but the flooded post-World War II job market had no space for him, so he enrolled at an acting school in London.He ended up helping with hair design for school productions and in the 1950s, after two years of military service, became an apprentice at Wig Creations, a large London theatrical company. He went on to become the main designer, working with the likes of Vivien Leigh, Marlene Dietrich and Laurence Olivier.Mr. Huntley helped construct the signature braids worn by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 movie “Cleopatra.” Ms. Taylor introduced him to the director Mike Nichols, who a decade later enlisted Mr. Huntley to do hair for his Broadway production of “Uncle Vanya” at Circle in the Square. He eventually became the go-to designer for plays and musicals, including “The Real Thing,” “The Heidi Chronicles” and “Crazy for You.” More