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      in Theater

      ‘Revolution Rent’ Review: Taking the Show South

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      This HBO documentary follows Andy Señor Jr. as he directs a production of “Rent” in Cuba.In the ballad “La Vie Boheme,” a colorful cadre of artists raise a toast to “emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion.” After all, Jonathan Larson’s groundbreaking musical “Rent” embodies revolution. In the earnest though narratively clumsy HBO documentary “Revolution Rent,” a director unpacks the relevance of this joyously defiant show when it’s translated to a different language, culture and political landscape.“Revolution Rent,” directed by Andy Señor Jr. and Victor Patrick Alvarez, depicts Señor’s rocky road to developing Cuba’s first Broadway musical produced by an American company in decades. The film begins with Señor’s background with “Rent” as a performer and his decision, regardless of his family’s protests, to direct a Cuban adaptation. In addition to confronting technical issues, translation adjustments and disagreements among the cast members, Señor is also forced to consider his own heritage and history. Despite the intriguing premise of the film, its cursory and lopsided narrative approach dilutes its salient themes and messages.The film feels scattered, with the first quarter too heavily reliant on abruptly intercut footage of the original Broadway cast performances, and the rest too shallowly dipping into details of the production’s story before skipping along to the next thing.And so Señor’s personal narrative shifts in and out of focus — his relationship to the musical and to his Cuban heritage are detailed just enough to leave us wanting more history, more background, more reflection and more depth. Similarly, the brief glimpses into the lives of its cast members, some queer and many impoverished, are compelling, but inconsistent and over too soon.For a documentary about a substantial staging of a beloved musical, “Revolution Rent” also skimps on the scenes of the final product itself. The production’s Roger singing an impassioned Spanish translation of “One Song Glory”; Señor pushing a cast member into an emotional reckoning with the meaning of the word freedom; the conversations about performing a queer musical in a country that hasn’t had a great track record for its treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people: These are the kinds of moments that most resonate but are overshadowed by the film’s sporadic approach.The show “Rent” gave us an onstage revolution, while “Revolution Rent” often gives us an underwhelming translation.Revolution RentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on HBO. More

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      in Movies

      They Fought to Make ‘In the Heights’ Both Dreamlike and Authentic

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      The creative team of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Jon M. Chu explain what it took to create a euphoric spectacle that stayed true to its cultural roots.Lin-Manuel Miranda still believes it was a miracle that “In the Heights,” the musical homage to Latino culture through the lens of the Washington Heights neighborhood, made it to Broadway. Back in 2008, before striving for inclusion became the entertainment industry standard, he and the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes were unknowns peddling a joyful narrative about unseen people.Their exuberant show inspired by their families and neighbors finally reaches the big screen (and HBO Max) this week after stumbling through multiple studios. Warner Bros. and the director Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) were ultimately entrusted with the project.In retrospect, Miranda said, it was naïve to think that getting the show from the stage to the multiplex would be easy. It took more than a decade.“Some of the hurdles were about Hollywood’s unwillingness to take chances on new talent and invest in that,” Miranda said. “When you watch this movie that Jon has so beautifully directed, you see a screen full of movie stars, but some of them you may not have heard of before. They were movie stars without the roles they needed to become movie stars.” More

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      Harvey Fierstein Donates $2.5 Million for Public Library Theater Lab

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      The gift from the writer and performer will help create an educational hub at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.Harvey Fierstein may be a multiple Tony-winning performer and writer. But he is also the son of a librarian, who still sometimes heads to the reading room when he needs to do homework.In 2005, when he was preparing to play Tevye in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” he visited the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch a recording of an earlier Broadway revival featuring Zero Mostel, which is included in its famed Theater on Film and Tape Archive.“And don’t tell anyone, but I’ve also used the library,” he said in an interview, dropping his famous Brooklyn molasses-spiked-with-gravel voice, “for pleasure.”Now, Fierstein has donated $2.5 million to create a new “theater lab” at the library’s Lincoln Center campus, a dedicated educational space where students and the general public will be able to attend programs drawing on its vast holdings of photographs, scripts, recordings, set models, costumes and other materials.“Live theater is live theater — you do it and that’s it,” said Fierstein, 67. “Without a library collecting this stuff, our whole history disappears.”The lab, which will be named for Fierstein, is to be built in what is currently a 770-square-foot office space. In a statement, Jennifer Schantz, the library’s director, said it would be “an incubator of creativity” that embodies “the library’s mission to inspire lifelong learning using the theater division’s unparalleled collections.”The performing arts library holds material from shows Fierstein wrote or performed in, including “Torch Song Trilogy,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “Kinky Boots” and “Hairspray.” But as it happens, his personal papers are elsewhere.In 2005, before a home renovation, Fierstein placed his personal archive at Yale University. “So I needed to also do something for the performing arts library,” he said.In addition to the $2.5 million donation, the library has been named a beneficiary of the Harvey Fierstein Trust, which will allow it to receive additional support in the future.Fierstein said he hoped the lab would help people reimagine what theater can be after the pandemic, which shuttered the entire industry. He recalled how over the years, every time he did a revival of “Torch Song Trilogy,” for which he won his first two Tonys in 1983, he would call the downtown experimental theater La MaMa to ask if he could use their rehearsal space, which he described as a kind of spiritual home.“I would ask, ‘Can I borrow your basement?’” he said. “I thought of it as a kind of womb. That’s what I think of this space as — a womb for something wonderful. You just don’t know what’s going to be born out of it.” More

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      Actors' Equity and Producers Clear Major Hurdle to Touring Shows

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      Under the agreement that will pave the way to reopening the shows, touring company members will be required to be fully vaccinated.Broadway producers and the labor union representing stage actors have reached an agreement on health protocols for touring shows that should allow hundreds of performers to return to work at theaters around the country beginning this summer.The 17-page agreement says that producers must require all members of the traveling company to be fully vaccinated and mandates free weekly virus tests. Also: “absolutely no interaction” will be permitted between performers and audience members.The union, the Actors’ Equity Association, announced the touring agreement with the Broadway League in an email to its 51,000 members Monday evening.The agreement does not apply to shows on Broadway — the rules for those are still being discussed — and it covers only actors and stage managers, not the many other theater workers represented by different labor unions. But it is a significant development for an industry that has been dark for 15 months, and gives a first indication of the safety measures producers and performers are envisioning.“This new set of protocols is another step toward the safe reopening of our industry in full,” the union email said, “and we’re excited to see where this leads us.”The Broadway League also welcomed the agreement. The League’s president, Charlotte St. Martin, said the deal followed several months of negotiations, and had been adjusted to reflect “changing guidelines, science and laws.”“It was great to work with Equity to help bring tours back and keep the employees safe,” she said.Touring shows are a major part of the commercial theater ecosystem. According to the Broadway League, 18.5 million people saw touring shows in about 200 North American cities during the 2018-2019 season, and those tours grossed $1.6 billion.Tours have been completely shut down throughout the pandemic, but many have announced plans to get back on the road. “Wicked” is planning to restart its tour in early August at Dallas’s Music Hall at Fair Park, while “Hamilton” is planning to resume performances later that month in Los Angeles and San Francisco; many other shows are planning fall performance dates around the country.The union said that safety protocols will continue to be adjusted as the public health situation evolves. But for now, the rules are quite detailed, covering everything from backstage signage to hand hygiene, mask laundering and prop disinfection, in an effort, the agreement says, “to minimize and mitigate the risk of Covid-19 transmission during a tour.”The rules require mask-wearing and social distancing “except when doing so is incompatible or interferes with their job responsibilities or part of the performance during the tour such as performing onstage.” And stage-dooring is out: “Autograph signings, meet-and-greets and backstage tours are strictly prohibited.”Some of the rules are quite detailed. There is a ban on self-serve buffets. Water dispensers should be contactless. Hair and makeup designers are to wear masks plus face shields plus gloves, and must change their gloves each time they work with a different cast member.Each touring company is to have a Covid-19 safety manager. Actors and stage managers who do not follow safety protocols can be fined and, after repeated violations, fired.The vaccine mandate allows company members to request accommodations for “a qualifying disability or a sincerely held religious belief,” but the agreement says it is up to producers whether to grant such accommodations. As for states where vaccine mandates are not allowed: “The League and Equity will determine the appropriate Health & Safety protocols.”The agreement has a few things to say about audience members as well. Venues must require that patrons be masked, and all patrons must be at least six feet from the conductor (if there is an orchestra pit) or the stage.The union and the producers also reached separate agreements outlining safety protocols for developmental work (closed-door rehearsal or performance sessions that producers and creators use to assess shows that are still being written and revised) and auditions. More

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      in Music

      Karla Burns, Who Broke a ‘British Tonys’ Color Barrier, Dies at 66

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      Her Olivier Award was for her signature role as Queenie in “Show Boat,” a part that once earned a Tony nomination. She later lost her voice in surgery and fought to regain it.Karla Burns, a singer and actor who in 1991 won a Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for her role as the riverboat cook Queenie in a production of “Show Boat,” and who later fought to regain her soulful voice after losing it in an operation to remove a growth in her throat, died on June 4 in Wichita, Kan. She was 66.Her sister, Donna Burns-Revels, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by a series of strokes.A spokeswoman for the Olivier Awards’ sponsoring organization, the Society of London Theater, said it’s believed that Ms. Burns was the first Black performer to win that honor.Her Olivier, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for best supporting performance in a musical, came in 1991 in recognition of her work in a revival of “Show Boat,” co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the West End. Almost a decade earlier she had earned a Tony nomination for playing Queenie on Broadway.Ms. Burns’s musical journey began when she was a girl growing up in Wichita in the 1960s. Her father was a blues and gospel pianist, and every Saturday night she danced beside his piano while he played. On bus rides to school she broke out in song. One day a choir teacher told her, “Kiddo, you can really sing.”After studying music and theater at Wichita State University, Ms. Burns auditioned for the role of Queenie in a regional production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical “Show Boat,” about the lives of the performers and crew aboard a floating theater called the Cotton Blossom that travels along the Mississippi River in the segregated South.Ms. Burns landed the role and was soon taking the stage at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City. Then she performed as Queenie in an Ohio dinner theater production, belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” nightly. In the early 1980s, she headed to New York to audition for the part for a national tour of “Show Boat” presented by the Houston Grand Opera. She competed for the role against hundreds of other women.“I had no agent and I walked in,” Ms. Burns said in an interview on the “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1982. “Some of them, I knew their faces, I knew they were famous women, and I said, ‘Well, I‘m here, and I’m from Kansas, and I’m going to go out there and do my best.’”She was asked to sing 16 bars of one song, and then the audition ended. After weeks of silence, someone called to apologize for losing her phone number. The part was hers, she was told.The musical, which starred Donald O’Connor and Lonette McKee, toured the country for months and arrived on Broadway in 1983.“There is standout work by Karla Burns,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Miss Burns has been handed a sizzling, rarely heard song, ‘Hey, Feller,’ that’s been restored to ‘Show Boat’ for this production.”She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance and won a Drama Desk Award. She later sang on a “Show Boat” studio album, released in 1988.Ms. Burns with Bruce Hubbard in the Broadway revival of “Show Boat” in 1983. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a riverboat cook.Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library“Karla was proud to play Queenie,” said Rick Bumgardner, a close friend of hers who directed her in productions of “The Wiz” and “Steel Magnolias.” “When she got the opportunity to put a rag on her head, she didn’t feel she was putting people down. She felt she was portraying strong women and reminding our nation of its past.”In the 1990s, Ms. Burns appeared in “Hi-Hat Hattie,” a touring one-woman musical based on the life of Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Ms. McDaniel was also a Wichita native and had played Queenie in the 1936 movie version of “Show Boat,” and Ms. Burns had long considered her a kindred spirit. More

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      in Theater

      Review: 'A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An Encounter' at the Public Theater

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      The experimental company 600 Highwaymen is back with theater of the most intimate kind, starring you and a stranger at close range.“So once you go inside,” the usher instructed me at the Public Theater on Saturday, “you’re going to walk onto the stage, and you’re going to take the seat farthest from the door.”“Farthest from the door,” I repeated calmly out loud, while my brain blared in silent alarm: “Wait, what? We’re doing this on the stage?”There are people drawn to center stage like blossoms to the sun, and then there is me, their opposite. Participatory theater scares me — even when, as in this case, it deliberately has no audience. Doing it onstage would make it extra intimidating.Still, I had swooned last fall for “A Phone Call,” the participatory, telephonic first part of the triptych “A Thousand Ways,” by the experimental company 600 Highwaymen. Ever since, I had been rooting for the in-person Part Two, “An Encounter,” to hurry up and get to New York so I could do it: just me and a stranger, following its script together. Now here it was. It’s just that, in my mind’s eye, it had all been much lower-key.None of this dramatic business of returning to the Public for the first time since the shutdown to find the lobby — normally a people-watching nirvana — whisper-quiet, then going upstairs to the Martinson Theater, where for a few minutes I was totally, eerily alone. My first encounter in “An Encounter,” then, wasn’t with my partner in this two-hander but with that familiar space, seen from an unfamiliar vantage, with nearly 200 empty seats staring back at me.As for “An Encounter” itself, my worry was unwarranted. It is a joy; even if it scares you, go. This is a work of inquisitive humanity and profound gentleness, which over the course of an hour buffs away the armor that lets us proceed through our days brusque, numb and antagonistic.Running concurrently in several spaces at the Public, it is seemingly as simple as simple can be. Like “A Phone Call,” which brings together two strangers by telephone and prompts them with an automated voice to share stories and memories, it is a private scripted meeting between strangers, both regular people, face to face across a table, masks on, with a glass panel between them.An arrow indicated which participant was to take each card. Maria Baranova(While you do not need to do Part One to do Part Two, the Public is also offering “A Phone Call” through July 18. The planned third part to “A Thousand Ways,” completing the journey through the pandemic, will be a large-group, in-person show.)In the theater, my stranger and I — I still do not know his name, or the bottom of his face — sat at the table under the stage lights and submitted to the script: a neat stack of printed notecards fitted in a small gap at the bottom of the glass. An arrow, pointing my way or his, indicated who was to take each card. On these we read our lines and stage directions.“Hello,” one stranger begins.“Hi,” says the other.“It’s good to see you,” the first responds, and what is striking is that this line of dialogue turns out to be perfectly true. It also hints at what this exercise asks and allows: that we look closely at each other, but kindly; that we take turns speaking and listening; that we try to imagine the contours of each other’s humanity. In this riven culture, when compassion for the stranger can be in much shorter supply than knee-jerk antipathy, these are not small gestures.Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, a.k.a. 600 Highwaymen, give the strangers in “An Encounter” a common goal — to get through the script together.“In silence, look across from you and imagine what keeps them up at night,” one stage direction reads. “In silence, imagine something they’re coping with,” says another.They have us draw pictures on the glass together with our fingertips (my stranger is a better artist than I am), tell each other scripted stories and ask and answer a laundry list of offbeat yes-or-no questions: “Have you ever broken a bone?” “Have you ever broken a heart?” When my stranger answered yes to that one, his dark eyes got so soulful that I felt his anguish and wanted to know more. But that of course is not permitted.“An Encounter” is less about the details of our lives than “A Phone Call” and more about spending time in the physical presence of another human being. I know that my stranger has a passport, can’t drive a stick shift and likes to dance. I know he has neat handwriting. My guess is that he is an actor and that he, like me, grabbed at the chance for this experience out of eagerness for theater’s return.But is this theater? Not really, though the script has a beautifully solid structure and the ending is both startling and powerful. Rather, this piece uses tools of theater — text, storytelling, the agreement to gather at an appointed time to have a collective experience — to achieve goals of theater, foremost the stoking of empathy and compassion. How extraordinarily “An Encounter” does this struck me only afterward.I am not usually the sort of person who walks around with Sondheim tunes as my internal soundtrack, but I was when I left “An Encounter.” Out on the sidewalk, as I headed toward Astor Place, then down 8th Street, I couldn’t stop scanning the weekend crowds. A snatch of “Another Hundred People” played on repeat in my head: the phrase “a city of strangers,” imbued with more warmth than I’d ever heard it.It sounds weird, and it was, but “An Encounter” left me in an altered state, keenly aware of these many people around me whom I did not know, and who seemed so alive with possibility, complexity, depth. Any one of them might have sat across from me at that table and been my stranger.I made my way through the throngs, trying to imagine the contours of their humanity.A Thousand Ways (Part Two): An EncounterThrough Aug. 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.orgA Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone CallThrough July 18; publictheater.org More

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      in Television

      Katori Hall Wins Drama Pulitzer for ‘The Hot Wing King’

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      The play, which had its run cut short because of the pandemic, centers on a kitchen in Memphis, where a man is trying to concoct award-winning chicken wings.Katori Hall, who has told stirring stories about Black life in America both onstage and onscreen, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “The Hot Wing King,” a family dramedy that centers on a man’s quest to make award-winning chicken wings while personal conflict swirls around him.The Off Broadway play — produced last year by the Pershing Square Signature Center, where it had a truncated run — drew praise for challenging conventional conceptions of Black masculinity and fatherhood.Its main character, Cordell, has recently moved into a home in Memphis with his lover, Dwayne, whom Cordell enlists to help him make his submission to the annual “Hot Wang Festival.” Things get complicated when Dwayne wants to take in his 16-year-old nephew, whose mother died while being restrained by the police — a tragedy for which Dwayne blames himself.In the awards announcements on Friday, the Pulitzer board called the play a “funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.”Hall, 40, the author of the Olivier Award-winning “The Mountaintop,” wrote a play that was full of frenetic action (stirring pots, dismembering chickens, spicing sauces), emotional exchanges and sitcom-style ribbing.She also co-wrote the book for “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which is nominated for numerous Tony Awards (including best musical and best book of a musical), and created the Starz drama “P-Valley,” which follows a crew of dancers at a strip club in the Mississippi Delta. Hall is currently working on Season 2 of the series, which is based on one of her plays.With theaters across the country closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer committee made some adjustments to its qualifications: Finalists were allowed to include works that were performed virtually or those that were canceled or postponed during the pandemic. “The Hot Wing King” opened at the beginning of March 2020 but was not able to finish its run because of pandemic closures.“What’s refreshing here,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review for The New York Times, “is the matter-of-fact depiction of Black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality.”“Watching Cordell and Dwayne casually snuggle and kiss,” he went on, “draping their bodies over each other, you sense a bond in which erotic attraction has segued into something both more relaxed and more complex.”The other two finalists for the prize were “Circle Jerk,” by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, and “Stew,” by Zora Howard. More

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      in Theater

      Rezo Gabriadze, Who Created Magic Out of Puppetry, Dies at 84

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      His productions, vivid and fanciful, played all over the world, including at Lincoln Center.Rezo Gabriadze, a playwright, screenwriter and director whose fanciful avant-garde stage works, many using puppets, were presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and numerous other outlets as well as at the theater named for him in his home country, Georgia, died on Sunday in its capital, Tbilisi. He was 84.The Rezo Gabriadze Theater in Tbilisi confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Gabriadze was known for unconventional works that challenged the audience’s imagination. In his play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” for instance, which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, branching out into acting, portrayed a man who thought he was a car.More often, though, Mr. Gabriadze’s stage works were populated not by human performers but by puppets. Perhaps his best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play first staged in Dijon, France, in 1996. It examined that pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories. Some involved human characters, but there was also a love story between two horses, as well as an ant with a dying daughter.“Writ terribly small, with the delicacy of lacework,” Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a production at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2000, “‘The Battle of Stalingrad’ compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed. And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Perhaps Mr. Gabriadze’s best-known creation was “The Battle of Stalingrad,” a puppet play seen here at The Kennedy Center in 2000. It examined the pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories.Mario del Curto/’The Battle of Stalingrad’Another scene from “The Battle of Stalingrad.” It “compels the audience to unusual concentration, lest the artistry be disturbed,” wrote a Times critic. “And artistry it is, beautiful, poignant and lingering.”Vladimir Meltser“The Autumn of My Springtime,” first seen in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2002, was a story about a bird that drew heavily on Mr. Gabriadze’s memories of his childhood. “Ramona,” seen at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2015, was a love story between two trains.These and other works were full of striking stage pictures and cleverly made, adroitly maneuvered puppets designed by Mr. Gabriadze and his expert team.“As characters either powerful or weak,” Mr. Weber wrote, “his puppets, long faced, with a clattery-boned droopiness, seemingly constructed from bird legs and seashell fragments held together with string, share a frailty that feels, well, human.”Mr. Gabriadze, who early in his career was a sculptor and then a screenwriter and film director, was most at home among his puppets.“The puppet theater is the ideal place for me because you can draw, sculpt and truly create your characters,” he told The Post & Courier of Charleston, S.C., in 2017, when he brought his two-trains-in-love story to the Spoleto Festival USA in that city. “This is the maximum of freedom you can achieve in art. I make and do everything in my theater myself. I write the plays, choose the music — I am completely free in my decision-making.”Revaz Gabriadze was born on June 29, 1936, in Kutaisi, in what was then Soviet Georgia. In a 2002 interview with The Times, he recalled having his imagination opened up after World War II when American movies began making their way to Georgia.“Our generation was ‘Tarzan-ized,’” he said. “Tarzan, feminine women, men in tuxedos; this was the first time we saw these things, and it was one part of our spiritual nourishment.”He was artistically inclined.“In my father’s family, the men worked stone,” he told Le Monde in 2003. “They built churches or bridges. There are many delicate and ancient bridges in Georgia. Maybe that’s where my first vocation came from, sculpture.”Those skills would prove useful when he began carving and constructing puppets. But other careers came first.After working for a time as a journalist, he gravitated to filmmaking, writing dozens of screenplays and directing a few movies. “I was making tragicomic films,” he said. “I was always watched by the authorities, and I lacked diplomacy.”Georgia was still under Soviet control, and it was the era of Socialist Realism in film and other genres. Realism, Mr. Gabriadze said, just wasn’t his thing.“I can understand the human urge to put things in order,” he told The Times. “But you can’t divide life between fiction and fact. ‘Tom Sawyer’ may be a novel, but it is also an encyclopedia of childhood.”In Mr. Gabriadze’s play “Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient,” which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, branched out into acting, portraying a man who thought he was a car.Michal DanielHe opened his puppet theater in 1981. (In 2010 it unveiled a newly renovated space designed by Mr. Gabriadze and featuring a deliberately crooked clock tower.)In the early 1990s, with Georgia embroiled in civil war, Mr. Gabriadze relocated to Moscow for several years, working at the Obraztsov State Puppet Theater, where he began to create “The Battle of Stalingrad.” The piece, he said, was in part a response to the civil war. But, like many of his works, it also drew on memories from his childhood.“I was 6 years old during the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said. “I remember the word echoing through childhood.”While taking his puppet productions all over the world, Mr. Gabriadze continued to pursue his love of art. In 2012 the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow mounted an exhibition devoted to his paintings, graphic works and sculpture.Full information on his survivors was not available. A son, Levan, produced some of his shows and, in 2018, made a film about his father’s life called simply, “Rezo.”In an interview with the travel blog Intrepid Feet First, Levan talked about his father and his work.“The thing about Rezo is that he lives in his own bubble,” he said. “We all do. But Rezo brings you into his.” More