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      ‘Bill’s 44th’ Review: Where Are All the Party People?

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      This poignant, comic puppet play, by Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck, is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness.There are shows so delightfully unexpected that you hesitate, when writing about them, to give anything away. “Bill’s 44th” is one of those — a poignant, comic puppet play for grown-ups about a birthday party whose guests fail to appear.Perhaps they had been to one of Bill’s shindigs before. They might have anticipated the forlorn tray of crudités, with celery sticks browning at the ends. Or foreseen that he would spike the punch to near-lethal levels, then want to bust some disco moves. With his bald papier-mâché head and thick Tom Selleck mustache, Bill is not, truth be told, the suavest of men.He is, however, enormously endearing, especially in his jaunty party hat. And in Dorothy James and Andy Manjuck’s “Bill’s 44th,” which had a brief live (and live-streamed) run last week at Dixon Place and is streaming on demand starting Tuesday, he is sweetly eager — impatient, even — to fill his solitary apartment with camaraderie and celebration.But in a wordless piece that is as much about the ingenuity of the mind as it is about loneliness, getting ditched is not such a formidable obstacle to having company — not once the boozy punch kicks in and Bill’s imagination cuts loose.All head and torso, Bill has a middle-aged paunch that strains at his sweater. The rest of his body is built on an illusion. The hands that emerge from his cuffs belong to James and Manjuck; his legs are Manjuck’s. His isolation, meanwhile, belongs to all of us: our pre-vaccine pandemic selves, having to make do for so long without the people we wished would surround us.Let me stop right here and tell you that this not-quite-hourlong show is buoyant, mesmerizing, joy-inducing — and that I’m about to wreck some of its more winsome visual surprises, which you might prefer not to see coming. Should you read the rest of this review? Maybe not, if you’re planning to watch “Bill’s 44th.”Because this is also a show about the nature of puppetry, and puppets, it turns out, are all around us. That tray of crudités? Bill rustles through the carrot sticks and finds the makings of a cheery orange friend he dubs Cary. With drawn-on eyes and smiling mouth, this is a guest for Bill to clink plastic cups with. Soon the party balloons get faces, too, and social dynamics come into play. It’s only when Cary turns human-size that things get really wild, though, and Bill has a partner to dance with. (Jon Riddleberger rounds out the excellent team of puppeteers.)With jazzy music by Eamon Fogarty and dreamy lighting by M. Jordan Wiggins, “Bill’s 44th” plunges its audience fully into a fantasy that, for all its silliness, leads its hero through stubborn hope and bitter disappointment toward a feeling of comfort in his own skin and an awakening to the world around him.This isn’t the birthday that Bill had hoped to have. But for the audience, his 44th is a gift.Bill’s 44thAvailable on demand June 8-15; dixonplace.org More

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      Bruce Springsteen Will Return to Broadway in June

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      “Springsteen on Broadway” opens on June 26 at the St. James Theater; audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination to enter.Bruce Springsteen is returning to Broadway.“Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which ran for 236 performances, including seven previews, in 2017 and 2018, will open on June 26 at the St. James Theater, at 246 W. 44th Street, and have additional performances through Sept. 4, according to an announcement. As of now, the show will be the first to open on Broadway since the pandemic shut down performances in March 2020. While some Broadway productions have set return dates as early as Aug. 4, most have targeted mid-September for their reopenings.Tickets go on sale Thursday at noon Eastern time through SeatGeek, the show’s official ticket seller. SeatGeek, a challenger to Ticketmaster, has a deal with Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates the St. James as well as the Walter Kerr Theater, where “Springsteen on Broadway” had its initial run.Although Broadway theaters and producers have said they plan to reopen their full lineup of shows after Labor Day, the speed of vaccination, and promising downward trend of coronavirus cases in the United States, have encouraged many performers and producers throughout the entertainment industry to move forward quickly.According to the show’s announcement, audience members will be required to show proof of full Covid-19 vaccination along with their tickets to enter the theater. Entry times will be staggered, and attendees will be required to fill out a Covid-19 health screening within 24 hours of the show.“Springsteen on Broadway” — which had its genesis in a private performance at the White House in January 2017, in the closing days of the Obama administration — is a mostly solo show by Springsteen, drawing from his catalog of hits and his 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” The show weaves in stories from throughout Springsteen’s career, with insights into how he wrote songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” (His wife, Patti Scialfa, joined him in some songs.)The show was a blockbuster hit, selling $113 million in tickets and playing to a total of 223,585 fans. It was also filmed for a Netflix special of the same title, which went online shortly after the last performance in December 2018.Proceeds from the opening night of “Springsteen on Broadway” will be donated to a number of charities, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Monmouth County in New Jersey, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Food Bank for New York City. More

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      How Lin-Manuel Miranda and Friends Made an Old Bookstore New

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      The century-old Drama Book Shop in Manhattan struggled for years. Then “Hamilton” happened.A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand, in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by “Hamilton,” including the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L. Nederlander, bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop — 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed up with Miranda, the two worked on “In the Heights” there.“I was not born in a trunk; I was born in the basement of the Drama Book Shop,” Kail said. “All of my early creative conversations and relationships were forged in that shop, and the thought of it not existing was painful. I couldn’t imagine New York City without it, and I didn’t want to imagine New York City without it.”The store’s decorations include replicas of armchairs used in the musical “Hamilton.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times More

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      New Musical About 19th-Century New York Plans Broadway Run

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      “Paradise Square,” a comeback bid by a scandal-scarred producer, is the first previously unscheduled musical to announce its Broadway opening since the pandemic began.“Paradise Square,” a new musical that explores race relations in 19th-century New York, plans to open on Broadway next winter, making it the first previously unscheduled musical to step forward since the pandemic began.The show, which has been reworked and in development for a decade, is about a long-gone slum in Lower Manhattan, Five Points, where, during the run-up to the Civil War, free Black residents and Irish immigrants coexisted until the draft riots of 1863.Not only about the history of New York City, the musical is also about the history of music and dance. It features songs by Stephen Foster, a prominent 19th-century American songwriter who spent time toward the end of his life in Five Points, and it credits the Five Points community with a role in the origins of tap dance. (Tap is an American dance form that is generally understood to have roots in the British Isles and Africa; it has a complex and murky history, but the dancing cellars of the Five Points were an important site of development for the form.)“Paradise Square” is a comeback bid by a storied Canadian producer, Garth Drabinsky, who won three Tony Awards in the 1990s but then was convicted of fraud. He served time in a Canadian prison; charges in the United States were later dismissed.The musical is to star Joaquina Kalukango, a Tony nominee for “Slave Play,” as the proprietor of the saloon in which much of the action takes place. Other cast members include Chilina Kennedy (“Beautiful”), John Dossett (a Tony nominee for “Gypsy”), Sidney DuPont (“Beautiful”), A.J. Shively (“Bright Star”), Nathaniel Stampley (“The Color Purple”), Gabrielle McClinton (“Pippin”) and Jacob Fishel (“Fiddler on the Roof”).The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews Feb. 22 and to open March 20 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Before the pandemic, the plan was to capitalize the musical for up to $13.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; a spokesman said the actual capitalization will probably be somewhat less.The show has a complex production history and an evolving creative team, led by the director Moisés Kaufman (best known as the creator of “The Laramie Project”) and the choreographer Bill T. Jones (a two-time Tony winner, for “Fela!” and “Spring Awakening”). It is based on a musical called “Hard Times,” which was conceived by Larry Kirwan, the lead singer of Black 47, and staged at the Cell Theater in 2012. Then, as “Paradise Square,” it had a production at Berkeley Repertory Theater in 2019, and this fall, before transferring to Broadway, it is scheduled to have a five-week run at the James M. Nederlander Theater in Chicago.The book is now credited to four writers: Kirwan and three playwrights, Christina Anderson, Marcus Gardley and Craig Lucas. The score, which includes original songs as well as some attributed to Foster, now has three writers: Jason Howland, Nathan Tysen and Masi Asare.Kaufman said the interruption of the pandemic provided the creative team “an opportunity to think.”“At Berkeley we learned that our story is epic, but we needed to continue focusing on our individual characters,” he said. “And that’s the work that’s occurred.”Brian Seibert contributed reporting. More

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      Peek at Broadway Comeback: Times Event With “Me and the Sky”

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      When The Times staged a musical number for its live event series, the performance served as a sneak preview of a theater world preparing for takeoff.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In March, Zoe Gertz, an Australian actress, was asked by The New York Times if she would be interested in singing the soaring anthem “Me and the Sky” for an episode of its Offstage event series, which examines the theater industry during its pandemic hiatus. The number is from the Australian touring production of the 9/11 musical “Come From Away.”After teams worked on in-house music and stage direction, Ms. Gertz belted the ebullient anthem to the rafters of a simple stage at Her Majesty’s Theater in Melbourne, sans audience but backed by six musicians and five castmates of the production’s female ensemble. And it all came together in just over two weeks.“I am suddenly aliiiiiive,” Ms. Gertz sang with an irrepressible smile as she told of her character’s love for flying.The sentiment seems to be spreading. Broadway’s reopening will now occur in August. In Australia, “Frozen,” “Hamilton” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” were running at or near full capacity in Sydney and Melbourne for months (though masks were still required) until a recent lockdown in Melbourne put shows in that city on hold again. The performance for the Times event served as both a reminder of theater’s vitality during the pandemic and a preview of the energy to come.The musical number began to take shape in early March after The Times’s theater reporter, Michael Paulson, suggested recording a special video of the inspirational song for the Offstage series, which streamed live on April 29 and is still viewable by Times subscribers.“We wanted a song that was both good and would make sense out of context for people who hadn’t seen the show,” Mr. Paulson said. “It’s also a song that works without a very elaborate band or orchestra and is essentially a solo number.”The four-and-a-half-minute track chronicles the tale of the real-life American Airlines pilot Beverley Bass, who was among the pilots with planes full of passengers who were diverted to Newfoundland on Sept. 11, 2001.“One of the many emotions captured in this song is Beverley having to come to terms with the job she loves being put on hold, and not knowing when she might fly again,” said Rachel Karpf, the director of programming at The Times who helped plan the event with Beth Weinstein and Rachel Czipo. “We saw some parallels to the experience of theater workers in Australia and around the world this past year, as their industry was brought to a near-total standstill by the pandemic.”Ms. Karpf said the Events team began discussing ideas for the episode in early January with Mr. Paulson; Scott Heller, then The Times’s theater editor; and Damien Cave, the Sydney bureau chief. Mr. Cave and Mr. Paulson were working on a story about the return of Broadway shows in Australia, which has been much more successful at containing the virus than the United States. More

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      Review: Connection, Interrupted, in ‘Communion’

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      Christopher Chen’s new play is big on concept and cleverness, but withholds the intimacy that theater-lovers have craved during the pandemic.Last March, I booked tickets to see “The Headlands,” a new play by Christopher Chen. A few days later, live theater vanished like some awful magic act. I never made it to that show. But now Chen, a high-concept playwright with a vertiginous approach to dramatic structure, has created a new one, “Communion,” a clever and chilly digital wisp produced by the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and experienced on Zoom. To see it, as in-person performances prepare to return elsewhere, provides a dizzy kind of symmetry.“Communion,” directed by Pam MacKinnon and starring Stacy Ross, begins as so many recent shows have. A house manager greets the audience (about 40 people on the night I attended), offering a brief tutorial on cameras and mics and gallery view. Then Ross, a beloved Bay Area performer, appears, speaking from what looks like a basement. A nice basement. Ross, wearing a blazer, pigtails and a shrunken porkpie hat, has through-the-roof charisma, even in a Zoom window. This helped during the pro forma opening monologue, a friendly acknowledgment of the limits and possibilities of remote theater. “I always thought it would be interesting to do a Zoom show that somehow really took advantage of this strange intimacy this platform has,” Ross said excitedly.Like works by Will Eno and Lucas Hnath, Chen’s create a tension between the ideas at play — here, presence and absence, truth and lies, trust and manipulation — and the characters who inhabit them. There’s so much intelligence in “Communion,” enhanced by Ross’s mischievous performance and MacKinnon’s sleek direction. But the overall effect is somewhat stingy. It might have felt differently earlier in the pandemic. But at this point, most of us with working Wi-Fi have already thought plenty about presence and absence. I would trade the conceptualism for something more embracingly human.In fairness, “Communion” offers that, too. Late in the show, an unseen force sorts the audience into breakout rooms, asking us to introduce ourselves and perhaps discuss one of the prompts Chen had emailed before the show — chiefly, “In one or two sentences, can you describe a guiding principle you have?” Awkwardly and then with more ease, we introduced ourselves. One man shared a guiding principle, often attributed to Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”The rest of us had no principles. Still, we reveled in one another’s company and in the experience of sharing a work of art together, even though we sat some 4,000 miles apart. (In this, it resembles the recent efforts of groups like 600 Highwaymen.) It made me nostalgic for all those taken-for-granted lobby nods, that post-show race around the corner to discuss the play at a safe distance, that feeling of constituting an audience.“Communion” ends with a few conceptual switcheroos designed to make you question everything you have seen and heard. And I did. But these reveals dangle what people who love theater hunger for — connection, intimacy and yes, sure, communion — then snatch it back again, like Tantalus on a video call. Did you suspend your disbelief? Sucker.I like my disbelief suspended. And if a year of seeing shows from my bedroom has taught me anything, it is that I will take theater where I can find it. Here, I’d locate it less in Chen’s forceful smarts and more in those halting, unscripted breakout room moments, in a grid of people marking time with good will and small talk until we can really, actually be together again.CommunionThrough June 27; act-sf.org. More

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      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

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      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More