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      Broadway Is Reopening. But Not Until September.

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      Even as New York City begins to reopen this summer, Broadway will not resume performances until Sept. 14. Here’s why.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo says that most pandemic capacity restrictions will ease in two weeks. Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wants the city to fully reopen on July 1. But Broadway, a beacon for tourists and an engine for the economy, is not quite ready to turn on the stage lights.Most shows are not planning performances until September or later. But there are signs of life: Mr. Cuomo said Wednesday that Broadway shows would start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting Sept. 14.Why the four-month wait? With as many as eight shows a week to fill, and the tourists who make up an important part of their customer base yet to return, producers need time to advertise and market. They need to reassemble and rehearse casts who have been out of work for more than a year. And they need to sort out and negotiate safety protocols.But the biggest reason is more gut-based: individually and collectively, they are trying to imagine when large numbers of people are likely to feel comfortable traveling to Times Square, funneling through cramped lobbies and walking down narrow aisles to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Most Broadway shows lose money even in the best of times, so producers say there is no way they can afford to reopen with social distancing, given the industry’s high labor and real estate costs.“We’ve never done this before,” said Victoria Bailey, executive director of TDF, the nonprofit which oversees the TKTS ticket-selling booth in Times Square. “The last time the theater industry opened from a pandemic, Shakespeare was still writing new plays.”Broadway’s emerging timeline, which is constantly being re-evaluated, serves as a reminder that New York’s rebound from the pandemic will be slow and gradual. Edicts from elected officials are only one factor in reopening: every economic sector will have to figure out when and how to restart, and every individual will have to figure out when and how to re-emerge.Broadway, home to 41 theaters, drew 14.6 million people who spent $1.8 billion on tickets in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic forced them all to close March 12, 2020, and reopening is clearly going to be far more complicated than shutting down. One of the biggest challenges the industry faces is the dearth of tourists, who made up roughly two-thirds of the Broadway audience before the pandemic struck.“We had such a good year before the shutdown, but now we need the ability to reignite the energy that we were sailing on,” said Tom Hulce, a lead producer of “Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations. “We basically are starting from zero advance, as most shows are, and now we need time to reach out and build back up.”“Ain’t Too Proud,” a jukebox musical about the Temptations, had a good year before it closed, but needs time to build back its audience.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAbout 30 shows are currently planning to begin performances on Broadway before the end of 2021 — approximately half starting in September, and the rest spread out across the year’s final quarter.Among the first to go on sale following the governor’s announcement: “The Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest-running show, which said Wednesday evening that it would put tickets on sale Friday in anticipation of resuming performances Oct. 22. “Emphatically: Yes, we are coming back,” said the show’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.The three juggernaut musicals that were the biggest box office grossers before the pandemic — “Hamilton,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” — have been planning to jointly announce next week that they expect to reopen in mid-September. Those shows, with their well-known titles and fervent fans, face lower hurdles than others in reintroducing themselves to potential ticket buyers, and they are also the most able to withstand financial risk.A number of other musicals are also hoping to open in September, including the long running “Chicago,” the David Byrne concert show “American Utopia,” Disney’s “Aladdin” and the inspirational Canadian hit “Come From Away.” Each is confident they can find an audience even as some forecasts suggest that it could be several years before tourism fully recovers.“I do think there’s going to be a real push to reach out to the tristate area, to day-trippers, and to locals,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.” “But does the pent-up demand explode and then go dormant? If we don’t put our toe in the water, we won’t know.”The longest running show in Broadway history, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which opened in 1988, said it will resume performances on Oct. 22.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere remain many uncertainties. Will masks be required for patrons? (Probably, at least at first.) Will performers sign autographs at the stage door? (Probably not, at least for a while.) Will vaccinations be required? (Governor Cuomo said he would prefer that, but said it would be up to the theater industry to decide. “Are you willing to go into an indoor theater and sit there for two hours next to a person who you don’t know if they are vaccinated or unvaccinated?” he asked. And “Phantom,” in its announcement, said protocols could require vaccination or negative test verification.)Even the frequency of performances is still to be determined. The Broadway League and several labor unions have been talking about the possibility of opening with fewer than the customary eight shows a week. That would mean lower pay for cast and crew, a concession they are likely to consider only if theater owners take the same percentage cut in rent.Pricing practices are expected to be fluid. Several producers said they expect to start selling tickets at prices similar to those in place before the pandemic, but that they could adjust depending on what demand looks like. One change that seems certain in the post-pandemic era: more liberal refund policies. (“Phantom,” for example, said all tickets could be refunded or exchanged until two hours before a performance.)“There’s never been a time when all the tickets have basically gone on sale at once, so there’s going to be a lot of learning,” said Brian Fenty, the chief executive of TodayTix, which runs a popular ticket-selling app.Every show faces casting complications, because most, if not all, contracts with actors have expired and will need to be renegotiated. Some performers need to recondition their bodies or their voices. Some are dealing with lingering effects of Covid. Some ensemble members may decide that life in, say, Nebraska is actually better than life in New York. Some child actors — and there are children in the casts of a half-dozen shows — have aged out of their roles. Elizabeth Stanley, a star of “Jagged Little Pill,” is pregnant. And Karen Olivo, whose character is central to “Moulin Rouge!,” issued a critique of Broadway’s priorities and the industry’s lack of response to abusive behavior and said she would not return.Karen Olivo of “Moulin Rouge!” decided during the pandemic that she does not intend to return to Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway has been rocked not only by the pandemic, but also by the unrest over racial inequity that coursed through the country last year after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed by police.All of the new plays announced for Broadway this fall are by Black writers. Two are commercial productions — Keenan Scott II’s “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” about a single day in the life of seven Black men in Brooklyn, and Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” about two Black men trapped by existential dread in a society where too many Black people are killed by police.“We are leaning in to the conversation that’s happening in America,” said Brian Moreland, a lead producer of “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which is aiming to open in October.There will also be three nonprofit productions of plays by Black writers on Broadway: “Clyde’s,” a new play by Lynn Nottage presented by Second Stage; “Lackawanna Blues,” a one-man show by Ruben Santiago-Hudson presented by the Manhattan Theater Club; and “Trouble in Mind,” a classic play by Alice Childress getting its first Broadway production via the Roundabout Theater Company.“It’s been a really hard year for the not-for-profits — we’re all suffering, and we all have deficits,” said Carole Rothman, the artistic director of Second Stage, who said she hopes to start performances of “Clyde’s” in November, after opening her smaller Off Broadway stage a little earlier. “I’m an optimist,” she said. “Definitely there’s going to be an audience chomping at the bit to see theater.” “Lackawanna Blues,” a one-man show by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, standing, is one of several works by Black playwrights coming to Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA handful of shows are not expected to return until 2022. The most prominent among them is the two-part play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which is rethinking its length and structure before deciding how and when to reopen. And plans for a pair of shows produced by Scott Rudin, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and a revival of “West Side Story,” are unclear following his decision to step back from active involvement after a series of news reports detailed his bullying behavior toward employees and collaborators.Expect at least four new Broadway musicals to open this fall, including “Six,” the concert-style British pop show about the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII, which was just 90 minutes from opening when theaters closed, as well as “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Diana” and “Flying Over Sunset.” And a fifth new musical — “MJ,” about a chapter in the life of Michael Jackson — is planning to start performances late this year.The lead producer of “Phantom,” Cameron Mackintosh, said the return of theater is essential for the cultural and economic life of both New York and London, but acknowledged that much is unknown.“No one is taking this for granted, and no one is assuming we’re going back to what it was pre-Covid,” he said. “We need to be completely optimistic, but also pragmatic, because none of us have been in this situation before.” More

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      A Rare Peek Inside a Semi-Secret ‘Secret Garden’

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      The 2018 workshop for a possible revival of the lush musical was never meant to be seen by the public, but will now stream as a benefit this weekend.When Marsha Norman suggested to the producer Jerry Goehring the idea of streaming the 2018 workshop of a stalled Broadway revival of “The Secret Garden” as a benefit, he thought it was a great idea.He just didn’t know if it would be possible.“I was like, ‘Honestly, I don’t know that it’s ever been done before,’” said Goehring, a member of the team angling to bring back to Broadway the sumptuous musical that has never been revived there since the Tony Award-winning 1991 production that starred Mandy Patinkin.Securing the rights to stream a musical — much less a workshop, footage that was never intended to see the light of day and showcases actors in their rawest form — can be complicated.But it helped that Norman, the musical’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book writer, was already on board — as was the new director, Warren Carlyle (“After Midnight”), and all 21 actors, among them Sierra Boggess (Lily), Clifton Duncan (Archibald Craven) and Drew Gehling (Neville Craven).“They were all asking ‘Please, what can we do to help?’” Goehring said this week.Getting buy-in from every member involved and compensating the actors were the stipulations for Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, to grant permission for the project, which will benefit The Dramatists Guild Foundation and The Actors Fund.“They said they rarely get requests for archival recordings,” said Goehring, who teamed with the producers Michael F. Mitri and Carl Moellenberg to develop the project. “But, if, at the end of the day, 100 percent of their members involved in the show agree, we could do it.”The two-hour workshop, which includes a full run-through of the show sans costumes or sets, will premiere on Broadway on Demand on Thursday, May 6 at 8 p.m. and remain available through May 9. It is dedicated to Rebecca Luker, the musical’s original Lily, who died in December at age 59 less than a year after announcing she had A.L.S.“It’s wonderful and terrifying at the same time,” said Carlyle, who directed and choreographed the workshop. “It’s in its rawest form, with all my terrible ideas and some good ones. It’s really like pulling back the curtain.”Goehring said the workshop showcases the production at its “very beginning” stages — and was never intended to be seen by any kind of audience, much less the public.“We didn’t plan on inviting anyone,” he said, noting that the authors had initially just wanted a chance to take their first look at the entire show — artistically. “But it turned out so special that everyone agreed we should invite our friends in the industry, including Broadway theater owners, to get their opinion.”Mandy Patinkin, left, and Daisy Eagan in the original Broadway production, for which Eagan, at just 11,  earned a Tony Award.Bob Marshak, via the Everett CollectionThe musical, based on the 1911 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, tells the story of an orphaned English girl whose personality blossoms as she and a sickly cousin restored a neglected garden. The original Broadway production earned three Tonys, with a cast that included Luker, Patinkin, a pre-Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and 11-year-old Daisy Eagan, who won for her performance as the heroine Mary Lennox.The revival, Carlyle said, is a “complete reimagining.” It will feature pared-back sets, more intimate orchestrations and different scenic design. But all of Lucy Simon’s songs are intact, he reassured fans of the original, just shifted around — not that anyone would dare cut “Lily’s Eyes.”“We joke that we lost a lot of big bushes,” he said. “Lots of big scene transitions from back in the early ’90s have been eliminated, so it really flows much better.”It’s clear, Carlyle said, that the workshop is a rough draft: The garden is imaginary; the dress code more T-shirts than waistcoats. Pieces of tape on the bare floor mark the edge of the stage, as well as where the wings would be. There are only a few props.“There are no frills,” he said. “Which allows me, as a director, to make sure we’re getting the story right.”To help people keep track of scene changes, the team inserted digital renderings by the production designer Jason Sherwood (“Rent: Live”) as transitions. But ultimately, Carlyle said, the material speaks for itself.From left: Drew Gehling, Sierra Boggess (near back wall) and Clifton Duncan in three of the musical’s key roles.via The Secret Garden workshop“The book Marsha has written and Lucy’s music are so strong that you can be in an empty room with talented artists and have it move you just as much as if it were on a Broadway stage,” he said.There are reasons the show has never been revived on Broadway: Critics said the lavish set and elaborate costumes left the actors fighting to be in focus, and the book was overstuffed with secondary characters.“Whether ‘The Secret Garden’ is a compelling dramatic adaptation of its source or merely a beautiful, stately shrine to it is certain to be a subject of intense audience debate,” The New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote in his review of the original. “I, for one, often had trouble locating the show’s pulse.”Broadway is still a target for the future, Goehring said, though the pandemic has thrown the timeline in flux.“We are not seeking new investment right now,” he said. “Our only goal is to raise money for the nonprofits.”The 2018 workshop was the latest in a string of high-profile iterations of the musical that also included a 2016 concert at Lincoln Center featuring Ben Platt, Ramin Karimloo and Boggess. David Armstrong directed a production at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle and Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company in 2016-17.No cast has yet been set or theater secured, but Goehring hopes the orchestrations will begin taking shape in the fall.“As soon as we can all get back in a room again, we’ll keep working on it,” he said.“Our ultimate goal is to make this as good as we can,” he added. “However long that takes.”Inside The Secret Garden: Workshop and Livestream ExperienceMay 6-9; livestream.broadwayondemand.com More

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      ‘Pass Over,’ About Black Men Trapped by Dread, Heads to Broadway

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      The play, by Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, has previously been staged at several prominent theaters and filmed by Spike Lee for Amazon.“Pass Over,” a searing play about two Black men trapped by existential dread in a world where too many of their peers have been killed by police, is coming to Broadway.A team of producers who include the playwright, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, said Tuesday that they would mount a new version of the play at the August Wilson Theater on Broadway later this year. The production will be directed by Danya Taymor.The play, an 85-minute riff on “Waiting for Godot,” began its life in 2017, directed by Taymor at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. That production was filmed for Amazon Prime Video by Spike Lee, and in 2018 the play ran at Lincoln Center Theater. It has since had several other productions, including at the Kiln Theater in London.The play, in which two friends pass time on a city street corner, sharing fears and dreams, was prompted in part by the death of Trayvon Martin, and draws on the Book of Exodus. Nwandu reworked the play’s ending between the Steppenwolf and Lincoln Center productions, and said she now plans to do so again. In earlier versions, one of the two main characters died at the end; Nwandu said that in the Broadway version, they will both survive.“I wrote the other versions of the play out of anger, and out of a desire to shock white people into caring about the fact that Black lives matter,” Nwandu said. “Now I’m ready to step back from that role of needing to indict white America. White America has been indicted, and continues to be indicted, by the actual death of Black people, so nobody needs to see that theatrically rendered anymore.”She said the play “is still largely a lament,” but that she is now envisioning a tonal shift at the end, as she thinks about her own emotional well-being and that of her audience. “We all know we need some sort of communal healing,” she said. “We have to witness. We have to grieve. And we have to heal, so we can go out into the world and fight these battles.”The Broadway production will have an eclectic producing team: Matt Ross, a longtime theater publicist who is becoming more active as a producer; Jujamcyn Theaters, the company that operates the August Wilson Theater; Lincoln Center Theater, the nonprofit that presented the play Off Broadway; Concord Theatricals, a publishing and licensing company with a growing footprint in the theater world; Renee Montgomery, a retired basketball player who is an owner of the Atlanta Dream W.N.B.A. team; the actor Blair Underwood; Madeleine Foster Bersin, who, along with Ross, was part of the producing team for “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and Nwandu.The cast has not yet been announced. More

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      With Her Final Album, Rebecca Luker Bids a Fond Farewell

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      The much-loved Broadway soprano, who died in December, had one more miracle up her sleeve.The last solo number on “All the Girls,” the new duo album from the sopranos Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert, is a piece of specialty material for Luker called “Not Funny.”It’s funny.In the song, by Michael Heitzman and Ilene Reid, Luker twits her image as a “spoonful of saccharine” but also punctures it. The gist is that lower-voiced belters get all the laugh lines, possibly because it’s so “hard to land a joke up here” — in the soprano stratosphere. Playing Laurey in “Oklahoma!,” Luker complains, “I’ll sing my ass off, but Ado Annie steals the show.” Then she disproves it by ripping a thrilling high C.Luker was 58 when she last performed the number live, during a concert with Wilfert at Merkin Hall in Manhattan. That was in September 2019, 15 months before she died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease.As yet undiagnosed that night, she had some trouble climbing onto the de rigueur stool, but she sounded as beautiful as ever, clearly enjoying the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with someone who was in fact as close as a sister. They met, Wilfert recalls, at a reading in 2005; when Wilfert said “I’m going to the bathroom,” Luker said, “I’m going too” and they sat “in adjacent johns,” yakking.Luker enjoyed the chance to sing songs about sisterhood with Sally Wilfert, who was as close as a sister. David AndrakoDespite Luker’s unshakable ingénue rep — built on Broadway roles including Lily in “The Secret Garden” (1991), Magnolia in “Show Boat” (1994), Maria in “The Sound of Music” (1998) and Marian in “The Music Man” (2000) — she was by the time of the Merkin Hall concert a sophisticated Broadway veteran and a complex actor, even taking over the crushing role of Helen in “Fun Home” in 2016. Though her voice remained infallibly lustrous, with classical size and control yet zero operatic fussiness, it was her intelligence in deploying it that kept her in demand well past the industry sell-by date for most stars of that repertoire.Nor did her intelligence let up as “All the Girls” was put together. Her husband, the Broadway performer Danny Burstein, says her notes for the producers were “meticulous” despite her suffering. Tommy Krasker, the head of PS Classics, her longtime label, says she listened to mixes with the “clarity of mind and healthy self-criticism” she’d always displayed in their 20 years of working together. When she thought a joke in “Not Funny” wasn’t landing as well as it might, she asked that the piano part, performed by her music director, Joseph Thalken, be rerecorded. The joke now lands like a gymnast after a handspring.What’s remarkable about this is not only that Luker’s health was quickly deteriorating, but that such a fond, full-smile, no-dud album got produced at all, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. How it happened is the kind of story that Luker, whose death came just two days before the digital release of “All the Girls” on Christmas — and in whose honor an A.L.S. fund-raising concert entitled “Becca” will be streamed on Tuesday — would have loved for its unlikeliness and bittersweet ending.Recording dates had been set for March 2020. The lockdown delayed that plan, but by the time PS Classics could safely book a studio again, in August, Luker could no longer sing. Her final performances, in “An Evening With Sheldon Harnick … and Friends” at the York Theater in March and in a three-song concert streamed from home in June, had been achieved with mounting difficulty as she gripped the arms on her wheelchair to make the notes emerge. By autumn she could not make them at all.Though it might have been sensible to abandon the album at that point, Krasker and the producer Bart Migal decided to try an experiment, attempting what Krasker calls “the first studio album made without ever stepping in the studio.” Thalken, the music director, was able to weave new orchestrations around surprisingly good recordings of the Merkin Hall rehearsal and concert; musicians recorded the new parts in their homes; the producers mixed the result; and by some miracle what emerged sounded pristine.Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. Genevieve Rafter KeddyBut not just pristine: rich and compelling. Though Luker and Wilfert have distinctive voices when singing separately, they can sound nearly identical when singing together. (They have the same voice teacher.) Listening to playbacks, even they could not always figure out who was who. In duets like “You Are My Best Friend” (the charming opener) and “Isn’t It Better?” (a Kander and Ebb torch song here turned into an anthem of sisterly support) something sublime happens as the two voices, blending so closely, seem to multiply even as they merge.That effect is at its height in the album’s finale, an unexpected pairing of the Patty Griffin song “Be Careful” with “Dear Theodosia,” a number sung by Aaron Burr to his infant daughter in “Hamilton.” As performed by Luker and Wilfert, “Theodosia” feels like a promise from today’s women to their spiritual daughters to leave them a safer world. “Be Careful,” whose lyric provides “All the Girls” with its title, is wrenchingly ambivalent, celebrating women’s strength but also their fragility — and ending, in this arrangement, on a daringly unresolved harmony.Which feels only right. Strong as the album is — five poetry settings by Thalken are especially lovely — it inevitably comes wrapped in a shroud of loss. I don’t mean just the loss of Luker herself. Her kind of voice (and Wilfert’s) is gradually being squeezed out of musical theater, as classically trained sopranos give way to the kind described so saucily in “Not Funny,” which Kelli O’Hara will sing at Tuesday’s concert. Most new works are written for belters.The greater loss is of course personal. Many of us, mourning a loved one, are grateful for any scrap of their voice that might be preserved in a phone message or video. That’s not Burstein’s situation. He has lots of Luker’s albums to listen to. The problem is that though they are comforting they are also devastating — especially, on “All the Girls,” that final medley, with its aching Griffin lyric: “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful how you send me/Be careful how you end me.”In any case, the albums are what Luker gave us, not him. More than her public voice, what Burstein misses most after 20 years of marriage is her private voice: the one he heard in car rides spent harmonizing together to ’70s hits on the radio.“Now it’s just me and the radio,” he says.By comparison, the rest of us are lucky. Listening to “All the Girls,” in some ways Luker’s funniest and wisest album, we get to keep her singing next to us forever.Rebecca Luker and Sally Wilfert“All the Girls”(PS Classics)Becca: A Night of Stories and Song in Memory of Rebecca LukerMay 4 at 7:30 p.m.momenthouse.com/targetals More

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      The Play Is Coming From Inside the House

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      Three new virtual productions, set in haunted homes and an interactive hotel, give you the excitement of exploring spaces that are off limits.Exploring a home that isn’t your own carries a voyeuristic thrill, a feeling that you’re intruding on a private space. This excitement holds even if you have paid for your admission, even if no one has lived there for decades. A rare upside of the pandemic — at least until people discovered decent virtual backgrounds — was the opportunity to peer into (and immediately judge) colleagues’ rooms.Back when interior spaces weren’t so perilous, I was a fiend for a historic home tour. Summer palaces, period rooms at the Met, living history installations with basket-weaving how-tos — yes, absolutely, all of them. Last summer, during the pandemic’s darker days, I spent some happy hours “visiting” Newport’s cottages online.Recently, digital theater has gotten in on this domestic act, offering virtual tours of spaces imagined and actual, in works such as Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Home!”; Jared Mezzocchi’s “Someone Else’s House”; and Blast Theory’s “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” They may not provide the frisson of walking through actual spaces — and surreptitiously fingering the occasional embroidered tablecloth — but the latter two offer the shivery pleasure of entering a space where you clearly don’t belong.“A House Tour,” directed by Jason Eagan, began in 2016 in San Francisco as an in-person event, which took an audience from room to creatively rendered room. It has been re-envisioned as an audio-only drama, accompanied by a deluxe mailer. (Mailers are another pandemic upside; sometimes they include wine.) This one contains two figurines that you are invited to decorate with feathers and pipe cleaners — I dragooned my children for this part — and a number of cunning packages.Danny Scheie in the original 2016 production of “A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion With Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry.”Julie SchuchardThe Broadway actress Lilli Cooper provides the introduction, a flawless parody of a museum audio guide. Her voice informs us that the Porter Family Mansion has doors, windows, rooms and “some of the finest world collections of many different things.” (The house is wholly imaginary.) Danny Scheie’s Weston takes over. Scheie was also the star of the in-person version, and his Weston has a strange and malevolent energy. He delights in sharing the most scandalous details of the lives and sweaty loves of Hubert and Clarissa Porter, the fictional one-percenters who built the mansion.The monologue leans heavily on innuendo and smutty puns. This salaciousness extends to the participatory elements, as when Weston tells us to fold up a card and put it in our “undies.” Let’s just say that even an obedient audience member — I had, as directed, mashed the figurines together in a simulation of sex — has her limits. (The children, thankfully, had already gone to bed.)More frustrating than the lewdness is how incompletely the creators have reimagined this experience for at-home consumption. The house never really comes into mind’s eye view and the items in the box, almost entirely irrelevant, don’t help. Also, the audio runs nearly two hours, which is an awfully long time to sit at your computer, headphones in, staring at concupiscent dolls. And the humor is beyond juvenile. I had hoped that “A House Tour” would create a kind of memory palace, a mansion of the mind, but it just loiters, endlessly, in the gutters.“Someone Else’s House,” produced by Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, is an altogether shorter, tauter and shrewder work. Developed for an online audience and running just under an hour, it’s a chiseled piece of at-home horror, ostensibly based on a colonial-era New Hampshire house that Mezzocchi’s parents and siblings once inhabited. “This isn’t just a ghost story,” Mezzocchi says. “It’s real. It happened to my family.”“Someone Else’s House” also has an accompanying box. This one contains items relating to the house’s history, like a family tree and antique sketches and photographs. It also includes a candle, scented for some reason like decomposing vanilla.Mezzocchi, in flannel shirt, wool beanie and quarantine beard, makes an appealing narrator. The story he tells, from a location that becomes clear as the tale proceeds, is an extremely creepy one. (The short version: Maybe don’t buy a house with a former slaughtering cellar in the basement?) The design is meticulous, the archival photos unsettling, the “are they or aren’t they?” Zoom glitches unnerving. And if you have ever suspected that your furniture is out to get you, this is the digital work for you.Mezzocchi, who also wrote “Someone Else’s House,” makes an appealing narrator of this taut and shrewd work. via Geffen PlayhouseWhat’s strange, though, is how Mezzocchi doesn’t fully trust the theatrical form. If you have seen his previous work, like “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” you know that he’s an absolute wizard at making online theater feel live. “Someone Else’s House” ends in a frightening digital coup-de-theatre, but none of the multimedia effects are more uncanny than the low-tech vision of Mezzocchi sitting in front of his laptop, spinning a tale in a slowly darkening room.And yet, the scariest online house tour may be the brief one offered by the experimental English theater Blast Theory, which has produced a virtual version of its 2018 work, “A Cluster of 17 Cases.” Created when Blast Theory were artists in residence at the World Health Organization, the piece explores the transmission of the SARS virus to 17 people on the 9th floor of Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel. The company has built a scale model of the hotel, in lightweight aluminum. An interactive site allows you to take the elevator up and explore it.“Some people will leave unscathed, and some people will die. It’s time to choose your room,” a narrator says, coolly. There are only three rooms to discover, plus trips back down to the lobby to learn how many other people the rooms’ occupants infected once they left the hotel and flew home. (As Covid-19 has taught us, aerosolized particles are no joke.) The nerve-shredding experience lasts perhaps 15 minutes. Like “At Home” and “Someone Else’s House,” it’s ultimately a cautionary tale. For more than a year most of us have been told to stay indoors, but as these shows argue, inside isn’t so safe either.A House Tour of The Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry … At Homeporterfamilymansion.com.Someone Else’s HouseThrough July 3; geffenplayhouse.org.A Cluster of 17 Casesblasttheory.co.uk. More

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      ‘Black Feminist Video Game’ Review: Pixels and Polemics

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      Live performances via Zoom mix with actual game footage in this well-intentioned but preachy play by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes.Audre Lorde isn’t going to save you. She’s too busy resting in the heavens of legendary artist-activists to be your personal Black feminist guru. That’s what a teen gamer named Jonas finds out in the Civilians’ well-intentioned but clumsy “Black Feminist Video Game.” Jonas (Christon Andell), our Player 1, is a biracial, autistic high school student with a single working mother (Constance Fields) who has tried to teach her son lessons from the great Black feminists, like bell hooks. However, Jonas learns how hard it is to internalize those lessons when a girl he’s dating, Nicole (Starr Kirkland), breaks it off. In an attempt to win her back, he, with the help of his gamer friend Sabine (Kyla Butts), seeks guidance from an old gift from his mother: the 2-D video game that gives the play its title.Written by the poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes and directed by Victoria Collado, “Black Feminist Video Game” incorporates live performances via Zoom, actual video game footage and some light audience interaction through YouTube chat. We watch Jonas as he conducts livestreamed video diaries — and Andell does interact with the audience minimally, responding to audience comments and asking for advice, though the improvised prattle slows the show’s pacing and feels inorganic.The script, too, labors through attempts to smoothly and naturally be its most intersectionally woke self, but diversity feels downgraded to a checklist. (Black? Mixed-race? Queer? Autistic? Check, check, check, check.) And when it comes to the play’s message, with Jonas slowly understanding when he’s mansplaining and failing to truly listen to and respect Black women, “Black Feminist Video Game” gets unbearably preachy — and the performances don’t do much to help.As part of the production, Jonas (Andell) and Sabine (Kyla Butts) play through an actual game created for the show.via The CiviliansAt least there’s the game itself, created by Ché Rose and Jocelyn Short of Cookout Games, which is a fun, pixelated blast from the past. Adorable avatar versions of Jonas and Sabine run through the levels: the Forest of Feminist Angst, the Coven of the Many-Faced Mirrors, the Realm of Colorism, and Peak Patriarchy, where waits the final boss. Just like the rules of the game — which is psychic, by the way — confound Jonas, so, too, was I confused by its logic, even as Lorde showed up to impart wise words to our wannabe Black feminist protagonist.Though a notoriously bad crash-and-burn gamer myself, I enjoy the idea of them — video games, but also games built into theatrical experiences, especially those related to race. The tension between politics and play is exciting — think “The Colored Museum,” “Underground Railroad Game” and “Black History Museum.” I even thought of Kekubian Assassin, a real mobile game based on an episode of Terence Nance’s HBO series “Random Acts of Flyness,” in which a Black woman plays a first-person-shooter-style game where she fights back against racist and sexist street harassment. “Black Feminist Video Game” aspires to this same degree of poignancy and ingenuity, but despite its cute gameplay, it can’t get past Level 1.Black Feminist Video GameLive performances through May 2; on-demand May 3-9; thecivilians.org. (The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will present performances of “Black Feminist Video Game” May 11-16, with on-demand access available May 17-23; osfashland.org.) More

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      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Meets the Hot Vax Summer

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      A lusty new production is both an enticement and a warning as we tentatively explore intimacy after a year of forced solitude.What will be the idiom, in my modest estimation, to best define our relationship to sex during the Covid-19 pandemic? “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thicc” — so say the boys of Tinder.It’s not quite Shakespeare — or is it? I’m willing to bet that if they lived in 2021, Romeo and Juliet would quickly become fluent in our contemporary language of lust and seduction. After all, sex has always been an element of Shakespeare’s play, though portrayals of it have changed in productions over the last 400 years, depending on trends and cultural attitudes.So it would make sense, after the pandemic year we’ve had, that we’re in for a spate of sexy Shakespeare — frilly ruff and all. And “Romeo and Juliet” — including the lusty new filmed production that premiered last week on PBS — looks like it’ll be the play of this spicy summer to come.I’ve already encountered other renditions in the last couple of weeks: the Public Theater’s bilingual “Romeo y Julieta,” the Actors Theater of Louisville’s “Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020.” An interactive production is forthcoming from England’s Creation Theater.Though a play about intimacy, yearning and death feels right for the moment, I have to admit my discomfort with all those honeyed kisses and sweet nothings: The pandemic has left me unprepared for lovers meeting at any distance closer than six feet.The sexiness of “Romeo and Juliet” depends not just on a director but on the temperature of the times, whether the drafty climate of a chaste family dinner with Granny or the febrile blaze of a Friday night date set to a playlist of ’90s R&B jams.Though the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time were down for lewd wordplay and suggestive winks in the text, stage depictions of physical intimacy were a step too far. The Victorians? Stuffier than a mouth breather during allergy season, they tended to shift the story toward innocent love rather than lust.Romeo and Juliet got a movie makeover in the 1960s, however, when the director Franco Zeffirelli premiered his sensual adaptation, including a famous nude love scene, during the peak of the sexual revolution.And if you had a pulse in the ’90s you caught Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s wistfully romantic “Romeo and Juliet,” which seemed charged by the melancholic sighs of disenchanted youth — appropriate for the decade of irony and grunge.Orlando Bloom, left, and Condola Rashad in the 2013 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhich presents the question of where we are now. (The dull and curiously sexless 2013 Broadway production, starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, had little to add.) Have dating apps and the sex-positive and body-positive movements brought us to a new age of uninhibitedness?Honestly, I’m not sure. Many of our austere cultural standards around sex, cuffed to religious conventions, economics and antiquated notions about gender, still haunt us behind closed doors — even as much of our media uses sex as consumer currency. But a pandemic that made isolation the rule surely has changed our relationship to physical intimacy.That — not personal prudishness or naïveté — is why too sexy of a “Romeo and Juliet,” like the new filmed edition starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, leaves me scandalized, as though I didn’t grow up in a household with HBO.The fabric of the film feels cut from the central couple’s marital bedsheets — the intimacy is that palpable. Scene after scene feels like it’s taking place by candlelight. The hovering camerawork peeks over shoulders to catch a kiss or embrace.Cutting many of the play’s crass euphemisms (including the nurse’s many opinions on matters of the heart and, well, other parts of the body), this “Romeo and Juliet” builds from the physical tension among the characters.They tease one another, as Mercutio does Romeo and Benvolio in his Queen Mab’s speech; then he draws in Benvolio (depicted here as his lover) for a single electric moment before promptly shoving him away.Simon Godwin’s direction is tactile, obsessed with hands and the ways an open-palmed welcome, a single-finger caress, the taut-knuckled hardness of a fist can signify romance, or violence, or both.The confidential meeting of the lovers in the tussle of bodies at the Capulet shindig, the hesitant first touch of their fingers and, later, the urgent consummation — none of this is surprising. Neither is it risqué.And yet, to me, it felt alarming — pornographic even — given how we have spent the last year painfully aware of what threats proximity could breed.Last spring NYC Health released a much-mocked guide to safe sex during the pandemic, encouraging masturbation as the most Covid-friendly alternative to, in Shakespearean terms, sheathing one’s dagger. No more sweaty tangling of limbs in a dark bar, no more post-date kiss on the sidewalk outside a restaurant. Or at least not without risk.Even as more of us get vaccinated, intimacy will likely feel like a fresh adventure, for good and for bad. Some singles are emerging from their quarantine bubbles anticipating a “hot vax summer” of horny hookups and experimental exploits. Others are circumspect, our social skills atrophied and our inhibitions increased in response to a lethal disease.For the next several months, as we recover from a kind of intimacy-deprived PTSD, Shakespeare’s sexiest play — a play that links lust to violence, even death — may read as extreme, even subtly subversive.That’s the magic of the Bard, isn’t it? Racy enough for reprobates and rakes, or priggishly read by a congregation of stately stiff-backs, the work is spacious enough to accommodate any disposition. I might be too shy to subscribe to Romeo and Juliet’s steamy OnlyFans, but, hey, there are plenty out there who aren’t. More