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      A Salzburg Festival Tradition Deserves a Wider Audience

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      Robert Carsen’s take on “Jedermann,” a play staged at the festival every year, stands head and shoulders above other recent stagings of the work.The Salzburg Festival attracts an audience of music and theater lovers from around the world. Yet its oldest tradition is a surprisingly local one.In 1920, the director Max Reinhardt and the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal inaugurated the first Salzburg Festival with an outdoor production of “Jedermann,” an adaptation of a medieval morality play. The performance took place on the square in front of Salzburg’s imposing Baroque cathedral.“Jedermann” quickly became a festival fixture. Since the end of World War II, it has been performed here every summer, often with German-speaking acting luminaries tackling the title role of a wealthy and impious bon vivant who, in the prime of life, gets an unexpected visit from death. Faced with his mortality, the title character, whose name translates as Everyman, learns how fleeting fortune and fame are and undergoes a soul-saving conversion.This year, the play’s complete 14-performance run sold out well in advance — even though it is the only production at the festival that is performed without English supertitles.With this gripping new “Jedermann,” directed by Robert Carsen and starring the sensational Philipp Hochmair, it looks like it’s time for the festival to reverse that policy. This gutsy and moving production stands head and shoulders above Salzburg’s other recent stagings of the work, and deserves to be seen — and understood — by more than just the “Jedermann” die-hards.Every director who approaches “Jedermann” must contend with the play’s peculiarities, including the heightened dialogue, whose archaic touches and rhyming couplets make a naturalistic delivery all but impossible. Though a classic, “Jedermann” is not universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. The most successful “Jedermann” productions refrain from excavating subtle or hidden meanings and focus on bringing the play’s memorable episodes and characters to life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

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      Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Job’ Review: The Psychopath Will See You Now

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      A patient, a shrink and a gun are the raw ingredients of a chic, sadistic Broadway thriller.How long would you like to spend with a psychopath?If 80 minutes sounds good, you can take my seat at the Helen Hayes Theater, where the extremely effective, often funny and quasi-sadistic “Job” opened on Tuesday. I’ll just tiptoe away.But if you’re not a fan of relentless thrillers, you’re likely to feel that the gun the psychopath is aiming at her shrink when the lights come up — and keeps handy for the entirety of their supersized session — is really aimed at you.Admittedly, the shrink would quibble with my diagnosis: Jane, the patient, is probably not a psychopath. Or not just. Having apparently swallowed the D.S.M.-5 whole, she at various times displays symptoms of paranoia, post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorder, narcissism and snark. In layman’s terms, a real piece of work.And work is why the 20-something Jane has come to see the 60-something Loyd, a psychiatrist with expertise in desperate cases like hers. Having recently been put on leave from her position at a Bay Area tech company — a video of her standing on a desk screaming at co-workers went viral — she needs his sign-off to return to her job.Bringing a gun to a mandated therapy session does not seem like putting one’s best foot forward. But the play, by Max Wolf Friedlich, labors to make Jane, or at least her job, sympathetic. She works in “user care” — a euphemism for content moderation, itself a euphemism for the removal of violent, disgusting and often criminal material from the internet.Lemmon’s Jane is a marvel of compelling twitches, our critic writes, and Friedman is less flashy but perhaps even finer because of his character’s contradictions.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Six Characters’ Review: Making the Case Against a White-Centric Theater

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      At Lincoln Center Theater, Phillip Howze’s daring new play offers a hefty critique but takes aim at more targets than it can accommodate. Nothing makes some theatergoers as skittish as the specter of audience participation. Toying with that apprehension, Phillip Howze has designed a pre-performance interaction for people coming to see his confrontational new play, “Six Characters,” at Lincoln Center Theater.As part of what his script calls the overture, each person entering the Claire Tow Theater is meant to be asked, “Would you like to participate?,” yet given no details on which to base their answer. The query turns out to provide a frame for “Six Characters.”A metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Howze’s play is an indictment of the white-centric American theater and a warning about passivity in the face of looming fascism. Are you willing to participate in reshaping the theater and the country? “Six Characters” would like to know.Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater. A principal theme — Black artists navigating overwhelmingly white traditions — is clear from the preshow and interstitial music: Italian opera sung by Black stars, including Leontyne Price and Pretty Yende.Dustin Wills’s production opens with a Director (Julian Robertson) alone on the bare stage, fumbling comically with lighting and ladders. He is the first of the play’s six Black characters: a Europhile whose elegant coat is from Italy, and who has a habit of bursting into Italian. (The set is by Wills, costumes by Montana Levi Blanco.)Scott plays a cleaner and Julian Robertson is the Director in Phillip Howze’s play, a metatheatrical nod to Luigi Pirandello’s canonical 1921 work.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two More New York Theaters to Share Space

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      The prestigious downtown nonprofit Soho Rep will share space with Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan while figuring out a longer-term plan.In another indication of how postpandemic economics are rattling the nonprofit theater world, the prestigious Soho Rep is giving up its longtime home in TriBeCa and will instead share space with Playwrights Horizons, a Midtown theater company, while trying to figure out a longer-term plan.The move, prompted by real estate constraints as well as fiscal concerns, comes at the same time that another important New York nonprofit, Second Stage Theater, is leaving its Off Broadway home. That company is now planning to reside, at least temporarily, with Signature Theater, which in recent years has had more space than it can afford to program.The two decampments follow a 2022 decision by the Long Wharf Theater, in New Haven, Conn., to let go of its waterfront home and become itinerant.Taken together, the transitions are a reminder of the enormous stresses facing nonprofits, and suggest that revisiting real estate choices will become part of the solution for some.“If you look at the field-wide vulnerability, partnerships are a result of that,” said Eric Ting, one of Soho Rep’s three directors. “We look to each other for support and for strength.”Soho Rep, established in 1975, is small: Its current annual budget is about $2.8 million, it has just five full-time employees and since 1991 it has been presenting most of its work in a 65-seat TriBeCa space, making it an Off Off Broadway theater. But the company, committed to what it calls “radical theater makers,” punches way above its weight. It was the first to stage Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2019, as well as Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” which was a Pulitzer finalist this year. The theater has regularly introduced New York audiences to work by important, and often provocative, playwrights, including Sarah Kane, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lucas Hnath.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Baldwin’s ‘Blues for Mister Charlie,’ 60 Years After It Hit Broadway

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      On the centennial of James Baldwin’s birth, a look at this revolutionary work that was a playwriting milestone for him.One day, in the spring of 1964, among the glittering theater marquees of Times Square, James Baldwin was en route to rehearsal for his new Broadway production, “Blues for Mister Charlie” — and he’d had a lot on his mind: Four little girls had been killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., just months earlier; the white producers of his play had been after him to soften the script, suggesting it might be inappropriate for Broadway. By the time he reached the theater, he was furious.David Leeming, Baldwin’s friend and biographer, recently recalled that day’s “horrible rehearsal,” in which Baldwin stormed in and climbed a ladder. Towering over the cast and crew, he went on a tirade, Leeming, 87, said in an interview, “essentially accusing them of failing to see his vision.”Besides cutting a swear word or two from the script, Baldwin did not waver, though not without fear — fear of the form and fear that he might not adequately portray the monstrosity and humanity of white Southern hate. The critics eventually weighed in, writing of his failure on both fronts, and struggles at the box office ensured the playwright’s debut on Broadway would be brief.When James Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of 63, he left a voluminous oeuvre. Deemed a “prophet” and a “witness,” he has experienced a revival in the past decade that quickened in 2024 — with reading guides, film screenings and symposiums — for the centennial of his birth on Aug. 2.His legacy is often most embraced through his essays and fiction, though another form may have better suited his artistry: the play.“He loved the connection, the immediate connection between the audience and the artist that occurred in the theater,” Leeming said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Seeing Through,’ by Ricky Ian Gordon

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      In “Seeing Through,” the prolific composer Ricky Ian Gordon shares the heroes, monsters, obsessions and fetishes that drive his art and fuel a dizzying life.SEEING THROUGH: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera, by Ricky Ian GordonEven devotees of symphony orchestras sometimes struggle with the opera — its muchness and pomp. “The uproar,” my father called it, and he was a serious amateur chamber musician who collected and played the works of obscure composers on a Montagnana violin that he most certainly would have saved from a fire before my guinea pig, Percolator.But enough about my daddy issues — let’s discuss Ricky Ian Gordon’s. Gordon is one of our foremost composers of modern opera (for what that’s worth, as he notes mournfully, to Generation iTunes), including works based on “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.” Now he’s also the author of a messy and mesmerizing new memoir called “Seeing Through.”“If I had my way, the whole world would look like a carnival,” writes Gordon, who has a synesthesiac “thing about color,” and this book is certainly pinwheels, sideshows and waxy litter scattered on the ground. Very entertaining; a little dizzying.Ricky was the youngest of four children and the only boy born to Eve and Sam Gordon, né Goldenberg, a dishonorably discharged World War II veteran — he’d punched an officer who’d made an antisemitic remark — who became an electrician and Masonic master, prone to lightning bolts of rage at home.This overstimulated family’s struggles were previously documented in the excellent 1992 book “Home Fires,” by Donald Katz — you can listen to it on Audible, which Katz, in one of those intriguing pieces of life-arc trivia, founded — and a year later in “Take the Long Way Home,” by Susan Lydon, the eldest daughter, a successful journalist who descended into serious addiction.Here, Sam’s neglect and maltreatment of his children, especially Ricky — who failed to be the expected “mirror” to his brute-force masculinity — comes in for more uncomfortable scrutiny. Sam never bothered to learn birthdays or look at schoolwork, cruelly beat his son and demanded sex from Eve multiple times a day, even when she didn’t want it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This Year’s BroadwayCon Raises the Curtain on Mental Health

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      The ninth annual fan event will include discussions on topics such as sobriety, self-care and body image. Here are six to look out for.Watching a Broadway musical can be an overwhelming experience — to say nothing of the actors performing in it.“If you die onstage, or your character’s screamed at, your body believes that’s really happening to you every night,” said Hannah Cruz, who made her Broadway debut this spring in the women’s suffrage musical “Suffs.”For decades, the industry fostered a “suck it up” culture of steely toughness. But one focus of this year’s BroadwayCon, which will draw thousands of theater lovers to the New York Hilton Midtown from Friday through Sunday, is to facilitate conversations about how performers deal with mental health, both on and offstage.The planned discussions and events address a variety of topics, including the challenges of staying sober while working in the business and increasing accessibility for autistic audiences. Here are six events you’ll want to catch.Autism and accessibility discussionsTheatergoers who want to share their experiences being on the autism spectrum, know someone who is or just want a safe space to learn more can take part in this event hosted by Skylar Reiner, a longtime Broadway fan.“Autism and Broadway: What It Means To Be a Fan While on the Spectrum,” Friday, 10 a.m.Five autistic performing arts professionals — including Conor Tague, Desmond Luis Edwards and Madison Kopec, who recently made their Broadway debuts in “How to Dance in Ohio” — will discuss their personal experiences with accessibility in the arts, as well as best practices for collaborating with autistic creators.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More