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      Mbongeni Ngema, Playwright Best Known for ‘Sarafina!,’ Dies at 68

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      Before the fall of apartheid, his plays, which also included “Woza Albert!” and “Asinamali,” challenged the South African government’s racial policies.Mbongeni Ngema, a South African playwright, lyricist and director whose stage works, including the Tony-nominated musical “Sarafina!,” challenged and mocked his homeland’s longtime policy of racial apartheid, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Mbizana, South Africa, after a car accident. He was 68.Mr. Ngema was a passenger in a car that was struck head on when he was returning from a funeral in Lusikisiki, in Eastern Cape Province, according to a family statement cited in the South African news media.“His masterfully creative narration of our liberation struggle honored the humanity of oppressed South Africans and exposed the inhumanity of an oppressive regime,” President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a post on X after Mr. Ngema’s death.In the decade before the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the dismantling of apartheid in the early ’90s, the South African system of institutionalized racism was an overwhelming concern to Mr. Ngema. During that decade he cocreated the play “Woza Albert!,” wrote and directed the play “Asinamali!” and wrote the script and collaborated on the music for “Sarafina!”“Sarafina!” evolved out of a conversation he had in the 1980s with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a prominent anti-apartheid activist who was then married to Mandela.“I was sitting with Mama Winnie Mandela, and I started thinking, ‘This country is in flames,’” he told the South African television show “The Insider SA” in 2022. “So I asked a question. I said, ‘Mama, what do you think is finally going to happen to this country?’“Mama looked at me, and she said, ‘I wish I had a big blanket to cover the faces of the little ones so they do not see that bitter end.’”Mr. Ngema soon began to envision young people, running and singing “Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow,” a song that he would write for “Sarafina!,” a musical that follows Black high school students in the township of Soweto in 1976 during the uprising against the government’s imposition of Afrikaans, rather than Zulu, as the official language in schools.Mr. Ngema wrote the book and collaborated with the trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela on the score.Mr. Ngema, left, with former President Nelson Mandela in 2002.Lewis Moon/Agence France-Presse“Sarafina!” opened in Johannesburg in 1987. It moved that fall to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center and then, in early 1988, to Broadway, at the Cort Theater, where it played 597 performances.In his review of the production at the Newhouse, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Ngema had “brought forth a musical that transmutes the oppression of Black townships into liberating singing and dancing that nearly raises the theater’s roof.”The score, he added, “evokes the cacophony of life in a Black society both oppressed and defiant, at once sentenced to hard labor and ignited by dreams of social justice.”“Sarafina!” received five Tony nominations, including three for Mr. Ngema: for best direction of a musical (won by Harold Prince for “The Phantom of the Opera”), best original score (won by Stephen Sondheim for “Into the Woods”) and best choreography, which he shared with Ndaba Mhlongo (won by Michael Smuin for “Anything Goes”).“Sarafina!” was also nominated for best musical and best featured actress in a musical.It was adapted as a film in 1992, starring Leleti Khumalo, who had starred in the South African and Broadway productions, with Whoopi Goldberg as an inspirational teacher and the singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba as Sarafina’s mother.Mbongeni Ngema (pronounced mmm-bon-GEN-i nnn-GAY-ma) was born on June 1, 1955, in Verulam, a town north of Durban.According to his official biography for the film “Sarafina!,” he was separated from his parents at 11, then lived for a time with extended family in Zululand and later on his own in the poor neighborhoods around Durban. From age 12, he taught himself to play guitar.“When I grew up all I wanted to be was a musician, and I was influenced greatly by the Beatles,” he said on “The Insider SA.”Working in a fertilizer factory in the mid-1970s, a fellow worker asked him to play guitar to accompany a play he had written.“And then I fell in love with the part of the lead character in the play,” he told the magazine Africa Report in 1987. “When he was onstage, I would mimic him backstage — making the other musicians laugh.” One night, when the actor did not show up, he played the role.Mr. Ngema and the playwright began to collaborate, which led Mr. Ngema to start directing and writing his own small pieces. In 1979, he began working in Johannesburg with Gibson Kente, a playwright and composer, to understand the magic in his productions. After two years, he left and began working with the performer Percy Mtwa.He, Mr. Mtwa and Barney Simon created “Woza Albert!,” a satire that imagines the impact of the second coming of a Christ-like figure, Morena, who arrives in South Africa on a jumbo jet from Jerusalem, through the lives of ordinary people, vigorously played over the course of 80 minutes by Mr. Ngema and Mr. Mtwa.The white government tries to exploit Morena, then labels him a Communist and locks him up on Robben Island, where Mandela and other political prisoners were incarcerated.The play opened in South Africa in 1981 and was staged over the next three years in Europe, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater and around the United States.In The Washington Post, the critic David Richards wrote in 1984 that “Woza Albert!” “tackles such harsh realities as injustice, poverty and apartheid in South Africa, but does so with far more spirit, humor and, yes, hope, than the subject generally inspires.” He added that “with only their wonderful, wide-eyed talent,” Mr. Mtwa and Mr. Ngema “can summon up a landscape, a society, a history.”The trumpeter Hugh Masekela, third from right, with members of the cast of “Sarafina!” during a rehearsal at Lincoln Center in 1987. Mr. Masekela and Mr. Ngema collaborated on the score for the musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Ngema then wrote and directed “Asinamali!” (1983), in which five Black men in a single South African prison cell describe — through acting, dancing, singing and mime — why they were incarcerated and how they were victimized by racist laws, unemployment and police violence.The play’s name (which means “We have no money”) comes from the rallying cry of rent strikers in 1983 in the Lamontville township.Mr. Ngema said that “Asinamali!” was alarming enough to authorities in Duncan Village, in the Eastern Cape, that they arrested the audience for attending a performance.“They said it was an illegal political gathering,” Mr. Ngema said in an interview in 2017 on a South African podcast.He called “Asinamali!” a celebration of resistance.“It shows that no matter how bad things get, victory is inevitable,” he told The Times in 1986 during rehearsals before the play opened in Harlem at the New Heritage Repertory Theater. “The spirit of the people shall prevail.”Later that year, “Asinamali!” was part of a South African theater festival at Lincoln Center.Information on Mr. Ngema’s survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Ms. Khumalo, the star of “Sarafina!,” ended in divorce. Mr. Ngema, who wrote several other plays, was involved in a controversy in 1996 when his sequel to “Sarafina!,” “Sarafina 2” — commissioned by the South African Health Department to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic — led to a government corruption investigation over accusations that its cost was an excessive “unauthorized expenditure” and that its message was inadequate.He defended the show’s price tag, saying it was necessary to bring Broadway-quality shows to Black townships.“People have said it’s a waste of government money,” Mr. Ngema told The Associated Press in 1996. “It think that’s a stupid criticism.” More

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      Mike Nussbaum, Celebrated Chicago Theater Actor, Dies at 99

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      He appeared memorably in “American Buffalo” and in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” but gave up a career on Broadway for one in Chicago.Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with David Mamet, the Chicago-born playwright, died on Dec. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 99.His death was announced by his daughter Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer.For the last decade, Mr. Nussbaum has also been known as the country’s oldest working actor, a distinction that mildly irritated him. (For admiring journalists, he gamely performed his daily regimen of 50 push-ups, a practice he kept up until he was 98.) He often said he would have preferred to have been recognized solely for his acting skills, not the age at which he was acting.Mr. Nussbaum came up in Chicago’s community theaters, notably Hull House, an incubator of talent in the 1960s, while also running a successful exterminating business. When he was 40, he was tackling a wasp nest when he fell off a roof, smashing a kneecap and breaking a wrist. While he stewed on the couch recuperating, he decided it was the right moment to pursue acting full time.A pivot point in his acting career came in 1975 when Mr. Mamet, then a fledgling playwright, cast him in the role of Teach in an early production of the celebrated play “American Buffalo,” about a trio of hapless, double-crossing hustlers. The pair had met at Hull House, where Mr. Mamet had worked as a gofer when he was a teenager.“It was, for those of us who saw it, kind of an overwhelming, definitive experience,” Robert Falls, the former artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, told Chicago magazine in 2014. “Over the years I’ve seen actors like Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall play that part, and no one has ever played it the way Mike Nussbaum did. There was a Chicago quality to it in its voice, in terms of attitude, a sense of pathos and danger that he brought to it that’s never been really equaled.”Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman, in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”When Mr. Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another tale of desperate hustlers, opened on Broadway in 1983, Mr. Nussbaum, along with fellow Chicagoan Joe Mantegna, were cast as two of the play’s striving, venal real estate agents. Mr. Mantegna earned a Tony for his role as the slick Ricky Roma; Mr. Nussbaum won a Drama Desk Award for his role as George Aaronow, a beaten-down salesman with a nascent conscience; and the play would win Mr. Mamet the Pulitzer Prize in drama.“There’s particular heroism in Mike Nussbaum, whose frightened eyes convey a lifetime of blasted dreams,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “and in Joe Mantegna, as the company’s youngest, most dapper go-getter.”The pair had performed years earlier in Mr. Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater,” a slight but biting two-man play about a young actor and an older one, goading and guiding each other, ego to ego. Mel Gussow of The Times praised their performances as effortless. “As the cynical old poseur, Mr. Nussbaum is a Jack Gilford with a touch of John Barrymore,” he wrote.Mr. Mantegna, speaking by phone, said that Mr. Nussbaum was “the role model for what everyone considers the Chicago actor.”“He wasn’t doing it for the end game,” Mr. Mantegna said. “In New York, there’s an end game: Maybe I’ll get to Broadway, get a shot at TV. It’s an industry. L.A. is an industry. In Chicago it was never an industry, we were doing it for the love of doing it.”He recalled Broadway producers urging Mr. Mamet to cast “Glengarry Glen Ross” with stars, and Mr. Mamet pushing back. “He said, ‘I’m going to do it with my kind of guys.’ Then there we were, this pack of unknowns, doing what would ultimately win the Pulitzer Prize.”Then Mr. Nussbaum walked away from it all.B.J. Jones, artistic director of the renowned Northlight Theater, in Skokie, Ill., which Mr. Nussbaum helped found in the 1970s, phoned Mr. Nussbaum during his run on Broadway to ask him to play the lead in a work by the English playwright Simon Gray.Mr. Nussbaum called out to his wife at the time, Annette, for advice. “Do it,” she said. “I’m tired of New York.”“Mike left Broadway to perform in a play for which we probably paid him a few hundred bucks,” Mr. Jones continued. “And when he did, they were scalping tickets in the lobby to see him. He was a Broadway star but he came home.”As Mr. Mantegna said, “We were on the carousel, and there was the brass ring and he could have grabbed it, but he decided he liked the carousel.”A slight man with a bushy mustache, Mr. Nussbaum could seemingly play anybody: He was a fierce Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” and a bawdy witch in “Macbeth,” two of his many roles for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He also worked steadily in film and television. He was a pompous school principal in “Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball fantasy starring Kevin Costner, and a chillingly gentle jewelry store owner in “Men in Black,” the 1997 sci-fi comedy with Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith.A scene from the film “Men In Black” (1997), in which Mr. Nussbaum played a chillingly gentle jeweler.Columbia Pictures, via Alamy“Mike was the consummate ensemble player,” Mr. Jones said. “And he had an inherent warmth that infused all his characters.”Mike Nussbaum was born Myron G. Nussbaum on Dec. 29, 1923, in New York City, and grew up in Chicago. His father, Philip Nussbaum, was a fur wholesaler; his mother, Bertha (Cohen) Nussbaum, was a homemaker. Mike was a skinny, unhappy child, beaten and demeaned by his father, “a man I did not admire,” he told Chicago magazine.He was 9 and at summer camp when he discovered acting,though he froze during his first performance and had to be carried off the stage. He attended the University of Wisconsin before dropping out and enlisting in the Army during World War II.He worked as a Teletype operator in France, first in Versailles and then Reims, and was on duty on May 7, 1945, the day of the German surrender. He sent out the announcement declaring the end of the war in Europe, signing it not with his initials, as was customary, but with his full surname. He kept a framed copy as a memento.He returned to Chicago in 1946 and married Annette Brenner, who later worked in public relations for the American Civil Liberties Union and elsewhere. He went into the exterminating business because he wanted a home, a family and a stable life, which he knew he couldn’t have as a professional actor. “I wanted the American dream,” he said. Mr. Nussbaum in 2019. “I’m lucky,” he once said of his long career. “Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would’ve gotten in New York.”Neil Steinberg/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressHis first wife died in 2003. In addition to his daughter Karen, Mr. Nussbaum is survived by his son, Jack, a writer and activist; his second wife, Julie (Brudlos) Nussbaum; seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Susan, a playwright, novelist and disability activist, died last year.“I’m lucky: Chicago has given me chances that I don’t think I would have gotten in New York,” Mr. Nussbaum told Patrick Healy of The New York Times in 2014. “There’s no real fame here, not like in New York. And your salary doesn’t go up when you win a Jeff” — otherwise known as The Joseph Jefferson Award, an honor given to the theater arts in Chicago — “not like when you win a Tony. But I’ve gotten steady work, great work, and all I ever wanted to do was act.” More

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      For a Times Critic on Deadline, a Dramatic Reversal

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      Stories evolve. But a recent review proved to a theater critic that people can change even more.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do my job.That’s usually not a problem. As the chief theater critic for The Times, I enjoy the ritual of seeing plays during previews, thinking about them for a day or two and writing opening-night reviews.But after Second Stage Theater announced in June that it would produce a revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” I dithered for months about covering it. True, it would be the play’s Broadway debut — and the playwright’s. Both are important milestones for the paper to acknowledge with a thoughtful response.On the other hand, I’d seen “Appropriate” before, when it premiered Off Broadway in 2014. Other critics welcomed it as a serious play by a serious playwright.I hated it.That surprised me. The play’s subject — the legacy of racism in America — is something I care about deeply. And the plot is clever: Three white siblings bicker over the horrible souvenirs of slavery they find in their father’s plantation home. But the tone seemed too hectic and self-consciously outrageous to suit the subject.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?  More

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      Review: This ‘Night of the Iguana’ Is Williams Without the Excess

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      A new revival directed by Emily Mann and starring Tim Daly leans into its flailing characters’ confusions.While not his most elegant work, Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” about a group of lost souls at a coastal hotel in 1940s Mexico, is not without its misty pleasures. Even as his characters stumble tragically in search of meaning, their convictions carry the sharp-tongued certainty of soap opera idols. But a new revival from La Femme Theater at the Signature Center mires itself too deeply in its characters’ confusions to let the edges of his language shine.It’s an issue of confidence, with Emily Mann directing her cast away from Williams’s assured dialogue and toward their characters’ flailing. And this play, with a defrocked minister who now leads Baptist church ladies on unreliable bus tours at its center, already has plenty of flailing.Plagued by nervous breakdowns, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly) is grasping at straws when he brings his ersatz flock to the cheap hotel run by his friend, the sultry Maxine (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Calling God a “senile delinquent” during a mid-sermon lapse in belief got him fired; his statutory rape of a 16-year-old on the trip could mean worse, and the girl’s chaperone (Lea DeLaria) is already rushing to phone the authorities.Like many of the playwright’s antiheroes, Shannon is disheartened by the world’s hypocrisy while also contributing to it. These contradictions are typically enlivened by the kind of fiery speechifying an actor can chew heartily, but “Iguana” is Williams in bold, underlined red ink: Shannon goes on about feeling hopeless and at the end of his rope, then later says as much about the panicking iguana caught and tied to a post by two hotel workers. No need for SparkNotes.His pleas need spirit, if only of desperation, and Daly, in a verbally stumbling performance, does not convey someone with the power to seduce with ease. This hesitation extends to most of the ensemble, who struggle with the cadence of Williams’s writing, except for the unflinching DeLaria and, as a hippie-ish painter named Hannah, Jean Lichty.Like Shannon, Hannah is a hustler with lofty spiritual ambitions, traversing the world trading watercolors and recitations for hotel rooms with her aging poet father (Austin Pendleton, whose adequacy with the play’s rhythms is undermined by the brevity of his time onstage). Shannon and Hannah’s near act-length conversation in the show’s second half, as she attempts to calm him down from the ledge, comes closest to achieving its intended discourse on freedom and redemption thanks to the surety with which Lichty imbues her character.It might be that, in trying to demystify Williams’s extravagance to get at its emotional core, Mann has thrown the priest out with the holy water. It’s possible to strip away the surfaces of the playwright’s worlds — a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last year did away with its Old South glamour and still got its point across — but not the excesses they need to reach their delicious boiling points.Traces of those remain, like Jeff Croiter’s tropical lighting, Beowulf Boritt’s stilted, shabby-chic set, and Rubin-Vega’s unshakable earthiness. But they don’t compensate for the play’s weaker elements, like two giddy German tourists (Alena Acker and Michael Leigh Cook) whose sporadic, Nazi-praising appearances are a thudding example of the duplicity Shannon rails against, in this case aimed at Maxine for renting them rooms.Williams wants it both ways in those moments, validating his protagonist’s gripes even as he condemns him. The gambit is not impossible, but is one that needs a production more convincing, more drunk on its own pretensions, to really win over a congregation.The Night of the IguanaThrough Feb. 25 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; iguanaplaynyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Best Arts Photos of 2023

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      Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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      Sondheim Was a Critical Darling. Since His Death, He’s a Hitmaker, Too.

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      The musicals of Stephen Sondheim often struggled at the box office during his lifetime, but since his death several have become huge hits on Broadway.Stephen Sondheim, the great musical theater composer and lyricist, was widely acclaimed as a genius, but during his lifetime he had a bumpy track record at the box office, with many of his shows losing money.In death, however, his shows have flourished.A revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — which was so unpopular when it debuted in 1981 that it closed 12 days after opening — is now the hottest ticket on Broadway. A lavish revival of “Sweeney Todd” that opened in March is already profitable, and at a time when almost everything new on Broadway is failing.Meanwhile, Sondheim’s unfinished and existentialist final work, “Here We Are,” is now the longest-running show in the brief history of the Shed, a performing arts center in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, where luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Lin-Manuel Miranda signed up as producers to make sure no expense was spared on the Sondheim send-off.“There just seems to be an unbounded appetite for him,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed.The posthumous Sondheim bump appears to have resulted from a confluence of factors.The big Broadway revivals feature fan-favorite talent — the “Merrily” cast includes Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame, while “Sweeney” is led by the celebrated baritone Josh Groban — reflecting a desire by top-tier entertainers to champion, and tackle, Sondheim’s tricky but rewarding work.The revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with, from left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso: The outpouring of praise for Sondheim upon his death, when he was hailed as a transformational creative force, seems to have spurred new interest in his work. And his shows, some of which felt challenging when they first appeared, are now more familiar, thanks to decades of stage productions and film adaptations. Plus, according to most critics, the current revivals are good.“Sondheim went from being too avant-garde to being a sure bet, like you’re doing ‘A Christmas Carol’,” said Danny Feldman, the producing artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, a Southern California nonprofit that won this year’s Regional Theater Tony Award. The playhouse devoted the first half of 2023 to Sondheim: A production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” a show once seen as esoteric, became one its best-selling musicals ever, and a production of “A Little Night Music” was not far behind. “The interest was shocking,” Feldman said.One side effect of his popularity: Ticket prices are high. “Merrily” is facing strong demand from Sondheim lovers and Radcliffe fans, but its capacity is limited; it is playing in a theater with just 966 seats. That has made it the most expensive ticket on Broadway, with an average ticket price of $250 and a top ticket price of $649 during the week that ended Dec. 17. “Sweeney” is also pricey, with tickets that same week averaging $175 and topping out at $399. (Both shows offer lower-priced tickets, particularly after the holidays.)“We shouldn’t be criticized for being a hit and paying back investors who have taken a big punt in New York,” said the “Merrily” lead producer, Sonia Friedman. “Most shows right now are not working, and therefore when something comes along that does, let’s get the investors some money back.”In life, Sondheim was often seen as more of an artistic success than a commercial one — a critical darling with a passionate but finite fan base, leading to short runs for many of the shows whose scores he composed, especially during their first productions. A few shows, particularly “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” were hits from the start, but some musicals that are now viewed as masterpieces, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” did not recoup their costs during their original productions.“It’s not like he fell out of favor and has been rediscovered. He’s always been revered and valued and prized by everybody who loves theater, but we also have to recognize that several of his shows, when they first premiered, were not understood and were not embraced,” said Jordan Roth, the producer who brought “Into the Woods” back to Broadway in the summer of 2022, seven months after Sondheim’s death. Now, Roth said, “The grip on our hearts seems to have tightened.”“Into the Woods,” a modestly scaled production, featured the pop singer Sara Bareilles and a troupe of Broadway stars. It recouped its costs and then had a five-month national tour.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” did not recoup its investment, but the current revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford is making a profit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn February, seven weeks after “Into the Woods” concluded on Broadway, “Sweeney Todd” began previews. It’s a much bigger production — big cast, big orchestra — that was capitalized for up to $14.5 million. It has sold strongly from the get-go (during the week that ended Dec. 10, it grossed $1.8 million) and has already recouped its capitalization costs.“I’m sorry that I can’t call him and say look at these grosses. He definitely would have had a sarcastic statement in response, but he would have liked it secretly,” said the show’s lead producer, Jeffrey Seller. “Who doesn’t want to be affirmed by the audience?”Groban and his co-star Annaleigh Ashford are ending their runs in the show on Jan. 14; the show’s success has prompted the producers to extend the run, with Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster taking over the lead roles on Feb. 9.“It has morphed into being under the umbrella of an enormous and deserved celebration of Sondheim’s work and legacy and life,” Groban said. “All of a sudden there’s grief involved, and wanting to do him proud, and what-would-Steve-do feelings.”“Merrily,” which began previews in September, is the biggest turnabout, given that its original production is one of Broadway’s most storied flops. The current revival, capitalized for up to $13 million, has been selling out.“Of all the things he wanted, he wanted as many people as possible to be in the theater watching the shows, and he just missed it,” said Maria Friedman, the director of the “Merrily” revival and a longtime Sondheim collaborator.In November, 10 members of the company of the original ill-fated “Merrily” attended the revival and marveled at the reversal of fortunes.“It’s thrilling to see the show finally get its due,” said Gary Stevens, who was an 18-year-old in the original “Merrily” ensemble, and who is now 60 and works an executive at a chauffeuring company in Florida. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there was a sense of bittersweetness. We look at this revival’s success as, in some ways, our success, because the day after closing, even with how exhausted we were and how sad we were, we recorded a kick-ass album that kept that show alive, so that it became a legendary flop and cult classic that kept going and going, and now this.”Another member of the original “Merrily” cast, the actress and singer Liz Callaway, was nominated this year for a Grammy Award for a live album of Sondheim songs, one of two collections of Sondheim songs nominated in the 2024 Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. “I think a new generation is falling in love with Sondheim now,” she said.“Here We Are” is a little different. It is not expected to recoup its costs, or to transfer to Broadway, but both the leadership of the Shed and the commercial producer who raised money to finance the production proclaimed it a success.“It was always about honoring Steve’s legacy,” said the producer, Tom Kirdahy. “And we hope that it has another life, in London or on the road.”In London, there are also two Sondheim shows running. “Old Friends,” a revue of Sondheim songs with a cast led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is in the West End. And at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a revival of Sondheim’s rarely staged “Pacific Overtures” opened earlier this month to critical praise.“For those of us who wanted to do right by him, this is a year I’ll never forget,” Groban said. “I just hope he’s smiling down.” More

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      Leo Reich Likes Nothing Better Than a Movie Where Nothing Happens

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      “Any movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European,” said the comedian, who has a special on Max. “Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town.”Like a lot of comedians, Leo Reich works out the kinks in his stand-up routines by pacing the floor and talking to himself.During the pandemic, that process reached a fever pitch.“I think that’s where a lot of the angst in the show was from,” he said about “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!,” his Gen Z lampoon now streaming on Max, “the fact that I was at home in the childhood bedroom where I’d always lived with all of my old posters on the wall, just furious about the state of affairs that I was finding myself in.”Under that strain, what began as a confessional, rather traditional set eventually morphed, he recalled in a video call from London, into a kind of self-parody “of the worst excesses of my own personality.” During the new set, Reich, 25, flop-sweats across the stage in short shorts and black eye makeup.“It’s so funny having done a show that tries to send up on some level that whole idea of the fetishization of young talent,” he said, before elaborating on snobbery, eating animals and the freedom of humiliation, “and then essentially become what I was trying to lovingly criticize.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Two Pints of Beer and a CigaretteIt can be hot sun, Coronas and a Camel Blue. It can be dead of winter, subzero temperatures, two pints of Guinness and a Marlboro Red. What I will say is that after you’ve had two pints of beer and a cigarette, that is actually scientifically peak physical performance that a human being can get to. You will never feel as good as that in any other context.2Bird Watching and Pondering the Natural WorldThere was a period when I was 9 to 15 where I was a really obsessive bird watcher. Not to get religious about this, but sometimes in our lives we have to sit back and be in awe of the majesty of nature. It also makes you think, “God, I really know nothing about the universe because this little guy is dressed in bright, bright blue, and there is no possible explanation for that that I could possibly make sense of.”3Bad Sketch ComedyI passionately believe that perfection is the enemy of joy. To watch someone onstage do something that is on some level quite humiliating, but have the absolute best time doing it, you get a feeling of freedom and human connection that is unparalleled.4Movies Where Nothing HappensAny movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European. Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town and runs her hand along a curtain. Something where someone wonders, “Is this all there is to life?” That’s perfect to me.5OffalIf you’re going to kill and eat an animal, you should do it in the style of a Renaissance king and make sure that you eat the whole thing. The perfect intersection of that for me is eating a liver, a kidney, some intestines — something where you truly cannot hide away from the fact that what you are doing out of your own free will as a human being is biting into something that was once alive.6Snobbery and Reverse SnobberySome things I’m a snob about: superhero films, interior design, restaurants, grammar, weirdly. Things I’m not a snob about: coffee, wine, reality TV, pop music. You’ve got to choose a couple of things where you’re like, “Listen up, I know more than you about this.” And some other things where you’re like, “Don’t over-intellectualize it. I’m just here to have fun.”7PiningYou don’t need any material reason or justification for it. You can pine after literally anyone, and your brain and heart will create the most gorgeous back story out of absolutely nothing that will sustain you, in my experience, years at a time.8Dancing to ’80s PopI mean, if you are dancing in a club that’s got lasers in it and, I don’t know, some Pet Shop Boys, come on. It rewires your brain forever.9Novels Where Nothing HappensThe person wandering around the city is probably from the ’20s or ’30s, and they’re doing something like planning a party or collecting a package. The whole novel is a metaphor for civilizational decline. I’m talking “Mrs. Dalloway” — almost any novel by Virginia Woolf will work for this. I’m talking Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” Something that if someone saw you reading it, they’d go, “Oh, the guy’s an intellectual.” Little do they know you don’t understand a thing that’s going on.10Saying Something StupidI think that one of the nicest things in the world is to embarrass yourself in a social setting and just accept that it’s happened. More

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      In Vienna, the Adventures of ‘Candide’ Continue

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      On the heels of the new film “Maestro,” an American director will stage Leonard Bernstein’s often-reworked operetta in its “concert version.”The production history of “Candide,” Leonard Bernstein’s operetta based on Voltaire’s novel, is as epic as the highs and lows of its title character’s journey in a volatile and menacing world. From its infamously unsuccessful Broadway debut in 1956 to its various revisions for opera houses, theaters and concert halls around the world, “Candide” may be as complicated as it is beloved.Matthew Newlin plays Candide and Nikola Hillebrand plays Cunegonde in the production.David Payr for The New York TimesThe MusikTheater an der Wien, in Vienna, is among the latest companies to take on “Candide.” Starting next month, it will perform the so-called concert version, first staged in 1989 at the Barbican Center in London. This version uses a narrator, much like Voltaire’s satirical 1759 tale, to guide the topsy-turvy story of Candide, an innocent and perpetually optimistic young man — and the characters he encounters along the way, including Cunegonde, his love interest, and the bumbling Dr. Pangloss — in the aftermath of a version of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755.This “Candide,” running for nine performances from Jan. 17 to Feb. 3, also arrives on the heels of “Maestro,” a new film directed by Bradley Cooper, who also portrays Bernstein at his zenith as both composer and conductor. For many of the people involved with the operetta in Vienna, a city where he is still held in high esteem — a street was named for him in 1995, five years after his death — it is a fitting moment to celebrate a composer and his work.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?  More