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    ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’ Review: Revenge of the Broadway Nerds

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    The history of movable type is a terrible idea for a show. Which is why it’s so on brand for this satire of theater and its eternal hopefuls.I know we could all use a good laugh nowadays. But would you settle for a thousand chuckles?Because that’s what “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is offering. In the two-man, 20-character skit of a show that opened Thursday evening on Broadway, the jokes are abundant, interchangeable and lightweight: comedy as packing peanuts.If that suggests an inconsequential payload, well, perhaps consequential was not what the writers, Scott Brown and Anthony King, and the director, Alex Timbers, were after. Silliness crossed with satire seems to be their target, and with the help of two expert farceurs, Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, they do hit the silliness bull’s-eye. The satire, I’m not so sure.But let’s enjoy what we can. Gad plays Bud Davenport and Rannells is Doug Simon, loserish 40-something co-workers at a nursing home in New Jersey. Bitten by the Broadway bug, they decide to collaborate on a musical, despite a rudimentary knowledge of the genre and an advanced lack of talent. When Bud, the sweaty, impulsive one, inherits money from an uncle who recently started (and then suddenly stopped) hang gliding, they get their chance: They rent the James Earl Jones Theater for a bare-bones reading in hopes of acquiring a backer. Doug, the button-down one with the toggle-switch smile, chips in by selling his parents’ house.What we see on the stage of the Jones is the deliberately horrible result. Bud has written the music and Doug the book (and both of them the lyrics) for a show about the 15th-century German inventor who gives the show its title. Having discovered from a Google search that reliable information about Gutenberg is “scant,” Bud and Doug are relieved of the responsibility to historical truth that is apparently so burdensome to the creators of most biomusicals. About the inventor of movable type, they can make everything — not just most of it — up.So their Gutenberg is, counterfactually, a “wine presser” in the nonexistent town of Schlimmer; his wine press is what inspires his printing press. (“I’m gonna take the grapes out and put letters in,” he sings. “Put letters where them grapes have been.”) But a mad monk who is not a fan of literacy denounces the new technology and leads the townsfolk to burn its inventor at the stake. A familiar moral is drawn from that fake history: “Gutenberg’s death did not stop his dream,” a laborer steps out of time to tell us.Or rather, Doug does, because he and Bud, having spent all their money on the rental of the theater, were unable to afford a cast. Instead, with the help of 99 custom-printed trucker hats to identify the dramatis personae, and another 25 that become a kind of puppet chorus line, they narrate the show and play all the characters in it. These include Dead Baby, Beef Fat Trimmer, Feces, Two Drunks, Antisemitic Flower Girl and of course the printer’s love interest, a wench named Helvetica. Her big number (sung by Bud, petting his imaginary tresses) is “I Can’t Read.”Rannells and Gad are expert farceurs, but the show’s silliness eventually wears itself out.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGad and Rannells, a Mutt and Jeff team since they starred in “The Book of Mormon” in 2011, couldn’t be better. Gad’s weird combination of bluster and insecurity (he twitches a lot) makes Bud almost two-dimensional; Rannells, with his golden retriever gloss and whirring-computer energy, takes Doug most of the way from conceit to character. Together they land every joke.But with more than two hours of can-you-bottom-this yucks, it’s exhausting work — for them and for us. As a distraction, Timbers provides innumerable bits of clever stage business, seldom involving anything fancier than mime, sound effects and simple props. At one point the two men, just by switching hats and poses, somehow perform a four-part chorale. At another, Gutenberg’s big moment of inspiration is capped with the firing of what you might call a confetti popper, except that “confetti” implies plural. Here there is approximately one confett.Even so, the nifty bits soon start to seem compensatory. (When in doubt, hit the big red “Fog” button.) Even the hats wear out their welcome as we wait for a turn in the story that will have some meaningful effect on the cheery, woebegone souls who wear them.That turn never comes. Despite the arrival of a third character played at most performances by a guest star — Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Groff and F. Murray Abraham so far among them — Bud and Doug are still the same sad sacks at the end as they were at the beginning. Perhaps that wouldn’t be a problem if the show were just 45 minutes long, as it was in its original one-act incarnation, at the Upright Citizens Brigade in 2003. (By 2006, when it ran for a few months Off Broadway, it had grown a second act.) Pythonesque sketch comedy thrives in a tight, humble frame.Without it, the silliness wears itself out. And since the printing press story was never more than a beaten-to-death MacGuffin, that leaves “Gutenberg! The Musical!” as just another satire of musical theater and its eternal hopefuls. Here the problem is not excess but triteness; the tropes of sincere incompetence and pathetic ambition are too familiar, if expertly carried out. They have been flogged so much — and often more wittily, in musicals like “[title of show]” — that they do not respond much to the whip anymore.This problem partly stems from what may have been a deliberate form-fails-function choice to put nothing onstage that would seem more skillful than what Bud and Doug could have written themselves. So the songs, accompanied by a trio called the Middlesex Six, are never more than the dittyish retreads you might expect from an untrained doodler like Bud. And aside from the jokes, which exist only outside of the “Gutenberg” story, and at the expense of the two men within it, this Broadway musical’s book might as well be Doug’s.For better or worse, that’s the writers’ premise — “We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King told Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. And you can’t say that premise isn’t maintained with discipline from top to bottom: the dollar-store stage set by Scott Pask, the clumsy high school movement by Nancy Renee Braun and especially the on-the-nose costumes by Emily Rebholz. Gad in a dad tie and Rannells with his argyle sweater vest tucked into his cuffed pants are somehow funny without further elaboration.Alas, everything else does get elaborated: “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff,” King also told The Times.Fair enough, but two hours is a tad long for lovemaking. If I cannot therefore give “Gutenberg! The Musical!” my heart, I’ll at least give it a confett.Gutenberg! The Musical!Through Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; gutenbergbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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      Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad Tackle Another Book (Not Mormon)

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      Twelve years after opening “The Book of Mormon,” the two actors — and good friends — return with “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Josh Gad still remembers the first time he and Andrew Rannells met, in June 2010 in a Los Angeles audition suite. No matter what Gad did during their scenes together, Rannells didn’t laugh. Not once.Rannells was auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical from the creators of “South Park.” Gad, then a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” had long been attached. The producers wanted a celebrity opposite him, and they’d invited several to these tryouts. Rannells, a replacement actor in “Hairspray” and “Jersey Boys,” was not remotely famous. Confronted with Gad’s cyclone energy, he chose stillness.“I was so intimidated. And it really upset me,” Gad said, over dinner at Chez Josephine, a theater district mainstay where Rannells, in younger days, used to work the coat check. Gad turned to Rannells. “I had that Tony locked until you walked in the door. And I still had a grudge because you beat me out for ‘Jersey Boys.’” (It was unclear if Gad was joking. Then again, Gad is almost always joking.)“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser. Both men were nominated for a Tony Award and both men lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for “Catch Me If You Can.” Somewhere along the way, they became close friends, which was apparent over dinner, a symphony of bits, riffs and callbacks between bites of tuna tartare and duck breast. They had ordered identical meals and identical Diet Cokes.Rannells, 45, has spent his post “Mormon” years in other Broadway shows and on television (“Girls,” “Black Monday,” “Girls5Eva”). Gad, 42, has since become a voice-over luminary (“Frozen,” Frozen 2,” “Central Park”). Now they are reuniting, one block south and one block east of their “Mormon” haunts, in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” which begins previews at the James Earl Jones Theater on Sept. 15.“Gutenberg!” directed by Alex Timbers and written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, is a farcical, largehearted duet about a pair of nursing home workers, Bud and Doug, bitten grievously by the Broadway bug. Using an inheritance and the proceeds from the sale of a home, they rent a Broadway theater for one night, hoping to find a producer for their deeply misguided and tragically under-researched original musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and the publisher of the Gutenberg Bible.“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTwo old friends finding a vehicle for a Broadway return has the whiff of a vanity project. But this deliriously silly show, in which the two actors play dozens of characters and wear a combined 107 baseball caps, demands that vanity be left at the stage door.Over dinner, Gad joked (probably!) that when Timbers had sent him a photo of those 107 hats, each inscribed with the name of one of the show’s characters, he’d tried to back out.“It was too late,” Rannells said.“I know,” Gad said. “I read my contract last night.”The day after dinner, at a rehearsal space at the Alvin Ailey Extension, Gad and Rannells were stumbling through (with an emphasis, perhaps, on stumbling) the second act of “Gutenberg!” In a scene at the top of the act, as Bud and Doug introduced themselves to the audience, Rannells hit Gad in the face, perhaps accidentally.“That’s assault,” Gad said.“You walked into it,” Rannells replied. Moments later they were standing cheek to cheek, singing spooky oo-oo-oos.Rannells was wearing a shirt and shorts in complementary greens, his wavy hair reliably perfect. Gad was all in black. He was also drinking an iced coffee. Given his typical energy levels, this seemed like a bad idea. He had burst into the rehearsal room after the lunch break singing “Unchained Melody” with heavy vibrato. He also riffed on a line from “Sunset Boulevard”: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”“No,” Rannells said. He hugged Gad. Or maybe he gave him a mild version of the Heimlich maneuver. This is more or less their way, with Gad as an avatar of chaos and Rannells in smirking control.Casey Nicholaw, the director of “The Book of Mormon,” had noted this contrast. “Josh’s comedy basically just says, ‘Watch me. Love me.’ Josh is just out there,” he said. “And Andrew’s is sneaky. Andrew knows how to just hold himself with grace and dignity and then just go for it.”Each has a different process, a different style, a different affect. Collaborators I spoke with compared them to famous comic duos — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Gad cited “The Odd Couple.”“I definitely am more anxious than he is,” Gad said over dinner. “I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to learning dances. I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to getting lines right.” Gad said that he is also a hypochondriac and that sometimes, offstage during “The Book of Mormon,” Rannells would suggest possible diseases for him.“He’s got a mean streak,” Gad said. “I can say that now.” Rannells, sipping his Diet Coke, didn’t deny it.Despite that mean streak, a friendship endures. Nikki M. James, their “Mormon” co-star, recalled watching it begin. “Onstage, they played very different people who end up becoming each other’s best friends,” she said in a recent interview. “That camaraderie and friendship and love and sense of family, it was very clear offstage as well.”That show left them inextricably linked. “When I die, if I get an obituary in The New York Times, Josh’s name will also be in it,” Rannells said, somewhat darkly.And after they departed “The Book of Mormon,” each for a quickly canceled sitcom (“1600 Penn” for Gad, “The New Normal” for Rannells), they would often talk about how they might work together again. A revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” was mooted. So was a revival of “The Producers.” About four years ago Timbers (“Moulin Rouge,” “Beetlejuice”) had another idea.Brown and King (“Beetlejuice”) had first conceived “Gutenberg!” more than 20 years ago. Back then, King was a musical theater intern at Manhattan Theater Club. Tasked with sifting through the slush pile, he found himself listening to home-recorded tapes and CDs of new musicals, most of them sung through by the author or authors, most of them hopeless. King thought that he and Brown could write something just as bad. Worse even.“We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King said.But what began as a way to prank King’s boss evolved into something just a little more sincere. As King put it, “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff.”In 2003, Brown and King performed a 45-minute version of the show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. It ran for about two years. With encouragement from a producer, they wrote a second act and took it to London. The show that emerged was never about the real Gutenberg — Bud and Doug have only the vaguest ideas of how movable type and medieval history work. Instead it was a loving lampoon of Broadway wishes and tropes.Gad and Rannells’s characters in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” hope to find a producer for their musical about the inventor of movable type.Adam Powell for The New York TimesBut for the Off Broadway premiere in 2006, directed by Timbers, the creators stepped out in favor of actual actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos, which made it feel more like a real show and less like a goofball routine written by two starving artist roommates.There had been conversations about moving the show to Broadway. Those conversations had never been especially earnest. Then Timbers slipped Gad the script, hoping that he would share it in turn with Rannells. Which is exactly what happened.With Brown and King and Timbers, the actors met for a reading in workshop in Los Angeles in March 2020, an inauspicious moment for Broadway-bound musicals. The reading went well. To succeed, the friendship between Bud and Doug has to feel ardent, unbreakable. Gad and Rannells had that.So after a delay of about three years, conversations began again. A two-person show felt overwhelming, especially one in which the actors also had to serve as their own crew, moving each prop and set piece. Gad described it as “more intimate, and yet much more insane than even ‘Mormon.’” Still, he and Rannells agreed.In rehearsal, that insanity was in evidence. The two men were playing not only Bud (Gad), the composer, and Doug (Rannells), the book writer, but also every other baseball-capped character. And they had to play them with all the naïveté and enthusiasm that newbie writers would bring, but also with the necessary skills of a practiced musical theater performer, because bad acting and bad singing aren’t funny for long.“You have to commit to doing fully lived-in characters by performers who otherwise would not be on Broadway,” Gad said.“It’s literally a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat,” Rannells sighed.Hats aside, they seemed to be having a pretty good time, particularly during one sequence where Rannells reenacted an eagle attacking a sea gull, while Gad, playing a pubescent girl, did a sexy, scary skeleton dance.It wasn’t all skeletons and sea gulls. Opening a Broadway show is stressful. “I think our actual human sweat will give us away,” Rannells said. “I’m going to be a real mess 10 minutes into the show.” Opening a Broadway show with a best friend in accidental smacking distance is stressful in a different way. But it’s also pretty nice. “Gutenberg!” is about two characters supporting each other, through thick and thin and third reprise. And as Gad and Rannells tell it, that tracks for the actors, too.“There are times where I want to fall down and just cry at how tiring the show is,” Gad said. “Then I look at Rannells and I’m like, ‘OK, he’s going to keep me upright.’”He turned to Rannells, adding, “I’m so happy you got ‘Jersey Boys’ now. Now I actually think they made the right choice.” More

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      Everybody Dance Now! ‘Here Lies Love’ Dictates Your Moves.

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      Engaging viewers’ bodies is central to this Broadway musical, a rare production that sets its audience in motion on the dance floor.Like many Broadway musicals, “Here Lies Love” involves a lot of dancing. Notably less common: how much moving is done by the audience.It isn’t unheard-of for a musical to tell the story of a dictator’s wife, but this one, with songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, is distinctly focused on its subject’s dancing habits. Imelda Marcos — wife of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines — was fond of discothèques. Accordingly, the Broadway Theater has been half-converted into a club on the model of Studio 54. There is a giant disco ball and a D.J., and the orchestra seats have been stripped out so that up to 300 members of the audience can experience the 90-minute show while crowded on a dance floor.As at a disco, those standing can dance as they like. But they are also herded by wranglers in magenta jumpsuits with light-up wands like the ones used to direct taxiing airplanes. Wheeled platforms and runways are regularly rearranged around the floor area, displacing audience members. One cruciform platform is aptly called the Blender. It churns the crowd like batter.The rest of the audience is seated, above the dance floor and back into the depths of the mezzanine. But these viewers move, too, encouraged by the D.J. to join the standing folks in a simple line dance, picking up the moves from cast members spread throughout the theater on more platforms and catwalks. A lot of the story action happens up there, too.“The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual,” Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, said. “And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”The choreographer Annie-B Parson: “The engagement of the audience’s body is highly unusual. And when you engage the body, you also engage the mind and the heart.”Naima Green for The New York Times“Here Lies Love” has developed over more than a decade in various incarnations, but dance and audience motion have been at the center of the conception from the start, said Alex Timbers, the director: “We didn’t want it to be interactive, with people pulled up onstage and feeling embarrassed. We wanted the audience to be moving as a unit so no one feels singled out.”The idea is to cast the audience in the drama as extras, Timbers said. They aren’t just dancers at the club. They are guests at the Marcos’s wedding; the public at political rallies and election parties; witnesses to the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the Marcos’s rival; participants in the People Power Revolution that overthrew the dictator in 1986.“Your journey changes, just like America’s relationship with the Philippines,” Timbers said. “After Aquino’s assassination, you feel a little complicit in having danced at Imelda’s wedding.”Similarly, the D.J. telling everyone what to do is somewhat dictatorial. When Marcos institutes martial law, no audience member “is getting tortured or anything,” Timbers said, “but there is a metaphor at play physically.”“You watch the audience applaud,” Parson said, “and you watch them wonder why they’re applauding. It’s pretty Brechtian.”Development of the show has been a trial-and-error experiment in how to get audiences to move as the creative team wants. “You don’t have the same audience every night,” Timbers said, “so you’re looking at trends, at human nature.”Elaborate charts delineate how the wranglers can redistribute the crowd effectively and safely without being distracting. And since the people in the mezzanine face in one direction while those on the floor face in several, directing everyone to “step to the right” in a line dance isn’t a simple matter. (Well-placed performers and video screens help.)Parson, who has worked with Byrne on concerts tours and on his recent Broadway show, “American Utopia,” comes from the world of postmodern dance. She said that while Timbers “has a beautiful sense of the body and space,” he and she had opposing, if complementary, attitudes about the fact that no audience member of “Here Lies Love” could see everything.The director of “Here Lies Love,” Alex Timbers, said the idea was to cast the audience in the drama as extras.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Alex worked really hard to share all the story material with everyone in the theater,” she said, whereas she was thinking about the composer John Cage’s philosophical idea that every seat in the house is perfect. “It becomes about perception. I love the experience of watching someone watch things that I might not be seeing. You feel things in your body that you may not see.”It’s a question of perspective, and not the only one. Many reviews of “Here Lies Love” and public objections to the show have focused on how the glamour and play of the club atmosphere rub against the show’s critique of the Marcoses.Parson said the context of disco — “an ecstatic dance form that tips quickly into despair” — is intentionally ambiguous. “Dancing is relative. You can use it for ill or for the greater good.”Imelda’s use of dance, what became known as her handbag diplomacy, “was embodied statesmanship,” Parson said. “She didn’t put a table between her and Nixon or Castro. She asked them to dance. She wasn’t a great dancer but that gave her a lot of power.”At one point, cast members act this out, wearing masks of famous political leaders. At other points, the choreography borrows a few of Imelda’s signature moves: circling her eye with two fingers, tapping the tops of her butterfly sleeves.The line dance, Parson said, was designed to be “fun and easy, something you could do in a chair if space was tight.” (“The Philippines have a really muscular tradition of line dancing,” she added, noting that the line dancing performed by the all-Filipino cast at parties is much more intricate.)Much of the choreography for the cast is more complicated, but mostly in tone, Parson said. In the title song, for example, Imelda tells the audience to remember her for love. “But let’s talk about the families she destroyed,” Parson said. “It’s a beautiful song, but it is ironic, so that’s how I choreographed it, with swinging umbrellas and sternum to the ceiling. You can’t take it straight.”Timothy Matthew Flores, who plays Aquino’s son along with other ensemble roles, said the detail of Parson’s choreography — “every single movement has a meaning” — made it more difficult than flashier and harder-hitting dance he’s done before. And running all around the large theater is “90 minutes of cardio.”But getting the audience out of their seats and dancing? That’s just fun, Flores said. “They start off shy and then they end up having a really good time. You can see them thinking, ‘Wow, this is not like any other Broadway show.’” More

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      Review: Dancing With Dictators in David Byrne’s ‘Here Lies Love’

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      A new Broadway musical tells the disturbing story of Imelda Marcos by putting her, and the audience, in a disco.It’s the applause — including my own — I find troubling.Not that there isn’t plenty to praise in “Here Lies Love,” the immersive disco-bio-musical about Imelda Marcos that opened on Thursday at the Broadway Theater. The infernally catchy songs by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, performed by a tireless and inspired all-Filipino cast, will have you clapping whether you want to or not. Their chunky beats, abetted by insistent dance motivators, may even prompt you to bop at your seat — if you have one.Because the real star of this show is the astonishing architectural transformation of the theater itself, by the set designer David Korins. Opened in 1924 as a movie palace, more lately the home of “King Kong” and “West Side Story,” the Broadway has now been substantially gutted, its nearly 1,800 seats reduced to about 800, with standing room for another 300 in the former orchestra section and a 42-inch disco ball dead center.The folks upstairs, if not the mostly younger standees below, will surely recognize the visual reference to Studio 54, the celebrity nightclub where Marcos, the first lady of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, danced away the last decade of her reign while impoverishing her people. That she would probably adore the over-emphatic atmosphere of “Here Lies Love” — with its lurid lighting by Justin Townsend, skittering projections by Peter Nigrini and earsplitting sound by M.L. Dogg and Cody Spencer — is, however, equivocal praise.For here we are, at the place where irony and meta-messaging form a theatrical-historical knot that can’t be picked apart. Which is why, as you clap, you should probably wonder what for.Is it for Imelda (Arielle Jacobs), the beauty queen who rose from “hand-me-downs and scraps” to become the fashion-plate wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos? Is it for the ruthless Ferdinand himself (Jose Llana)? (His landslide election in 1965 elicited some Pavlovian cheers the night I saw the show.) Or is it for Ninoy Aquino (Conrad Ricamora), the opposition leader who was Imelda’s former beau? (Having spurned her in their youth, he was later assassinated by forces thought to be close to Ferdinand’s regime.) All get equivalent star treatment here.Seating at the Broadway Theater was reduced from 1,800 to about 800, with standing room for another 300, to create a Studio 54-like atmosphere, complete with a 42-inch disco ball in the center of the house.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe confusion of sympathies is just where Byrne and the director Alex Timbers want us. Avoiding the near-hagiography of “Evita” and yet unwilling to bank a commercial production on a totally hateful character, they aim for a middle ground that doesn’t exist, yet mostly hit it anyway. Their Imelda is a victim of poverty and mistreatment, dim despite her cunning and innocent by reason of inanity. When Filipinos fully turn against her during the People Power revolution of 1986, she is more mystified than crushed. “Why don’t you love me?” she sings.We know the answer: The string of her outrages, even apart from her husband’s, seems literally endless. She did not retire from public office until 2019, and her son, Bongbong, is now president.But “Here Lies Love” — the title taken from an epitaph she proposed for herself — tempers the atrocities with the pleasure of its songs. Jacobs, a Broadway Jasmine in “Aladdin,” gets the catchiest ones, and delivers them well, if without the emotional nuance Ruthie Ann Miles brought to the role a decade earlier when the show had a developmental run at the Public Theater.To be fair, the material steers as far from emotion as possible, no matter how many times the word “love” is used. Byrne’s characteristic idiom — which feeds disco, folk and pop through an art rock filter — is too cool for that, and his lyrics, perhaps because they are based on public utterances of the real-life figures, reject psychology almost entirely. They are often thus too banal to serve the usual purpose of songs in musicals; instead of developing character internally they suggest it externally with a torrent of catchphrases. “It takes a woman to do a man’s job,” Imelda sings blankly upon assuming power from the sickly Ferdinand.Without a vivid inner life to inflect such clichés, it’s hard to wring anything from them except a cringe. The beamish Ricamora and the scowling Llana, returning from the earlier production, get around the problem with their charisma, and Lea Salonga, in the cameo role of Aquino’s mother, turns “Just Ask the Flowers,” sung at Ninoy’s funeral, into a powerful if perplexing anthem through sheer vocal bravura.Conrad Ricamora, center, as Ninoy Aquino, performing on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while sweeping the audience into new configurations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, a musical not centered on feelings is a strange thing. Where another show might attempt to squeeze the relationship between Imelda and Ninoy for drama, it is merely a lump of undigested fact here. And Imelda’s infamous collection of state-financed shoes goes unmentioned, which is like mounting “Evita” without the Dior dress.To compensate, or double down, Timbers emphasizes pure pageantry in his staging. The actors often perform on an array of moving platforms that transport the action to various parts of the theater while incidentally sweeping the standees into new configurations. (Guides in pink jumpsuits with airport-style light wands keep them from getting mowed down.) You are left to draw your own conclusions about how crowds, whether in Manila or Manhattan, respond to being pushed around for too long and for apparently arbitrary reasons. There’s a reason affiliations and uprisings are often called movements.No surprise then that the most expressive element in “Here Lies Love” (along with Clint Ramos’s costumes, which also move beautifully) is the choreography by Annie-B Parson. Based on small hand gestures and large traffic patterns, it suggests a fuller spectrum of human engagement than the otherwise narrowly focused and sometimes mechanical production achieves.Is it wrong to seek that engagement more fully? (Or as Imelda sings: “Is it a sin to love too much?”) For most of its 90 intermission-less minutes, “Here Lies Love” finesses the question, preferring to be treated as anything — an art object, a dance party — besides what it is. In that way, it recalls Byrne’s Broadway concert “American Utopia,” on which Timbers and Parson also collaborated. But that show, which had no story, needed only to be sleek and enjoyable to score its points.“Here Lies Love” bets that glamour can make up for narrative — or, rather, that in a show about the dangers of political demagogy, glamour itself is the narrative. It’s a case of form follows function into the fire. We are drawn to cultural and political excitement in much the same, often dangerous way.Perhaps the irony of making a musical about that is more viscerally appreciable down on the dance floor. It was for me at the Public, where almost everyone had to stand and be part of the story, not observers of it. (There were only 42 seats.) And perhaps, 10 years later, with our own politics looking a lot more like the Marcoses’, no one can afford to keep a distance.In any case, on Broadway, it’s not until the gorgeous last song, “God Draws Straight,” that the material matches the movement in a way that reaches the balcony. Led by Moses Villarama, and based on comments by eyewitnesses to the peaceful 1986 revolution, it acknowledges the moral superiority of its real heroes — the Philippine people — in the only way a musical can: by giving it beautiful voice. Finally, it’s OK to applaud.Here Lies LoveAt the Broadway Theater, Manhattan; herelieslovebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      For Filipino Audiences, ‘Here Lies Love’ Offers Emotional Rip Currents

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      The disco balls were spinning, the club music was pulsing, and on the dance floor, several Filipino audience members were near tears.It was a Saturday night, and at the Broadway Theater, “Here Lies Love,” the David Byrne-Fatboy Slim musical about the rise and fall of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, the former first couple of the Philippines, was preparing for its Broadway opening on July 20. In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers, reeled in by the chance to see their national — and in some cases, their family — history told onstage, close enough for them to literally touch.“I’ve never been in a play where I have a personal connection” to the story, said Earl Delfin, a 35-year-old Manhattanite. “I felt represented on a New York stage for the first time.”He got emotional in the opening scenes, he added. “And of course I danced.”Arielle Jacobs as Imelda Marcos, whose journey from beauty pageant contestant to wife of a despot is the focus of the show.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Here Lies Love,” which opened to critical raves and sold-out crowds at the Public Theater downtown in 2013, arrives on Broadway after sojourns in London and Seattle, each time expanding its house and fine tuning its immersive staging. But only now has it added a fully Filipino cast — the first-ever on Broadway, organizers say. Also new are a cadre of Filipino producers, including the Tony winner Lea Salonga, the Pulitzer-winning writer Jose Antonio Vargas, the comedian Jo Koy and the Grammy-winning musician H.E.R., along with investors from Manila.“It only felt responsible, to fully engage with the motherland,” said the costume designer and creative consultant Clint Ramos, a native of Cebu, Philippines, who has worked on the show since its inception. He is now also a producer.“Having cultural capital from the motherland, but also financial capital from the motherland, it feels like the authorship and ownership of the show are holding hands very tightly. And that’s a great feeling,” he said.The narrative framework of the show has not changed: It still harnesses the gloss of a discothèque — as first lady, Imelda was a denizen of Studio 54 — to reflect the Marcoses’ dizzying rise to power, and the glittery allure of privilege and wealth that led the couple to spend their nation into massive debt, to live lavishly as their constituents suffered.The production has a cultural and community liaison who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, the show attracts attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesArielle Jacobs, a new addition to the cast, plays Imelda, whose journey from naïve beauty pageant contestant to sentimental megalomaniac — “Why Don’t You Love Me?” goes a signature song — is the focus of the story. Jose Llana reprises Ferdinand from the Public; his path from charismatic leader to presidential despot is shorter. “If they want to boo Marcos,” Llana said of audiences, “then I think I did my job right.”There is no book; the action is driven by Byrne’s soaring tunes (with beats by Fatboy Slim) and by the exuberant choreography of Annie-B Parson, Byrne’s frequent collaborator. A D.J. (Moses Villarama) acts as an emcee.Every day, Ramos said, as the creative team worked out the massive lighting rigs and costume transitions, they also asked the question: “Are we looking at history correctly here?”The challenge — engineered by Byrne, who hoped that the nightlife setting would give audiences a taste of the limitlessness of power — is formidable. “How do you combine joy with tragedy?” said Alex Timbers, the director, in a joint interview with Ramos.In place of a stage, the Broadway Theater was redesigned to create a dance club. Moving platforms carry the performers, with standing theatergoers surrounding them on the floor; catwalks bring the actors within arms reach for those seated above. The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies — moments of civilian joy and swept-along fellowship that are broadcast on giant screens around the space, alongside darker, real news footage and transcripts.Audience members making the Laban sign, a Filipino hand gesture popularized by Ninoy Aquino, Ferdinand Marcos’s chief political rival.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesElizer Caballero, a fan who came from San Francisco, was practically vibrating with delight as he sang and bopped along to the score. The experience of being surrounded by the actors as they told this native story was almost surreal — he felt like part of the show — “but it’s also very poignant,” he said. “Especially for a Filipino American, it’s best to be on the floor. It adds more depth.”An untranslated moment when Imelda curses at Ferdinand in Tagalog has gotten a more consistent laugh on Broadway than it ever did downtown, cast members said. (The production has a cultural and community liaison, Giselle Töngi, who plans Filipino community events; even on regular nights, it attracted attendees who had direct dealings with the Marcos and Aquino clans, organizers said.)Salonga, the first Asian woman to win a Tony (in 1991, for “Miss Saigon”) is stepping in as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s chief political rival, in a guest spot this summer. It is the first time in her long career she has played a role written as Filipina.Seeing a production of “Here Lies Love” a few years ago surfaced visceral memories of her childhood in Manila, during the Marcoses’ reign. Performing in it felt overwhelming. “I’m slamming into history,” Salonga said.Researching the part, she spoke to friends in the Aquino family. (Corazon C. Aquino, Benigno’s widow, succeeded Marcos as president.) In rehearsals for her number, she thought, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to keep my emotions from overtaking me as I try to sing the song?” she said in a phone interview. “I had friends texting me, saying, How on earth are you going to keep from crying when you do this?”Attendees of Filipino descent have described experiencing an intense personal connection at seeing their history depicted onstage.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJustin J Wee for The New York TimesFor second-generation Filipino Americans, whose families prioritized assimilation, learning the story of their homeland has been a different kind of revelation. “Growing up, the only thing I really knew about Imelda was her shoe collection,” Jacobs said. “Getting in touch with this part of the Filipino culture, and the resilience of the Filipino people — all of that has been an awakening for me.”“Here Lies Love” is arriving on Broadway in a political and social landscape that’s vastly shifted since its premiere in the Obama era. The rapid unraveling of democracy it depicts is close at hand, the world over, Timbers and Ramos noted. Ferdinand’s habit of exaggerating or outright fabricating his successes is part of the autocrat playbook. Even his recorded dalliances with a starlet have a familiar ring. Ferdinand and Imelda’s son, known as Bongbong, is currently president of the Philippines. (After her husband’s death in 1989, Imelda, now 94, returned to politics and served three terms as a congresswoman.)Developing the project with Byrne, the protean former Talking Head, the creative team took pains not to glamorize Ferdinand, who imposed martial law from 1972 to 1981, and whose regime carried out mass arrests and silenced critics. The assassination of Aquino, at the airport when he returned from exile in the U.S. in 1983, served as a turning point to galvanize opposition against the Marcoses, and is an emotional rip current in “Here Lies Love.”In previews, it has drawn a growing stream of Filipino American theatergoers.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesConrad Ricamora, who has played the boyish Aquino (known as Ninoy) in three of the four productions, understood his legacy quickly. On Broadway, audiences make the Laban sign — a hand gesture like an inverted L; the word means “fight” — that Ninoy popularized. “If you look at people who do heroic things throughout history, they are only able to do them because they are deeply in touch with their humanity and the humanity of others,” Ricamora said.The show has still been criticized for putting a couple known for their ruthless corruption in the spotlight, and for minimizing Imelda’s political prowess. (A website aims to contextualize the country’s history.) In a statement, the producers said their new, binational group came together “in a time of necessary and welcome assessment of who tells what stories,” and that having people with lived experiences of this era further imbued the show “with authenticity.”For the nearly two dozen cast members — eight of whom are making their Broadway debuts — it is a rare chance to commune, and revisit, together, a past that is hardly in the rearview mirror for some of them.Ramos calls himself “a martial law baby,” raised under Marcos’s most brutal period. He was also there in February 1986, a school kid “on top of a tank,” he said, when the four-day protests known as the People Power Revolution swept the couple out of office, peacefully. “I experienced the whole arc of the regime,” he said. He came to the U.S. in the late ’90s, for grad school.Llana’s family landed in New York in 1979, when he was 3; his parents were student activists who had fled martial law. “Me being a part of this show for the past 10 years has really been cathartic,” he said, “because it wasn’t something necessarily that my parents talked about.”The choreography encourages audience members to interact with the cast, hip-swiveling beside them in line dances, and playing the part of the faithful at political rallies.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesWhen he first heard about the show, he hoped to play Aquino: “I thought nothing would make my parents prouder.” Instead he was asked to read for Ferdinand. It was, he said, an awkward conversation with his family when he got the part, and he made it known to the creative team that he would walk away if the production flattered a dictator.Still, he said, as an actor he needs to find the humanity in his characters. “And I think maybe that’s where sometimes people start criticizing us, is that we’re humanizing them. But you have to humanize people if you want to hold them accountable.”Llana’s castmates call him “kuya,” which means older brother or older male cousin in Tagalog — a term of endearment. For him, even after so many years with the show, the addition of Filipino producers was deeply meaningful. “It made me feel safe,” he said, “knowing that the Filipinos were in charge, that we could just do our jobs” as artists.Like Salonga, he has played a variety of ethnicities, just about none of them Filipino.“I feel like I owe all of those ethnicities an apology — like, I’m sorry I got cast,” Salonga said. “But things were very different at the time.”Even putting a complex, layered story like this on Broadway — staged like a dance party, no less — could serve as inspiration and empowerment, she hoped. “I want to see other communities of color be able to look at ‘Here Lies Love’ and go, ‘We can do that. We have these stories that we are able to tell. We are going to be able to do this.’” More

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      Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells to Reunite in ‘Gutenberg! The Musical!’

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      The pair, who were the original co-stars of “The Book of Mormon,” will return to Broadway this fall in a two-man musical comedy.Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells, whose careers were transformed when they co-starred as hapless missionaries in “The Book of Mormon,” will reunite this fall in a comedic two-hander, “Gutenberg! The Musical!,” that has been staged around the world but will now arrive on Broadway for the first time.“There is no bigger passion as an actor than being on a stage,” Gad, who has been working in film and television for the last decade, said in a joint telephone interview with Rannells. “It’s how I got my start, and I’ve missed it.”“Gutenberg” is a musical that satirizes musicals; it is about two aspiring musical theater writers who decide to write a musical about Johannes Gutenberg without knowing all that much either about him (he was a Renaissance inventor, best known for his contributions to the history of printing presses) or about musical theater. The show is set at a backers’ audition — a run-through staged for potential investors — but in this case, the artists have so little money they have to perform every role themselves.“‘Gutenberg’ is very much a love letter to musical theater,” Rannells said. “We’re playing these two characters who have very passionately written a show without a ton of historical information and without a lot of skill, but a lot of passion and a lot of heart and one shot to find some Broadway producers to help them put this show on.”The musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, began its life in the comedy world, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where King was the artistic director, and then was further developed at the New York Musical Festival. It had runs in London and Off Broadway starting in 2006, and has since been produced in Australia, France, Korea, Spain, and around the U.S.; Brown and King, who have been friends since childhood, went on to write the book for the musical adaptation of “Beetlejuice.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 15, to open Oct. 12, and to close Jan. 28 at the James Earl Jones Theater. The director will be Alex Timbers, who also directed the 2006 Off Broadway production; Timbers later won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!,” and he has also worked in comedy, including as the director of “Oh, Hello” on Broadway.“I love this show, and it gets seen and performed all over the world, but isn’t really known in New York,” Timbers said. “It straddles the play and comedy worlds, and I feel like there’s an audience for that.”Timbers and Gad had been talking for some time about finding a way to collaborate; Gad said they had discussed the possibility of doing a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” In 2020, Timbers suggested “Gutenberg,” and Gad loved the script, which he in turn shared with Rannells; the three did a first reading together in March of 2020, days before theaters were shut down for the coronavirus pandemic, and are now returning to the project.“Broadway is rebounding, and it is due for an even bigger rebound,” Gad said. “I was watching the Tony Awards, and I was blown away by how many productions I was so excited to go see on my next trip to New York, and to be a part of that — this incredible comeback that Broadway is long overdue post-pandemic — is a really exciting opportunity. And more than anything, I think that people miss laughing.”The lead producer of “Gutenberg” is the Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that has become increasingly active on Broadway; among the other producers is Bad Robot Live, which is a new division of a company co-founded by the filmmaker J.J. Abrams, and which has a partnership with the Ambassador Theater Group. More

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      ‘Here Lies Love,’ an Imelda Marcos Disco Musical, Will Play Broadway

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      The immersive dance show, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will arrive this summer after a decade of productions Off Broadway and in London and Seattle.“Here Lies Love,” a wild, immersive, disco-driven dance musical about Imelda Marcos, the extravagant and colorful former first lady of the Philippines, will make its long-anticipated trip to Broadway this summer.The show, with downtown roots and dance-floor audiences, will be an unusual fit for Broadway: Its animating idea has been that both the actors and the audience are on their feet, circling one another as they move throughout the production.A sung-through musical written by the pop musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, “Here Lies Love” began its public life in 2007 as an embryonic multimedia song cycle presented at Carnegie Hall. In 2010, Marcos listened to part of the double album with a New York Times reporter (“I’m flattered; I can’t believe it!” she said).Then came the stage productions: in 2012 at Mass MoCA, an art museum in the Berkshires; in 2013 at the Public Theater in New York; in 2014 at London’s National Theater and back at the Public for a second engagement; and in 2017 at the Seattle Repertory Theater.Along the way, it has been transforming from a happening into a show, or at least learning how to do both by adding more chairs for patrons who like to watch while seated. The upcoming production will be staged at the Broadway Theater, one of the largest venues on Broadway, although a spokeswoman said that audience capacity had yet to be determined.The producers said in a statement that they planned to “transform the venue’s traditional proscenium floor space into a dance club environment, where audiences will stand and move with the actors,” but promised that “a wide variety of standing and seating options will be available.”The production will be directed by Alex Timbers, who has been with the show through its stage journey; the set is designed by David Korins (“Hamilton”), and the choreographer is Annie-B Parson, who also designed the movement for Byrne’s previous Broadway venture, “American Utopia.”Timbers has some experience with unconventional staging experiments on Broadway. In 2014 he directed a musical adaptation of “Rocky” in which some patrons were reseated during the show to make way for a boxing match, and in 2020 he won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” with some patrons seated at cabaret tables surrounded by the stage action.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on June 17 and to open on July 20, which will make it part of the 2023-24 season. Casting has not been announced.The producers, some of whom have been endeavoring for a decade to bring the show to Broadway, include Hal Luftig, Patrick Catullo, Diana DiMenna, Clint Ramos and Jose Antonio Vargas. Ramos, who is also the show’s costume designer, and Vargas, who is a writer and an immigrant rights advocate, were both born in the Philippines, and the show has hired a Filipino American actress, Giselle Töngi, who is also known as G, as a cultural and community liaison. More

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      Alex Brightman Lays ‘Beetlejuice’ to Rest

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      A concussion nearly derailed the actor’s fan-favorite turn as the madcap, black-and-white striped ghoul. But he recovered in time for the closing show.As Alex Brightman disappeared through the doorway to the Netherworld one last time at the Marquis Theater on Sunday night, his black-and-white-striped Beetlejuice suit enveloped by a cloud of smoke, he uttered a few special parting words:“Goooodbye, Broadway!”And he meant it.“I’m very aware that it really could be the last time I am on Broadway,” said Brightman, 35, who for parts of the past four years has played the ghostly guide to the other side in “Beetlejuice,” the Broadway musical based on the 1988 Tim Burton film about a face-off between a goth girl and a devious demon. “So it’s a humbling experience to be up there and to be able to share and be vulnerable.”After his first entrance of the final show, Brightman was met with a two-minute standing ovation.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesHis farewell wasn’t quite the one he had anticipated. At a Christmas Eve performance, Brightman slammed into the show’s giant sandworm backstage at a full sprint — when a door hadn’t opened, Brightman tried an ill-fated alternate route — leaving him with a concussion.“I didn’t realize what had happened,” he said. “I figured I just banged my head.”Symptoms abruptly surfaced two days later, and after spending the next week nauseous, achy and painfully sensitive to light, he thought he’d played his final performance — maybe ever. (Three of the show’s standby and understudy Beetlejuices, Andrew Kober, Elliott Mattox and Will Blum, filled in while Brightman was out.)“I thought I wasn’t going to recover,” said Brightman, who was funny and lively in the eighth-floor cocktail lounge at the Marriott Marquis hotel before getting into costume for Sunday evening’s performance. “It felt like one long 10- or 11-day sickness in one day.”But things improved about a week ago, he said, and after doing a four-hour rehearsal on Thursday, he got the all-clear to return for the show’s final three evening performances.The 1,602 audience members at the sold-out performance on Sunday night, many of whom sported black-and-white striped suits and green wigs, showered Brightman with appreciation. (Everyone in attendance received a special Playbill with a silver sticker on the cover that read “It’s the Final Showtime.”) It started with his first entrance, when he received two minutes of applause and a standing ovation.Brightman received a Tony Award nomination in 2019 for his performance as Beetlejuice.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I’ve never had that happen before,” said Brightman, who has been in six Broadway shows, earning Tony Award nominations for his role in “Beetlejuice” and as Dewey Finn in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical adaptation of “School of Rock.”Though “Beetlejuice” opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater in April 2019 to mixed reviews (the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “absolutely exhausting”), it became a fan favorite — dozens of them would turn up as Lydia, the Maitlands and, of course, Beetlejuice to compete in the musical’s preshow costume contests. Still, the show was handed a closing notice in December of that year when what the Shubert Organization saw as a potentially lucrative production of “The Music Man” needed its real estate. Then the pandemic happened, and the production shuttered in March 2020.The surging sales before the closure led producers to reopen the show last year at the Marquis Theater in April. But attendance dipped again over the summer, and producers announced in October that the show would close in January after 679 performances. (A national touring production began in December, and there are also coming international versions in Brazil and Japan.)To protect his vocal cords, Brightman creates Beetlejuice’s signature gruff voice using a technique called ventricular fold phonation, in which he vibrates the cartilage in his throat.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBrightman and Elizabeth Teeter, who plays Lydia, paid tribute to the show’s fans, known as “Netherlings,” on Sunday night, holding up signs at the curtain call that read “Hey guys” and “Love you guys!”“This is a show about death that’s actually really a celebration of life,” the show’s director, Alex Timbers, said from the stage after a purple-and-green confetti storm. “And you all have given us life.”Before the show and directly afterward in his dressing room — sweaty and smiling in a white V-neck stained with green and red blotches as his team helped him remove his makeup for the final time — Brightman reflected on parting ways with the ghost with the most, the show’s fervent fan following and what’s next for him (other than, of course, sleeping).These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“This is a show about death that’s actually really a celebration of life,” said Alex Timbers, the show’s director, addressing the house on closing night. “And you all have given us life.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesYou first read the part in 2017. How are you feeling after tonight’s performance?Exhausted. It was very cathartic. I’m thrilled I got to close it after six years.Do you have any lingering effects from the concussion?I still have headaches, but they’re not pounding. I take Aleve. And my doctor said I will probably be prone to more headaches throughout the rest of my life because of it, but nothing too crazy.How important was it to you to make it back for the closing night?I’m not necessarily one of those people that believes in making that miraculous appearance at that last performance because he has to. I value my health, and I want to do more things after this. So running the risk of passing out onstage or reinjuring myself if I wasn’t ready was not in the cards.What has it been like starring in a show with such a devoted fan base?It never, ever gets old. The “Beetlejuice” fans are the warmest fans that I’ve ever encountered in the six Broadway shows I’ve done. It’s a lot of me in there, so for 1,500 people to accept my character in the show and my style of absurdity and comedy and improv is extremely cathartic and emotional.What is it like to spend so long with the same character?The last thing I want to do is be bored with anything I do, and anything this long has that danger, but this part allows me to discover new things not every night, but every minute. I have the ability to be a bit topical, a bit loose — it doesn’t feel like I’m on a track. That’s made it easy to do for six years.The show developed a devoted fan base who call themselves “Netherlings.” They frequently attended shows dressed as “Beetlejuice” characters.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesWhat’s a moment that’s different in every show?There’s a part in the opening number where I have a stand mic and do a Frank Sinatra impression for a “Tip Your Waitress” kind of thing. And in it, there’s space for me to say a couple of things if I want to. The other night, I just screamed “The Kardashians!” and it got a laugh for no reason. And then right after I said, “I can’t keep up with them.” “Gangnam Style!” has also been a popular one.What did your first attempts at the Beetlejuice voice sound like?At my first audition, I was like, “I don’t know how to do a Michael Keaton impression, so let me just try something.” And it went fine, but I paid for it for two days — my voice was on fire.How do you do it now for eight shows a week without damaging your vocal cords?It’s called ventricular fold phonation, and it means you vibrate the cartilage in your throat alongside your vocal cords. I was able to figure out through trial and error that it’s the same muscles I use to clear my throat. I could do this interview better — and more healthfully —[switches to Beetlejuice voice] in this voice than just talking to you with [reverts to normal voice] this voice, because right now I’m using my vocal cords, and vocal cords get tired. Cartilage doesn’t get tired — there’s no nerves, it’s not a muscle.“This part allows me to discover new things not every night, but every minute,” Brightman said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesWhat’s next for you?I sold a cartoon series to Warner Bros., “Cleaners,” which is a raunchy, slightly musical comedy about a crew from Boston that does biohazard cleanups — crime scenes, meth labs, hoarders. And I wrote a play called “Everything Is Fine,” about the one-year aftermath of a mall shooting from the perspective of the family of the perpetrator, who is no longer with us. Cynthia Nixon directed a number of the readings, and we’re hoping to continue getting that somewhere in New York. And I’m working on a musical with Universal Theatrical with my writing partner, which is an adaptation of the film “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” about a kid who checks himself into a psychiatric ward.So, a lot of writing.I’ve been onstage for 15 years now, kind of consistently, and I’m a little Broadway-ed and musical-ed out, which I know is a very privileged thing to say. But what comes with doing this is scrutiny. People look at you and judge you every night. I want to do my own thing for a second — to just let my work speak for itself and not have to defend it with a musical number.Would you ever want to return to “Beetlejuice”?What I know is that I have the right of first refusal for a London production, were it to happen. There are no designs for it to happen just yet that I know of, but I would consider it.“I’ve been onstage for 15 years now, kind of consistently,” Brightman said. “I want to do my own thing for a second.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesLet’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.Ooh, yes!You have done the voice in a public setting that is not the theater.Confirm. A few months ago, I went into Starbucks and said [in his Beetlejuice voice] “Can I just have one grande Pike Place with a little bit of half and half and just one Splenda?” They said, “What’s your name?” And I said [in Beetlejuice voice], “B.J.” And then they said, “Coffee for B.J.?” And I said [in Beetlejuice voice], “Thanks so much.” And I left. It’s New York. I was the least weird thing to walk into that Starbucks that day.You get nervous when you know someone famous will be at the show.Deny. The only person who would make me nervous would be Mel Brooks, because I revere him to a point that is probably pretty unhealthy.If you had to choose between marrying Beetlejuice or having to wear a single pair of used workout clothes for the rest of your life, you would —Marry Beetlejuice, if only for the fact that I know how much I sweat. More

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      ‘Beetlejuice’ to Close on Broadway

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      The show had a bumpy, boisterous run, and will now begin a tour.“Beetlejuice,” an exuberantly ghoulish musical that was so on brand it came back from the dead, will end its Broadway run on Jan. 8, the show’s producers announced Tuesday.This is the latest in a string of closings as Broadway grapples with diminished tourism, fewer Manhattan office workers and an inflation-driven rise in production costs following the lengthy pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week, “The Phantom of the Opera,” which is Broadway’s longest-running show, announced that it would close in February; over the weekend “Dear Evan Hansen” closed and “Come From Away” is closing early next month.“Beetlejuice,” adapted from the 1988 film, has had a bumpy ride on Broadway. It opened in 2019, but sales were weak enough that the Shubert Organization asked it to vacate the Winter Garden Theater; before it did so, sales rebounded thanks to a viral embrace of the show on social media, and then, while it was still trying to figure out its next steps, the pandemic shuttered all theaters.The show, produced by Warner Bros. Theater Ventures and Langley Park Productions, returned to Broadway last April, now at the Marquis Theater, and its grosses have been decent — $930,798 during the week that ended Sept. 18 — but apparently not good enough to sustain a long run for a large-scale musical. At the time of its closing it will have played 679 performances, including the runs at both theaters.The musical features songs by Eddie Perfect and a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King; it is directed by Alex Timbers. The show is planning a tour starting in December in San Francisco.“Beetlejuice” was originally capitalized for $21 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It has not recouped those costs. More