Tony Awards (Theater Awards)

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      J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell Win Tony Awards, a First for Out Non-Binary Performers

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      J. Harrison Ghee accepting the Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical, “Some Like It Hot.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimeAlex Newell accepting the Tony Award for featured actor in a musical, “Shucked.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJ. Harrison Ghee, whose portrayal of a gender-questioning musician fleeing the mob in “Some Like It Hot” has charmed critics and audiences, won a Tony Award for best leading actor in a musical Sunday night, becoming the first out nonbinary actor to win that award.Ghee’s victory came shortly after Alex Newell, who is also nonbinary, won a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical, becoming the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony.The wins come at a time when gender identity has become a central element of America’s culture wars, as conservatives in multiple states press for legislation on a variety of L.G.B.T.Q.-related issues, including gender-affirming medical care for transgender children and teenagers, bathroom access, sports participation and, in some states, performances.The Tony Awards, like the Oscars, have only gendered categories for performers, and Ghee and Newell agreed to be considered eligible for awards as actors. (Another nonbinary performer this season, Justin David Sullivan of “& Juliet,” opted not to be considered for awards rather than compete in a gendered category.)Asked in a recent interview with The New York Times about having been nominated in a gendered category, Ghee said: “Wherever I am, I will show up as who I am. Someone’s compartmentalization of me doesn’t limit me in any way.“I hope for the industry we can remove the gender of it,” they added, “because we are creators and we should free ourselves beyond so many labels and let the work speak for itself.”At least two performers who later came out as nonbinary have previously won Tony Awards as best featured actress in a musical: Sara Ramirez, who won in 2005 for “Spamalot,” and Karen Olivo (also known as K O), who won in 2009 for a revival of “West Side Story.” Also: Last year, the Tony Award for best score went to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss for “Six,” and Marlow is nonbinary.Ghee’s depiction of a main character in “Some Like It Hot” reflects the way views on gender have evolved since 1959, when the Billy Wilder film it was based on was released. In the movie Jack Lemmon plays a musician named Jerry who dresses as a woman named Daphne to flee the mob; in the musical Ghee plays the same character, but Jerry’s path to becoming Daphne becomes one of self-discovery, not disguise.The performance earned critical praise. Jesse Green, The Times’s chief theater critic, wrote that Ghee “carefully traces Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, and then the merging of the two identities into a third that takes us into territory that’s far more complex than jokey drag.”Ghee, 33, worked as a drag performer before finding success in musical theater, with key roles on Broadway in “Kinky Boots” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” before “Some Like It Hot.” More

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      What Did Michael Arden Say at the Tony Awards?

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      Michael Arden, a three-time Tony nominee, won his first Tony Award for his direction of the Broadway revival of “Parade,” the 1998 musical about the lynching of Leo Frank by an antisemitic mob.Arden, who had previously been nominated for revivals of “Once on This Island” and “Spring Awakening,” won acclaim for what Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, praised as a timely and gorgeously sung revival.With Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond cast as Leo and Lucille Frank, Arden tilted a musical about a horrific miscarriage of justice to more strongly emphasize the love story playing out between husband and wife.“‘Parade’ tells the story of a life that was cut short at the hands of the belief that one group of people is more or less valuable than another and that they might be more deserving of justice,” he said in accepting his award. “This is a belief that is the core of antisemitism, of white supremacy, of homophobia, of transphobia and intolerance of any kind. We must come together. We must battle this. It is so, so important, or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history.”Arden went on to recall how he had been called a homophobic slur — “the F-word,” he said — many times as a child. And he drew raucous cheers as he reclaimed the slur, making clear that he was now one with a Tony. “Keep raising your voices,” he said.One of the production’s most talked-about features is Platt’s wordless presence onstage during the entire 15-minute intermission. Arden recently told Michael Paulson that he “wanted to challenge the audience, when they’re getting their cocktail or texting their friends or talking about what they’re having for dinner, to look back and see Ben onstage, and to get a sense that while the world was turning, this man was sitting in a prison cell.”In taking home his first Tony, Arden won a directing category that included Jessica Stone, who directed the beloved new musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” and Casey Nicholaw, whom some saw as a contender for “Some Like It Hot.” More

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      The Tony Awards Are Sunday. Here’s How to Watch.

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      Here is all the information you’ll need to tune in on Sunday to the annual ceremony honoring Broadway’s top productions and performers.When are the Tony Awards? We’re so glad you asked!The Tony Awards, which each year honor the best plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are Sunday night.The main event, with lots of song-and-dance numbers between the prizes, is at 8 p.m. Eastern, and will be televised on CBS and streamed on Paramount+. And before that, starting at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, is a preshow at which a number of awards for creative work, such as design, will be handed out. That will stream on Pluto TV.This year is going to be different from the usual in several ways.First, the ceremony will take place in a new location: the United Palace, a former movie house in Washington Heights, which is one of Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhoods. The reasons for the move are predominantly financial; the United Palace proved much less expensive to rent than Radio City Music Hall, where the show often takes place.Second, screenwriters are on strike, and that strike initially threatened to disrupt the Tonys as it has disrupted other televised awards shows. In order to secure an agreement from the Writers Guild of America not to picket the telecast, the Tony Awards had to pledge not to use any scripted writing during the awards ceremony. The result is that there will be more singing, and less talking, than in normal years.Who’s hosting?The broadcast will be hosted for a second consecutive year by Ariana DeBose, who this year, because of the absence of writers, is expected to dance more and to make fewer jokes. She won an Academy Award last year for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, and she was nominated for a Tony Award in 2018 as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” This year’s Tonys preshow will be hosted by Julianne Hough (“POTUS”) and Skylar Astin (“Spring Awakening”).Who’s performing?Each of the five shows nominated for best musical will do a song — that’s “& Juliet,” “Kimberly Akimbo,” “New York, New York,” “Shucked” and “Some Like It Hot.” And all four shows nominated for best musical revival will also perform — that’s “Camelot,” “Into the Woods,” “Parade” and “Sweeney Todd.”But wait, there’s more! Lea Michele is going to lead a number from the revival of “Funny Girl” that opened a year ago. The cast of “A Beautiful Noise,” a jukebox musical about Neil Diamond, will also perform. And Joaquina Kalukango, one of last year’s Tony winners, will sing a song to accompany the In Memoriam segment.Why do the Tonys matter?Broadway is still struggling to recover from the lengthy coronavirus shutdown — attendance remains 17 percent below prepandemic levels — and producers view the Tony Awards as an important way to introduce a large audience to the newest shows.Also, the Tonys are a way to lift up theater as an art form, often boosting the careers of the artists involved. Wins and nominations help plays get staged at regional theaters and taught in colleges, and telecast performances help musicals sell tickets and tour.The Tony Awards, named for the actress and philanthropist Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing. The winners are chosen by voters — there are 769 of them this year — who are mostly industry insiders: producers, investors, actors, writers, directors, designers and many others with theater-connected lives and livelihoods.This Sunday’s ceremony will be the 76th Tony Awards. More

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      Tony Predictions: Expect Wins for ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ and ‘Leopoldstadt’

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      Our theater reporter talked to one-fifth of the Tony voters ahead of Sunday’s ceremony. Here’s hoping they steered him right.What do you get when you toss together a brassy grifter, an Elvish-speaking anagrammist, a show choir and, oh yes, a teenager with a life-threatening genetic condition? This year, it seems, you get a Tony-winning musical.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a small show with a huge heart, is likely to win the most coveted prize at the 76th Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday, according to my annual survey of Tony voters.Over the last week, I have connected, by email or telephone, with 158 voters who generously agreed to discuss their picks (and, often, their concerns about, and hopes for, the theater business); they are distributing their votes widely among the nominees after a season with few consensus favorites.There are a total of 769 Tony voters, and they are mostly industry insiders — producers, investors, actors, writers, directors, designers, and many others with theater-connected lives and livelihoods. Although in recent years, voters have been allowed to cast ballots only in categories in which they had seen all nominees, this year, because health and economic disruptions (and, over the last few days, wildfire smoke) made it hard for some voters to catch some shows, there is more leeway: Voters can cast ballots in any category in which they have seen all but one nominee.This is not a scientific poll, but in past years this exercise has provided a reliable forecast of the ultimate winners in key categories. For the actual results (and the songs!) tune in on Sunday for the telecast at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+ (and, if you want to see the awards for design and other creative categories, stream the preshow at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Pluto TV).Until then, here’s what I am hearing:‘Leopoldstadt’ leads in the race for best play.In each of the last four Tony Awards, voters have chosen as best play an epic production imported from London. Last year was “The Lehman Trilogy,” and before that were “The Inheritance,” “The Ferryman” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”This year, that trend seems certain to continue. By a significant margin, voters are favoring “Leopoldstadt,” a play by Tom Stoppard about how the Holocaust affected an assimilated and affluent Jewish family in Austria.The play proved inadvertently timely: Although written several years ago, it arrived on Broadway last September, just as concern about resurgent antisemitism was rising in the United States and beyond.“Leopoldstadt” is leading the second-place favorite, “Fat Ham,” two-to-one among the voters with whom I spoke, suggesting that it is all but certain to win. Three other nominated plays, “Ain’t No Mo’,” “Cost of Living” and “Between Riverside and Crazy,” are further behind.“Fat Ham,” now running on Broadway with, from left, Nikki Crawford, Marcel Spears and Billy Eugene Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize, but it looks likely to be the runner-up in the Tony race for best new play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, who is 85, is already the winningest playwright on Broadway: He has previously won the best play Tony four times, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia.”“Leopoldstadt,” directed by Patrick Marber and featuring an ensemble cast of 38, is about a fictional family, but is inspired by Stoppard’s own life experience: He was born in what was then Czechoslovakia; his parents fled invading Nazis when he was a toddler; he has spent his life in Britain; and, like a character in “Leopoldstadt,” only late in life came to understand his family’s Jewishness and the impact of the Holocaust on his relatives.The play, which transferred to Broadway after winning the Olivier Award for best play in London, opened last October to strong reviews and healthy box office sales in New York. Its sales have softened considerably this year, and it is scheduled to close on July 2.Among new musicals, ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is favored.“Kimberly Akimbo” is the smallest of the nominated new musicals, with just nine characters and a budget that is about one-third that of its splashiest competitors.But it is shaping up to be the little engine that could: It opened last fall to the strongest reviews of any of the season’s new musicals, and now a plurality of voters interviewed say they are voting for it as the season’s best new musical.Not all voters love “Kimberly Akimbo” — some are finding it extraordinarily moving, while others are left cold — but the show’s odds are good because those who are not voting for it are splitting their votes between two comedies: “Some Like It Hot,” adapted from the Billy Wilder film, and “Shucked,” a pun-filled and country-scored fable. The two other nominated musicals, “& Juliet” and “New York, New York,” lag considerably behind.J. Harrison Ghee, in the red dress, is heavily favored to win a Tony Award as best leading actor in a musical for “Some Like It Hot.” Ghee’s dancing partner, Kevin Del Aguila, is also a Tony nominee.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Kimberly Akimbo,” which opened in November, is about a high school student, 15 going on 16, whose life is threatened by a genetic disorder that causes her to age prematurely; that sounds sad, and it is, but the musical is also quite funny, as the protagonist navigates a dysfunctional home life, a gawky peer group, and the criminal aunt who connects those worlds. The show, directed by Jessica Stone, is adapted from a play by David Lindsay-Abaire; he wrote the musical’s book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.The revival categories are tougher to predict.This was, by all accounts, a good season for revivals, many of which were praised by critics and a number of which sold well at the box office. But that is making these categories tougher for voters, who liked so many of the offerings that they are torn over which to single out for prizes.Among play revivals, a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” appears to have a modest but real lead, and is likely to win the Tony Award. If it is upset, it would be by the revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” but there is enough support for revivals of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” to make it difficult for any of them to catch up.Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, left, and Corey Hawkins as the two brothers at the heart of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play “Topdog/Underdog.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Topdog/Underdog,” first staged Off Broadway in 2001, is about two Black brothers, portentously named Lincoln and Booth, living together in a one-room apartment, trying to get by in a world that makes their lives difficult. The play is an undisputed classic — it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002, and in 2018 was named the best American play of the previous quarter century by New York Times critics. The revival, directed by Kenny Leon, ran from September 2022 to January.The musical revival category is even closer. A production of “Parade,” a 1998 musical written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown about the lynching of a Jewish man in early-20th-century Georgia, has a narrow lead among voters I spoke with, but there is also substantial support for revivals of two shows with songs by Stephen Sondheim: “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd.” Any of those three could win; a revival of “Camelot” is not a significant factor in the race. “Parade” opened in March and is scheduled to close in August; “Camelot” and “Sweeney Todd” are running indefinitely, while “Into the Woods” is wrapping up a national tour.Three of the top acting races are sewn up. One is not.J. Harrison Ghee, Jodie Comer and Victoria Clark can start writing their acceptance speeches. Each of them is almost certainly going to take home a Tony Award.The category of best leading actor in a play, on the other hand, is way, way, way too close to call, but has boiled down to two of the five contenders: Sean Hayes and Stephen McKinley Henderson.Sean Hayes, left, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, right, seem to be the front-runners in the very tight race for best leading actor in a play.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGhee, who is nonbinary, is winning over voters with an empathetic, but also entertaining, portrayal of a musician whose gender identity is evolving in “Some Like It Hot.”Comer wowed voters with her physically and emotionally exhausting tour-de-force performance in “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault until she becomes a victim herself. Amazingly, this is her first stage role.And Clark is heavily favored for her mind-bending star turn in “Kimberly Akimbo,” in which the 63-year-old actress plays an ailing adolescent with all the awkwardness, resilience and premature wisdom that such a role requires. Clark previously won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.”As for that race for best leading actor in a play: A little less than a third of voters I spoke with chose Hayes, who in “Good Night, Oscar” portrays Oscar Levant, a pianist whose bitter humor made him a popular talk-show guest while he battled serious psychological problems. But nearly the same number of voters are supporting Henderson for his portrayal of a retired police officer trying to hang onto a rent-controlled apartment in “Between Riverside and Crazy.”Who will win? Check back on Sunday night. More

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      ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Star Shows Off Her Snug Upper West Side Rental

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      Bonnie Milligan, a star of the musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” has been the lucky occupant of a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan for 15 years.Bonnie Milligan, an actress known for her vocal range and belting voice, shares a snug rental on the Upper West Side with a college friend who is also a performer. Ms. Milligan’s bedroom is sufficiently small that she has to leave to change her mind. The kitchen and living room are pretty much one and the same space.But the 30-something Ms. Milligan, a Tony nominee for her performance as the shifty, shiftless Aunt Debra in the musical “Kimberly Akimbo” (the awards ceremony is scheduled for June 11), isn’t much for trafficking in discouraging words. Thus, she quickly points out her building’s admirable location (handy to both Lincoln Center and a subway stop) and eagerly enumerates the desirable features of the apartment complex. A concierge across the street “collects packages for us, which is a huge thing,” she said. There’s a washer and dryer in the basement, and workout equipment in the courtyard.As for the apartment itself: Ta-da! It’s rent controlled.“Over the course of the 15 years I’ve been here, it has gone up $550 in total,” Ms. Milligan said.Bonnie Milligan, a Tony Award nominee for her performance in the musical “Kimberly Akimbo,” shares a rental on the Upper West Side with a college friend. “I feel comfort here,” she said.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesBonnie Milligan, 30-somethingOccupation: ActressTwo’s company: “My apartment mate and I have both gone out of town on jobs. I’ve been here alone, or she’s been here alone, and we think, ‘I really like the comfort of living with my best friend.’ That’s the long and short of it.”“We have all these amenities that would mean a skyrocketing price if we went elsewhere,” she added, while declining to reveal her current rent. “Every time we’ve looked somewhere else in the neighborhood, we end up thinking that we might as well stay here.”And even if the Tony nomination is great and validating — and, perhaps, a sign of lucrative things to come — Ms. Milligan knows that the one certain thing in an actor’s life is uncertainty. She made her Broadway debut in 2018 in “Head Over Heels,” a musical that combined a Renaissance pastoral romance with the music of the Go-Go’s. When it closed (barely five months after it opened), she had a year of readings and workshops, and “maybe a demo here and there, and I think maybe I shot a little TV,” she said. “But I was hustling to get money for my bills.”Ms. Milligan comes honestly by her modest housing expectations.She spent her formative years in a double-wide trailer behind her grandparents’ home in central Illinois. “I had friends — not even the mean kids, but friends — who would say, ‘We love coming to your house. Yours is the only one with license plates and taillights.’ Those little jabs were hard,” said Ms. Milligan who, after her parents’ divorce, moved with her mother to a small house in northwestern Ohio.Next stop, in 2007: Manhattan.“I remember trying to decide if I wanted a bigger apartment, but this feels like home to me,” Ms. Milligan said.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“I’d been there before on some trips as a teenager, and I just knew it was where I wanted to be to do musical theater. I was a small-town girl, but New York was always my heart,” said Ms. Milligan, who initially sublet space in a three-bedroom, fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side. “During my first six months in New York, I lived in every one of the bedrooms as people came and went.”She found stability when some college pals invited her to take over a recently vacated room in their three-bedroom Upper West Side apartment. “That was February 2008, and I’ve been here ever since,” she said.When one of the original residents moved out some years ago, a procession of subletters took over the third bedroom. “I got to a point where I said, ‘Let’s not do this anymore,’” Ms. Milligan recalled. Now that spare room is an office.By necessity, the apartment is light on furniture. A blue love seat in the kitchen/living room is the spot to sit, eat or watch television. A small bookcase near the front door holds Ms. Milligan’s alphabetized DVD collection of 1960s and ’70s television series, most snagged from the $5 bin at Target. Another small bookcase with more DVDs — “Taxi,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show”— sits in her bedroom, along with the bed and bureau from her teenage room in Ohio.The refrigerator is covered in a very tidy array of magnets.Earl Wilson/The New York TimesThe tidily arrayed magnets on the front and side of the refrigerator clue visitors in to her heroes in the most compact way possible. Her beloved maternal grandmother, Betty Jean Meador, loved cardinals; thus, the cardinal magnet. There are Lucille Ball and Gilda Radner magnets, “because both of them were influences on me,” Ms. Milligan said.Doris Day also figures prominently. “I’ve been a huge fan since I was a kid,” she said. “I used to take my allowance money and go on eBay and buy magnets from her movies.”At its most essential level, the apartment is mixture of where Ms. Milligan came from and where she is. The quilt on her bed and the Afghan slung over the sofa once belonged to her grandmother. So did a tin in the living room and the jewelry box atop the bureau. “We were very close, so I like to have a lot of her around,” Ms. Milligan said.The bureau is also home to a small stuffed teddy bear previously owned by Ms. Milligan’s father, a pastor and talented singer, as well as a photo of Ms. Milligan’s mother and grandmother. Nearby is a hatbox that was a prop in “Head Over Heels,” and a small wooden chest that a friend’s grandfather made for Ms. Milligan as an opening night gift.The bedroom walls, on the other hand, tell the story of Ms. Milligan’s life in New York — show posters, fan art, awards, caricatures by Justin “Squigs” Robertson, a theatrical illustrator, and a drawing, commissioned by a friend, of a raccoon garbed in the same warehouse-store vest that Ms. Milligan sports in the last moments of “Kimberly Akimbo.”“My friend and I love raccoons in general, and we’ve always believed that Aunt Debra is an absolute raccoon,” she said.On the morning the Tony nominations came out, three of Ms. Milligan’s college friends came over to watch the announcement on CBS, bringing along coffee, bagels and champagne (just in case there was reason to pop a cork).“It was really beautiful being with dear friends that I met at the Ohio State University,” Ms. Milligan said. “They’ve known me for, like, 20 years. So it was my past and present all together in one place. And that’s the whole thing of my apartment.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      5 Shows, 94 Actors, 450 Costumes: Emilio Sosa Dresses Broadway

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      With two Tony Award nominations in a single season, this prolific costume designer lets textiles tell the story.During the pre-Broadway run of “Good Night, Oscar” at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, the actress Emily Bergl was known to the staff as “the lady in the Dress.”As June, the wife of the troubled raconteur-pianist Oscar Levant, Bergl wears a floral dress and matching chartreuse coat. The dress radiates the energy of a Jackson Pollock canvas — black and daffodil-yellow on shimmering silver brocade, hand-painted to generate the perfect luster for the stage. It stands out in that show’s sea of impeccable suits.Bergl calls it the Dress.“I’m not discrediting my performance in ‘Good Night, Oscar’ when I say that the Dress does half the work,” she said.When Bergl first met the man behind the Dress, the costume designer Emilio Sosa, he told her, “June Levant’s clothes are armor.”“I knew right away that he understood the character completely, and that I was in good hands,” she said.In a recent phone interview, Sosa said: “Listening to actors is 95 percent of my design. You need to have your actors actively involved in the costume they’re going to wear.”This season, Sosa has dressed 94 actors for five Broadway productions in 450 costumes. He has earned two Tony nominations for his costume design, for “Good Night, Oscar” and “Ain’t No Mo’,” a satire on contemporary Black America. He also designed costumes for the revivals of “1776” and “Sweeney Todd,” and was co-credited with the designs for the Neil Diamond bio-musical “A Beautiful Noise,” alongside Annie J. Le.It has been a dizzying blur of looks, from sensible suits to sequins, from American colonial-era dress to Crayola-colored camp.“I knew right away that he understood the character completely,” said Emily Bergl, center, who collaborated with Sosa to develop her costume in “Good Night, Oscar.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt his busiest, Sosa found himself working on three shows at once, averaging three hours’ sleep a night. He follows a maxim he picked up early on from his mentor, Geoffrey Holder, “The Wiz” director and multifaceted cultural figure: “‘Say ‘yes’ to everything — then figure out how to make it work.’”Sosa, 57, describes himself — tongue firmly in cheek, he wants to be clear — as an overnight sensation 30 years in the making. Sosa made his Broadway debut in 2002 with Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog.” His second Broadway show, for which he earned his first Tony nomination, was “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012.Sosa was also a contestant on the reality TV competition “Project Runway,” in 2010 and 2012, an experience he credits with building the confidence that allowed him to present himself and his designs.In between, there has been a lot of “hustling, struggling, and trying to earn a living” including plenty of work in regional theater. “I was a broken kid with a tough upbringing,” Sosa said. “But I figured out, in the arts, no one could beat me. So I developed that. That’s where the drive comes from.”If there’s something Sosa’s diverse projects have in common, it might be his enthusiastic embrace of color. “In my culture, as a Latino, we’re not afraid of color,” he said.One of his earliest memories is of the color blue. Sosa and his family immigrated to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was 3 years old, flying Pan Am from Santo Domingo; Sosa loved the blue of the airline’s logo.Crystal Lucas-Perry, center, as an incarnation of Blackness who bursts onto the stage wearing a quilt, in “Ain’t No Mo’.” The play’s director said Sosa’s design made the character “a living, breathing pastiche of Black history and culture.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Blue was the first color I attached an emotion or memory to. I remember the logo, the color of the carpeting, the taste of the food, the flight attendants’ uniforms. That color has always stayed with me.”Growing up in the Fort Apache section of the Bronx in the 1970s, Sosa was fascinated — amid the “chaos and destruction” — by glimpses of color inside burned-out apartment buildings. “You could see the interior walls,” he said, “since half the building was gone.”His father worked as a super and handyman; his mother worked at a plastics factory. He stuttered, couldn’t play baseball and had trouble fitting in.“I never felt I belonged, I never felt I looked right, I never felt anything was right about me,” he said. “But then a teacher of mine used art to try to get me to come out of my shell. She put a colored pencil in my hand, and I never let it go.”He designed his first piece of clothing when he was 15: a blouse for his mother. He can still picture the print — in gold, brown, emerald, mustard — acquired at a fabric store near Union Square he’d once been afraid to enter. (His aunt, a seamstress, sewed the garment; Sosa wouldn’t dare sew around his father.)“I was a broken kid with a tough upbringing,” Sosa said. “But I figured out, in the arts, no one could beat me. So I developed that. That’s where the drive comes from.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesInitially, theater wasn’t on Sosa’s radar. That changed when, while studying fashion design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he took a summer job with Grace Costumes, founded by the stage costumer Grace Miceli. At the end of the day, he would volunteer to sweep up, sticking around to watch Miceli and her artisans at work.“It gave me an appreciation for the craftspeople — the makers,” he said. “It was better than getting a graduate degree from some tony-ass school. It was, ‘We need this costume done by 12 o’clock.’”After graduation, Sosa worked as an assistant wardrobe supervisor for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and styled music videos for SpikeDDB, the advertising agency founded by the director Spike Lee. Designing commercials, some only 15 seconds long, Sosa learned the importance of making an immediate visual impact. “Spike told me, ‘The audience needs to know who this person is the moment they step in front of the camera.’”But Sosa felt drawn to Broadway most of all, intrigued by the way a single costume could speak volumes.“He’s an innate storyteller,” said Stevie Walker-Webb, the director of “Ain’t No Mo.’” “He uses textiles instead of words, silhouettes instead of sentences.”A memorable moment in “Ain’t No Mo’” involved a character named Black — an incarnation of Blackness that bursts onto the stage wearing a quilt. The idea for the costume emerged from a Zoom call with Walker-Webb. Sosa noticed something behind the director; it was a photo of a 150-year-old family quilt, stitched by the director’s great-, great-, great-grandmother and passed through many generations. With that image as the seed, the character became, according to Walker-Webb, “a living, breathing pastiche of Black history and culture.”“It’s that sensitivity, and curiosity, that makes Emilio an invaluable collaborator,” he said.There’s anothers project Sosa takes very seriously: improving diversity backstage. In 2021, he was elected chairman of the American Theater Wing, a nonprofit that offers professional development opportunities to emerging theater artists. He closely observes the Springboard to Design program, which encourages and mentors students from communities underrepresented in the theater design industry. “They meet fellow costume designers who look like them,” he said. “We need more set designers of color, more lighting designers of color. I’m always trying to push young kids to get into those departments.”As busy as Sosa has been, this was also a year of learning for him. “I had to really dig deep, and really focus, and step my game up just to survive my schedule,” he said. If an intense schedule is the new norm, he’s prepared to make it work.“Planes, trains, and automobiles. Buses, park benches. I could sketch in the middle of Times Square if I had to.” More

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      Robin Wagner, Set Designer Who Won Three Tony Awards, Dies at 89

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      He created sets for more than 50 of Broadway’s most celebrated productions, including “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “On the Twentieth Century” and “The Producers.”Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer of more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to be racing toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca strapped to the front of it, died on Monday at his home in New York City. He was 89.His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She did not say in what borough he lived.Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower that was raked upward to the back in a delicate curve.On Broadway, his work included the sets for the transcendent 1968 rock musical “Hair” (in The New York Times, Clive Barnes described a “beautiful junk-art setting”) as well as “The Great White Hope,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “42nd Street,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Dreamgirls” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.”Mr. Wagner’s stage designs could be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and what the director wanted. He viewed scenic design as problem solving.“When I’m reading the script, I can see it, how it fits together and how you get from one scene to another,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I guess that’s what makes designers designers — they visualize things a certain way.”For the musical “City of Angels,” which opened on Broadway in 1989, he created dual color schemes to match the interconnected stories that the show’s writer, Larry Gelbart, set in a world of mansions, sound stages and solariums in 1940s Los Angeles. In sequences involving an author who was turning his novel into a screenplay, everything was in color, while those involving a private eye movie character were in black and white, befitting the show’s homage to film noir.In his review in The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Mr. Wagner’s set design was “brilliant, with flats moving on and off in a rhythm that is nothing if not movie-ish and with a final pull back to a Hollywood sound stage that is Cecil B. De Mille breathtaking.”Mr. Wagner’s sets for the musical “City of Angels” after it opened in 1989.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryMr. Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second for scenic design following one in 1978 for “On the Twentieth Century.” He won a third in 2001, for “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’s hit about a scheming pair who try to make a financial killing by purposely staging a Broadway flop.One of his most enduring designs, which did not receive a Tony nomination, was his simplest. For “A Chorus Line,” the producer Joseph Papp’s ultimately long-running musical about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical, Mr. Wagner’s design consisted only of mirrored walls, black velour drapes and a white line on the floor.“That was the result of two years’ work of Michael Bennett and I trying to distill things,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill in 2007, referring to the director and co-choreographer of the show, which opened on Broadway in 1975. “We started with big things for visualizing scenes, and as we went through the show’s workshop period, they got smaller and smaller.”He added, “And then we knew we needed a black box, which represents theater, and that we needed the mirrors, because they represent the dance studio.”Robin Samuel Anton Wagner was born on Aug. 31, 1933, in San Francisco to Jens and Phyllis (Smith-Spurgeon) Wagner. His father, who had immigrated from Denmark, was a maritime engineer and, for a time, the keeper of two lighthouses where the Wagners lived until Robin was 10. His mother had been a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States, where she was a homemaker.One of Mr. Wagner’s simplest sets was for the musical “A Chorus Line.” The scene, in 1990, was the finale of the last performance of the show in its original Broadway run.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs a boy, Robin was enamored of Disney films like “Fantasia” and hoped to be an animator, creating the backgrounds of cartoons, not the characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio, trying to find my way into some kind of real life, which I still think I sometimes am,” he said in an oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.He created comic books in junior high school and, after high school, attended the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953 to 1954. While there, and after, he worked on set design with theater and opera groups, like the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco; built window displays for a clothing store; and got a paying design job in summer stock with the Sacramento Music Circus.Mr. Wagner moved in 1958 to New York, where he became an assistant to one Broadway designer, Ben Edwards, and then another, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to 1967, he was the set designer for Arena Stage, the renowned regional theater in Washington.Returning to New York, he designed the sets for “Hair,” which Clive Barnes, in The Times, described as “masterly.”A scene from “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” in 1992. Mr. Wagner designed the sets for it and its sequel, “Angels in America: Perestroika.”John Haynes/Bridgeman ImagesGeorge Wolfe, the director who worked with him on several shows, including the “Angels in America” productions, said that Mr. Wagner had a talent for finding the essence of a story. He recalled one of Mr. Wagner’s small, but effective, touches on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.“Jelly was dying in L.A., and Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like the graphic of an earthquake,” Mr. Wolfe said in a telephone interview. “It was so breathtakingly simple; it was along the lower part of the back wall.”He added, “Just those three lines, you knew it was L.A.”But there was also a complex engineer’s side to Mr. Wagner, which was on view with “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Bennett’s 1981 musical based loosely on the career of the Supremes. Mr. Wagner designed five aluminum, spotlight-studded towers that moved in various configurations to create — with minimal use of props — the illusion that the setting was changing from a nightclub to a recording studio to a Las Vegas show palace.“And all the lighting bars were basically platforms,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill, “so the actors could climb up on those things and fly out, which they did.”Mr. Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design earned him a Tony nomination and one of his six Drama Desk Awards.His final Broadway credit was for “Leap of Faith,” a musical about a fraudulent evangelist, in 2012.In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Kowal; another daughter, Leslie Wagner; a son, Kurt; and a granddaughter. His marriages to Joyce Workman and Paula Kauffman ended in divorce. The train that Mr. Wagner designed for “On the Twentieth Century” was one of his great creations, with its long, elegant, streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments that were open on one side to let the characters be seen. Train exteriors that slid in front of the compartments let the audience look at the actors from the outside, after they had peered inside at them.“This gesture,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times, “aside from notably enhancing the cinematic quality of the show — nothing is more movie-like than quick cuts from inside to outside — is also a gentle and pleasing play on the traditional description of the stage set as a room in which the fourth wall has been removed.” More

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      For Lorna Courtney of ‘& Juliet,’ New York Has Always Been Her Stage

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      To pursue her dreams of stardom, Lorna Courtney didn’t have to move far away from home. But she did have a lengthy daily commute. In her teens, she would take a bus and two trains (or three, “depending on how long I wanted to walk”) from her home in South Ozone Park, Queens, to the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.“That’s not even bad, because there were people that commuted from Staten Island,” said Courtney, the young, Tony Award-nominated star of the new Broadway musical “& Juliet.”The real distances, however, were not measured in miles. At LaGuardia, Courtney was thrown into a new world. “I realized that I was with people who had free lunch and people whose parents had yachts,” she said recently at a cafe near Union Square.She made the most of her years studying voice at LaGuardia, performing in student productions and taking on the roles of Nina in “In the Heights” and Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” (in which her fellow Tony nominee Micaela Diamond played Mrs. Potts.)Fast-forward eight years, and Courtney, 24, is portraying another strong-willed ingénue, Juliet, on Broadway. That would be Shakespeare’s Juliet, except in this musical flight of fancy, the protagonist is not a 14-year-old killing herself for love but a young woman eager to experience the world and figure out who she is. Oh, and this Juliet is belting hits written by the pop mastermind Max Martin, including “Stronger,” “Since U Been Gone” and “Roar.”Courtney in the musical “& Juliet,” a girl-power romp featuring songs by the pop hitmaker Max Martin, at the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s a “blow-you-away performance,” as the New York Times critic Jesse Green put it in his review. Courtney said that she was shocked to hear her name listed among the other Tony nominees for leading actress in a musical, and “got to eat cake as a celebration at 9 o’clock in the morning.”Courtney was born in New Jersey in 1998, the same year Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” the first song she performs in the show, was released. She grew up in an ethnically and religiously mixed family; a DNA test informed her that the highest percentage in her ancestry “was 18 percent for Nigeria, followed by Ireland, Jewish-Eastern Europe, and then it was Mali, and I also have Mexican mixed in there, too,” she said.Little predestined her to show business. Her parents were not particularly interested in music, though when her mother saw a segment on “60 Minutes” about Vy Higgensen’s Gospel for Teens program, she encouraged her daughter to join. At 15, Courtney was performing in Higgensen’s long-running musical, “Mama, I Want to Sing!” with the choir in Japan.“It was then that I decided that I could see myself doing musical theater instead of opera, which I studied in high school,” Courtney said. She was off to the races, and proved to be not just gifted, but also enterprising.“All throughout my life, if I had an idea and I felt strongly about it, I was always working to get to that goal,” she said. “I didn’t have many resources easily available and easily accessible but I would use what I had.”While many of her peers at the University of Michigan enjoyed spring break during what she called her “junior-slash-senior year” (she graduated early), Courtney traveled to New York for non-Equity auditions. Waiting to meet with a regional theater for a summer-stock gig, she spotted a call for a “Dreamgirls” revival and managed to pass along her headshot and résumé, even though she didn’t have an agent. She earned a callback, but was not cast. (The production ultimately did not happen, either.)Around graduation, Courtney was back in New York, auditioning for “Dear Evan Hansen” and the Ivo van Hove revival of “West Side Story.” She landed both, starting as a standby in “Hansen” before moving on to “West Side Story” as a member of the ensemble and the understudy for Maria.This was a bracing time for Courtney, who said she relished working with van Hove and the avant-garde choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker on their boldly staged revival, even when they tested her comfort zone. “That particular process was challenging only because in the ensemble, dancing isn’t my forte,” Courtney said. “Particularly, Anne Teresa’s style is very specific, and I had no idea how to move in that way.”The pandemic shutdown — a time when Courtney, like most actors, felt in limbo — put a definitive end to that experience: “West Side Story” was not among the Broadway shows to reopen. Once things crawled back to life, she sent what she estimated to be around a hundred video auditions. (And she landed a part on the pilot of the Queen Latifah series “The Equalizer.”)Then “& Juliet” materialized.The show had premiered in Britain in 2019 to lukewarm reviews, but received nine Olivier Award nominations the following year. By the time the director, Luke Sheppard, conducted auditions for a pre-Broadway run in Toronto, he was very familiar with the role of Juliet. And yet Courtney took him by surprise.“She was able to find a version that was distinctly her version,” he said in a video interview. “It was joyful and eccentric, wonderfully naïve but also incredibly intelligent — this special intelligence that just saw the best in the world around her.”“I’ll just never forget hearing her unbelievably beautiful, powerful pipes,” said the actress Betsy Wolfe, whose callback appointment for “& Juliet” was right after Courtney’s. “Meeting her a couple of minutes later, I thought, ‘Well, this is their Juliet.’”OK McCausland for The New York TimesIt didn’t hurt that she could sing, too.Betsy Wolfe, who plays Anne Hathaway in the show (and who is also nominated for a Tony), remembers that she and Courtney had back-to-back appointments for their callbacks. “Before I even saw Lorna or heard her speak, I heard her sing through a thick wall in a studio rehearsal room,” Wolfe said in a phone interview. “I’ll just never forget hearing her unbelievably beautiful, powerful pipes. Meeting her a couple of minutes later, I thought, ‘Well, this is their Juliet.’ It’s very, very hard for me to even separate the two of them at this point.”Courtney received the good news in December 2021. At the time, she was working behind the desk at an Equinox in Hudson Yards. “I get a call from my agent and manager and they say, ‘You got the role of Juliet,’” she recalled. “Because so many people that work there were also actors, singers and dancers, they were all so excited for me and we were jumping up and down, screaming.”Between the runs in Toronto and on Broadway, Courtney has spent about a year with the musical. She said it’s helping her “grow as a person,” and she values its message. “It’s about staying true to yourself, and finding your own voice, and not being afraid to speak out,” she said. “It’s also about love — multigenerational love, love of friends, love of people who may not be your biological family, and relationships.”And though her family has been an invaluable “support system,” she is at last ready to move into her own place after staying with relatives in either in South Ozone Park or in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan.In mid-May, her application for an apartment had been approved and she was anticipating the move — because it was in Harlem, a neighborhood she was familiar with from her days in the gospel choir, but also because this savvy New Yorker knew her commute to the theater district in Times Square would be a cinch.“The 2 and 3 is one block away, and then the B and C is another,” Courtney said with obvious relish. “It’s a straight shot.” More