Tony Awards (Theater Awards)

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      Audra McDonald Makes History With 10th Tony Award Nomination

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      Audra McDonald has been here before.And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before. And before.The actress earned her 10th acting Tony Award nomination on Tuesday, for best leading actress in a play, for her role as the writer Suzanne Alexander in Adrienne Kennedy’s 1991 play “Ohio State Murders,” the 91-year-old Kennedy’s Broadway debut. The feat ties her with Chita Rivera and Julie Harris as the most nominated individual performers in the 76-year history of the awards.“It’s an honor,” said McDonald, who has won six Tony Awards, the most of any performer. “But the work is the true joy.”McDonald, 52, previously won four featured actress Tonys in the play and musical categories for her roles in “Carousel” (1994), “Master Class” (1996), “Ragtime” (1998) and “A Raisin in the Sun” (2004). She won leading actress Tonys for her performance as the strongheaded Bess in the musical “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” in 2012 and her turn as the famed jazz singer Billie Holiday in the play “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” in 2014. She is the only person to win in all four acting categories.In his review of “Ohio State Murders,” which he called a “piercing production,” the New York Times critic Jesse Green praised McDonald’s performance, “ripped from her gallery of harrowing women,” and noted that it builds to “a shattering catharsis.”In an interview during her lunch break from a workshop in Manhattan on Tuesday, McDonald discussed her milestone achievement, why it still feels special to be recognized for this particular production and what she hopes people took away from her performance. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.This is your 10th nomination, and you’ve already secured the record for the winningest performer, with six Tonys. Is it still special?It’s incredibly special. Being able to be a part of Adrienne Kennedy having her Broadway debut and getting her work seen by a larger audience was something that was very important to me. Even if I hadn’t gotten a nomination, I’d still feel very proud of the work. I was honored that she trusted our vision and what we wanted to do with the play.The older and younger versions of Suzanne Alexander are usually played by two different actors, but you played both. Why?Because Suzanne is going back in time to remember these things, I thought being able to actually step into those memories and feel them in her body would inform even more when she stepped back out of them to a narrative, reflective place. So I asked Adrienne for permission for that and she said, “Sure, that’s great, let’s see what happens.”What spoke to you about the show?How often do we have plays that really center a Black woman’s experience? This is a chance for the character Suzanne — and it’s semi-autobiographical, so Adrienne, to an extent — to be able to speak her experience. Being able to play this incredibly brilliant, wounded and, in some ways — at the end of the play — triumphant woman was very appealing, even though it was very, very difficult. And it was an indictment that needs to be delivered in terms of what systemic racism does to people, and how it destroys.In his review, Jesse Green praised your “astonishing access to tragic feeling.” Where did you go to find that?When you’re playing a role you have to be that character’s advocate at all times, even when you’re playing a villain. Part of being an advocate for Suzanne is trying to find the empathy for the pain and the terror and the tragedy and the trauma that she experienced. The powerful question in acting is, “What if that were to happen to me?” What would I be thinking? What would I be feeling?How did your performance evolve over the course of the run?Because the play is so incredibly dense and the language is so full and poetic, for me the evolution came in becoming more at ease with Adrienne’s language, which I don’t think I had at the beginning of the run.Your character’s babies are represented, not with dolls, but as slips of pink fabric. Why?That was the brilliance of Kenny Leon, who’s an incredible director. We knew that once you bring babies onstage, even if they’re dolls — which was one thought at one point — it was going to be very difficult to set them aside for times when the focus isn’t necessarily on them. We wanted to make sure the audience wasn’t distracted by them.What do you hope people took away from the show?I hope they had a broader understanding of the destructive power of racism. I also hope that people who are not Black could see that we are not a monolith. This is a woman, as a character, who is not always represented onstage, and I wanted this very educated and smart and brilliant, yet wounded, woman out there telling her story and centering her story and demanding that it be heard.What did Kennedy tell you after seeing it?She was very moved. I still speak with her. I got an email from her a couple of days ago, actually, and I’m going to go visit her in a couple of weeks. She was very happy that we had done it. She’s had a lot of people play the role and I think loved all the interpretations of it.How does it feel to have been able to bring a lesser-seen work to the stage?Plenty of people have known who Adrienne Kennedy was for years, but there was a younger generation that was introduced to Adrienne Kennedy with that production, and that makes me happy. More

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      Jodie Comer on Her Tony Nomination: It ‘Has to Mean More Than Just Me’

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      That Jodie Comer should have received a nomination for her work in the solo show “Prima Facie,” a role that already won her Olivier and Evening Standard Theater awards, should have come as a surprise to no one. Except apparently Comer.“I’m in shock,” she said from the back of a taxi late Tuesday morning.In “Prima Facie,” which also earned nominations in three design categories, Comer plays Tessa, an ambitious young barrister who finds herself transformed after a colleague rapes her. With compassion, bold physicality and raw, febrile emotion, Comer enacts that assault and its aftermath eight times a week, standing in the stage rain (which the backstage crew has usually, though not always, warmed up) as Tessa struggles to gain a new perspective on her life and the law.Comer said she hopes that the play continues to generate discussions around sexual assault and hopes that her nomination is in service of the many women she endeavors to represent. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How do you feel?We’ve been on such a journey with this play. I never dreamed that this would be a point that we would be at. So it just feels incredible. The response has been beautiful, and I just feel very, very grateful that so many on the team have been recognized as well. I can’t stress enough how much of a team effort this piece truly is.On the night I saw the play, as it ended, I could hear several women weeping. Has the response here been any different than it was in London?The only difference, I would say, has been to the humor. People find humor in different moments. But given the subject matter, which is so universal, the response has been very, very similar to the U.K. We’ve had a lot of people sending letters to us backstage, explaining their experiences watching the play and how it affected them. And we’ve had people reach out who came to see the play in London, and have also come to Broadway, expressing and confiding how their lives have changed within the past year. It feels like we can have the same conversation here.The nomination is clearly a testament to a truly astonishing Broadway debut. But given what the play concerns, do you feel that the nomination honors something more?I hope so. It has to. I have so many people to be thankful for and so many people that I am representing. This nomination has to mean more than just me.What’s the pleasure of playing Tessa, even knowing that this terrible thing happens to her?What I love about performing this play every night is the journey that she goes on. The evolution of this woman, even through this really difficult time, her sense of self and strength and resilience, I really do love. She comes out of this experience definitely changed in some way, but by no means defeated. Tessa still inspires hope. We get a lot of messages like that, like, “I felt completely crushed, but also invigorated.” More

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      Alex Newell Earns First Tony Nomination For Their Role in ‘Shucked’

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      Alex Newell’s Monday night was already pretty great. They attended the Met Gala, landing a spot next to Jimmy Fallon and Glenn Close. “I was like, ‘I’ve made it,’” they said.Then boom — on Tuesday morning, their first Tony Award nomination.“I haven’t cried yet,” they said in an interview from the Pierre Hotel on Tuesday, “so I’m waiting for that little dime to drop soon.”Newell, 30, who uses they/them pronouns, was nominated for best featured actor in a musical, for their role as the big-voiced whiskey entrepreneur Lulu in “Shucked,” the new, countrified Broadway musical about a small farming town whose corn crop begins mysteriously dying.In The New York Times review of the production, Jesse Green wrote that Newell, who may be most recognizable for their time on “Glee” as the transgender teenager Unique Adams, turns Lulu “into a full-blown comic creation.” They have become the show’s breakout star, bringing down the house in the middle of the first act with the showstopping feminist anthem “Independently Owned,” a soulful, commanding number in which Lulu emphatically declares that she doesn’t need a man to be fulfilled. (Newell’s powerful voice is showcased in two Tony-nominated productions this season: Their high-energy bop, “Kill the Lights,” plays during the disco-inspired dance party at the end of “Fat Ham.”)Newell, operating on a few hours of sleep, discussed their first nomination, their dream role and their feelings about corn. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How does it feel to receive your first nomination?Surreal. Crazy. Absurd. I feel like I could throw up at any time.Your performance of the feminist anthem “Independently Owned” has been earning nightly standing ovations. Did that happen at the first preview?Yes.Were you expecting it?This is going to sound like the most pretentious thing in the world, but we built it for that. We made the song to make people lose their minds.It happens every night now, right?That’s the part that’s flabbergasting. The standing ovation isn’t jarring as much as the consistency of it. I’m beside myself a lot of the time because I’m like, “Y’all are really still standing up.”How similar are you to your character?Very, in the sense this woman has built her career and her livelihood on her own. I’m not saying I’ve done everything on my own without any help, but I’ve been making life decisions, moving cross-country on my own. So when I sing “Independently Owned,” it’s kind of my own anthem talking about what I’ve done for myself as well.You identify as nonbinary, and the Tony Awards use gendered categories. Why did you choose to compete in the best featured actor category?I look at the word “actor” as one, my vocation, and two, genderless. We don’t say plumbess for plumber. We don’t say janitoress for janitor. We say plumber, we say janitor. That’s how I look at the word, and that’s how I chose my category.Have you seen any of the other nominated shows?I saw “Some Like It Hot,” and I’m so happy that my friend J. Harrison was nominated. I haven’t gotten to see “Kimberly Akimbo,” but I’m superexcited that my good friend Bonnie Milligan is nominated.If you could have anyone in the audience at a performance, who would you choose?Beyoncé.What would be your dream role?I’m still gunning for Effie in “Dreamgirls.”Last question, and I must ask — do you like corn?My publicist says I’m not allowed to say it, but I do hate corn. OK, I don’t hate it. I’ll eat it from Chipotle, and there’s this lovely corn couscous dish at Glass House Tavern that’s tolerable. And my mom makes a great cornbread, so I’ll eat that, too. More

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      J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell, Gender Nonconforming Performers, Earn Tony Nominations

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      Even as gender identity has become an increasingly politicized subject in a polarized America, Broadway shows are featuring a growing number of gender nonconforming performers, and two of them scored Tony nods Tuesday morning.J. Harrison Ghee, one of the stars of a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” was nominated in the best leading actor in a musical category. And Alex Newell, who plays a whiskey distiller in the country musical “Shucked,” was nominated in the best featured actor in a musical category.Both performers use he/she/they pronouns, and both agreed to be considered as actors (rather than actresses) for Tony purposes.Another gender nonconforming performer on Broadway this season, Justin David Sullivan of “& Juliet,” opted out of awards consideration, rather than choosing between the actor and actress categories. More

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      What Is an EGOT? A Detailed History of Its Origins and Winners.

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      Many people were introduced to the idea of an EGOT — winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — through “30 Rock.” But it’s an actor from the 1980s who deserves the credit.Common would be the first to admit that he has an EGO — that is, an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award and an Oscar — making him just a Tony Award shy from securing the coveted EGOT, the achievement of winning all four major entertainment awards.Eighteen other people have done so, and the “Frozen” songwriter Robert Lopez is the only person to do it twice. The most recent addition was the actress Viola Davis, who earned a Grammy in February for the audiobook of her memoir, making her one of six women to have an EGOT.Now Common has a shot at joining this rather uncommon club. The Tony nominations will be announced on Tuesday, and he is eligible in the featured actor in a play category after making his Broadway debut in “Between Riverside and Crazy.”But where did the EGOT acronym come from, and what does it really take to earn the accolade?Why did we start talking about EGOTs?Many people who first heard of an EGOT assume it originated on the hit NBC sitcom “30 Rock,” which began airing in 2006. But it turns out the term dates back to 1984, when only three people had achieved EGOT-hood: the composer Richard Rodgers and the actresses Helen Hayes and Rita Moreno.It’s actually Philip Michael Thomas, Don Johnson’s partner on the police drama “Miami Vice,” who deserves the naming credit. The accomplishment was previously known as a “grand slam,” a term used for similar achievements in golf and tennis.Thomas has told reporters that his dream was to win an Emmy for his work on “Miami Vice,” a Grammy for his record albums, an Oscar for a play he wanted to adapt as a film, and a Tony for some musicals he had written.Thomas, who later claimed the acronym also stood for his career mantra — “Energy, Growth, Opportunity and Talent” — even wore a medallion with “EGOT” engraved on it. But he was never nominated for any of the awards he dreamed of winning.How did EGOT enter the popular lexicon?Despite Thomas’s efforts, it took a couple of decades before “EGOT” became a thing. Then Kay Cannon, a writer and producer on “30 Rock,” decided to incorporate the rare feat into a satirical story line that began in 2009. “You’d hear this red carpet commentary,” Cannon told The New York Times recently, “that they were one award away from EGOT-ing.”At the time, even some luminaries didn’t know about the distinction. The comedian Whoopi Goldberg first learned she had achieved EGOT status when she guest-starred on one of the four “30 Rock” episodes in which the character Tracy Jordan, played by Tracy Morgan, bought Thomas’s necklace and started strategizing to achieve his own EGOT. (“A good goal for a talented crazy person,” he says in the show.)“I watched ‘30 Rock’ and loved the concept,” Lopez said. “One doesn’t really ever think of themselves as a candidate for achieving something so ridiculous, but I realized that maybe I could do it one day.” Lopez got his wish in 2014, winning an Oscar for the song “Let It Go” from the Disney animated hit “Frozen.”The composer Andrew Lloyd Webber was more old school. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘If I get this Emmy, I’d be an EGOT,’” Lloyd Webber said about achieving the feat in 2018 for “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.” The lyricist Tim Rice and the singer John Legend, who played the title role, reached EGOT status at the same time.“It hadn’t really crossed my mind,” Lloyd Webber said. “I’m much more conscious of it now.”So, what is the best strategy for winning an EGOT?The not-so-quiet secret is that when you’re close to an EGOT, it is possible to game the system.Lloyd Webber said he was recently asked by a fellow artist — someone famous, he won’t say who — how to add a Tony to an awards collection that already included a Grammy and an Emmy. “I said, ‘Well, one way you could do that is become a producer, put some money into a few shows,’” he said. “Every show seems to have 20 producers these days.”That strategy worked for the singer and actress Jennifer Hudson, who achieved an EGOT in 2022 with her Tony win as a producer of “A Strange Loop.”Lloyd Webber thinks getting an Oscar is the most difficult. A Grammy is the easiest, he said, simply because there are more available categories: “You could be the best banjo player in Latin America.”And if Davis’s clinching Grammy win — in the best audio book, narration and storytelling category — revealed anything, it’s that nonmusical methods can be just as effective. “Do a comedy album or narrate your own audio book,” Cannon said. “Write a book, narrate that and then adapt it to the stage.”After considering her own track record (“I’m 0-for-4 right now”), Cannon said she thought her best bet could be a Broadway adaptation of “Pitch Perfect,” the 2012 musical comedy film that she co-wrote.Does it help to have an EGOT as your goal?Probably not. The renowned composer Alan Menken had already won 11 Grammys, eight Oscars and one Tony when his representatives realized he just needed an Emmy to complete the EGOT. “To be honest, it wasn’t something that was really on my wish list until it was brought up, and brought up, and brought up,” he said. “But you can’t will something like that into existence.”So about six years ago, Menken wrote a song about wanting to achieve an EGOT, soliciting assistance from comedy writers like Judd Apatow. The idea was that it would start off sounding sincere, and then would get more and more desperate with each section. Ultimately, he discarded the song (“It wasn’t any good, I can promise you”) and instead secured an Emmy for the animated series “Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure.”What is the value of an EGOT?An EGOT is a flattering distinction that ultimately means nothing, said Menken, who described it as a “random assortment of honors.”“Just do what you do, as well as you can, and don’t think about it,” he added. “If you get awards, great.”There is no organizing body that awards EGOTs, and no ceremony at which a trophy is handed out. But there are hazy areas of eligibility, such as lifetime achievement awards. There are also EGOT enhancements, like the PEGOT, for either a Peabody Award or a Pulitzer Prize. Some say the G should instead represent a Golden Globe, or that the EGOT should become an EGGOT.Menken is proud of the fact that he also has a REGOT — the four traditional awards, plus a Razzie, also known as a Golden Raspberry Award. The ignoble prize was for worst original song from the film “Newsies,” the same project for which he won a Tony. “The Razzie puts everything in perspective, frankly,” he said.At least with the Razzies, there is a ceremony and a physical award. Cannon thinks there should be a similar ceremony for EGOTs, if only a mock version. After all, even “Saturday Night Live” commemorates the occasion when someone hosts the show for a fifth time. “You become a member of the Five-Timers Club, they give you a jacket.”Who’s not throwing away their shot?Over the years, artists have become more comfortable expressing their EGOT dreams. In a segment for the 2015 BET Hip Hop Awards, the composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda rattled off his scorecard: “Got a Grammy, got a Tony, got an Emmy,” he rapped, adding, “Somebody show me the way to the Oscars.”Miranda’s dream could come true next awards season: He has written new songs for the live-action “The Little Mermaid” movie, which will be released in late May.Menken, Miranda’s collaborator on the three new “Little Mermaid” songs, mused about whether he should take his name off them to give Miranda a better shot. “I have eight Oscars,” he said. “They’re probably going to go, ‘Alan, man, no.’ So I feel guilty.”Lopez agreed that Manuel deserves it, but he’s also rooting for someone else: Kristen Anderson-Lopez, his collaborator and wife. She just needs a Tony to secure the EGOT. An added benefit, he said, is that it would bring “more peace to my household.”Wait, so who exactly is in the EGOT club?These are the 18 people who have won EGOTs, along with the year and award that secured the achievement:Mel Brooks (2001, Tony)Viola Davis (2023, Grammy)John Gielgud (1991, Emmy)Whoopi Goldberg (2002, Tony)Marvin Hamlisch (1995, Emmy)Helen Hayes (1977, Grammy)Audrey Hepburn (1994, Grammy)Jennifer Hudson (2022, Tony)John Legend (2018, Emmy)Andrew Lloyd Webber (2018, Emmy)Robert Lopez (2014, Oscar)Alan Menken (2020, Emmy)Rita Moreno (1977, Emmy)Mike Nichols (2001, Emmy)Tim Rice (2018, Emmy)Richard Rodgers (1962, Emmy)Scott Rudin (2012, Grammy)Jonathan Tunick (1997, Tony) More

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      Ariana DeBose to Return as Tony Awards Host This Year

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      The annual ceremony, honoring Broadway plays and musicals, is to take place June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights.Ariana DeBose, whose exuberant embrace of song and dance enlivened last year’s Tony Awards, will return to host the annual ceremony this spring.DeBose, who in 2022 won an Academy Award for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, appeared in six Broadway shows between 2012 and 2018, and was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” She is currently featured in “Schmigadoon!,” a streaming musical comedy series on Apple TV+, and she has several upcoming films.Earlier this year, she sang the opening number at the BAFTA Awards, and a rapped section paying tribute to female movie stars was mocked and memed for a hot second. DeBose, who is 32, seems to have taken it in stride — in London earlier this month, she turned the kerfuffle into merch that raised money for charity, and last weekend she performed at Lincoln Center.This year’s awards ceremony will for the first time take place at the United Palace, a large theater in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The ceremony, which is presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, honors plays and musicals staged on Broadway; it is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11, and to be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.This season’s Tony nominees are to be announced on May 2. More

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      Adrian Hall, Who Invigorated Regional Theater, Dies at 95

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      As founding artistic director, he made Trinity Rep in Rhode Island a leader in theatrical innovation. He then made his mark in Dallas as well.Adrian Hall, who as founding artistic director built Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., into one of the premiere regional theaters in the country, and who did similarly important work in Dallas and elsewhere, died on Feb. 4 in Tyler, Texas. He was 95.Trinity announced his death in a statement. A neighbor, Ruth Barrett, said Mr. Hall, who lived in his native city, Van, Texas, east of Dallas, died in a hospital.Curt Columbus, Trinity’s current artistic director, called Mr. Hall “a visionary artist, not only in the way he challenged the aesthetic limits of the stage, but also in the challenging subject matter he produced.”Mr. Hall led Trinity from its founding in 1964 until 1989, presenting one inventive production after another. For the last six years of that tenure, he was also artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, another important regional house.In the 1960s and ’70s, with the establishment not only of Trinity but also of houses like American Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Steppenwolf in Chicago, the regional theater movement that had begun a generation earlier under Margo Jones in Dallas and others solidified. Mr. Hall and his counterparts championed bold works innovatively staged.“His work was rooted in the work of the founders of the movement who came before him, especially Margo Jones, but then burst it wide open,” Kevin Moriarty, executive director of the Dallas Theater Center, said by email. “Like them, Adrian was deeply committed to creating a body of work with a company of actors who were resident in a community, rather than pick up actors for hire.“But,” he continued, “his unique approach to theatrical narrative and design was a significant aesthetic departure. Fusing the European influences of Brecht and Grotowski with a deep American sensibility (even more specifically, that of a gay Texan maverick), Adrian created theater in which actors confronted the audience directly.”In the early days of Trinity, that audience often consisted of high school students. In 1966, Mr. Hall received federal funding for a three-year program he called Project Discovery, which bused students from throughout Rhode Island to Providence to experience theater. In the first season, he mounted shows like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” thinking that the students would be interested in seeing plays they might be reading in class.They weren’t. They slashed seats, vandalized the bathrooms, threw things at the actors.“It was my moment of truth,” Mr. Hall told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “Even though I was frightened of them, I knew it was a battle unto the death with me. I had to make them listen.”“That,” he added, “is when I fired the cannons and sprayed them with water.”The reference was to the company’s adaptation of “Billy Budd,” the Herman Melville novella. Mr. Hall staged it in 1969, with the theater transformed into the H.M.S. Indomitable. The set was the work of Mr. Hall’s longtime collaborator Eugene Lee, who died on Feb. 6. (“Lee’s Indomitable is a masterpiece of stagecraft,” Kevin Kelly wrote in a review in The Boston Globe, “and it wouldn’t surprise me if she sailed.”)For that and other productions, Mr. Hall altered the theater seating in ways that made the students feel part of the action, an effort to shake them out of their indifference.“It seemed to me I had worked all my life to make theater possible, and the audience was saying, ‘We don’t want no part of it,’” he told The New York Times in 1975. “And so I began right then to move outside of the proscenium and to surprise those little devils, to throw things at them, to challenge them, to intimidate them.”That approach became a signature of Mr. Hall’s work. By 1972 The Times was calling him “probably the most interesting director now working in the American regional theater.” Fifteen years later, the newspaper described the Texas-born Mr. Hall as “regional theater’s most charismatic evangelist, preaching the gospel of the nonprofit theater and warning against that devil, Broadway, with a driven fervor that is as Southern as tent meetings and as brashly Texan as a fur coat at the Cotton Bowl.”For some directors, the text of a play guides the presentation. But for Mr. Hall, and others in the regional theaters of the day, the director’s vision was paramount.“He brought his own unique aesthetic to a play,” Mr. Moriarty said, “focusing on the violence of a visceral experience in a shared, rough space, rather than creating illustrations that attempted to represent reality.”In 1981 Trinity won the Tony Award for regional theaters.Mr. Hall on the set of “The Tempest” at the Dallas Theater Center in 1987. For the last six years of his tenure at Trinity, he was also artistic director there.Mark Perlstein for The New York TimesMr. Hall was born in Van on Dec. 3, 1927, to Lennie and Mattie Hall. His father thought he should follow in his footsteps and become a rancher; his mother envisioned him as a preacher. Instead he read a lot, acted in school plays and, after graduating from high school at 16, enrolled at East State Texas Teachers College in Commerce.In 1947, he took a fateful trip to Dallas, where he met Ms. Jones, who was attracting attention with the repertory theater she had started there.She suggested that he apply to the Pasadena Playhouse’s theater arts school in California. He was accepted, and studied for six months there before returning to the teachers college. He graduated in 1949 and, from 1951 to 1953, served in the Army, where he started the Seventh Army Repertory Company, “doing grim little plays like ‘Darkness at Noon’” all over Europe, he told The Boston Globe in 1986.In the 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Hall directed in New York City, the Catskills and elsewhere before getting the call from a group of Providence business people who were trying to turn an amateur theatrical group, Trinity Square, into a professional one.He leaves no immediate survivors.Mr. Hall had a big personality and sometimes clashed with theater boards; his reluctance to set his full season in advance was one source of friction, since that made it hard to market subscriptions. A split with the Trinity board led him to leave Providence in 1989 and devote his full attention to the Dallas job, only to have that end when he clashed with the board there the same year, after which he became a freelance director.“Every once in a while,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1989, “an Adrian Hall will meet an unmovable object such as the Dallas Theater Center board.”If his personality set him apart, so, to some, did being openly gay. It also influenced his work.“Being gay, well, it’s an outsider status, no matter what anyone else says, and part of me really likes that,” he told The Globe in 1986. “It keeps me on edge, keeps me aware of what it’s like not being fully accepted, what it’s like being scored and thought less of because you’re different.“I identify with society’s rejects. Always have. That’s what my work’s about.” More