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      Broadway Power Brokers Pledge Diversity Changes as Theaters Reopen

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      To address Black artists’ concerns, the pact calls for forgoing all-white creative teams, renaming theaters for Black artists and establishing diversity rules for the Tonys.Fifteen months after the George Floyd protests called renewed attention to racism in many areas of society, some of the most powerful players on Broadway have signed a pact pledging to strengthen the industry’s diversity practices as theaters reopen following the lengthy shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.The agreement commits Broadway and its touring productions not only to the types of diversity training and mentorship programs that have become common in many industries, but also to a variety of sector-specific changes: the industry is pledging to forgo all-white creative teams, hire “racial sensitivity coaches” for some shows, rename theaters for Black artists and establish diversity rules for the Tony Awards.The document, called “A New Deal for Broadway,” was developed under the auspices of Black Theater United, one of several organizations established last year as an outgrowth of the anger Black theater artists felt over the police killings of Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Black Theater United’s founding members include some of the most celebrated performers working in the American theater, including Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Billy Porter, Wendell Pierce, Norm Lewis and LaChanze.The signatories include the owners and operators of all 41 Broadway theaters — commercial and nonprofit — as well as the Broadway League, which is a trade organization representing producers, and Actors’ Equity Association, which is a labor union representing actors and stage mangers. Their pledges are not legally enforceable, but they agreed to “hold ourselves and each other accountable for implementing these commitments.”The document was negotiated at a series of virtual meetings that began while theaters were closed because of the pandemic; the changes are being announced as two Broadway shows have begun performances this summer, with 15 more planning to start, or restart, in September.“We convened all of the power players in our industry — the unions, the theater owners, producers and creatives — and had conversations about changing habits, structures and creating accountability,” said the director Schele Williams. “We knew that before our theaters robustly started opening in the fall, everyone deserved to know who they were in the space, and how they would be treated, and that’s something none of us have known in our careers.”One of the key changes being called for is that creative teams — which include directors, writers, composers, choreographers and designers — should be diverse. A section signed by directors and writers vows to “never assemble an all-white creative team on a production again, regardless of the subject matter of the show,” while a section signed by producers says, “We will make best efforts to ensure true racial diversity on all future productions.”The meetings, which started in March, were funded by the Ford Foundation and facilitated by Kenji Yoshino, director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University School of Law. “Everyone came in ready to make change,” the producer David Stone said.Among the changes that will be most visible to the general public: The three big commercial landlords on Broadway — the Shubert, Nederlander and Jujamcyn organizations — each pledged that at least one theater they operate would be named for a Black artist. Jujamcyn already operates the August Wilson Theater, the only Broadway house named for a Black artist.“This is a movement that is going to make change, and we’re happy to be part of it,” said Robert E. Wankel, chairman and chief executive of the Shubert Organization..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The document’s signatories are committing to changes that would affect many aspects of the theater business, from casting to hair care. But Broadway is a highly unionized work force, and the only labor unions that signed the agreement are those representing actors, stage managers, makeup artists and hairstylists.That leaves some conspicuous gaps — there is pervasive concern about low levels of diversity among Broadway stagehands, musicians and design teams, for example — and the leadership of Black Theater United said that although the group has endorsements from individuals working in those areas, it will continue to work to win more organizational support for the document.The actor NaTasha Yvette Williams said that she expected more groups to embrace the calls for change. “It’s only a matter of time before they come around,” she said.The director Kenny Leon acknowledged frustration that his own union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, was not a signatory. “I am disappointed that my directing union hasn’t signed on yet,” he said. “But as a Black member of that union, I’m going to keep fighting for that.”The executive director of the union, Laura Penn, said the organization was “deeply committed to the principles” of the agreement, but opted not to sign because much of it is “beyond the scope of the union’s purview.”Jeanine Tesori, a composer, said she is hopeful that the variety of professions represented in a show’s music department will jointly commit to creating more opportunity in what can be a tough area to break into. “We have to invite newcomers in,” she said.The signatories pledged to create a new, mandatory, industrywide training program for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Belonging. And, with an eye toward further diversifying the industry, they also committed to “mentoring and sponsoring Black talent in our respective fields on an ongoing basis.”“Everybody has a Black Lives Matter statement out,” said the actress Allyson Tucker. “The words are no longer enough. What is the action?”Among the other commitments: remove “biased or stereotypical language” from casting notices; insist on diversity riders prioritizing inclusivity as part of director and author contracts; search more widely for music contractors, who are the gatekeepers to orchestra staffing; and abolish unpaid internships. “Internships had a reputation of being for people who could afford to not be paid any money,” said the actor Darius de Haas.The signatories also commit to “sensitivity” steps for shows dealing with race. “For shows that raise racial sensitivities, we will appoint a racial sensitivity coach whose role is akin to an intimacy coach,” the document says. And separately, it says, “While acknowledging that creatives can write about any subject that captures their interest or imagination, we will, when writing scripts that raise identity issues (such as race), make best efforts to commission sensitivity reads during the drafting process to assist in flagging issues and providing suggestions for improvement. Playwrights and/or those individuals or entities with contractual approval rights will retain creative control to accept or reject the sensitivity reader’s recommendations.”“We have to tell difficult stories,” Schele Williams said. “But we also must take great care.”The document does not detail what kinds of diversity rules the group is seeking for the Tony Awards. But the actor Vanessa Williams said the document’s call for diversity “requirements for Tony Award eligibility” was inspired by new rules for the Academy Awards that will require films to meet specified inclusion standards to qualify for a best picture nomination. More

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      Micki Grant, Groundbreaking Broadway Composer, Dies at 92

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      With “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” she became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical.Micki Grant, who in the early 1970s became the first woman to write the book, music and lyrics of a Broadway musical, “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope,” a soulful, spirited exploration of Black life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, at Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, was announced by Joan Allen, a family spokeswoman.Ms. Grant, an actress, composer, playwright and musician, had developed “Don’t Bother Me” for two years with the director Vinnette Carroll, taking it to small theaters in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before opening on Broadway in April 1972.She would also be known for her work on another Broadway musical, “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” and for her seven years on the NBC soap opera “Another World.”Set in New York City, “Don’t Bother Me” explored topics like ghetto life, Black power, feminism and student protests with an all-Black cast performing songs — all by Ms. Grant — that drew from rock, jazz, funk, blues calypso and other musical genres.Ms. Grant recalled in 2018 that she and Ms. Carroll had wanted audiences of the musical to recognize the similarities among races, not the differences.“And I think that’s expressed when you find out in the end that the audience is willing to reach out and take someone’s hand,” she said in an interview with The New York Amsterdam News. “Some people in the audience never held the hand of a person of a different race before, and all of the sudden, they’re holding another person’s hand.”The musical got rave reviews, including one from Clive Barnes of The New York Times, who wrote: “It is the unexpected that is the most delightful. Last night at the Playhouse Theater a new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”The show received Tony nominations for best musical, best original score, best book (also by Ms. Grant) and best direction. It won a Grammy for best musical theater album, making Ms. Grant the first female composer to win in that category.“Don’t Bother Me” was revived in 2016 as a concert performance by the York Theater Company in Manhattan and two years later by the Encores! Off-Center series at New York City Center, directed by Savion Glover.Amber Barbee Pickens, foreground, in the Encores! production of “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope” at New York City Center in 2018. One critic said of the original Broadway production: “A new musical came clapping, stomping and stamping in. It is fresh, fun and Black.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJames Morgan, York’s producing artistic director, said in a phone interview that Ms. Grant had “wanted a say in everything and would say, ‘No, that’s not how that goes.’ I’d tell her, ‘We want this to be your version of the show.’”He had been hoping to stage a full Off Broadway production of “Don’t Worry,” he said, but couldn’t raise the money. “I so wanted it for her, because there’s still a big audience for it,” he said.Ms. Grant was born Minnie Louise Perkins on June 30, 1929, in Chicago to Oscar and Gussie (Cobbins) Perkins. Her father was a barber and a self-taught pianist, her mother, a saleswoman for Stanley Home Products.Minnie was smitten by theater and music at a young age. At 8 she played the Spirit of Spring, touching flowers to bring them to life, in a community center production. She began taking piano and double-bass lessons at about the same age.And, she recalled in an interview with The Times in 1972: “I was busy writing poetry and walking around the house reciting it. My family always listened and said what nice poetry it was.”Ms. Grant began writing music at 14 or 15 and acting in community theater at 18. She studied at the Chicago School of Music and later attended the University of Illinois, Chicago.But one semester shy of graduating, she left to perform in Los Angeles, where, in 1961, she appeared in a musical revue, “Fly Blackbird,” a social satire about the evils of segregation. She moved with the show to its Off Broadway production in 1962.By then, she had changed her name to Micki.Ms. Grant made her Broadway debut a year later in a supporting role in “Tambourines to Glory,” a short-lived “gospel singing play” — written by the poet Langston Hughes with music by Jobe Huntley — about two female street preachers in Harlem. It also starred Robert Guillaume and Louis Gossett Jr. A year later she appeared in a revival of Marc Blitzstein’s musical play “The Cradle Will Rock,” set in 1937 during the Great Depression.She turned to television in 1965, beginning a seven-year run on “Another World” playing a secretary-turned-lawyer, Peggy Nolan. She is believed to have been the first Black contract player in soaps. She later had roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light,” “Edge of Night” and “All My Children.”Ms. Grant in the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1968. She had a seven-year run on the show playing a secretary-turned-lawyer.Fred Hermansky/NBCCasey Childs, the founder of the Primary Stages Company in New York, recalled directing her in one soap opera episode. “She was an absolutely lovely actress, who understood the need on a soap to move quickly and make fast choices,” he said in an interview.During her long run on “Another World,” Ms. Grant was building a theatrical legacy with Ms. Carroll, who in 1967 founded the Urban Arts Corps to provide a showcase for Black and Puerto Rican performers.They put together the first production of “Don’t Bother Me” in 1970 at the company’s theater on West 20th Street in Manhattan. Ms. Grant also wrote the music and lyrics for a song and dance version of the Irwin Shaw novel “Bury the Dead” and for a children’s show called “Croesus and the Witch.”Working with Ms. Carroll, she said, was a “magical” experience.“It all came together so perfectly,” Ms. Grant told American Theater magazine in an interview this year. “It was a fortunate meeting between us: I needed somewhere to present my work, and she needed the new work to present because of who she was — having original works brought out her creativity, rather than trying to repeat something that was already done.”The two women also collaborated on “Your Arms Too Short to Box With God,” an acclaimed gospel-infused musical that opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for 429 performances. Ms. Carroll wrote the book, and music and lyrics were by Alex Bradford, with additional songs by Ms. Grant.Two years later, Ms. Grant was one of the five songwriters behind the musical “Working,” which was based on the writer Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with everyday people about their jobs. The group was nominated for a Tony for best original score.In one of Ms. Grant’s songs in “Working,” a woman laments: “If I could’ve done what I could’ve done/I could’ve done big things./With some luck to do what I wanted to do/I would’ve done big things./Swam a few rivers/Climbed a few hills/Paid all my bills.”She returned to Broadway one last time, with a musical, “It’s So Nice to Be Civilized” (1980), which closed after eight performances.Her other credits include the English-language lyrics to songs in “Jacques Brel Blues,” which debuted in East Hampton, N.Y., in 1988, and “Don’t Underestimate a Nut,” a musical based on the life of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who promoted the cultivation of peanuts. It was commissioned by a children’s theater in Omaha, Neb., in 1994.In the late 1990s, Ms. Grant spent two years with Lizan Mitchell on a tour of the United States and South Africa as they played the centenarian Delany sisters in “Having Our Say,” Emily Mann’s Tony Award-winning play.Ms. Grant had no immediate survivors. Her marriages to Milton Grant and Ray McCutcheon ended in divorce.When Encores! revived “Don’t Bother Me,” Ms. Grant, reflecting on its creation, said that her and Ms. Carroll’s goal had not been to produce an incendiary musical about the difficulties faced by Black people in America.“There was a lot of angry theater out there at the time, especially in the Black community — Bullins, Jones,” she said, referring to the playwrights Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones, who became known as Amiri Baraka. “I wanted to come at it with a soft fist. I wanted to open eyes but not turn eyes away.” More

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      Elliot Lawrence, Award-Winning Conductor, Dies at 96

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      He led a big band, conducted on Broadway, collected Emmys and for nearly 50 years led the orchestra on the annual Tony Awards broadcast.Elliot Lawrence, who after leading a big band in the 1940s and ’50s won a Tony Award for his conducting on Broadway and spent nearly a half-century in charge of the orchestra that plays on the Tonys’ annual broadcast, died on July 2 in Manhattan. He was 96.His son Jamie confirmed the death, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.A pianist by training, Mr. Lawrence was a leader from a young age, forming one youth ensemble, the Band Busters, at age 12. In his 20s he started Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra, which was voted the most promising new big band in Billboard’s college polls in 1947 and 1948.His later work as conductor of the Tony Awards orchestra — a job he got because of his success on Broadway and in television — earned him two Emmy Awards.“He was happiest in front of an orchestra,” said Jamie Lawrence, who is also a musician and conductor.The big-band era was waning after World War II, but Mr. Lawrence’s orchestra found success playing colleges, proms and concerts. In 1949 alone, it traveled 65,000 miles.The band’s members variously included the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who wrote some of its arrangements, and the trumpeter Red Rodney. It performed at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan and at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.“He knew how to rehearse, and he had great ears,” Joe Soldo, who played saxophone for Mr. Lawrence’s band from 1949 to 1951, said by phone. “He had instrumentation, like a separate oboe and a French horn. He brought classical input to his arrangements.”But Mr. Lawrence decided to stop touring in 1954 after a trombone player in his band, Ollie Wilson, had given him bad news about some of the other musicians.“He came to me one night on the road and said, ‘El, I’m sorry to tell you this, but out of the 16 guys in the band, 14 of them were junkies.’ Only Ollie and I were clean,” Mr. Lawrence recalled in 2009 in an interview with the alumni magazine of his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.He occasionally reassembled the band in various configurations to record albums, including “Elliot Lawrence Plays Gerry Mulligan Arrangements” (1955), “Swinging at the Steel Pier” (1956) and “Jazz Goes Broadway” (1957).By then he had begun to find work in television. In 1959, he conducted a 42-piece orchestra that the television host Ed Sullivan took to the Soviet Union.While there, one of the many performers on the trip, the choreographer Gower Champion, asked Mr. Lawrence to be the musical director of “Bye Bye Birdie,” which Mr. Champion was directing and which was to open on Broadway the next year.Mr. Lawrence was conducting the “Bye Bye Birdie” orchestra — on his way to a Tony nomination — when the composer Frank Loesser hired him for the same job on his new musical, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” which opened in October 1961.Their collaboration proved fruitful. Mr. Lawrence won a Tony, one of seven that the show received, including best musical and best actor (Robert Morse).Mr. Lawrence, at the piano, in 1946. He found success leading several bands, including Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra.CBS RadioElliot Lawrence Broza was born on Feb. 14, 1925, in Philadelphia. His father, Stan Lee Broza, was a founder and executive of the local radio station WCAU. He and Elliot’s mother, Esther (Malis) Broza, produced the long-running variety show “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour” on radio and later on television.Elliot began taking piano lessons at age 3. In 1930 he contracted polio, which affected his fingers and neck, but he recovered and began playing again, and at 10 he was accompanying his mother when she sang tunes from the Great American Songbook at parties in their home.He went on to perform with the Band Busters on his parents’ “Children’s Hour.” At 16 he entered the University of Pennsylvania on a music scholarship and became student director of the marching band, writing, he recalled, jazz arrangements for the school’s fight songs when the football team faced Army in a sold-out game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.After graduating in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in music, Mr. Lawrence took over WCAU’s house band, which played live on the air. He formed his big band a year later. Around that time he changed his surname to Lawrence and made Broza his middle name.In 1949, as a veteran bandleader of 24, he was focused on the music as well as the business of overseeing a touring group of 17 members, including two singers, that was grossing $300,000 a year but losing money nevertheless because of salaries, transportation, uniforms, booking agency fees and other costs.“You can see it isn’t a way to get rich quick,” Mr. Lawrence told The Kansas City Star, adding: “My father is my business manager. I don’t have to worry about my money being stolen.”The big-band work yielded to conducting on Broadway, where, after “How to Succeed,” he was the musical director of eight more shows, including “1776,” which opened in 1969. By then he was a year into his run as conductor of the Tony Awards orchestra, a gig that would last until 2013.In addition to the Emmys he won for his work on the Tonys, Mr. Lawrence also won Emmys for his musical direction of the television specials “’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous, ’S Gershwin,” a tribute to George and Ira Gershwin in 1972, and “Night of 100 Stars” (1982), an all-star variety show celebrating the centennial of the Actors’ Fund of America.His television credits include writing music for soap operas like “The Edge of Night,” for which he won two Daytime Emmys, and two ABC Afterschool Specials, which earned him two more Daytime Emmys.He also wrote music for the opening sequence of “The French Connection” (1971) and for “Network” (1976). But most of his “Network” score was cut, Jamie Lawrence said.“Paddy Chayefsky came into the edit room and said, ‘I don’t want to hear music,’” Mr. Lawrence said, referring to the film’s screenwriter. “He only wanted dialogue.”“My dad,” he added, “was very proud of that score.”In addition to his son Jamie, Mr. Lawrence is survived by his daughters, Alexandra and Mia Lawrence; another son, Danny; and five grandchildren. His wife, Amy (Bunim) Lawrence, died in 2017.Ricky Kirschner, the executive producer of the Tonys broadcast, recalled Mr. Lawrence as a gentlemanly leader of the orchestra until he was nearly 90.“Think about it,” he said by phone. “It’s a three-hour show, with 15 performances, and you have to arrange and rehearse music for every possible winner. And when they say who the winner is, you have to be fast enough to play it while the director is in your ear, telling you to cut after 20 or 30 seconds”He added, “Think of doing that when you’re 88.” More

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      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ to Slim Down Before Broadway Return

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      Reducio! The play, which had been performed in two parts, will be condensed and restaged in one part when it returns this fall.“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the sprawling stage play that imagines Harry and his friends as grown-ups and their children as wizards-in-training, will be substantially restructured before returning to Broadway this fall.The play, which had been staged in two parts before the pandemic, will return as a single show on Nov. 16.The show was widely acclaimed, winning the Olivier Award for best new play when it opened in London, and the Tony Award for best new play when it opened in New York. But it was costly to develop, costly to run, and costly for theatergoers, who had to buy tickets to two shows to experience it fully.The play’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, in a joint statement attributed their decision to “the challenges of remounting and running a two-part show in the U.S. on the scale of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,’ and the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”The show will continue to run in two parts in London; Melbourne, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany, but will be a single part in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. It was not immediately clear how long that single part would be; the two parts have a total running time of about 5 hours and 15 minutes.Structured essentially as a stage sequel to J.K. Rowling’s seven wildly popular “Harry Potter” novels, the show was the most expensive nonmusical play ever to land on Broadway, costing $35.5 million to mount, and another estimated $33 million to redo Broadway’s Lyric Theater. Before the pandemic, the play was routinely grossing around $1 million a week on Broadway — an enviable number for most plays, but not enough for this one, with its large company and the expensive technical elements that undergird its stage magic.The play, a high-stakes magical adventure story with thematic through lines about growing up and raising children, was written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, based on a story credited to Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany. Thorne and Tiffany said they had been working on a new version of the show during the pandemic, which, they said, “has given us a unique opportunity to look at the play with fresh eyes.”The writers did not say what kind of changes they would make, but the production promised that the new version would still deliver “all the amazing magic, illusions, stagecraft and storytelling set around the same powerful narrative.”“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” began its stage life in London, opening in the summer of 2016, and winning nine Olivier awards — the most of any play — in 2017. It arrived on Broadway in 2018, picked up six Tony Awards, and initially sold very strongly, grossing about $2 million a week. But the sales softened over time, as average ticket prices fell, apparently because of a combination of the lengthy time commitment and the need to buy two tickets to see the whole story, which made it particularly expensive for families.The show has been expanding globally — adding productions in San Francisco and Australia, and planning its first production in a language other than English for Hamburg — making restructuring complicated. But the producers have apparently decided to go to a one-part structure in North America, while maintaining the two-part structure elsewhere in the world, as they try to find the formula for long-term global success. According to the production, the play has already been seen by 4.5 million people.Tickets for the Broadway production will go on sale July 12; ticket prices have not yet been announced. The San Francisco production is scheduled to resume performances at the Curran theater next Jan. 11, and the Toronto production is to begin performances next May at the Ed Mirvish Theater.The two-part play is already running in Melbourne and is scheduled to reopen in London on Oct. 14 and to resume previews in Hamburg on Dec. 1. More

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      Special Tony Awards Go to 'American Utopia,' 'Freestyle Love Supreme'

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      The Broadway Advocacy Coalition, “David Byrne’s American Utopia” and “Freestyle Love Supreme” win special Tonys.The Tony Awards, long delayed by the pandemic, announced on Tuesday the first recipients, honoring the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, an organization started five years ago by a group of actors and others as a tool to work toward dismantling racism through theater and storytelling.The other recipients were “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” an intricately choreographed concert by the Talking Heads singer, and “Freestyle Love Supreme,” a mostly improvised hip-hop musical that was created, in part, by Lin-Manuel Miranda. These honors, called special Tony Awards, were presented to three recipients that the Tony administration committee thought deserving of recognition even though they did not fall into any of the competition categories, according to a news release.The recipients were announced more than one year after the ceremony had originally been expected to take place. During the coronavirus pandemic, the ceremony was put on indefinite hold. The awards show — a starry broadcast that will celebrate Broadway’s comeback — is now set to air on CBS in September, when Broadway shows are scheduled to return to theaters in almost full force. Most of the awards, however, will be given out just beforehand, during a ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.The award for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is indicative of how deeply the American theater industry was affected by the mass movement for racial justice set off by the police killing of George Floyd last year.In a statement, Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, and Heather A. Hitchens, the chief executive of the American Theater Wing — the two organizations that present the awards — said that the coalition has provided an “unparalleled platform for marginalized members of our theater community and tools to help us all do better as we strive for equity.”Among the organization’s projects is Theater of Change, a social justice methodology — developed with Columbia Law School — that brings together Broadway artists, legal and policy experts and people whose lives have been shaped by forces such as the criminal justice, immigration and educational systems to collaborate on storytelling as a means to advocate “just policies.”This year’s ceremony for the Tonys, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, will be the 74th such event and will recognize work performed on Broadway between April 26, 2019, and Feb. 19, 2020.Broadway’s 41 theaters have been closed since March 12, 2020; right now, the first planned performances are for “Springsteen on Broadway,” the rock legend’s autobiographical show, which is set to open this Saturday at the St. James Theater. As of now, the next show scheduled to open is “Pass Over,” a play about two Black men trapped on a street corner, on Aug. 4 at the August Wilson Theater.“American Utopia,” which opened on Broadway in October of 2019, is planning to restart performances on Sept. 17. “Freestyle Love Supreme,” which opened that same month, is scheduled to play again for a live audience on Oct. 7. More

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      Karla Burns, Who Broke a ‘British Tonys’ Color Barrier, Dies at 66

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      Her Olivier Award was for her signature role as Queenie in “Show Boat,” a part that once earned a Tony nomination. She later lost her voice in surgery and fought to regain it.Karla Burns, a singer and actor who in 1991 won a Laurence Olivier Award, Britain’s highest stage honor, for her role as the riverboat cook Queenie in a production of “Show Boat,” and who later fought to regain her soulful voice after losing it in an operation to remove a growth in her throat, died on June 4 in Wichita, Kan. She was 66.Her sister, Donna Burns-Revels, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by a series of strokes.A spokeswoman for the Olivier Awards’ sponsoring organization, the Society of London Theater, said it’s believed that Ms. Burns was the first Black performer to win that honor.Her Olivier, Britain’s equivalent of a Tony, for best supporting performance in a musical, came in 1991 in recognition of her work in a revival of “Show Boat,” co-produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the West End. Almost a decade earlier she had earned a Tony nomination for playing Queenie on Broadway.Ms. Burns’s musical journey began when she was a girl growing up in Wichita in the 1960s. Her father was a blues and gospel pianist, and every Saturday night she danced beside his piano while he played. On bus rides to school she broke out in song. One day a choir teacher told her, “Kiddo, you can really sing.”After studying music and theater at Wichita State University, Ms. Burns auditioned for the role of Queenie in a regional production of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical “Show Boat,” about the lives of the performers and crew aboard a floating theater called the Cotton Blossom that travels along the Mississippi River in the segregated South.Ms. Burns landed the role and was soon taking the stage at the Lyric Theater in Oklahoma City. Then she performed as Queenie in an Ohio dinner theater production, belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” nightly. In the early 1980s, she headed to New York to audition for the part for a national tour of “Show Boat” presented by the Houston Grand Opera. She competed for the role against hundreds of other women.“I had no agent and I walked in,” Ms. Burns said in an interview on the “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1982. “Some of them, I knew their faces, I knew they were famous women, and I said, ‘Well, I‘m here, and I’m from Kansas, and I’m going to go out there and do my best.’”She was asked to sing 16 bars of one song, and then the audition ended. After weeks of silence, someone called to apologize for losing her phone number. The part was hers, she was told.The musical, which starred Donald O’Connor and Lonette McKee, toured the country for months and arrived on Broadway in 1983.“There is standout work by Karla Burns,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Miss Burns has been handed a sizzling, rarely heard song, ‘Hey, Feller,’ that’s been restored to ‘Show Boat’ for this production.”She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance and won a Drama Desk Award. She later sang on a “Show Boat” studio album, released in 1988.Ms. Burns with Bruce Hubbard in the Broadway revival of “Show Boat” in 1983. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as a riverboat cook.Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library“Karla was proud to play Queenie,” said Rick Bumgardner, a close friend of hers who directed her in productions of “The Wiz” and “Steel Magnolias.” “When she got the opportunity to put a rag on her head, she didn’t feel she was putting people down. She felt she was portraying strong women and reminding our nation of its past.”In the 1990s, Ms. Burns appeared in “Hi-Hat Hattie,” a touring one-woman musical based on the life of Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Oscar, for her role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Ms. McDaniel was also a Wichita native and had played Queenie in the 1936 movie version of “Show Boat,” and Ms. Burns had long considered her a kindred spirit. More

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      in Theater

      A Chance to Fix the Tonys, and So Many Things to Fix

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      It has been a tough year for Broadway. Now it’s time to get tough on the show that too often honors investors instead of achievers.You know that hideous scrum of investors storming the stage when their show is named best play or best musical at the Tony Awards?Well, they’re heading back unless somebody stops them.The 2021 Tonys, which because of the pandemic are actually the 2020 Tonys, will be awarded on Sept. 26. That will make 27 months since the last telecast, in June 2019: plenty of time to rethink what has become a reliably mortifying experience. But to do that, Broadway will have to face up to the way it has traditionally favored the financiers over the artists in its shotgun wedding of art and commerce.Take the 2014 telecast, on which Jennifer Hudson sang the bombastic title song from the musical “Finding Neverland.”Was that show in the running for any awards? No — it did not even open until the following season. Was Hudson at least supposed to appear in it? No, but she was more famous than anyone who did. Was the staging, in which Peter Pan performed a ballet in green camo while Hudson swanned nearby in silver lamé, even remotely understandable?Well, yes, if you knew that the producer of “Finding Neverland” was Harvey Weinstein.Even when not being manipulated by moneybags, the awards have regularly represented Broadway as a neurotic mess: defensive about its marginality, embarrassed by its serious works and insecure about its commercial appeal. In the opening number at the 2019 awards, the host, James Corden, spent more than nine minutes begging the CBS audience to honor the liveness of live theater, even as he listed the many delightful and far more accessible experiences available on television, including his own CBS talk show.James Corden, flanked by Kelli O’Hara, Brooks Ashmanskas and other Broadway performers, during the opening number of the 2019 Tony Awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow is the time for the Tonys to pull their act together. Why should the best show people somehow keep making the dullest, tackiest hodgepodge of a show?Which is not to say it will be easy, especially this year. Aside from reflecting the disaster of the pandemic, which saw Broadway darkened, its ranks thinned by disease and thousands out of work, the Tonys will have to address, within the context of an entertainment product, the racism long built into the theatrical ecosystem and the recent calls for change. That’s a story not very susceptible to jazz hands.With so much to do, the announcement that only three competitive awards will be given out within the two-hour CBS broadcast — the other 22 having been relegated to a two-hour preshow on the streaming service Paramount+ — may prove to be good news instead of the abomination it at first seemed.That’s because pushing most of the awards into one compartment and most of the singing and dancing into another may allow the producers and writers of this year’s show, many of them veterans of previous Tonys, to celebrate both parts of the Broadway package more fully. The gravity and the razzmatazz can each have their say, in their own style, instead of fighting for dominance and airtime, and losing jointly.There was a time when razzmatazz had no part in the proceedings. In the early years of the awards, which were first televised, to a local New York audience, in 1956, the ceremony was more like a funeral directors’ dinner, with little or no entertainment, extremely brief speeches and some very odd categories. (Best stage technician?) Coaxing potential audiences, especially out-of-town ones, to see a Broadway show was not on the agenda, and television itself, blurry and black-and-white, was no competition anyway. The point was merely to honor the honorees.Now we accept that the Tonys are an industry marketing tool, the honorees merely bait.That can be fun, and even powerful, when staged with the wit and intelligence that the best musicals apply to the uneasy relationship between art and commerce. In recent years, numbers from “Fun Home” (2015) and “The Band’s Visit” (2018) were so beautifully conceived for the camera — largely by their original directors, Sam Gold and David Cromer — that without any loss of seriousness or subtlety they demonstrated why people might want to see the shows in the first place.And with enough savvy, even a crushing loss could be expressed in prime time, as when students who survived the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sang “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” on that year’s telecast.But for the most part, recent musicals appear in a poor light compared to the classics of past Tonys, not because they are necessarily worse but because the old telecasts often cushioned their selections in context and let you get to know their characters. Plays have it even worse: They are barely permitted to present themselves at all. “Choir Boy,” in 2019, was the exception that proved the rule, intercutting spoken elements of its story with a thrilling version of “Rockin’ Jerusalem.”Finally, at the bottom of the pecking order, come the artists, starting with leading actors, then supporting actors, then directors, choreographers, composers, book writers, designers and, well, does anyone remember the last time we got to hear an orchestrator say more than four words on television?All of this can be improved in a split show. With its increased total time of four hours — and especially this year, with fewer categories and nominees than usual — the ceremony can honor the plays with meaningful excerpts, and the people who actually make the work with recorded segments that help us see what they do. The entertainment segment can likewise be given more time to breathe, allowing drop-dead production numbers and quieter, more intimate moments to create a rhythm more like the experience you actually get on Broadway.And if the Tonys would deign to take some pointers from the creators of the Antonyo awards, which in the worst of the pandemic managed to honor Black theater artists with dignity and warmth — or for that matter, this year’s surprising Grammys — they might remember that what they’re trying to promote, especially now, is human connection. The smarmy introductions and whirligig graphics and general aura of hectic oversell could be replaced with a more confident statement of what theater, at its best, has been and can be.Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas sang a moving rendition of “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” at the Tonys ceremony in 2018.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times ORG XMIT: FSTI’m afraid that means some drastic changes. First, let’s get rid of hosts whose Broadway cred comes mostly from untutored enthusiasm and the wishful thinking that they might boost ratings. (It never works; for years, the show has drawn only 6 million to 8 million viewers no matter what — and recently even fewer.) Homegrown talent — Billy Porter? Meryl Streep? — will do nicely, thanks.And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the overcaffeinated television directors, editing as if to induce convulsions and framing all scenes as if they were sitcoms. Recent highlights have repeatedly shown what should be obvious: Theater directors make the best televised theater.Not that Broadway’s identity crisis is going anywhere, even if we achieve the Best Tonys Ever. But to get to a healthier, more entertaining place, the American Theater Wing and the Broadway League, the organizations that present the event, have to stop favoring the commercial side so fawningly. Producers of individual shows should not be allowed to shape any content but their own; otherwise, the telecast winds up being hijacked by beamed-in celebrities singing songs from terrible musicals no one’s yet seen.And as for those stage-swarming investors? Let’s ban them too. The awards they bogart belong to the authors.In other words, let the artists be in charge. Money may talk, but it doesn’t sing. More

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      in Television

      Broadway’s Tony Awards, Delayed by Pandemic, Set for September

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      Most of the prizes will be announced on the Paramount+ streaming service, followed by a starry concert celebrating Broadway on CBS television.The long-delayed Tony Awards, honoring the last set of shows to open on Broadway before theaters went dark, finally have a plan: The ceremony will take place on Sept. 26, timed to bolster a pandemic-hobbled industry as shows begin to reopen.Three of the 25 competitive awards — best musical, best play and best play revival — will be presented live during a television program, broadcast on CBS, that will primarily be a starry concert of theater songs. But the bulk of the awards, honoring performers, writers, directors, choreographers and designers, will be given out just beforehand, during a ceremony that will be shown only on Paramount+, the ViacomCBS subscription streaming service.The organizers’ current expectation is that the event — awards and performances — will be live and in-person, taking place inside a Broadway theater.The three jukebox shows vying for best musical — “Jagged Little Pill,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” and “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” — will each be invited to perform on the television broadcast. Many details — like which theater will be used, whether there will be a host, and who will perform — have not been determined.The two-platform structure, running a total of four hours, was arrived at during lengthy negotiations between the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing — the two organizations that present the awards — and CBS, which has broadcast the ceremony since 1978. CBS pushed to emphasize entertainment value, particularly in a year when viewership has plunged for many awards shows; the theater organizations wanted a way to honor the artistry of the abbreviated 2019-2020 season.“The ground was shifting under our feet the entire time, but our goal was to get as much celebration of the community and all the nominees as possible,” said the League’s president, Charlotte St. Martin.In a joint interview, St. Martin and the Theater Wing’s chief executive, Heather Hitchens, said they were pleased with the outcome.“Everybody wanted to create something that would celebrate the community, help sell tickets and be appealing to a national audience,” Hitchens said. “There were really good, thorough and passionate discussions about how best to achieve those three things.”They noted that it has been years since all Tony Awards categories were viewable nationally. For six years, starting in 1997, some of the awards were presented on a PBS special that would air just before the CBS broadcast, but in recent years, many of the design and writing awards have been presented off the air.“One of the things we’re proudest of is we got Paramount+ for all of our awardees, and the celebration of these awards on a major platform is a huge achievement,” Hitchens said. “That’s something we’ve wanted for years.”The broadcast segment is being described in a news release as “a live concert event, featuring superstar Broadway entertainers and Tony Award winners reuniting onstage to perform beloved classics and celebrate the joy and magic of live theater.” Asked for more detail, Hitchens said, “It’s going to be jam-packed with entertainment that is about Broadway. More to come on that.”The two-platform plan is similar to that used by the Grammy Awards, at which the majority of the prizes are announced at a preshow ceremony, followed by an entertainment-focused television broadcast. Some of the Tony Award winners named during the streaming ceremony will also be acknowledged during the TV portion.The ceremony, originally scheduled for June 7, 2020, will take place in September as part of an effort to reinforce the marketing message that Broadway is back in business — in fact, the show is being titled “The Tony Awards Present: Broadway’s Back!” Broadway’s 41 theaters have been closed since March 12, 2020; at the moment, the first show planning performances is “Hadestown,” on Sept. 2, followed by “Chicago,” “Hamilton,” “Lackawanna Blues,” “The Lion King” and “Wicked” on Sept. 14 and at least two dozen more over the fall and winter.“To have tickets on sale, to have shows announcing their openings, and to have an announcement about the Tony Awards, feels exhilarating, and hopeful,” St. Martin said.This year’s awards ceremony — formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards — will be the 74th such event and will recognize work performed on Broadway between April 26, 2019, and Feb. 19, 2020. The Tony Awards retroactively set that eligibility deadline after determining that too few voters had seen a revival of “West Side Story” and a new musical called “Girl From the North Country” that opened in the final weeks before the pandemic arrived; those shows are expected to be eligible to compete for awards next year.The nominations for this year’s ceremony were announced last October; 15 shows managed to score a nod.The five contenders for best play are “Grand Horizons,” by Bess Wohl; “The Inheritance,” by Matthew López; “Sea Wall/A Life,” by Simon Stephens and Nick Payne; “Slave Play,” by Jeremy O. Harris; and “The Sound Inside,” by Adam Rapp.The winners have already been determined, although the results are unknown: the 778 Tony voters — producers, performers, directors, designers and others associated with the industry — were invited to cast their ballots, electronically, in early March. The results have since been safeguarded by the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP.The streaming portion of the Sept. 26 Tony Awards ceremony is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. Eastern; the broadcast show, which can also be streamed live and on demand on Paramount+ and the CBS app, is scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern. As in years past, the Tony Awards show will be put together by the producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss of White Cherry Entertainment; Weiss will be the show’s director. More