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      Ben Platt to Lead ‘Parade’ Revival on Broadway This Season

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      The musical’s exploration of antisemitism is timely, with rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning star of “Dear Evan Hansen,” will return to Broadway next month to lead the cast in a revival of “Parade,” a musical about an early-20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The revival, directed by Michael Arden (a two-time Tony nominee, for revivals of “Once on This Island” and “Spring Awakening”), had a seven-performance run at New York City Center last fall. Platt plays Leo Frank, a factory boss convicted of killing a young girl in a case tainted by antisemitism; Micaela Diamond, who previously played the youngest version of the title character in “The Cher Show” on Broadway, will co-star as Frank’s wife, Lucille.The show, with songs by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Alfred Uhry and co-conceived by Hal Prince, had a brief run on Broadway that opened in 1998; it was commercially unsuccessful, but won Tony Awards for both book and score. The history it depicts is real: Frank was convicted in 1913, lynched in 1915 (at age 31), and in 1986 he was posthumously pardoned.The musical’s exploration of antisemitism has made it more timely now, when there is rising concern about the issue in the United States and beyond. The City Center production garnered uniformly strong reviews: in The New York Times, Juan A. Ramírez called it “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The “Parade” revival will begin previews Feb. 21 and open March 16 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, where the musical “Almost Famous” closed on Sunday. The “Parade” production is planning a short run, to Aug. 6.The revival is being produced by Seaview, a company created by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea that previously produced “Slave Play” and “POTUS,” and Ambassador Theater Group, a large British theater company that operates two Broadway houses (the Hudson and the Lyric) and also produces shows. More

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      Tony Awards to Be Staged in Manhattan’s Washington Heights

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      The annual ceremony honoring Broadway’s top productions and performers is moving to the New York neighborhood where the musical “In the Heights” was set.After 75 years of ceremonies in and around New York’s theater district, the Tony Awards next year will move uptown, holding the annual best-of-Broadway awards ceremony in Washington Heights.Tony Awards administrators made the surprise announcement Tuesday morning, saying that the next ceremony would take place on June 11 at the United Palace, an ornate theater in northern Manhattan that was constructed as a movie theater and is now used for religious and cultural activities.The administrators did not immediately offer a rationale for the move, but it brings the ceremony to a neighborhood with a large Hispanic population, and to a theater that has been championed by one of Broadway’s best-known stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Miranda’s first Broadway musical, “In the Heights,” is named for, and takes place in, the neighborhood.)The ceremony, which will honor plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 29, 2022 and April 27, 2023, will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+. The nominations will be announced on May 2.The United Palace is a landmark building that opened in 1930 as a Loew’s “Wonder Theater,” which were large and luxurious movie palaces. The building has 3,400 seats, which makes it the fourth largest theater in Manhattan — it is significantly smaller than Radio City Music Hall, where the Tony Awards have often taken place, but larger than the Beacon Theater, where the awards have sometimes been staged in recent years.The Tony Awards have, since 1947, changed locations multiple times. They were initially held in hotel ballrooms, then Broadway theaters before switching to larger venues in the 1990s.The Tony Awards, formally known as the Antoinette Perry Awards, were founded by the American Theater Wing and are now presented by the Broadway League and the Wing. Next year’s ceremony will be directed by Glenn Weiss, who has frequently played that role; Weiss and his longtime collaborator, Ricky Kirshner, will produce the broadcast with the League and the Wing. More

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      Seymour Press, a Behind-the-Scenes Fixture on Broadway, Dies at 98

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      He started playing in Broadway orchestras in 1957, and eventually he began recruiting those orchestras as well.Seymour Press, who for more than 60 years served an important role — though one that went largely unnoticed by audiences — in dozens of Broadway and Off Broadway shows, first as a member of pit orchestras and later as the person who assembled those orchestras, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Hackettstown, N.J. He was 98.His daughter, Gwynn Press Anidjar, said the cause was advanced myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer.Mr. Press, known as Red because he had red hair in his younger days, played multiple instruments, including saxophone; he first sat in a Broadway pit for the 1958 musical “The Body Beautiful,” one of the first shows to feature music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. In the mid-1970s he began taking on the demanding job of musical coordinator (also called music contractor), although he continued playing in orchestras well into the 2000s.His primary duty as coordinator was hiring orchestras for shows. But he also scheduled rehearsals, made sure musicians were paid, handled issues between their union and management, and ironed out all manner of problems.“The guy who waves his arm is the music,” he said in a 2018 episode of the podcast “Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends,” referring to the conductor. “Everything else that has to do with the orchestra is me.”For 28 years, he filled that role for the Encores! revival series at New York City Center; he announced his retirement only this spring. He was also working on Broadway until just a few months ago, receiving the coordinator credit on the current productions of “The Music Man,” “Funny Girl” and “Into the Woods,” all of which opened this year.In 2007, he received a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater, which recognizes outstanding achievement in theater by those who do not qualify in a traditional Tony Award category.Mr. Press in 2016. He was the music coordinator for the Encores! series at New York City Center for 28 years before announcing his retirement this year.Walter McBride/Getty ImagesSeymour Press was born on Feb. 26, 1924, in the Bronx. His mother, Rose (Guttman) Press, was a homemaker, and his father, Arthur, was a salesman and “a frustrated musician,” as Seymour Press put it in the podcast. His father’s cousin, he said, played the saxophone and introduced him to the instrument; Mr. Press later added flute, clarinet, piccolo and others to his arsenal.Mr. Press graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his second year at what is now the City University of New York, he enlisted in the Army. He had expected to be drafted, he said, so when he saw a poster recruiting for the Army band, he bit.He spent his service playing for troops as they shipped out of Newport News, Va. It was, he said, both a safe assignment and good music training.“I went in an amateur saxophone player,” he said on the podcast. “I came out a professional.”After mustering out in 1946, he toured with various bands, small-time ones at first and eventually those of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. But by the mid-1950s, big-band music was fading; “the musical style I thought would last my lifetime was gone,” he said. He married Nona Gwynn Holcomb in 1957 and began looking to trade life on the road for something at least somewhat more stable.“The Body Beautiful” didn’t last long, but in 1959, Mr. Press found himself in the pit for a show that did: the original production of “Gypsy.”“Not only was it the first hit show I had,” he said, but it was also “the first time I could look at myself and say, ‘I’m going to be working 52 weeks a year,’ which was a big thing.”Mr. Press’s wife died in 2021. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a stepson, Edward Finkenberg, and two grandchildren.In his decades as a pit player and musical coordinator, Mr. Press saw lots of change: orchestra sizes and instrumentation varied, the pits moved (often to create more seats), and sound engineering became more sophisticated. He also fielded his share of odd requests. On the podcast, he recalled being asked to recruit a trio for one production: cello, violin, piano. But, the director told him, not just any players would do.“He wanted one to be tall and thin, one to be overweight and one to be very short,” Mr. Press said. “That was a problem.”Mr. Press got an insider’s view of countless shows, but his tastes weren’t infallible. He remembered working on “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge,” a sequel to the 1977 smash “Annie.” He first heard it at a backers’ audition.“I left that and I called my wife and said, ‘It’s going to be a giant hit,’” he said.Audiences at the pre-Broadway tryout in Washington in 1990 disagreed.“I watched them walk out — in throngs, not just four people, not just five people,” he recalled, adding, “We opened in Washington and closed in Washington.” More

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      Angela Lansbury, TV’s Favorite Sleuth on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ Dies at 96

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      She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury in 2010 to discuss her life and accomplishments on the stage and screen. She spoke with us with the understanding the interview would be published only after her death.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAngela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.Her death was announced in a statement by her family.Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five competitive Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. She also received a special Tony for lifetime achievement at this year’s ceremony. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.Ms. Lansbury as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”It might also have been a matter of bones. Her full, round face was not well suited for the dramatic lighting of the time, which favored the more angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any event, she appeared in many a forgettable film before breaking out as the glamorous, madcap aunt in “Mame” on Broadway.MGM regularly cast her as an older woman, or a nasty one. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper magnate trying to get her married lover elected president.With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury joined the national touring productions of two stage plays, “Remains to Be Seen” and “Affairs of State.” But when she returned to the movies as a freelance actress, she again found herself cast as either of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.”Ms. Lansbury with Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” She played a witch.DisneyShe was Elvis Presley’s possessive mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961). She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Though she was only three years Mr. Harvey’s senior, her maternal authority was entirely convincing when she told him, “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.”) She played a woman who kills her husband in “Please Murder Me” (1956) and an overbearing mother in “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958). And so it went.On to BroadwayMs. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso,” a translation of a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theater work. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.”In 1964 she was cast as a corrupt mayor in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” A notorious failure, it closed after only 12 previews and nine performances, but it showed she could summon the right stuff for live musical performance. “I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,” she said in 2009. “So I learned how to belt.”Ms. Lansbury with Frankie Michaels in “Mame.” More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, were said to be under consideration for the role.via Angela LansburyMs. Lansbury was anything but a shoo-in for the coveted lead in “Mame,” the Jerry Herman musical adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel “Auntie Mame,” which had already been adapted into a stage play and a movie — both starring Rosalind Russell, and both great successes.Ms. Russell did not want to play Mame again. Mary Martin was cast but opted out. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, were said to be under consideration. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition for the role in front of the show’s creative and financial principals.In a Life magazine cover article about the show and her part in it, she recalled that there had been many distracting interruptions by men in dark glasses, compelling her to sing the songs over again. “Then they said, ‘Goodbye, thank you.’ That was all,” she said.Back home in Malibu, Calif., with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, she waited for months for a call from the East. Finally, she flew to New York and confronted the producers.“I am going back to California,” she recalled telling them, “and unless you tell me — let’s face it, I have prostrated myself — now, yes or no, that’s the end of it.” That afternoon, she got an official yes.Her performance made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”Ms. Lansbury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesTo Ms. Lansbury’s disappointment, though, Lucille Ball was chosen for the film version of “Mame,” which was not a success.Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony for best actress as the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in “Dear World,” a 1969 musical adaptation of “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” The production itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. For a while, though, it held the distinction of charging the highest ticket prices on Broadway: $12.50 for the best seats (the equivalent of about $105 today).She then returned to Hollywood, where she played an aging German aristocrat in “Something for Everyone” (1970), a rare cinematic effort from the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and a witch in the Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971).But this was a tumultuous time for her and her family. Their Malibu house was destroyed in a brush fire. Her son and daughter were using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California for the coast of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse design.It was the sanctuary they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children overcame their drug problems. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, with credits including numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”; Deirdre eventually married Enzo Battarra, a restaurateur, and became his business partner.With Len Cariou in “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lansbury won a Tony Award for her performance as the baker Mrs. Lovett.Martha SwopeOver the next decade Ms. Lansbury worked mostly on the stage, in London and New York. She starred as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” which opened in London and won her a third Tony when it reached Broadway in 1974. She won yet another for her performance as Mrs. Lovett, the baker with a grisly source of meat for her pies, in Mr. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou in the title role, which opened in March 1979 and ran for 557 performances.Success on the London stage closed a circle for Ms. Lansbury.Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, and grew up there in upper-middle-class comfort, the daughter of Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician who was the son of a Labour Party leader, George Lansbury. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9; her grandfather died five years later, and that loss, together with the Blitz, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half sister and her twin younger brothers.“We left everything behind,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “Suddenly, we just weren’t there anymore.”Ms. Lansbury as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the hugely successful CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”CBSA Surprise HitFor all her stage success, Ms. Lansbury would capture the biggest audience of her career in 1984, when she was cast as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”It was widely believed that the series, whose protagonist was a bicycle-riding widow living in a small town in Maine, had little chance against sexier competition like the action crime drama “Knight Rider” on NBC. The conventional wisdom was that advertisers would not go after the older audience the show was likely to attract.“We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,” Richard Levinson, one of the show’s creators, recalled. “At best, we hoped that it would be a marginal success.” Instead, the show became a huge hit. In its second season it outdrew Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated anthology series, “Amazing Stories,” by more than two million viewers a week, and it went on to run until 1996.“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” Ms. Lansbury said in an interview with The Times early in the show’s second season, “is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”She received 12 successive Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher, but she never won.Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. And there were more Broadway performances to come. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacements could keep her off the stage for very long.She starred with Marian Seldes in the Terrence McNally comedy “Deuce” in 2007 and played the eccentric medium Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” earning Tony No. 5. Her lifetime achievement award brought the total to six — a total matched only by Audra McDonald and Julie Harris (including Ms. Harris’s own lifetime achievement award). Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her performance later that year as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of the Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.”Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.” A year later, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.Ms. Lansbury and the MGM executive Peter Shaw. They married in 1949.via Angela LansburyMr. Shaw, her husband, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to Richard Cromwell, an American actor, ended in divorce after less than a year. Ms. Lansbury is survived by her sons, Anthony and David; her daughter, Deirdre; a brother, Edgar; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.While many older actresses complained about a shortage of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacked for work and seldom turned it down.She did opt out of a big chance to return to Broadway for the 2017-18 season, in a revival of “The Chalk Garden,” saying she had decided to spend more time with her family rather than face a long, lonely stretch of living in New York. But other good roles continued to catch her fancy, including the rich, imperious Aunt March in the BBC mini-series “Little Women” and the nice lady who sells magical balloons in the film “Mary Poppins Returns.” Both were released in 2018.“I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she told Katie Couric of CBS in 2009. “So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it.”Ms. Lansbury in 2009. “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she said that year.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBut, she added, there was one thing she was still missing after all those years: “I’d like to do one great movie before I pass along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I think there’s one out there somewhere.” More

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      ‘A Strange Loop,’ Which Won Best Musical, Will End Broadway Run

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      The meta-musical, which won the Tony Award this year and the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, announced it would close on Jan. 15.“A Strange Loop,” the winner of this year’s Tony Award for best musical, will close on Broadway on Jan. 15, after a short run that reflects the industry’s ongoing pandemic-related struggles and the challenges of marketing an unconventional musical that wrestles with complex themes.The musical, a meta-theatrical story about an aspiring musical theater writer who is writing a musical about his struggles to find his way professionally and personally, has been a triumph in many ways — a first show by a previously unknown writer, Michael R. Jackson, it was hailed by critics as soon as it opened Off Broadway in 2019, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in drama, and then, after opening on Broadway in April, picked up Tony Awards in June for best musical and best book of a musical.But its run will be unusually short for a best musical winner in recent years, when the prize has often had more box office impact.At the time of its closing, “A Strange Loop” will have had 314 total performances, including 13 previews. That is significantly fewer than for other recent winners with modest runs, including “Fun Home,” which won the award in 2015 and closed after 609 total performances; “The Band’s Visit,” which won in 2018 and closed after 624 total performances; and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” which won in 2014 and closed after 935 total performances.All three of those shows recouped their capitalization costs. A spokesman said it is not yet clear whether “A Strange Loop” would recoup its capitalization costs, which a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said were $9.5 million.“A Strange Loop” was a passion project for Jackson, who labored on the musical for more than a decade. Inspired by his own experiences, the musical tells the story of Usher, who is working as an usher while writing about his own life, while also struggling with his family’s homophobia and with the racism and sizeism he encounters in the gay community.The show — which markets itself as “the big, Black and queer-ass Great American Musical” — is more sexually and emotionally frank than most Broadway musicals.The musical saw a bump at the box office after winning the Tony Award, playing to sold-out houses for two weeks with grosses peaking at $860,496 during the week that ended June 26. But grosses have been sliding since; during the week that ended Oct. 2, it grossed $579,354 and played to houses that were 79 percent full.Its creator, Jackson, said in a statement that he felt “blessed to have had the opportunity to share this raw, vulnerable and personal story with the world and to have connected with so many enthusiastic, loving audiences.”Broadway had been enjoying a yearslong sustained boom before the coronavirus pandemic, but like many other performing arts forms it has been struggling to rebound following the lengthy shutdown of theaters. The industry has been challenged not only by concerns about public health, but also by diminished tourism in New York City, the slow return of office workers to Midtown, a worrisome economy and, possibly, changing entertainment habits.During the 2021-22 Broadway season — a short season because most theaters remained closed during the summer of 2021 — 6,729,143 people attended Broadway shows, down from 14,768,254 during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic. Annual Broadway grosses dropped from $1.8 billion to $845 million over that time period.The industry’s softness appears to be ongoing. During the week that ended Oct. 2, there were 25 shows running on Broadway, attended by 209,668 people and grossing $25,208,583. During the comparable week in 2019 — the last comparable week before the pandemic shutdown — there were 33 shows running, attended by 261,793 people and grossing $30,098,714.The struggles have contributed to a number of closings. Most significantly, “The Phantom of the Opera” has announced that it plans to close Feb. 18, concluding a record-breaking 35-year run on Broadway. Two more modest hits, “Come From Away” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” also closed recently, and a strong-selling revival of “The Music Man” plans to close on New Year’s Day.New Yorkers will have another chance to see Jackson’s work next year. His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is scheduled to have an Off Broadway run next spring at Second Stage Theater, which is producing it jointly with Vineyard Theater. More

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      Charles Fuller, Pulitzer Winner for ‘A Soldier’s Play,’ Dies at 83

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      He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.Denzel Washington, left, and Charles Brown in 1981 in Mr. Fuller’s acclaimed play “A Soldier’s Play,” staged by the Negro Ensemble Company in New York.Bert AndrewsIn “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”Kenny Leon (with microphone), who directed a 2020 revival of “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway, addressed Mr. Fuller, third from left, onstage after a performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCharles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Theater.“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.” More

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      Chase Mishkin, Tony-Winning Producer of ‘Dame Edna,’ Dies at 85

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      She was nearly 60 when she began producing shows on Broadway. In 19 years, she had a hand (and her money) in 30 plays and musicals.Chase Mishkin, a prolific theatrical producer who received two Tony Awards, one for bringing the uninhibited Australian character Dame Edna Everage to Broadway, and who was something of flamboyant figure herself, chauffeured around town in her London taxicab, died on July 24 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.Her sister Julie Kahle confirmed the death, adding that Ms. Mishkin had dementia. She had also had two strokes.After her husband died, Ms. Mishkin arrived on Broadway in 1996 with her first play, “The Apple Doesn’t Fall . . . ,” which she had produced in Los Angeles. Over the next two decades, she became one of the most prominent female producers on Broadway, with a hand, and her money, in 29 more shows.“She had a real commitment to be a Kermit Bloomgarden” — who produced “Death of a Salesman” and “The Music Man” in the 1940s and ‘50s — said Joe Brancato, a friend who is founding artistic director of the Penguin Rep Theater in Stony Point, N.Y., in Rockland County. “She had a real dedication to each show.”Working with other producers, her hits included the musical “Memphis,” for which she shared the Tony for best musical in 2010; Martin McDonagh’s Irish drama “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (which opened in 1998); Claudia Shear’s Tony-nominated play “Dirty Blonde” (2000), and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2005), a musical adaptation of the Frank Oz film with Steve Martin and Michael Caine as con men.“Dame Edna: The Royal Tour” was one of Ms. Mishkin’s most conspicuous successes. It starred the Australian actor Barry Humphries as a former housewife-turned-self-appointed “gigastar” who, dressed in an elaborate evening gown, mauve wig and wild eyeglasses, held court with the audience, whom she called “possums.”It was a profitable hit during its run, from 1999 to 2000, and earned Ms. Mishkin, along with her frequent producing partner Leonard Soloway and two other producers, a special Tony for live theatrical presentation. But when Mr. Humphries went on tour two years later, he stunned his producers by leaving them behind.Ms. Mishkin said she felt betrayed. Asked if she would work with Mr. Humphries again, she told Michael Riedel, who was then the theater columnist for The New York Post, “I am in the enviable position of being able to say that once you lose me, you lose me forever.”Ms. Mishkin in 1997 with, from left, Steven M. Levy, Peter Crane and her frequent producing partner Leonard Soloway, inside the Gramercy Theater, which they were converting from a movie house to an Off Broadway theater. It is now a live music venue.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe was born Mary Margaret Hahn on Jan. 22, 1937, in Vanduser, Mo., and grew up in Sparta, Ill., and Dexter, Mo. Her mother, Violet (Phegley) Hahn, was a homemaker. Her father, Harold Hahn, was not a part of her life. She attended Washington University in St. Louis for a semester in 1955.Little is known about her next decade or so, other than that she was a dancer in Las Vegas who met her future husband, Ralph Mishkin, while modeling for an advertisement for his carpet manufacturing company. By then she had changed her given name to Chase.She and Mr. Mishkin married in 1970 and lived for a while in an estate they had bought from the singer and actress Cher in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Ms. Mishkin became known as a hostess and philanthropist, but she turned to theater after Mr. Mishkin’s death in 1993.In 1996 she staged Trish Vradenburg’s “The Apple Doesn’t Fall … ” — about a woman’s relationship with her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease — at a small theater in Los Angeles before taking it the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, with her friend Leonard Nimoy directing.It flopped, but Ms. Mishkin moved on, becoming increasingly familiar on Broadway for her flaming red hair and mink coats and her arrivals at premieres — and at Sardi’s, the theater district gathering spot — in her black London cab, which she had reupholstered in Burberry plaid.“She came on the scene in a bold way,” said Mr. Riedel, the author of “Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway” (2016) and a co-host of a morning radio show on WOR-AM in New York. “She was part of a new breed of female producers who said, ‘If I’m going to give you $500,000, I won’t be a passive investor — I want to be involved in every aspect of the show.’”Daryl Roth, another woman who started to find success as a theatrical producer in the late 1980s, wrote in an email about Ms. Mishkin, “My impression of her is one of being a ‘dame’ in the best possible way; she was outspoken but always gracious; she had a great attitude about enjoying life.”Ms. Mishkin endured failures like “Prymate,” about the battle for control over an aging gorilla between an anthropologist and geneticist, and “Urban Cowboy,” a 2003 a musical adaptation of the 1980 film about a Texas honky-tonk.In 2003, Ms. Mishkin and other producers decided that “Urban Cowboy” — devastated by bad reviews, a four-day musicians’ strike, the start of the war in Iraq and dismal ticket sales — would close after its fourth performance. But as Lonny Price, who directed the musical, walked to the stage to say goodbye to the audience, he encountered Ms. Mishkin backstage.“She said, ‘We’re not closing,’ and I said, ‘What did you say?’” he recalled in a phone interview. “She said, ‘I’ve decided not to close the show,’ and I said, ‘May I say that?’ And she said, ‘Go ahead.’ And she funded the show for the rest of its run.”The musical stayed alive — it got two Tony nominations — but closed after 60 performances.“When business didn’t pick up, she reluctantly closed the show,” Mr. Price said.She was just as persistent with Mark Medoff’s 2004 play, “Prymate.” At its center was a Black actor, André De Shields, as Graham, a 350-pound gorilla. Wearing a baggy T-shirt and shorts, Mr. De Shields grunted, screeched and scooted about onstage and, in one notorious scene, was masturbated by a sign-language interpreter.Faced with poor reviews and ticket sales, Ms. Mishkin bought an advertisement in The New York Times that urged theatergoers to see the play, which also starred Phyllis Frelich, James Naughton and Heather Tom. “Come Be Engrossed!” she wrote. But it closed after five performances.“I don’t try to defend that one,” she told New York magazine in 2009. “But I don’t throw rocks at it, either.”Ms. Mishkin also produced Off Broadway shows and earned an Emmy Award as executive producer of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street In Concert,” which Mr. Price directed on PBS in 2001. Her final Broadway show, “Doctor. Zhivago” (2015), closed after 23 performances.In addition to her sister Julie, she is survived by another sister, Dixie May; a stepson, Steve Mishkin; and five step-grandchildren. More

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      Michael R. Jackson, in a Place All His Own in Washington Heights

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      The Tony- and Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Strange Loop’ finally has an apartment to himself in Manhattan.It had to be around here someplace, but Michael R. Jackson could not readily locate his Pulitzer Prize certificate when an importuning visitor asked for a look. He rummaged through piles of paper on a closet shelf. Not there. He inventoried the plastic storage boxes in that same closet, but came up empty again.“It was, like, in a cardboard folder. What did I do with it? What did I actually do with it?” Mr. Jackson said, casting about his two-bedroom condo sublet in Washington Heights and looking stricken. “I could not have thrown it away. This is now going to torture me for the rest of my life.”Do not judge. Do not “tsk-tsk” about carelessness. Of late, it has been a wild loop-the-loop ride for Mr. Jackson, 41, the author and composer of “A Strange Loop,” the hit Broadway show. The metafictional chronicle of an overweight, gay Black man writing a musical about an overweight, gay Black man, “Loop” won the 2022 Tony Award for best book of a musical and the Tony for best musical, to say nothing of the 2020 Pulitzer for drama. (The errant document eventually turned up atop a bookcase in the second bedroom, near photographs taken by Jill Krementz of Mr. Jackson’s proud parents at the opening-night performance of “A Strange Loop” and of the playwright himself during the opening-night curtain call.)“I’ve been traveling so much. I’ve been doing press and running in and out for the last two months,” Mr. Jackson said. “It was, ‘Throw this suit on! Take that suit off!’ It was like a cartoon, clothes flying left and right, and me running out the door.”“It just doesn’t feel like you’re in the city,” said Michael R. Jackson of his Washington Heights neighborhood.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesMichael R. Jackson, 41Occupation: Playwright and composerDesignated designer: “I hated every second of choosing furniture. This is the kind of thing I’m just not interested in. I want it to be done. I just want to be at a point where I can appoint a person who knows me really well and knows my taste to do their thing.”“The apartment was starting to look like a crack den, and I had to bring my attention to cleaning,” he continued. “I got the housekeeper to come yesterday, and we sort of tag-teamed, but there was still a lot to do.”Mr. Jackson moved into his current quarters in May 2021. For the preceding 16 years, he lived around the corner, in a crepuscular three-bedroom rental with a rotating cast of apartment mates, minimal furniture and — for the first few months of the pandemic, thanks to an issue with a gas line — an out-of-commission stove.“It was cheaper to live there, but it just got sort of painful to me personally. I’m not as young as I once was,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was like, ‘I want to live alone.’”Mr. Jackson enlisted the set designer of “A Strange Loop,” Arnulfo Maldonado, to help furnish the apartment.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesHe was determined to stay in the neighborhood — “I find this to be a peaceful space” — but seemed uncertain about the process of securing new housing or, more likely, was just too busy to engage. Accordingly, the lead producer of “A Strange Loop,” Barbara Whitman, recommended Bohemia Realty Group, a niche agency that caters to the New York theater community and specializes in rentals and sales in the northern precincts of Manhattan.The floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and the views of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge from the compact balcony were all that a certain prospective tenant could desire. The roof deck was value added.“I’m a big fan of sunlight and windows, which I did not have in my old place, which for 16 years was so distressing to me,” said Mr. Jackson, who was also impressed with the primary bathroom. “It’s the nicest I’ve ever had, and I don’t have to share it with anyone.”The weighted blanket — lots of loops — has proved a favorite.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe décor is a crucial step up from Ikea — anodyne good taste, in shades of sienna and blue-gray, with a pop of burnt orange. The weighted Afghan on the ottoman, a true security blanket, adds texture.“I’ve always sort of lived like a college student,” Mr. Jackson said. “And so when I was able to upgrade a bit, I needed some help to figure out some basic things.”Arnulfo Maldonado, the set designer for “A Strange Loop,” became the furniture whisperer, presenting various options to his decidedly low-maintenance client.“I said, ‘I need a couch,’ and Arnulfo said, ‘You need a rug under the couch,’” Mr. Jackson recalled. “It would never have occurred to me to put a rug underneath the couch.”Perhaps more to the point, it would not have occurred to him to buy a rug.Mr. Jackson borrowed the soap opera magazines from his neighbor, Florencia Lozano, who was, for a time, part of the cast of the daytime drama “One Life to Live.”Desiree Rios/The New York Times“I do not have an interior-design bone in my body,” said Mr. Jackson, who vows to raise his game when he buys a house — something he hopes will happen in the next few years. “I couldn’t tell you whether I prefer neo-Classical to neo-non-Classical. I don’t know any of that. It isn’t something I’ve ever had to think about.”Of course, he has his discrete spheres of expertise. He waxes Talmudic on what he calls his trifecta of “Inner White Girl Inspirations.” Said trifecta comprises a framed poster of Joni Mitchell’s “Dog Eat Dog” album, which hangs over the sofa; a signed vinyl copy of Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville,” an opening-night gift from his agent (“This put Liz Phair on the map,” he said. “It blew the roof off the indie rock scene at the time — it’s a really iconic album”); and a vinyl copy of Tori Amos’s “Under the Pink.”“The first song on the album is ‘Pretty Good Year,’ and when I sat down to listen to it in high school, it really changed the game for me in terms of the kind of art I wanted to be making as a writer,” Mr. Jackson said. “She opened up a whole world of thought for me.”He is similarly steeped in the fine points of daytime dramas. “I was a huge soap person,” he said. “I watched all of them, or most of them. I had a subscription to Soap Opera Digest. I came to New York initially to become a soap opera writer. I interned at ‘All My Children’; I interned at ABC Daytime.”During lockdown, Mr. Jackson was able to rewatch many of the sin-and-suffering-in-the-afternoon episodes he had recorded years earlier, courtesy of the still-functioning TV-VCR combo his father bought him just before his freshman year in college.“I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I have more money and time now, and I should put my attention to developing home-décor taste,” he said.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesWithout fanfare, he sat down at the Yamaha keyboard in the second bedroom and played a lovely stretch of melody from “White Girl in Danger,” a musical in development that is drawn in part from his love of soaps.“I do think having a nice setup does make me feel less stressed when I’m working, which is good,” Mr. Jackson said. But he insisted that his previous apartment, gloomy though it may have been, did not impede the progress of “A Strange Loop.”“It didn’t matter,” he said. “My whole life was writing all the time and working on the piece. I had to write. I had to get it done.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More