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      in Theater

      Augmented Reality Theater Takes a Bow. In Your Kitchen.

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      The Immersive Storytelling Studio at the National Theater in London is using technology to bring a miniature musical to viewers’ homes. It’s one of several high-tech British projects pushing dramatic boundaries.LONDON — Standing in front of a golden bandstand, dressed in a white satin gown and pearls, the vocalist Nubiya Brandon sashayed to a gentle beat. Stepping toward the spotlight, she took a lazy turn around the stage, singing a playful calypso number and smiling occasionally at the band behind.The weird thing about this show, called “All Kinds of Limbo,” was that Brandon appeared to be in this reporter’s kitchen. The singer was in fact an eerily realistic holographic avatar on a mobile phone screen; her performance had been recorded and was now being broadcast in augmented reality from the National Theater in London.Via the technology’s strange alchemy, which overlays digital imagery onto whatever a camera phone is pointing at, Brandon seemed to be singing and sashaying on the countertop. After she took a bow, her image evaporated and the bandstand faded into nothingness, leaving only a sink full of washing up behind.The success of digital-only theater productions has been one of the pandemic’s surprise silver linings: Audiences have been willing to try them and theater companies have found fans thousands of miles away. But could immersive technologies provide a more intriguing path forward for drama, one that will endure once Covid-19 (hopefully) subsides? Augmented reality (A.R.) and virtual reality (V.R.) are already changing gaming, music and art; might theater be next?“All Kinds of Limbo’s” director, Toby Coffey, said he hopes so. In 2016, he set up the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, which operates as a kind of “start-up” within the company, he said in a recent interview at the studio’s modest space, which was crowded with a jumble of technical equipment. The team’s brief is to see how live theater and new technologies can interact and intersect.Toby Coffey, who founded the National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio in 2016.Suzie Howell for The New York Times“Theater makers are naturally fascinated: They’re used to working in 3-D,” Coffey said. “As soon as you bring a director or stage designer or choreographer into V.R., you see their brains whirring.”The studio’s first production, “Fabulous Wonder.land,” was a V.R. music video featuring a track by the musician Damon Albarn with words by the playwright Moira Buffini. The team has since made 360-degree films of live shows, developed a one-on-one piece in which an audience member interacts with a live actor while wearing a V.R. headset and created a mixed-reality “exhibition” about government welfare cuts.“All Kinds of Limbo” came into being in 2019 after the National Theater had a hit with “Small Island,” a play about postwar Jamaican immigration to Britain. Coffey and his team commissioned Brandon, the vocalist, and the composer Raffy Bushman to create a 10-minute song sequence responding freely to the play’s themes. It was written, performed and motion-captured that year, and was initially presented as a V.R. experience in one of the theater’s event spaces.Brandon performing in a motion capture studio to record “All Kinds of Limbo.”The National TheaterWhen the pandemic shut down British performing venues in March 2020, Coffey accelerated plans to turn “All Kinds of Limbo” into an at-home experience. The retooled version can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer. Brandon’s performance stays the same, but, depending on the device used, the experience feels subtly different.To summon some of theater’s shared intimacy, it’s being ticketed and broadcast as live, although the show is recorded. Other people attending virtually are represented by blades of moving white light and, by playing with the settings, you can move around the space and see the action from different angles.It’s a short piece, but “All Kinds of Limbo” does feel like the glimmering of a new art form: somewhere between music video, video game and live cabaret show.Over the last few years, Britain’s theater scene has become a test bed for similar experiments. Last spring, the Royal Shakespeare Company co-produced an immersive digital piece called “Dream” that featured actors performing using motion-capture technology and was watchable via smartphone or computer. Other projects, such as shows by the Almeida theater in London and the company Dreamthinkspeak in Brighton, England, require participants to turn up in person and get equipped with VR headsets.Francesca Panetta, a V.R. producer and artist who was recently appointed as the alternate realities curator at the Sheffield DocFest film festival, said in a video interview that practitioners from audio, gaming, theater, TV and other art forms were collaborating as never before. “Many different people are trying to explore this space and work out what it really is,” she said. “No one is quite sure.”One of the most keenly awaited partnerships is between the immersive theater troupe Punchdrunk, which pioneered live site-specific shows such as “Sleep No More” and “The Masque of the Red Death” in the mid-2000s, and the tech firm Niantic, best-known for the wildly successful A.R. game Pokémon Go.Speaking by phone, Punchdrunk’s co-founder Felix Barrett seemed invigorated by the creative possibilities. “We’re on the cusp of a new form of entertainment,” he said. “It’s a new genre; it just hasn’t been named yet.”Later this year, Niantic and Punchdrunk plan to unveil the first results of their collaboration. Barrett was reluctant to reveal too much, but said that it would offer participants “a citywide adventure” that will feel like an immersive video game happening in the real world. “Our goal is to try and make you the hero of your own living movie,” he said.Ambitious as such projects are, they are also — at least by theater standards — time-consuming and forbiddingly expensive. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Dream” wouldn’t have been possible without corporate sponsorship and a hefty grant from a roughly $55-million British government fund promoting digital arts innovation. The latest iteration of “All Kinds of Limbo” relies on a partnership with Microsoft and the livestreaming platform Dice.Production work on “All Kinds of Limbo.” The show can be watched via A.R. on a mobile device, via a V.R. headset, or on a regular computer, through Jan. 30.The National TheaterThere’s also the question of audience. Though theater-led projects such as “Dream” and “All Kinds of Limbo” have gained positive reviews, they have attracted only a tiny fraction of the 12 million viewers who watched a 2020 virtual performance by the rapper Travis Scott in the online game Fortnite. The chances of monetization at scale look slim, at least for now.And the irony is that, while the pandemic may have whetted audience appetites for digital drama, it has had devastating consequences for theater companies themselves. The National Theater’s Immersive Storytelling Studio originally had four staff members; after belt-tightening layoffs in the company, it’s now just Coffey and one full-time co-worker. “Even before the pandemic, we could have been doing 10 times more than we had resource to be able to do,” Coffey said. “We need to work within those restrictions.”What happens next is up for debate. The National Theater is working on redeploying the app and distribution platform used for “All Kinds of Limbo” into something that works for other projects. Panetta said that the metaverse, if it genuinely takes off, offers its own possibilities for live performance. “It’s difficult to see what the pathway is; I suspect it’ll be a mix of many different things,” she added.So how long until we’re watching Ibsen or Shakespeare in augmented reality at our kitchen tables? Coffey laughed, then cautioned that designing successful A.R. performances was still an emerging skill. “But some day it’ll happen, I have no doubt,” he said.All Kinds of LimboStreaming through Jan. 30; allkindsoflimbo.com. More

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      in Music

      He Makes Justin Bieber and the Bee Gees Go Viral on TikTok

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      Griffin Haddrill is a founder of VRTCL, an agency hired to turn hit songs into memes.Name: Griffin HaddrillAge: 24Hometown: Bozeman, Mont.Currently Lives: In a four-bedroom house in Las Vegas with walls covered in street art.Claim to Fame: Mr. Haddrill is a co-founder of VRTCL, an agency hired by major record labels to make songs go viral on TikTok through remixes, mash-ups, meme-able chorus snippets, creator partnerships and other algorithmic alchemy. “I usually start with the lyric sheet to see if there is maybe a trend we can capitalize on or maybe a creative idea around the beat,” he said. For Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” that meant devil-themed makeup tutorials and interpretive dance routines set to the track. He also works with vintage hits like the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman,” which thanks to his efforts, has been featured in more than 279,000 TikTok videos including sunset selfies, boba tea tutorials and cyst removals. The right music “makes influencers feel part of a cool and cultured moment, and they like showing that off to fans,” he said.Big Break: Mr. Haddrill has always had an ear for music and business. At 12, he handed his father a business plan for high-tech earbuds. At 16, he was a music manager for Gregory Lake, an underground hip-hop artist, and 100Tribn, a D.J. act, while he was completing rehab in Salt Lake City for cocaine addiction. At 20, he dropped out of San Jose State to pursue music management full-time in Las Vegas. In 2019, he and Sean Young, a former influencer on Vine, saw how social media algorithms were starting to mold the habits of young listeners, and founded VRTCL.Latest Project: VRTCL, which Mr. Haddrill said brings in $1 million in monthly revenue and employs 18 people, was acquired in July by Create Music Group, a data-driven music company in Los Angeles. Mr. Haddrill, who is staying on as chief executive, is guarded about the terms of the deal. “With earning potential, the acquisition is in the eight figures,” he said.Next Thing: Mr. Haddrill helped turn “Stay” by Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber and “Best Friend” by Saweetie and Doja Cat into TikTok earworms last year. But his dream client list skews older: Duran Duran, Billy Joel and other cassette-era acts. “One song that I always thought could really blow up again is Cher’s ‘Believe,’” he said.Unlimited Data: He recently hired Conover Wang, a former roommate and software engineer at Reddit, to develop a program to analyze TikTok song data, including views, comments and shares. “The software is really a core part of our business, although it doesn’t have a name yet,” he said. “We should probably call it something cool.” More

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      in Television

      The Boy King of YouTube

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      Over the protests of my fellow concerned parents, I want to admit something: I don’t care all that much about screen time, the great child-rearing panic of the 21st century. So many of us have come to believe that if our children spend more than a certain amount of time staring at a screen, whether television, phone or iPad, they will succumb to some capitalist plot to turn them all into little consumption monsters with insatiable appetites for toys, sugar, more screen time. This seems absurd to me, but as the father of a 4-year-old, I have not been immune to screen-time shaming — it upsets me to see my child watching a vapid show like “Paw Patrol” on our iPad. These moments of protest usually come, it should be noted, when I’m sitting beside her, staring at my own phone, scrolling through Twitter.“This show is dumb,” I’ll sometimes say. She almost always ignores me. Her stony silence then prompts me to try to think of a show that’s not dumb, which is an impossible task — because what kids’ programming isn’t dumb?For the last two years, her favorite show has been “Octonauts,” about a diverse band of animals who explore the oceans and swamplands in vessels called GUPs. They help whales and eels and flamingos in need. What’s left unsaid, but certainly seems clear enough to me, is that the Octonauts have colonized the Vegimals, a species of squeaking underwater creatures who all resemble one sort of vegetable or another. The Vegimals’ oppression does not register with my daughter, who has watched every “Octonauts” episode multiple times, owns a small fortune in toy GUPs and goes to her preschool dressed in a sweater with Kwaazi, an incorrigible pirate cat, knit across the front. I have not yet talked to her about how the Vegimals are portrayed as infantile, loyal beings who love to bake kelp cakes all day, but I plan on doing so soon.What effect do all these television shows have on the developing brain of a 4-year-old? I don’t honestly know, but I try not to worry too much about it. Life is long and full of different stimuli. I spent most of my preteen years reading horny fantasy books by Piers Anthony and the science fiction of L. Ron Hubbard. The “good” books I read mostly involved warrior mice who were probably also colonialists. I’m fine now. A wary ambivalence seems like the most healthful way to go.There is one type of video I refuse to let my daughter watch: toy videos. Parents with kids of a certain age will certainly know what I’m talking about here, but for the rest, a toy video is an internet genre, usually found on YouTube, that features someone playing with another plastic monstrosity, often one with tie-ins to “Paw Patrol.” The genre has spawned many toy-video variants: Some feature adults; others, kids. Some have even been deliberately packaged to hide their true content from concerned, but perhaps less than vigilant, parents.On occasion, especially on long drives, I’ll hand my daughter the iPad. She watches “Peppa Pig,” which I, of course, hate — those British pigs with their phallic noses prattling on about nothing. Invariably, after about 20 minutes or so, I’ll look back and see her, still strapped into her car seat, brow furrowed, jabbing at the screen with her finger. Then I’ll hear the same high-pitched nonsense, but in a much worse British accent, and know she has switched from Peppa proper to a video of some adult with Peppa toys who, for God knows what reason, is re-enacting a scene in which Peppa and her brother, George, go jump in muddy puddles or whatever.“No!” I yell.My daughter then looks up, annoyed.There’s no real logic to this, of course. What’s the difference between watching the Anglophone silliness of Peppa, a show that exists only to sell toys, and a video of someone playing with the toys themselves?Until recently, my daughter and I were somehow able to avoid the king of toy videos: Ryan Kaji. There’s no one way to describe what Kaji, who is now 10 years old, has done across his multiple YouTube channels, cable television shows and live appearances: In one video, he is giving you a tour of the Legoland Hotel; in another, he splashes around in his pool to introduce a science video about tsunamis. But for years, what he has mostly done is play with toys: Thomas the Tank Engine, “Paw Patrol” figures, McDonald’s play kitchens. A new toy and a new video for almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content that can overwhelm your child’s brain, click after click.Kaji has been playing with toys on camera since Barack Obama was in the White House. Here are a few of the companies that are now paying him handsomely for his services: Amazon, Walmart, Nickelodeon, Skechers. Ryan also has 10 separate YouTube channels, which together make up “Ryan’s World,” a content behemoth whose branded merchandise took in more than $250 million last year. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Kaji family take exceeds $25 million annually. But we’re a full decade into being stunned by YouTuber incomes, and I’m not sure these numbers should be alarming, or even surprising.Ryan Kaji and his parents, Loann and Shion, on the set of Nickelodeon’s “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate” last summer.Ilona Szwarc for The New York TimesRyan’s parents, Shion and Loann Kaji, met while they were undergraduates at Texas Tech University. Shion, the son of a microchip executive, moved to the United States from Japan when he was in high school and still speaks with a slight accent. Loann’s family escaped Vietnam on a boat and shuttled through refugee camps in Malaysia and Singapore before they made it to the United States; she grew up in Houston wanting to be a teacher. After college, Shion left to get his master’s in engineering at Cornell, but he returned to Texas within a year, after Ryan was born. (He would complete his master’s degree online.) They moved in together and began the uncertain and difficult work of trying to piece a family together.Which is all to say, these aren’t your stereotypical parents of a child star, who, frustrated with their own crashed Hollywood dreams, put their kid through singing and dancing lessons in the living room of a bungalow in Van Nuys. But neither are they just an adorable couple who stumbled into fame and fortune. They’re much cannier than that.In his first-ever video, Ryan Kaji, then just 3, squats on the floor of the toy aisle at Target. He looks very cute, doe-eyed with a Beatles mop cut. He’s being filmed by Loann. “Hi, Ryan,” she says brightly.“Hi, Mommy,” Ryan says.“What you want today?” Loann asks. “What is your pick of the week?”Ryan stands up and picks out a “Lego choo-choo train.” He does seem precocious, but not obnoxious — he doesn’t rattle off factorials or sing “Over the Rainbow” or “Tangled Up in Blue” or anything like that. Just a 3-year-old who seems a little advanced for his age, especially when it comes to expressing himself. There’s little that distinguishes this video from the millions of other family videos on YouTube, and Loann herself says she didn’t really expect anything to come from it other than something to share with her son’s grandparents. If you’re being uncharitable, you might note how “pick of the week” seems to suggest a plan for unending content.Shion saw no issue with it — why would he? — but he worried about the cost of buying toys nonstop for Ryan to play with on YouTube. And so the young couple agreed to allocate $20 a week in production costs, toys included. Loann would film everything on her phone and edit the videos on her laptop.For years, Kaji has made a new video almost every day of the week, adding up to an avalanche of content..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-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;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-1kpebx{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-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{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-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.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;}At the time, Ryan was watching a lot of YouTube shows. His favorites were “EvanTubeHD” and “Hulyan and Maya,” each of which served as inspiration. Children’s content on YouTube tends to be derivative in this way. Once a specific toy or activity becomes popular, copycats emerge, knowing that algorithms will pick up and spread their version of “Slime Time” or what have you. A result is a self-referential world where thousands of children do the exact same thing on thousands of separate channels.When Ryan was getting started, one of the most popular and copied trends involved a giant papier-mâché egg filled with toys. Loann says Ryan wanted to do a giant-egg video, but this would have broken the weekly budget. Loann improvised. She had a lot of old toys based on the movie “Cars” lying around, which she stuffed into the requisite papier-mâché egg. In the video, Loann wakes Ryan up from a pretend nap. He seems genuinely surprised and begins smacking away at the egg with an inflatable toy. Then he begins pulling some clearly used toys out of the egg and feigning great surprise. The video currently has over a billion views.The giant egg was Ryan’s breakthrough. His channel’s audience began growing at an explosive rate, which then placed pressure on Loann to keep feeding her son’s new fans. “I was worried,” Shion says. “Every time I looked at other YouTubers, I didn’t see the huge growth that we were seeing over a short period of time.” That growth wasn’t just limited to the United States; Ryan was becoming popular in Asia, as well. “I was concerned about how much we could keep doing this without putting too much pressure on Ryan.”Virality is mostly luck: A teenager does a dance on TikTok, and suddenly every middle- and high-school kid has seen it, and before you know it, the dancer has 100 million followers and 15 separate sponsorship deals. Some critics will divine great importance from the tiniest of details and build a theory about what the kids really want, but there’s usually nothing outside the brutal logic of algorithms and the insatiable appetites of children.When Ryan’s egg video went viral, Loann saw an opportunity to make some extra income, though she didn’t know all that much about monetizing videos. Their first paycheck from YouTube was for about $150. At the time, Shion was still working as a structural engineer, and while he wanted to help Loann, who had a job as a teacher, someone needed to earn a steady salary.But after about a year of continued growth and bigger paychecks from YouTube, Shion and Loann both realized that they needed to commit fully to influencer life or risk squandering Ryan’s rare gift. They wanted the core of their channel, at the time called Ryan’s Toys Review, to remain the same — Ryan playing with the toys he liked, from “Cars” and “Thomas & Friends” — but they needed help. So they hired a couple of editors and started a production company, Sunlight Entertainment. Loann, who was pregnant at the time with twin girls — Emma and Katie, who are now 5 years old and appear frequently in Ryan’s videos — finally quit teaching to become a full-time YouTube mom.Shion held out a little longer, but he, too, eventually left his job to manage his son’s business. “I started to feel like I was the dead weight in the family,” Shion told me. Ryan needed full support from both parents. “So that’s when I realized, OK, we need to kind of step back, and we have to see how we can support Ryan in his branding.”Shion and Loann noticed that a lot of kid YouTube channels were focused more on the brand of the toy than on the brand of the talent. They were, in plainer terms, just adding “Thomas the Train” to their titles and hoping that other kids who wanted to consume every single video about Thomas the Tank Engine would stumble upon their content. Shion thought this was backward. Ryan, not the toys, should be the brand. Shion was proposing an interesting evolution: Given Ryan’s popularity, why couldn’t he create his own brands, his own characters, his own toys? Why help Thomas when you can create your own universe of characters, diversify your content streams, ramp up merchandising and license your content to some of the biggest platforms in the world? “People are watching Ryan, not the toy he’s showing,” Shion says. “So, oftentimes, we create a new original, animated character that’s inspired by Ryan.”Today, Ryan’s World includes the separate channels “Combo Panda,” “Ryan’s World Español” and “Gus the Gummy Gator.” Ryan doesn’t put in extensive appearances in all these videos; sometimes he just gives a short introduction. In one recent video, the action starts with Ryan in his backyard holding a rubber ball. He tosses it halfheartedly in the air, watches it bounce and then says that Peck and Combo — two of the cartoon characters in Ryan’s World — are going to teach viewers about gravity. He’s on camera for all of 35 seconds.Loann and Shion say that cameos like this are their way of limiting the amount of time Ryan needs to be on camera, which is their main concern these days. Still, there’s little doubt that he has spent most of his childhood being captured on video. Many of these appearances are banal; some are of dubious taste, like “Ryan’s First Business-Class Airplane Ride to Japan.” Others are just more videos of a cute kid playing with toys. Right now, as I am typing this, the latest entry in the Ryan’s World feed is an hourlong video in which Ryan is present for a vast majority of the screen time. He gives a few scientific facts about the strength of spiders, plays with some toys and is his usual, charming self, all while wearing a Ryan’s World T-shirt.In 2017, the Kajis established a partnership with Pocket.watch, a licensing company headed by a former executive from the Walt Disney Company. Pocket.watch handles the Ryan’s World franchise, including the deals with Walmart, Amazon and Skechers. But even as the family enterprise was expanding, Shion says, most viewers at that time still wanted to see Ryan play with familiar toys. So, Ryan continued to do — and generate a great deal of revenue from — what he had always done: picking up a popular toy and playing with it on camera. In 2019, Truth in Advertising, a consumer watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, accusing the Kajis of “deceiving millions of young children” by not adequately disclosing their advertisers. (A spokeswoman for the family said that they “strictly follow all platforms’ terms of service and all existing laws and regulations, including advertising-disclosure requirements.”) The brand, which has continued to profit from sponsored content on its YouTube channels, also makes money from its line of Ryan’s World toys, multiple deals with streaming networks and licensing deals.Today, Sunshine Entertainment, the production company Shion and Loann created, has 30 employees. And the Kajis have traded Houston for Hawaii. When I asked Loann why they moved, she said, “Well, I always wanted to live in Hawaii, and now that we can afford it, we thought, Why don’t we just do it?”Last summer, I traveled with my daughter to Simi Valley, Calif., for a taping of the Nickelodeon show “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate,” a half-hour-long, professionally produced recapitulation of many of the motifs from Ryan’s YouTube videos. The night before the shoot, I asked my daughter to watch an old episode of the show on our iPad. She didn’t seem particularly interested at first, but when I moved to turn it off, she slapped my hand away and said she liked Ryan. Which didn’t surprise me — why wouldn’t she like him? But I admit I did feel slightly disappointed. Over the next few days, I had her sample a bit more from the Ryan Kaji media empire: A science lesson in which Ryan and his little twin sisters mix baking soda and vinegar; a game of tag played between Loann and Ryan; and the giant-egg video that started it all. She, of course, liked the egg the best.The Nickelodeon shoot was at a remote studio lot that had been made up to resemble a boulevard, with long stretches of building facades that somehow evoked historic Boston and the Wild West at the same time. Crew members in masks and plastic face shields were standing around the set, waiting for the talent to arrive. The Kajis’ tight schedule and their desire to spend as much time as possible in Hawaii means that Ryan flies to Los Angeles, films a season’s worth of shows, then heads right back home.Kaji and crew members on set of “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate.”Ilona Szwarc for The New York TimesThe conceit of “Ryan’s Mystery Playdate” is relatively simple. Ryan, Shion and Loann play a game. Ryan generally wins. Shion usually loses. Loann wins some and loses some, but she mostly hovers as a positive, encouraging presence. At some point, the mystery play date arrives. Today’s two guests were the Pie Ninja, who throws pies, and Major Mess, a burly military man who loves to make messes.A blast of cheery music sounded, then a round of recorded applause. Ryan emerged from a door wearing a pair of polarized sunglasses. Next came Loann and Shion, dressed in brightly colored jumpsuits, followed by a couple of production assistants who carried water and clipboards. The first contest was a simple memory-based matching game. Whoever missed got a pie in the face from the Pie Ninja. Before shooting started, however, Shion and the director on the set had to negotiate whether Shion would be hit with one or two pies. Shion said he didn’t really have any problem with two pies, which pleased the director.When the filming started, Ryan kept the scene together as Loann and Shion repeatedly forgot their lines. This, Loann would tell me later, is how nearly all these shoots go. Ryan rarely makes mistakes, nor does his positive attitude waver much. He spends a majority of “Mystery Playdate” with an amazed, gape-mouthed look on his face.Watching the Kajis coming together as a family to play these games reminded me of a moment from high school, when I was driving around town with a couple of classmates I didn’t know particularly well. One of them, an exemplary student who did things like run for student council, divulged that she and her parents played board games together once a week. This seemed absolutely insane to me, but I didn’t say anything about it, because you never know if your family’s dysfunction is atypical or if everyone else is just lying about their happy lives. I pictured this classmate seated on the floor of a living room, one much bigger than mine, playing Parcheesi with her bookish parents. This image persisted, and for the next year, I felt a great deal of hostility toward her. Today I play games with my daughter almost every night, but I suppose there’s still part of me that thinks about that happy family and still cannot fathom how such things could ever be possible.Why do children want to watch happy children playing with toys they can’t have? Are they responding to the toys or to the images of a happy family? Are they envisioning a life they already feel may be out of reach? And at what age does aspiration turn into resentment? I imagine my daughter will grow tired of these toy videos when she learns to feel real jealousy, which I suppose is a good reason to hope she just keeps watching them.And yet there’s something a bit unsatisfying about this explanation. Because if it were true that children just want to watch other children doing the things they most want to do, the most popular videos would show kids watching “Paw Patrol” on an iPad. The Kaji empire and its thousands of imitators, oddly enough, have created perhaps the only world in which children do not stare at screens. It’s a nice dream, I admit, but not to the extent of persuading me to allow my daughter to keep watching videos. The limits we set as parents may be arbitrary, but they are all we’ve got.Ryan’s life, despite its fictional presentation as a parade of remarkable discoveries that he shares with his enthusiastic parents, may not be all that different from my daughter’s. During the shoot in Simi Valley, after a long stretch of filming in the intense sun, I overheard a crew member say to him, “If you finish this scene, you can play Minecraft.”Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer for the magazine and the opinion pages. He is the author of the novel “The Dead Do Not Improve,” and his latest book, “The Loneliest Americans,” was published by Crown in October. More

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      in Television

      Michael Nesmith, the ‘Quiet Monkee,’ Is Dead at 78

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      He shot to fame as a member of a made-for-TV rock group, but he denied that he was the group’s only “real” musician. He went on to create some of the first music videos.Michael Nesmith, who rocketed to fame as the contemplative, wool-cap-wearing member of the Monkees in 1966, then went on to a diverse career that included making one of the rock era’s earliest music videos and winning the first Grammy Award for video, died on Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.Jason Elzy, the head of public relations for Rhino Records, the label that represents the Monkees, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Nesmith was a struggling 23-year-old singer and songwriter when he saw an advertisement in Variety seeking “4 insane boys” for “acting roles in new TV series.” Two aspiring television producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspired by the Beatles’ movies, were hoping to make a TV series about the zany antics of a rock band — not a real rock band (although the Lovin’ Spoonful was briefly considered for the job), but actors with musical backgrounds who could create the illusion of a band.The four members were picked to fit types. Davy Jones, a British vocalist, was the cute scamp; Micky Dolenz, the drummer and primary lead singer, was the wild jokester; and Peter Tork, the bass player, was the lovable dim bulb. Mr. Nesmith, a guitarist and occasional singer, was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.“He has that dry Will Rogers sense of humor,” Mr. Dolenz told Rolling Stone in 2012, characterizing Mr. Nesmith’s real persona. “That’s probably one of the reasons they cast him.”The show made its debut in September 1966, and though it lasted only two seasons, the Monkees became a cultural reference point, thanks largely to their best-selling albums (which featured a lot of studio musicians and backup singers, especially early on). Mr. Nesmith, who wrote and produced some of the Monkees songs, had the reputation of being the only “real” musician in the group, but in his 2017 memoir, “Infinite Tuesday,” he disputed that.The four members of the Monkees were picked to fit types. Mr. Nesmith was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.  NBC/via Getty Images“It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the ‘only musician’ in the Monkees,” he wrote. “Nothing was further from the truth.”The Monkees in action (or at least acting), from left: Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Mr. Nesmith.Getty ImagesBut he was musician enough to have a modest solo career after Monkee mania faded at the end of the 1960s, and that led him into a role in music-television history.In 1977 he recorded a song called “Rio” for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it.“They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing,” Mr. Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. But he did something different.“I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me,” he said. “As we edited these images,” he added, “an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.”Almost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. It got some play in Europe, but Mr. Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier).The Monkees (from left, Mr. Tork, Mr. Nesmith, Mr. Jones and Mr. Dolenz) in 1967, at the height of their fame.Ray Howard/Associated PressIn 1979 he and the director William Dear developed a TV show, “Popclips,” for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. “Popclips” showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a V.J. The show is often said to have helped inspire the creation of MTV in 1981, although accounts of the various people who claim to have had a role in MTV’s emergence differ widely. Mr. Nesmith, in his interview for “I Want My MTV,” took a nuanced view of his role.“It’s a gradual coalescence of different things,” he said of the concept of a full-time music video channel, “a confluence of energies. It’s one of those ideas that nobody really thinks up. It’s like justice. Or kindness. Nobody thinks that up.”Robert Michael Nesmith was born on Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston. His father, Warren, and his mother, Bette (McMurray) Nesmith, divorced in 1946, soon after Warren returned from fighting in World War II. His mother later remarried, took the last name Graham and became wealthy from inventing Liquid Paper and running the company that produced it. That money would give Michael the financial security to follow his varied interests.His mother moved to Dallas, where he grew up. In his book, he described himself as an indifferent student in high school.In 1960 he enlisted in the Air Force (earning a high school equivalency diploma while in the military). The Air Force, though, was not a good fit, and he requested and received an early discharge in 1962.He enrolled at San Antonio College, where he began performing on a guitar he had received as a Christmas gift from his mother and stepfather in 1961. He also met a fellow student, Phyllis Barbour. In 1964 the newly married couple resettled in Los Angeles, where Mr. Nesmith sought to further his fledgling performing and songwriting career.Mr. Nesmith in the recording studio in an undated photo. When his days as a Monkee were over, he formed a country-rock band and became a pioneer of music video.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAmong the songs he wrote in 1965 was “Different Drum,” though its best-known incarnation, a hit version by Linda Ronstadt and her group the Stone Poneys, would not come out until 1967, after the Monkees were famous. Mr. Nesmith was playing in local clubs and sometimes serving as M.C. at one of them, the Troubadour, when someone showed him the Variety ad.The Monkees’ early songs — provided mostly by outside writers and recorded largely by studio musicians, with the Monkees (primarily Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones) providing the vocals — were such hits that fans began clamoring to see the fake group live in concert.“We started wailing away in rehearsal, trying to get a decent rendition of the songs on the records,” Mr. Nesmith wrote. “It never sounded great, but it didn’t sound all that bad.”The Monkees gave their first live performance in December 1966 in Hawaii, the start of a tour that took them all over the United States.“The Monkees have been practicing more, and are learning to pull off live concerts,” The Boston Globe wrote in March 1967. “On their first tour, the continuous screaming drowned all imperfections in the music.”The mania, though, soon played itself out. “The Monkees” ended after two seasons, in March 1968, and both Mr. Tork and Mr. Nesmith left the band shortly afterward. Mr. Nesmith formed his own group, the First National Band, and released an album in early 1970, “Magnetic South,” which included a minor hit, “Joanne.”Two more First National Band albums quickly followed, showcasing a country-rock sound that was just slightly ahead of its time — as the First National Band was petering out in 1972, groups like the Eagles were pushing a similar sound into the mainstream, leaving Mr. Nesmith feeling as if he had missed the boat.Mr. Nesmith in concert with the Monkees in 2013, during one of the band’s periodic reunions.Jeff Daly/Invision, via Associated Press“I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018, when he organized a modest “First National Band Redux” tour. “The Eagles now have the biggest-selling album of all time and mine is sitting in the closet of a closed record company?”Several other musical ventures followed, but Mr. Nesmith was growing increasingly interested in video. He thought that videodiscs, which had come on the market in the late 1970s, were the future of music, and after “Rio” and “Popclips” he made “Elephant Parts,” an hourlong disc of music videos and comedy sketches (including a parody of his own song “Joanne” that featured the Japanese movie monster Rodan instead of a woman).In 1982, “Elephant Parts” received the first Grammy Award for video, a category called video of the year at the time (soon to be split into short- and long-form awards, the first of several title changes as the art form and technology evolved).“Elephant Parts” led in 1985 to “Michael Nesmith in Television Parts,” a short-lived TV sketch show. Mr. Nesmith had also begun producing movies, most notably “Repo Man” in 1984.And he continued to be a Monkee — when it suited him. In varying combinations, Mr. Tork, Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones (until his death in 2012) toured and recorded periodically as the Monkees. Mr. Nesmith only occasionally joined them onstage, but all four played and sang on, and wrote songs for, the group’s 1996 album, “Justus.” In 2016 the group released the album “Good Times,” which included some archival material recorded by Mr. Jones.Mr. Nesmith also wrote and directed “Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees,” a television special made to promote “Justus,” which was broadcast in early 1997.Mr. Nesmith became more willing, or perhaps more available, to embrace his Monkee past in recent years. He joined Mr. Tork and Mr. Dolenz for a tour after Mr. Jones’s death.Peter Tork died in 2019. Mr. Dolenz is now the last surviving Monkee.In 2018 Mr. Nesmith teamed with Mr. Dolenz for a tour, but that June he had to cancel the final four shows when shortness of breath left him unable to perform. He told Rolling Stone that he had quadruple bypass surgery shortly after that.“I was using the words ‘heart attack’ for a while,” he said. “But I’m told now that I didn’t have one. It was congestive heart failure.”Yet by that September he was back touring with his own group, playing his First National Band material. And he and Mr. Dolenz went back on the road this year, for what was billed as the Monkees’ farewell tour. They gave their last performance on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles.Mr. Nesmith’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1975. His marriages to Kathryn Bild, in 1976, and Victoria Kennedy, in 2000, also ended in divorce. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Christian, Jonathan and Jessica Nesmith, and a son from a relationship with Nurit Wilde, Jason Nesmith, as well as two grandchildren.Mr. Nesmith’s varied career included a legal battle with PBS. Early in the video era, his company, Pacific Arts, had bought the home video rights to some of PBS’s most popular programs, including “Nature.” PBS sued him over royalties, but in 1999 a federal jury in Los Angeles found in Mr. Nesmith’s favor and awarded him $47 million. His reaction to his legal victory was typically wry.“It’s like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo,” he said after the verdict was issued. “You’re glad to get your stereo back, but you’re sad to find out that Grandma’s a thief.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      Get to Know Sondheim’s Best in These 10 Videos

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      Jake Gyllenhaal, Patti LuPone, Judi Dench and an all-star Zoom trio find the wit, pathos and heartbreak in a remarkable songbook.Songs are there to serve the story and the show, Stephen Sondheim insisted. That’s not to say that his poignant duets, skittery patter songs and ambivalent tributes to old Broadway can’t deliver thrills even out of context. Here are 10 videos that show why, in mourning his loss, performers and writers are expressing thanks for his genius.‘Finishing the Hat’Jake Gyllenhaal’s turn in the title role of “Sunday in the Park With George” was meant to last three concert performances, but the response was so glowing that what started as a 2016 Encores! fund-raiser was retooled for Broadway. This backstage rendition of “Finishing the Hat,” a lament for the artistic struggle, shows why.‘Loving You’Judy Kuhn starred as the lovesick Fosca in the Classic Stage Company’s 2013 revival of “Passion,” one of Sondheim’s most austere, yet romantic scores. Among those who have covered this aching ballad are Barbra Streisand and Barbara Cook; Kuhn is onstage now at the same theater, playing Sara Jane Moore in Sondheim’s “Assassins.”Judy Kuhn, accompanied by Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf on cello, sings “Loving You” from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical “Passion,” now in revival at the Classic Stage Company.‘The Ladies Who Lunch’Sondheim’s 80th birthday was marked in an all-star tribute with the New York Philharmonic, in which Patti LuPone ripped into “The Ladies Who Lunch,” the boozy “Company” showstopper she is performing on Broadway in the revival now in previews. (Elaine Stritch, who introduced the song in the original production, was there, watchfully watching; she gave her all to “I’m Still Here” from “Follies.”)‘The Ladies Who Lunch’While the composer’s 90th birthday fell in the middle of the pandemic, a Zoom tribute still managed to hit the heights, no higher than when Audra McDonald, Meryl Streep and Christine Baranski knocked back the vodka stingers to “drink to that.”‘Giants in the Sky’A spate of stripped-down revivals have brought new life and young fans to the Sondheim songbook. Here Patrick Mulryan, playing Jack (of Beanstalk fame) in the Fiasco Theater’s 2014 “Into the Woods,” sings the plaintive “Giants in the Sky.”Mr. Mulryan sings “Giants in the Sky” from the Fiasco Theater’s production of the musical “Into the Woods,” with Matt Castle on piano. The show is at the Laura Pels Theater through April 12.‘I’m Still Here’Yvonne DeCarlo originated this showbiz survivor’s anthem in “Follies” on Broadway 50 years ago, and Ann Miller, Polly Bergen and Shirley MacLaine (onscreen in “Postcards From the Edge”) have done it, too. Tracie Bennett got the plum assignment in the National Theater’s lush 2017 revival; its director, Dominic Cooke, is on tap to make the very-long-awaited movie.‘Losing My Mind’The middle-aged former showgirl Sally Durant sings this “Follies” classic, but Jeremy Jordan proves this ballad of obsessive love and lifelong regret is truly universal.‘Send in the Clowns’Sondheim’s one true pop hit, thanks to Judy Collins, has become a full-fledged American songbook standard, thanks to Judi Dench and other performers who’ve gotten under the skin of the rueful actress Desiree Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music.”‘Not While I’m Around’This duet between the murderous Mrs. Lovett and her young charge Tobias offers the rare glimpse of unadulterated affection in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” though it turns out to be short-lived. Melissa Errico keeps things uplifting in this lilting track from her much-praised “Sondheim Sublime” album.‘Move On’Singing from home, earbuds and all, can’t dampen the emotion of this unforgettable “Sunday in the Park With George” duet between the artist Georges Seurat and his mistress (and model) Dot, played on Broadway by Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford. More

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      in Movies

      Stream These 7 Productions That Celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s Work

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      Here’s a guide to films, documentaries and other productions that provide insight into the composer-lyricist’s sly wit and melodic acumen.Stephen Sondheim, the composer and lyricist who died on Friday at age 91, had an unparalleled influence on contemporary theater. Revivals of two of his shows are currently onstage in New York — the gender-swapped version of “Company” on Broadway and the starry production of “Assassins” Off Broadway at the Classic Stage Company — and Steven Spielberg’s new film adaptation of “West Side Story” will be released on Dec. 10.But there are a few dozen ways to encounter Sondheim’s sly wit, melodic acumen and astonishing moral complexity from the comfort of your sofa. Not that he ever lets you get too comfortable. Unlike many of his peers, Sondheim has been served fairly well by film and video. Here are some of the best ways to watch the work of the man who gave us more to see.‘Original Cast Album: Company’Sondheim’s penetrating study of modern love and even more modern ambivalence is a classic. For a rich encounter with the material, try D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary, which details the contentious attempts to record the original cast album at the Church, a Columbia Records studio in Midtown Manhattan. A pleasure throughout and a useful insight into a communal creative process, the movie turns electric when the camera captures Elaine Stritch trying and failing to lay down the devastating track “The Ladies Who Lunch.”Stream it on the Criterion Channel.‘Gypsy’Though dinged at the time for casting Rosalind Russell as the stage monster Mama Rose — rather than Ethel Merman, who had created the role — Mervyn LeRoy’s 1962 movie offers a backstage pass to bygone forms of American entertainment: vaudeville and burlesque. Moving nimbly among moods and styles, Sondheim’s lyrics range from utterly innocent (“Little Lamb”) to tastily racy (“You Gotta Get a Gimmick”), with at least one number, “Rose’s Turn,” that suggests the radical revision of the musical that he would later attempt.Stream it on HBO Max; rent it on Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play.‘Into the Woods’Bernadette Peters rehearsing with Sondheim in 1987 during the original cast recording of the Broadway musical “Into the Woods.”Oliver Morris/Getty ImagesEnjoy, if you must, Rob Marshall’s overblown 2014 adaptation of this fairy tale concatenation. But the 1987 version, recorded for PBS’s “American Playhouse” and available on Apple TV, is a superb example of pre-“Hamilton” performance capture, preserving the indelible performances of Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleeson and Chip Zien. Children will listen, so watch it with yours. The first act, anyway. Or for a more modern take, try the 2010 version, recorded live in London’s Regent’s Park and streamable on Broadway HD, with Hannah Waddingham, of “Ted Lasso,” as the witch.Rent the 1987 version from Apple TV and Amazon Prime.Stream the 2010 version from Broadway HD.‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’A work of impeccable silliness and absolute froth, the 1966 film version of this meringue-like musical, stitched together from a handful of Plautus comedies, stars Zero Mostel as a scheming servant and Jack Gilford as a gentler one, with the future Phantom Michael Crawford as the love-struck master. It’s available on several platforms. The songs are flimsy when compared with Sondheim’s later work, but they delight — from the assertiveness of “Comedy Tonight” to the cheekiness of “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid” and the breezy whimsy of “Lovely.”Stream it on Pluto TV and Tubi; rent it on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play and Vudu.‘Sunday in the Park With George’An incomparable study of the profit and cost of artistic creation, this 1984 musical, loosely based on the life of Georges Seurat, was captured in 1986 with Mandy Patinkin as the pointillist painter and Peters as his muse, Dot. The filmic shades are muddied — a shame for an artist so obsessed with color and light. But Sondheim’s rigor and originality sound clear in songs like “Finishing the Hat,” “Children and Art” and “Move On.”Stream it on Apple TV.‘Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration’Audra McDonald, Meryl Streep and Christine Baranski celebrating Sondheim’s 90th birthday in April 2020.Broadway.comIf your preferred form of tribute involves a generous pour, a good cry and an invitation to sing along, lift your voice to this online offering, assembled last year and available in full on YouTube. Hosted by Raúl Esparza, its quality is uneven, a consequence of first-wave Zoom theater. But it still moves deftly across and through his six-decade career and offers performances by unmatched interpreters, including Patinkin (“Lesson #8” from “Sunday in the Park With George”), Donna Murphy (“Send in the Clowns” from “A Little Night Music”), Patti LuPone (“Anyone Can Whistle”), Bernadette Peters (“No One Is Alone” from “Into the Woods”) and the peerless triad of Audra McDonald, Christine Baranski and Meryl Streep (“The Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company”). Everybody rise? Why not?Stream it on YouTube. More

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      in Theater

      Broadway Play “Clyde's” Will Be Livestreamed

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      The digital experimentation born of the pandemic shutdown is continuing: the final 16 performances of Lynn Nottage’s “Clyde’s” will be streamed, for $59.The coronavirus closures prompted many theaters around the country to experiment with online offerings. Now, even though theaters have reopened, a new Broadway play is planning to try streaming some performances.Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit that operates a small Broadway house, plans to sell a limited number of real-time, virtual viewings in January for the final 16 performances of “Clyde’s,” a dramedy about a group of ex-cons working at a sandwich shop. The show, by the two-time Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage, opens Tuesday.The decision to stream some performances, which Second Stage views as an experiment, suggests that some of the survival strategies theaters embraced during the pandemic could have a lasting effect on the art form.“Over the 18 months when we had to pivot, and shift a lot of storytelling to Zoom, that opened up a new door of opportunity for many of us who make theater,” Nottage said. “What we’re hoping is that folks who are reluctant to come out because of the virus, or for whom theater is not accessible, will have access because of this streaming.”They are not aiming for a mass audience. The streams will cost $59, which is the same price as the least expensive ticket at the box office, so as not to undercut in-person sales. (There will also be a $30 ticket for people aged 30 and under, as with in-person performances.)The virtual tickets will be limited in number — probably to around 200 to 300 a performance — because as part of an agreement with labor unions, the theater will cap the number of streaming tickets sold so as not to exceed the total capacity of the theater over the course of the play’s run.The move is significant because, even though the Metropolitan Opera has been streaming performances to cinemas for years, and a number of leading symphony orchestras have long been streaming their concerts, Broadway has been resistant to such a step, in part because of quality concerns, in part because of the cost of compensating artists, and in part because of a fear of eroding the appetite for in-person attendance.In 2016, when BroadwayHD live-streamed a single performance of the Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of “She Loves Me,” the event was so unusual that it was recognized by Guinness World Records; a few months later, the same company also live-streamed a performance of Roundabout’s “Holiday Inn.”The pandemic prompted theaters to take digital work more seriously: with their buildings closed, many Off Broadway and regional theaters, as well as some prominent theaters in Britain, embraced streaming as one way to continue connecting to audiences. There were complications both mundane (which labor unions represent theater artists onscreen?) and existential (what is theater, anyway?), but one upside was increased access for people unlikely to attend in-person performances because of disability, geography or finances.For Broadway shows, there were some limited pandemic experiments with filmed performances, but not livestreaming. A “Hamilton” movie, using footage shot and edited in 2016, was released during the pandemic by a streaming platform, as was a filmed version of David Byrne’s “American Utopia”; the musicals “Come From Away” and “Diana” filmed invitation-only run-throughs during the pandemic, and those filmed performances were also released on streaming platforms.Now, as theaters reopen, some are discussing the pros and cons, as well as the feasibility, of a so-called hybrid model, in which stage shows can be seen either in-person or at home. Second Stage, working with the company Assemble Stream, earlier this fall offered its subscribers an opportunity to livestream some performances of an epistolary Off Broadway play, “Letters of Suresh”; encouraged by that experience, the nonprofit decided to try the hybrid approach for “Clyde’s,” which is its first post-shutdown Broadway show.“In-person activity is our priority, but we’ve learned a lot from the pandemic, as far as finding other ways of engaging with audiences,” said Khady Kamara, the executive director of Second Stage. There are a number of potential audiences — those still leery of public gatherings, those who live outside the New York area, those with a variety of accessibility concerns — and Nottage said she also hopes at some point that the play could be streamed in prisons.Kamara said the theater would livestream “Clyde’s,” which stars Uzo Aduba and Ron Cephas Jones, in real time during performances from Jan. 4 to Jan. 16 — it can’t be watched on demand.Is there a risk that the project will dissuade people from coming to see the show at the theater? “I really believe that the magic of being inside the theater, and being so close to the stage, is not something that goes away,” Kamara said. “I think that most people are still going to want to go with the in-person experience.”The performances will be captured by five to seven cameras mounted by Assemble Stream inside the Helen Hayes Theater; the footage will be edited, remotely, in real time, as with a live television broadcast, according to Katie McKenna, the company’s vice president of marketing and business development.Kamara and McKenna said the theater would not need to remove any seats to accommodate the cameras, and that the cameras would not obstruct any patron’s sightlines; the cameras will be operated remotely. “Our goal is to be as nondisruptive as possible,” McKenna said.Neither party would detail the financing arrangement, but Kamara said, “To begin with, we’re not looking at this as a revenue stream, as much as we’re looking at it as an additional avenue for us to provide access to the work that we put on our stages.”And will Second Stage seek to stream other Broadway shows in the future? Kamara described the “Clyde’s” streaming as a pilot project. “We are learning, and will continue to learn, and we’ll see what the future holds,” she said. “Certainly, if there is a market for it, hopefully we’re able to continue to offer it.” More

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      in Movies

      How Do You Make Teen Comedies Today? Buy a High School.

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      LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The teenage couple is lounging on the lawn outside a high school, taking advantage of a free period between classes in that age-old way: making out on the quad. A friend runs over, clearly agitated by a drama unfolding elsewhere, and asks for help. The duo reluctantly gets up and follows, dragging their backpacks behind them.Then there’s another interruption to their moment. The director, Sammi Cohen, yells cut. An actor, Tyler Alvarez, asks for another take. “One more, real quick,” he says.This is an early fall day, back to school at American High. The school has not had actual students in the halls for years, but it is once again home to high school drama of the sort generally captured in R-rated teenage comedies.Sitting inconspicuously in the far corner of that grassy area is Jeremy Garelick, 46, a writer/director/producer and the maestro of the American High experiment. Wearing an American High baseball cap, red-tinted sunglasses and a pair of headphones slung around his neck, he watched the scenes on an enormous iPad for this latest American High production, an untitled lesbian love story about an aspiring young artist who’s forced to join her high school track team.He nodded along with the action and laughed as the jokes landed. (“If you go down, I’m going down with you … like the Titanic,” generated a particular chuckle.)Jeremy Garelick, right, with his producing partner Will Phelps, on the school bus they purchased after Mr. Garelick bought the school for $1 million several years ago.Libby March for The New York TimesMr. Garelick, best known as the director of “The Wedding Ringer” and the screenwriter of “The Break Up,” is betting that the time is right now for a surge in hormonal high jinks captured on film: teen stories for the sensibilities of the Gen Z streaming generation. After all, it has been roughly two decades since tales of love, sex and related high school humiliations had created financial and cultural hits like “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait,” films that themselves were grabbing the baton from 1980s John Hughes classics.Studios, focused on special effects-laden blockbusters that make going to the movie theater into an event, don’t share his conviction. They now shy away from this kind of mid-budget-range film because of the marketing costs needed to help turn it into a box office success — and the risky proposition of selling something to the fickle teen audience. Back in 2007, the comedy “Superbad,” starring then-relative unknowns Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, became a significant hit, earning $170 million in worldwide grosses. Yet fast forward a decade to the female version of that gross-out comedy, the Olivia Wilde-directed “Booksmart,” which was beloved by critics and also featured an up-and-coming cast, but only earned $25 million in box office receipts. It all looks a bit too perilous for the big studios.Chris Weitz, the co-director of “American Pie” and one of the producers of Ms. Cohen’s film, attributes the shift to technology that puts audiences in control.“It was one thing when the gatekeepers, usually old fogies, controlled what kind of content was going to be put out about teens,” he said. “Now teens can get all kinds of content about themselves made by themselves, which gives them a greater sense of truth to them than something that any feature film producer would cook up.”With that landscape in mind, Mr. Garelick decided to make the films really inexpensively on his own. If done correctly, they could easily be funneled onto streaming platforms, which are constantly on the hunt for new material, especially content that attracts the ever elusive teen audience.He figured out if he shot two movies back-to-back in one location he could save one-third of his production costs. If he shot three, he could save half. He could be like the now begone film studio New Line, applying the “Lord of the Rings’” cost-savings method to the world of teen comedy. Peter Jackson relied on the verdant landscape of New Zealand for his Hobbit-driven epic.Mr. Garelick would have an abandoned school.“That’s when I had my ‘aha moment’” he said. “This is how I’m going to make my high school movies. Nobody out there is making them. Now is the time to get into it.”In today’s complex content ecosystem, studios are spending more and more to lure general audiences to theaters with blockbuster franchise films while the streamers are primarily trying to keep their fragmented audiences glued to their services by offering niche content. Teen comedies might not have enough consistent commercial potential for the studios, but Mr. Garelick thought that if he could offer a consistent flow of films, surely a streaming service would bite. And if he were to find a location where he could take advantage of the tax incentives given by local governments, his dollars would go further and he could benefit from the support of the local community.First, he needed a school, something brick and stately, at once lived-in but also easily adaptable for any high school scene. He thought of the basic settings in almost every teen comedy: a school gymnasium, a cafeteria, classrooms, hallways, an auditorium.It also had to be located in a state offering significant tax incentives. After some Google searching, Mr. Garelick and his then assistant and now producing partner, Will Phelps, 30, flew to Syracuse and drove to Liverpool, where Mr. Garelick saw the 89-year old A.V. Zogg School, a regal-looking institution that occupies an entire block in a tree-lined neighborhood. Over the years, it has functioned as both a middle school and a high school, a community church and had been most recently owned by a Thai businessman.For $1 million in 2017, it was Mr. Garelick’s.Mr. Garelick with the actress Teala Dunn. Before beginning production, Mr. Garelick held town halls where residents could ask questions and voice concerns.Libby March for The New York TimesSelling American HighTo sell his idea to investors, Mr. Garelick made a sizzle reel of his favorite high school films (“American Pie,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) — to show that every high school movie has the same basic locations — and took his pitch to the studios, independent financiers, anyone really who was willing to listen to his proposal. He was going to make three movies that looked as if they cost $30 million each but would only cost $8 million. The producer Mickey Liddell and his LD Entertainment bit, and American High was in business.He also had to sell it to his new neighbors. Early on, Mr. Garelick discovered the area wasn’t zoned for filming and the only way he was going to get the city’s approval was if he offered a trade school in addition to a production office. He also had to get buy-in from the community, so he and Mr. Phelps held town hall meetings where residents could voice any and all concerns: Would there be a lot of noise? What about the lights? One man was worried that the production would snap up all the barbers and he wouldn’t have a place to get his hair cut. After sifting through a year of red tape, American High was a go.“Plan B,” with Kuhoo Verma, right, and Victoria Moroles, was an early success for American High.HuluThe first two movies were small. “Holly Slept Over” cost only $500,000 while “Banana Split” was done for $1.2 million.Then American High produced “Big Time Adolescence” with Pete Davidson and Jon Cryer. The raunchy comedy made it into Sundance in 2019 and was sold to Hulu, the start of a partnership with the streaming service. The companies now have an eight-picture licensing deal. The latest film being directed by Ms. Cohen marks American High’s fifth production for Hulu. Others include “Plan B,” which debuted this year to strong reviews; “The Binge,” which Mr. Garelick directed; “The Ultimate Playlist of Noise”; and “Sex Appeal,” which has yet to come out. (A sequel to “The Binge” is set to begin production in January. “It’s our first franchise,” Mr. Garelick joked.)Mr. Garelick’s belief in the potential of this particular slice of American movies is based on his study of the Strauss-Howe generational theory — the notion that distinct groups throughout history share characteristics and values that cycle anew every 18 to 20 years. But audiences are more fragmented today than they were when “American Pie” came out and caught the cultural zeitgeist. And major studios long ago abandoned genre films for the surer bets of big blockbuster action titles.“At Hulu, we know that audiences still really want those genres, so something like a young adult title or a romantic comedy — that is something the audiences are still really clamoring for,” Brian Henderson, Hulu’s senior vice president of content programming and partnerships, said in an interview. “That’s a perfect place for Hulu to step in and bring those kinds of films to streaming audiences.”The new class“How many American High productions have you worked on?” Mr. Garelick asks every crew member he runs into while showing guests around the American High campus. “Nine,” said the costumer Celine Rahman. “Seven,” the location manager Emily Campbell said. In between working on the scripts and putting the films together, Mr. Garelick takes a lot of pride in having transformed his ragtag crew of recent college graduates into a professional operation that can handle bigger budgets and more complex shoots.Some actors have appeared in multiple films, like Mr. Alvarez, 23. “They make it so much fun, and I think that’s when you get the best work,” said Mr. Alvarez, whose previous production, “Sid is Dead,” about a social outcast who gets the class bully suspended has yet to debut. He mentioned the traditional end-of-production parties, which include a ritual where people attempt to throw a fire extinguisher through a wall. Not all the actors were as enthusiastic.“Love the people. Love the script. Hate the location,” quipped the YouTube content creator and actress Teala Dunn. “Terrible food. Terrible bugs.”This all gives the American High set the feel of a well-run summer camp more than a high-stress production environment. Part of that is the slew of young people traipsing around, part is the environment that Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps have cultivated where the majority of the work is done before shooting begins. Once the cameras roll, they let the directors do their job.Several of the movies have provided crucial experience for people like the first-time feature director Sammi Cohen.Libby March for The New York Times“There is a reason why Sam was given $7 million to make a movie,” Mr. Garelick said of Ms. Cohen, a veteran television director who is making her feature directorial debut with the current production, which is still untitled. “The biggest challenge for us is getting the script and the movie to a point where it’s awesome enough for somebody to say, ‘Here’s a lot of money to go make it.’ Once everything is put together, it’s really the director’s choice to do what she wants to do, especially on a movie like this. I don’t want to have a lot of input.”Natalie Morales confirms Mr. Garelick’s approach. The actress best known for her role as Lucy Santo Domingo in TV’s “Parks and Recreation” directed “Plan B” in 2020 after enduring six months of delays because of Covid. What she found surprised her, especially since, she said, Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps can initially come off more as “fun-loving bros” than serious businessmen.“Jeremy and Will were so trusting of me and so willing to support me,” she said in a recent interview. “That’s not the experience you typically get with men who consider themselves more experienced than you.”“Plan B” stars Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles as two teenagers who must cross the state lines of South Dakota to find a Plan B pill after a regrettable sexual encounter. And it represents the epitome of the American High ethos: the high school experience told from a different point of view. In this case, it involves a strait-laced Indian girl who’s always expected to do the right thing, and her friend Lupe, a wild child whose sexuality may not align with her family’s expectations. Hulu said that “Plan B” was a hit not just with younger audiences, but with older women as well.High school movies rarely deviate from a specific formula. Most chronicle the agony and ecstasy of adolescence: falling in love, tasting your first sip of alcohol, realizing your parents aren’t perfect, discovering what kind of music you love. Those themes play out in American High’s movies, too, but through a new lens.“We all grew up loving John Hughes movies,” Mr. Garelick said. “And we loved them because they’re universal high school stories but when we look back at them, they’re all about a white guy who wants to get laid by the prom queen and winds up with their best friend, or something like that. And the people of color or people from different backgrounds were either in the background or were the butt of the joke. In our movies, they are our leads, and they’re often the ones who wrote these stories.”Of the 11 American High movies that have been shot at the school since 2017, seven have been made by first-time filmmakers, three of them women.“They could have done the thing where they buy the school and they set this all up for themselves,” Ms. Morales said. “That’s not what they’re doing.”A different kind of film schoolThe Syracuse film commission estimates that each film shot at American High leaves 70 percent of its budget in the region, between the local crew members it hires to the money spent in restaurants and hotels.Libby March for The New York TimesBefore American High’s arrival, the Syracuse film commission struggled to attract productions to the area, despite offering sizable tax credits. The inclement weather and meager crew base were major obstacles.Since Mr. Garelick entered the picture, things have changed.“It was a total 180,” the Syracuse film commissioner Eric Vinal said. “We went from very much a gig economy with people working pretty sporadically in the industry to really having full-time, secure positions.”Mr. Vinal estimates that each film shot leaves 70 percent of its budget in the region, between the local crew members it hires to the money spent in restaurants and hotels. American High’s movies initially cost $1 million to $2 million and have now expanded to the $7 million to $9 million range, with roughly 70 crew members, and going from nonunion crews to almost all union employees.Pulling from local colleges like Syracuse University, Onondaga Community College, Ithaca College and Le Moyne College, American High and Syracuse Studios, the company’s production services operation, employs 10 students on each production — students who might otherwise have to move to Los Angeles or New York for film jobs.Costumes for Ms. Cohen’s new movie.Libby March for The New York TimesA scene from Ms. Cohen’s as-yet untitled film.Libby March for The New York Times“It was a fantastic idea for the kind of thing that we’re doing here, which is educating storytellers of the future,” said Michael Schoonmaker, the chairman of the television, radio and film department at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. “One of our advantages here in the frozen tundra of the snow capital city of the world, is that, you know, we’ve got them captive but also we’re pretty far away from everything. Jeremy’s program connects the two.”Will Sacca, 24, first met Mr. Garelick in the spring of 2017 when the director came to his intro to screenwriting class and pitched American High directly to the students. Mr. Sacca became one of the first summer interns and was charged with reading and analyzing comedy scripts for what could be American High’s first features. After graduation, Mr. Sacca returned to American High and worked in a variety of different departments: locations, production, accounting. He then became Mr. Garelick’s assistant before moving back into development, where now, as the head of the department, he manages a team of readers, including college interns who provide initial reaction to scripts.“I’m really fortunate,” Mr. Sacca said. “If I was at any of the mini-majors in L.A. or one of the big studios, I would be, at best, an executive assistant.”Ms. Rahman’s trajectory was similar. A recent graduate, she was living in New York City trying her hand at acting when she made a decision to return home to Syracuse. First she got a job as a background actor on American High’s second feature, “Banana Split.” That resulted in a move into the costume department, where she’s been ever since.“We’ve got Syracuse University and this really great film school there and you would think that this kind of thing would have been done a long time ago,” she said. “It seems that people are just kind of realizing, ‘Oh wait, there’s a place to make movies here and it’s sustainable.’”‘The Rah-Rah of it all’A classroom at American High. The company employs 10 students on each production, pulling from local colleges like Syracuse University.Libby March for The New York TimesNear the end of a long day of filming, Mr. Garelick sat in American High’s gym, watching a scene unfold and ruminating on his own high school experience. Not surprising, he loved it. Growing up in New City, N.Y., he was a football player, a member of the school’s theater troupe and president of the class. “I loved the Rah-Rah of it all,” he said.Now he gets to relive that feeling every day.American High has the bandwidth to shoot five films a year. Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps have also trained enough crew members that they can hand the reins of a production to others and get to work on the next American High film or other projects they’re involved with. (Mr. Garelick recently decamped to Hawaii to begin preproduction on the sequel to the Netflix film “Murder Mystery.”)What weighs on Mr. Garelick now is just how big of a beast he’s created. “We both feel responsible for a lot of people, and it’s definitely a lot of pressure,” he said. “But it’s also incredibly rewarding.” He acknowledged that things have become easier in the last year as more production has come to the area and his crew members have become experienced enough to get jobs on non-American High projects.Mr. Garelick with Mr. Phelps have trained enough crew members that they can hand the reins of a production to others.Libby March for The New York TimesIt also helps that immersing themselves in the world of R-rated teen comedies has made them experts.“We’ve gotten really good at knowing all the talent in this age range and in this space,” Mr. Phelps said. “We know all the scripts that are floating around because we’ve probably read them all.” More