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    Lincoln’s Murder Is Often Re-enacted, but Not at Ford’s Theater

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    The theater says that allowing the assassination to be recreated there would undermine the gravity and significance of Abraham Lincoln’s death.Since Ford’s Theater reopened as an active theater in 1968, no one has staged a dramatic re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln being shot to death there on April 14, 1865.“Manhunt,” the Apple TV+ series, said it recently asked for permission and was turned down. Robert Redford considered it at one point but was dissuaded, an executive at the theater said.The theater’s website explains the reasoning.In a posting titled, “Why Ford’s Theatre Doesn’t Stage Assassination Re-enactments,” the historian David McKenzie, who worked at the theater for nine years, wrote in 2021:“For us at Ford’s, in the place where the tragedy actually happened, a re-enactment of the Lincoln assassination would take attention from the gravity of the event and its impact on our society at large,” adding that “it would focus attention instead on the macabre details of one night. It could prove kitschy, downplaying the event’s significance. It would also give John Wilkes Booth the prominence he desired in his quest to topple the United States government and preserve a system of white racial superiority.”Paul Tetreault, the Washington theater’s veteran director, said that, despite the resolute tone of McKenzie’s posting, the rationale against such a re-enactment is not a formal policy, but more a matter of “common sense.”“So the reality is,” he said, “there is nothing written that says no re-enactments. It’s just that it’s just respectful. You know, at Ford’s we have an obligation. We have an obligation to the facts. We have an obligation to truth, we have an obligation to, you know, be respectful and be reverential. This is a memorial site. It’s a national historical site.”Tetreault said Robert Redford considered using the theater in his 2010 film “The Conspirator,” and even toured the space to mark camera angles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ABC Affiliate Cuts ‘Bachelorette’ Finale for Football Game

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      Fans of the reality show were not happy after a local ABC affiliate showed a preseason game between the Washington Commanders and Baltimore Ravens instead.Fans of “The Bachelorette” reality television show who live in the Washington, D.C., area were unable to watch the finale of the show’s 20th season on Monday night. It turns out their ABC affiliate showed an N.F.L. game instead — and a preseason one at that.If you know any “Bachelorette” fans, you can probably guess how the Washington-area ones felt about this particular programming call.“I was pretty frustrated,” Pegah Moradi, 25, who lives in Arlington, Va., said by phone early Tuesday.“It’s more important for sports to be live, obviously, than it is for a prerecorded reality show finale,” said Ms. Moradi, a graduate student. “But at the same time, it’s difficult when something that you’re accustomed to viewing at a certain time is just not there.”The practice of cutting one must-watch TV broadcast for another, more common in the past, has become rare in the streaming era. If something is important enough to broadcast live these days, networks and streaming platforms can usually find a way to do that.But on Monday, the “Bachelorette” finale was shelved in the D.C. area by ABC’s local affiliate in favor of a football game between the Washington Commanders and the Baltimore Ravens. (The Commanders won, 29-28, after kicking a field goal in the game’s waning seconds.)“It might be because the two football teams are regional favorites that people are obsessed with,” said Julia Swift, a professor in the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. “But people are also obsessed with ‘The Bachelorette.’”The “Bachelorette” finale was available on Charge!, a broadcasting network owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Charge! is free and does not require a paid subscription. But some fans, including Ms. Moradi, had never heard of it and could not figure out how to watch.Professor Swift said that it would have made more sense to air the episode on a streaming platform that belongs to ABC or Disney, the network’s corporate parent.Representatives for Disney did not respond to a request for comment overnight. Neither did a spokesman for the N.F.L.The latest season of “The Bachelorette,” a spinoff of “The Bachelor” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” stars Charity Lawson, a real-life child-and-family therapist from Georgia who is looking for a life partner. Ms. Lawson, 27, began the season with 25 suitors; by the finale, she was down to three.The ABC affiliate that cut the finale likely did so after calculating that more people would watch the football game, said Amanda Lotz, a professor of media studies at Queensland University of Technology in Australia who has studied the U.S. television industry. Whatever the reason, the decision illustrates how the federal policies governing American television today were designed decades ago to promote “local sovereignty” by giving local affiliates discretion over what to air, said Professor Lotz, the author of “We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All.”The concept of “local sovereignty” may sound anachronistic in the streaming era, she added, “but these were policies that were designed to protect local community differences so that they wouldn’t be overrun by the creation of a national culture.”One way to read Monday’s scheduling call would be as a kind of karmic victory for football fans, who were famously denied the ending of a nail biter of a game between the Jets and the Oakland Raiders on Nov. 17, 1968. With 50 seconds left, the television broadcast cut out abruptly to make way for “Heidi,” a made-for-TV children’s movie about a Swiss orphan.As for the “Bachelorette,” Ms. Moradi said she understood that the Commanders and the Ravens are both in her television market and have local fan bases. “But a preseason N.F.L. game versus the finale of a major franchise TV show is not a very difficult decision to make in terms of what to broadcast,” she said.After her viewing plans were scrambled on Monday, Ms. Moradi inadvertently saw a spoiler for the show as she searched for how to watch. At this point, she said, she wonders if watching the finale will even be worth her time.“Everyone I know who was watching it will have already seen it, for the most part, so I’ll just kind of be in the dark for 24 hours,” she said. “I won’t get to join in on this rare experience: watching live TV at the same time as everyone else.” More

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      in Theater

      In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets

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      Three new plays at theaters in Washington explore how the past is both erased and inescapable.Although James Ijames does not specify the setting of his new play “Good Bones,” it sure seems like Washington. For one thing, a character says it “used to be a swamp.”That checks out; when I paid a visit to the capital last week, the summer humidity was already settling in. And hasn’t Washington become, as Ijames writes of the play’s locale in an introduction to the script, one of those places “that is now too expensive for most people to live”? It has: My older son, an elementary schoolteacher in D.C., is just squeaking by.Well, lots of cities are wet and pricey. But when two characters in “Good Bones” — one a new homeowner renovating a townhouse and the other a contractor intimately familiar with its former incarnations — discover that they both grew up in a nearby project called Dunbar Gardens, local bells may ring. The Paul Laurence Dunbar apartments are less than a mile from the Studio Theater, where the play is running through June 18.Of course, there are apartment complexes named for Dunbar, one of the country’s first Black poets to gain widespread recognition, in several American cities. Still, anyone who spends even a little time observing Washington’s glassy new high-rises squeezed up against its squat Federal piles, many built by enslaved people, will recognize Ijames’s spiritual geography: a place where history is both erased and inescapable.So even if it was a coincidence that the tension between past and present informed all three plays I saw during my visit, it was a telling one. “Good Bones,” Ijames’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” (now on Broadway), examines the theme through the lens of contemporary gentrification — though the gentrifiers and the gentrified are, in this case, both Black. The familiar knots of privilege and appropriation become even more tangled when the people raising the property values grew up in the same neighborhood as the people they’re pricing out.From left: Joel Ashur, Johnny Ramey and Cara Ricketts in “Good Bones” at Studio Theater in Washington.Margot SchulmanThe other plays look further back, and at other forms of erasure. “Here There Are Blueberries,” which I saw at the Shakespeare Theater Company, concerns the discovery in 2006 of an album of 116 photographs that depict daily life among the residents of Auschwitz. Mind you, these are not the concentration camp’s prisoners, who are never seen, but the jolly-looking Nazis who ran it. Why such an album survived, and what should be done with it, are questions that bedevil the archivists who narrate the story.Our responsibility to the past is also the crux of Kenneth Lin’s “Exclusion,” at the Arena Stage. The title refers, in part, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers; designed to last 10 years, it was not repealed until 1943. The law, as well as the anti-Asian violence it in essence sanctioned, is, in the play, the subject of a celebrated book by a Chinese American historian named Katie who sells the television rights to Hollywood.You could almost write the next beat yourself: Katie finds herself participating in egregious falsifications, as a terrible injustice is turned into entertainment by the dumbing-down machine. It’s a heavy if sadly believable irony that the mini-series created by a smarmy producer sidelines its historical conscience (Katie gets fired) and eventually excludes the Exclusion Act itself.But because Lin’s play, running through June 25, is a satire, the curtain does not come down on that downer. In a comic turnaround that could be motivated more clearly, Katie comes to believe that the producer’s rewrites are justified. Yes, he has turned a doctor who in real life was lynched by a mob into a kung fu expert who lynches the mob instead. And yes, he has transformed a humble seamstress into a prostitute to make the role more attractive to the actress who will play the role. Still, when the show becomes a huge critical and popular success, providing visibility to Asian actors and a boost to her career, Katie accepts the strange trade-off of being seen by being erased.As directed by Trip Cullman with the bright colors and swift pacing of situation comedy, “Exclusion” is instantly legible and accessible. Still, its emotional high point is just the opposite: a halting conversation between Katie and the actress that takes place in unsubtitled Cantonese. And though what they say is thus incomprehensible to those who do not speak the language, it dramatizes with great poignancy the power of what we can sense but not understand.Tony Nam, right, and Karoline in “Exclusion” at the Arena Stage in Washington.Margot SchulmanThere are moments like that in “Good Bones,” too. The homeowners, Aisha and Travis, hear sounds in their house they cannot explain. Are they the voices of ghosts whose lives are being painted over by the beautiful pale blue of their new kitchen?Yet the plot turns, somewhat squeakily, on sounds they can explain all too well: booming music from a late-night party nearby. When Travis, over Aisha’s objections, calls the police to complain about his neighbors, the conflict is set in motion, pitting the entitlement of new wealth against the traditions of old community.The questions Ijames raises in “Good Bones,” directed by Psalmayene 24, are profound: How can cities feel welcoming to people whose ideas of welcome are incompatible? What is the responsibility of newcomers to the surviving structures, both physical and emotional, of the past? And though those questions do not yet coalesce into a tight narrative — the tacked-on happy ending is a carpentry job their contractor would redo immediately — “Good Bones” is a house in progress. By the time it gets to New York (the Public Theater plans to present it in an upcoming season) it may well look and feel completely different.“Here There Are Blueberries,” a Tectonic Theater project conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman, also approaches history as a living process. Like previous Tectonic works, including “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” it proceeds in the form of an investigation based on interviews and relevant documents.In this case, the interviews begin with archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — not far from the theater — as they process the astonishing trove of photographs sent to them by a possible donor who says little about how he got them. The images of Auschwitz leaders and workers enjoying outings and singalongs and rewards for their “accomplishments,” including bowls of fresh blueberries, seem to say almost too much.By the time the play introduces another Auschwitz album — one that fills the historical and emotional gaps of the first with images of inmates — you understand why, as a former Nazi propagandist explains, “One must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering.”Yet I’m not sure plays should. “Blueberries,” which closed on Sunday in Washington but will be presented next spring at New York Theater Workshop, is so brisk and unsentimental it sometimes feels merely clinical, or perhaps surgical, its unbearable topic opened up for autopsy.That’s effective, but the more powerful moments for me are those in which characters vitally and morally involved in the story — descendants of Nazis, a survivor of the camp — speak from painful experience about the ways history implicates them, and all of us, even as it starts to fade from collective memory. The procedural mysteries of the albums are, after all, less important than the living fact of their irrefutable testimony.Theater is its own kind of testimony. “Blueberries,” like “Exclusion” and “Good Bones,” uses drama (and comedy) to extend our thinking about the legacies of prejudice and resistance, power and deprivation. But then so does any tour of this history-rich, antihistorical city. As our teacher son walked us back to our hotel after seeing “Blueberries,” I asked him about a particularly impressive Beaux-Arts building we passed. “The Carnegie Library,” he said. “It’s now an Apple store.”Good BonesThrough June 18 at the Studio Theater, Washington D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.ExclusionThrough June 25 at Arena Stage, Washington D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      In a Musical About Penicillin, Superbugs Take Center Stage

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      “The Mold That Changed the World” focuses on the physician who discovered penicillin. And it offers a message: Don’t take antibiotics unless you really need them.WASHINGTON — Robin Hiley’s eyes rolled when he recounted the night in 2016 that a friend, an infectious disease doctor, asked him what seemed like a crazy question: “Wouldn’t it be a great thing to have a musical about antibiotics?”Hiley, a composer and songwriter who is the artistic director of the Charades Theater Company in Edinburgh, was skeptical. Though the troupe calls itself “theatre with a social conscience,” antibiotics — or more precisely the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which can lead to death when common germs evade treatment — seemed a bridge too far.But the friend, Dr. Meghan Perry, was persistent, passionate about what she conceded was “this wacky idea.” And so it is that “The Mold That Changed the World,” a musical about Alexander Fleming, the Scottish physician and microbiologist who received a Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin, is playing this week (through Sunday) in Washington.The show traces the life of Fleming, from his days as a young private in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps who later became a medical doctor, through two world wars and his famous discovery. It also offers a glimpse into a dark future — one predicted by Fleming himself — where antibiotics no longer work because deadly “superbugs” have learned to evade them.It also has a neat twist: a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast. They include people like Mario Sengco, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency who also sings in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.Emily Bull, as Rose, comforts a wounded soldier played by Scott Armstrong in “The Mold That Changed the World.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times“How often can a musical deliver a lifesaving message to society?” he asked.The danger Fleming foresaw is, in fact, already here. Experts estimate that antimicrobial resistance leads to 1.2 million deaths around the world each year.And the problem — known by its initials, A.M.R. — is getting worse, because the drugs were overused during the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The show opens on Nov. 1 in Atlanta, home of the C.D.C.; Dr. Walensky will participate in a panel discussion before the performance.)At a discussion before Thursday night’s performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center here in the nation’s capital, Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, made the story personal: After a cut he sustained while gardening led to an antibiotic-resistant infection, he spent a week in the hospital, and almost lost a thumb. It took seven antibiotics to cure him. Another panelist, the writer Diane Shader Smith, lost her 25-year-old daughter, who had cystic fibrosis, to a superbug infection.In Edinburgh, that is precisely what Dr. Perry was worried about when she pitched her idea to Hiley, who said he gravitates “toward historical stories that have a social impact.” He began reading about Fleming, he said, and “saw this potential of a story and started to begin to understand the global impact of A.M.R. And the seed was sown, so to speak.”The musical features a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThey received funding from the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which in turn led to backing from a powerful figure: Dame Sally Davies, who was then Britain’s chief medical officer. She was so concerned about antimicrobial resistance, she said, that it is now on Britain’s “risk register,” along with pandemics and bioterrorism, as a security threat.The show has had sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and has also played in London and Glasgow — with mold spelled “mould.” It opens with Fleming, played by Jeremy Rose, at the end of his life, encountering an otherworldly, barefoot Mother Earth figure named Rose, played by Emily Bull.Rose, the Mother Earth character, hovers over the story as a kind of narrator, bringing Fleming back and forward in time. Two ethereal-looking circus performers, dressed in flowing psychedelic colors, appear throughout the musical, spinning on an acrobat’s wheel. Hiley envisioned them as the “Gram twins,” representing two different types of bacteria: Gram-positive and Gram-negative. (Penicillin treats Gram-positive infections.)The audience sees the young Army private bidding farewell to the London Scottish Regiment, where he has served for 14 years. (“Private 6392, this mess hall honors you!” the cast sings.) Soon it is 1914, and Fleming is in Bologne, France, tending to soldiers — some from his old unit — facing death from exposure to poison and shrapnel wounds that turn into deadly infections.He cries at the uselessness of it all: “These men came to war prepared to die to protect their homeland, their families, their friends — not to be poisoned by gas, gangrene, harmless cuts; infected by horse manure on the fields on which they fought!”Fleming, later seen in his bacteriology lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, is a rumpled, earnest figure. He was apparently not the neatest of scientists, and the show riffs on other scientists who frown on his untidy habits. (“It’s clean and tidy we adore,” the chorus, dressed in lab coats, sings. “So sterilize those beakers! Disinfect that glass pipette!”) But that very untidiness led to his world-changing discovery.In 1928, while experimenting with common staphylococcal bacteria, Fleming spotted a ring of mold in a petri dish he had left by an open window while he was off on vacation. He was astonished to see that the mold had killed the germs. But that is not the end of the story.More than a decade passed before his discovery could actually be put to use. It took a couple of polished Oxford University scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to purify the mold called penicillium notatum so that it could be tested on mice, and then people, and manufactured in mass quantities. They shared the Nobel with Fleming.A panel discussion at the Atlas Performing Arts Center included, from left: the composer and songwriter Robin Hiley; Sarah Despres of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Bethany Brookshire, a science writer in Washington; Dr. Rick Bright; and the writer Diane Shader Smith.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesOne of the biggest challenges in modern medicine is that drug companies don’t want to invest in developing new antibiotics; it is not that lucrative, and if germs keep evolving to evade new drugs, the market potential is limited. In bringing the show to Washington, Dame Sally said, she hopes to persuade Congress to pass a bill, the PASTEUR Act, that would offer incentives for companies to innovate. (The name, a play on the famous scientist Louis Pasteur, stands for Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance.)“We have a market failure,” Dame Sally said.Looking ahead, Dr. Walensky said, “addressing antimicrobial resistance is going to be the next chapter because it was the thing everybody was worried about before the pandemic.”As “The Mold That Changed The World” winds down, Fleming finds himself in the future, aghast at what humankind has wrought. With so many people taking antibiotics unnecessarily, and farmers using them to prevent and treat disease in livestock and increase productivity, modern medicine is no more equipped to handle bacterial infections than the young Fleming was on the battlefield.The message, Dr. Perry said, is clear: “Don’t take an antibiotic unless you really need it.” She harked back to when she and Hiley were brainstorming at the cafe in Edinburgh, and to the message she had written in block letters atop their storyboard: “Antibiotics are precious.” More

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      in Music

      Lizzo Plays New Notes on James Madison’s Crystal Flute from 1813

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      A classically trained flutist, the singer, rapper and songwriter spent more than three hours admiring the flute collection at the Library of Congress. Madison’s instrument was made for the second inauguration by a Parisian craftsman.Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”Lizzo responded without much hesitation.“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813.Library of CongressMadison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.” More

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      in Movies

      The Black List, Founded in Hollywood, Expands Into Theater

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      The Black List, an effort to boost the careers of undiscovered writers by drawing attention to high-quality unproduced scripts, was formed 17 years ago with a focus on Hollywood. Now the organization is looking to extend its work into theater.The project’s leadership announced Tuesday that it would begin inviting playwrights and musical writers to share their work with gatekeepers in the theater, film and television industries, with the goal of helping them find representation, get feedback and land productions in the theater world or jobs in the film and television world.Four well-regarded nonprofit theaters, Miami New Drama in Florida, the Movement Theater Company in New York, Victory Gardens in Chicago and Woolly Mammoth in Washington, have each agreed to commission a new play or musical from a writer whose work surfaces through the project. The commissions are $10,000 each.“Our fundamental belief is that there’s a lot of amazing playwrights whose opportunities don’t befit their talents,” said Franklin Leonard, who founded the Black List. “If we can rectify that, that’s something we should do.”The Black List started as an annual survey of scripts that Hollywood executives liked but hadn’t turned into films, and the organization says that 440 of those scripts have since been produced. Then the Black List added a for-profit arm that allows writers to post scripts online to bring them to the attention of industry professionals, and which also allows writers, for a fee, to seek script evaluations from readers who work in the industry.(Evaluations cost $100, of which $60 goes to the reader.)Leonard said he and Megan Halpern, the Black List executive spearheading the theater expansion, have been talking with theater industry leaders for months about the idea of broadening the Black List’s scope, with the goal of helping undiscovered playwrights and musical theater writers find work in theater and, possibly, also in film or TV.“What we’ve heard is that people want to find new playwrights, but the reality of wading through the slush pile is insurmountable,” he said. More

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      in Music

      In Washington, a Princess Party and a Carnival of Self-Loathing

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      Two shows with Broadway aspirations, “Once Upon a One More Time” and “A Strange Loop,” represent opposite extremes of what a big, mainstream production can be.WASHINGTON — Sidney Harman Hall was bustling before a recent matinee of “Once Upon a One More Time,” a revisionist fairy tale mash-up scored with Britney Spears songs at Shakespeare Theater Company here. People were taking group selfies at one of two step-and-repeats. A few girls — and women — tittered in tiaras. Purple T-shirts and tote bags with the show’s title and the names of storybook princesses were being sold. And the theater, which has a capacity of about 700, had no empty seats in sight. At least from the outside, “Once Upon a One More Time” looked like the kind of splashy show you might find on Broadway.I was in Washington for the weekend, at the first post-opening matinee of the show, and it wasn’t the only musical in the neighborhood with Broadway aspirations; the second show I saw here, Woolly Mammoth’s production of “A Strange Loop,” by Michael R. Jackson, has just announced plans for a Broadway run in the spring. It’s a more daring work: a meta show about a queer Black playwright writing a show about a queer Black playwright that opened Off Broadway in 2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize.Two very different shows in two very different theaters less than a mile apart: “Once Upon a One More Time” and “A Strange Loop” represent opposite extremes of what a Broadway production can be.Written by Jon Hartmere and directed and choreographed by the husband-and-wife team Keone and Mari Madrid, “Once Upon a One More Time” is set inside an abstract representation of the world of children’s storybooks. That’s to say that whenever a child opens a book of fairy tales, the denizens of this magical kingdom must act out the classic plots for the reader. Meanwhile, the princes and princesses — Snow White (Aisha Jackson), the Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu), the Princess and the Pea (Morgan Weed), Rapunzel (Wonu Ogunfowora) and several others — hang around like on-call workers, waiting for their boss, the Narrator, to direct them through the scenes of their tales, which they must obediently act out in order to have their happily ever after.Princesses take a stand: From left, Lauren Zakrin, Selene Haro, Ashley Chiu, Adrianna Weir (seated), Wonu Ogunfowora, Aisha Jackson, Jennifer Florentino and Amy Hillner Larsen.Mathew MurphyBut Cinderella (Briga Heelan) isn’t happy, and becomes even less so after she learns that her Prince Charming (Justin Guarini) is being paid for his services while she isn’t. Then Cinderella meets the Notorious O.F.G. (that’s Original Fairy Godmother, comically played by Brooke Dillman), who comes all the way from the mystical land of Flatbush, Brooklyn, to give poor Cin a copy of “The Feminine Mystique.” Suddenly enlightened by feminist theory, Cinderella leads her fellow princesses in protest, demanding that they be allowed to write their own stories.The audience cheered at the more clever pairings of popular Spears songs with important plot points, like an unfaithful prince singing “Oops! … I Did It Again” or Cinderella’s evil stepmother singing “Toxic.”But as I watched the show, I wondered: Who is the target audience for this? So many Broadway shows are aimed at a general audience, and similarly, “Once Upon a One More Time” seems to want to appeal to both children and adults. The fairy tale premise (nodding to shows like “Into the Woods” and “Shrek”) and the earnest sermonizing seem to point to an audience of kids. But the lines of dialogue about microaggressions (the Narrator warns Cinderella about being “difficult,” getting “hysterical” and using a “shrill” voice, all of which made the audience gasp), along with some mild sex jokes, are clearly aimed at knowing adults. Plus, call me conventional, but I doubt a children’s show would include a song called “Work Bitch.” In aiming for a Broadway stage, “Once Upon a One More Time” still seems to be figuring out what its prospective audience would look like.With its blatant messaging about female empowerment and revisionist approach, not unlike two recent Broadway musicals — “Six” and “Diana,” both of which recast famous women from history as self-possessed and self-reliant feminist icons — “Once Upon a One More Time” reflects the broad strokes of modern-day feminism but shies away from anything too hefty or complex. That includes the pink-pigtailed elephant in the room: Spears herself, who has documented what she has called years of exploitation in her quest to end her conservatorship. So particularly the Britney faithful will most likely be disappointed to find the pop star absent from a show largely based on the products of her career.“A Strange Loop” has announced plans to transfer to Broadway in the spring. From left: James Jackson Jr., L Morgan Lee, Antwayn Hopper, John-Andrew Morrison, Jaquel Spivey (seated right), Jason Veasey and John-Michael Lyles.Marc J. FranklinAt Woolly Mammoth’s space, just a few blocks from Sidney Harman Hall, there were no selfie stations or gift kiosks. The theater seats less than 300 people, and the content of Jackson’s “A Strange Loop” could not be more different from “Once Upon a One More Time.”Directed by Stephen Brackett, “A Strange Loop” is a carnival of its protagonist’s self-loathing, his insecurities, his introspective reveries on sexuality and identity, society, family and religion. It’s hilarious until it turns vicious, and vice versa. And it defines itself through a critique of commercial productions, like the long-running Broadway show “The Lion King,” as well as through a deconstruction of the expectations society may have of a Black, queer artist, which can crush brave new work.The musical rejects the polite, family-friendly themes and the tidy endings of what its protagonist, a Broadway usher named Usher (Jaquel Spivey), sees at work. Full of references to sexual assault and racism, and with enough offensive language to fill a gallon-size swear jar, “A Strange Loop” aims to bring taboo topics to mainstream theater. The Woolly Mammoth crowd snapped and mmhmm-ed to lines breaking down queer and race politics; at one point a man in the row behind me got out of his seat and waved his arms around to the music as if he were at a rave — if raves played devastating songs about homophobia and abuse.Walking out of the theater afterward, I overheard a group of friends wonder if “A Strange Loop” could go to Broadway. One woman had reservations; she liked it, she said, but — and here she paused before awkwardly stumbling through her qualifier — it was a musical about AIDS.I held my tongue — because I could’ve mentioned that “Rent” and “Angels in America” were two Broadway shows about AIDS. Or that “A Strange Loop” is about so much more than AIDS. Or that this season, Broadway had “Dana H.,” a show about kidnapping and assault, and “Is This a Room,” about a real F.B.I. investigation — both fantastic, critically acclaimed works of art. Or that “Slave Play” brought similarly explicit language and sexual content to Broadway in 2019 and has now reopened.Or I could’ve simply said that this beautifully brutal work of theater is already headed to Broadway. More

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      Six Great Movies About Presidents

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySix Great Movies About PresidentsIf you’re looking for some escapism, these films are a good reminder that democracy works.Daniel Day-Lewis took an Oscar-winning turn as President Abraham Lincoln in the 2012 film “Lincoln.”Credit…DreamWorks Pictures and 20th Century FoxJan. 16, 2021When a new president is inaugurated, it’s traditionally an occasion for pageantry and pomp, showcasing the splendor of Washington and reminding the country and the world of the United States’ democratic promise: that power ultimately rests in the will of the people. As we head into these ceremonies next week, it’s a good time to let these movies remind us that the mechanisms of American politics and the institution of the presidency — at their best and worst — have endured for centuries.These six entertaining films are about real and fictional presidents, and are set against the backdrop and complicated culture of our nation’s capital.‘Lincoln’The director Steven Spielberg and the screenwriter Tony Kushner take an unusual approach to telling the story of one of America’s most beloved presidents, focusing mostly on the first months of Abraham Lincoln’s second term, when he cajoled a reluctant Congress into passing a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Daniel Day-Lewis gives an Oscar-winning performance as Lincoln, capturing the man’s gentle good humor and shrewd — sometimes ruthless — political instincts. The “Lincoln” creative team make the figures from history books look and feel like real people, with complex personalities and motives.Watch it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]‘Thirteen Days’The title of this film refers to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons not far from the Florida coast pitted John F. Kennedy and his inner circle against both the Russians and their own Joint Chiefs of Staff. The outcome of this story is well-known. (Spoiler alert: The missiles were removed and a potential catastrophe was averted.) But the director Roger Donaldson and the screenwriter David Self still successfully dramatize the tension and paranoia brewing when Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood), his brother Robert (Steven Culp) and his adviser Kenneth O’Donnell (Kevin Costner) scrambled to out-negotiate their rivals.Watch it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]‘Seven Days in May’The characters in this jittery 1964 thriller are fictional, but the situation — particularly of late — feels all too real. Kirk Douglas plays a Marine colonel who suspects that a hawkish Air Force general (Burt Lancaster) is organizing a coup against a pacifist president (Frederic March). The director John Frankenheimer (who two years earlier made the similarly pulse-pounding “The Manchurian Candidate”) and the screenwriter Rod Serling adapt a novel by Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel into an offbeat war movie, where the soldiers fight in boardrooms instead of battlefields, attacking using clandestine meetings and phone calls.Watch it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]‘All the President’s Men’Richard Nixon is at the center of this newspaper drama, even though he mostly stays offscreen. Based on Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s account of how they investigated the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, this film conveys the day-to-day business of gossip, leaks and social networking in the nation’s capital. But it’s also a rousing story about how citizens and journalists can serve as a check on the executive branch, whenever presidents and their staff start imperiously ignoring or bulldozing over federal laws.Watch it on HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]‘Dave’One big appeal of movies about presidents is the chance to see how the leader of the free world lives. In this 1993 comedy “Dave,” Kevin Kline plays an ordinary guy who looks just like the president. When the White House staff asks him to pose as POTUS while the real one recovers from a stroke, Dave soon finds himself embroiled in a plot involving scandal, chicanery and romance. What makes this picture so delightful is Kline’s endearingly upbeat performance as someone who genuinely enjoys the privileges of the presidency — from the perks of the White House to the power to improve people’s lives.Watch it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]‘The American President’The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has a knack for creating charismatic and inspiring politicians, as seen in his hit TV series, “The West Wing.” In this 1995 romantic drama, Michael Douglas plays the title character, a Bill Clinton-like centrist Democrat prone to push for popular legislation rather than taking controversial stands. Sorkin’s story (directed by Rob Reiner) is mostly about the widowed president’s love affair with an environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening. But the movie also imagines an idealized Washington, where the right speech at the right time can change minds and perhaps save a nation.Watch it on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube[Read The New York Times review.]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘A Dog Called Money’ Review: Lyrical Encounters With PJ Harvey

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘A Dog Called Money’ Review: Lyrical Encounters With PJ HarveyIn this documentary, the musician PJ Harvey travels to Kabul, Kosovo and Washington, D.C. to find inspiration.PJ Harvey in the documentary “A Dog Called Money.”Credit…Seamus Murphy/AbramoramaBy More