Trevor Griffiths, a prolific and avowedly Marxist writer for stage and screen most widely known for his play “Comedians,” which was staged in London and on Broadway, died on March 29 at his home in Yorkshire, England. He was 88.
His agent, Nicki Stoddart, said the cause was heart failure.
An important figure on the English left, Mr. Griffiths conjoined the political with the personal and expressed that affinity across a wide range of topics, whether connected to British party politics or comparable upheavals abroad.
He was at his most visible during the decade or so from 1975 onward. That period encompassed the premiere of “Comedians” in Nottingham, England, in 1975, as well as its New York premiere in 1976 — it was his only Broadway play — and his lone foray into Hollywood, as a collaborator with Warren Beatty on his screenplay for the much-admired movie “Reds” (1981).
His plays granted Laurence Olivier his last stage role, in the National Theater premiere of “The Party” (1973) — an anatomy of the British left set against the backdrop of the 1968 political tumult in Paris — and offered early opportunities for budding talents like Jonathan Pryce, who won a Tony for “Comedians,” and Kevin Spacey and Gary Oldman, who starred in the American and British premieres of the play “Real Dreams” in the 1980s.
“Comedians,” set in Manchester among the hopefuls in a night comedy class, has had various notable revivals over the years — among them a 2003 Off Broadway production, with Raúl Esparza inheriting Mr. Pryce’s career-defining role, and one at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2009, David Dawson playing the same role.
Mr. Pryce’s performance as the angry, class-conscious Gethin Price, who has shorn his hair in a symbolic gesture, caused a sensation first in Nottingham and London then, finally, in New York, where Mr. Pryce, then 29, took the town playing Mr. Griffiths’s bilious skinhead, who also happens to be an amateur comic. (Mr. Pryce’s performance lives on in a 1979 version filmed for the BBC.)
“There were a few hiccups along the way trying to relate a shaven-headed Manchester United supporter to a New York audience,” Mr. Pryce said in a phone interview.
But the play, Mr. Pryce said, “established me in America; getting the Tony” — in 1977 — “and having a foothold there meant I could go backwards and forwards, which I have done all my life.”
Mr. Pryce’s memories of that time include looking on as Mr. Griffiths was “wooed and seduced,” he said, by Mr. Beatty, who had alighted upon Mr. Griffiths to write the screenplay for “Reds,” Mr. Beatty’s historical film epic about the Harvard-educated socialist activist and author John Reed.
“Politically, they were like-minded,” Mr. Pryce said of Mr. Beatty and Mr. Griffiths. “I think Trevor saw the film as a way of getting a bigger audience for his beliefs and thoughts, though I don’t think he came out of it happily, shall we say.”
That was very much confirmed in a 2007 Vanity Fair article about the making of “Reds.”
“The atmosphere around us was poisonous, terrible,” Mr. Griffiths told Peter Biskind, the author of the article. “It was messy, it was vile and it was foulmouthed on both sides.” As a result, Mr. Griffiths departed the very film for which he went on to share a 1982 Oscar nomination for original screenplay with Mr. Beatty — whose own Academy Award acceptance speech that year, when he won for best director, made no mention of his onetime colleague.
Trevor Griffiths was born on April 4, 1935, into a working-class family in Manchester: His father, Ernest, cleaned vats in an acid-making factory, and his mother, Annie, was a bus conductor. Britain’s Education Act of 1944 broadened access to good schools, which in an instant changed his horizons. He studied English at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1955, and then worked as a teacher and an education officer for the BBC.
From the 1970s onward, he coupled writing for the theater with larger-scale work for television. An early play, “Occupations,” had several runs before it was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a young Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley among the cast. Its focus on the Italian Marxist writer and theorist Antonio Gramsci was characteristic of Mr. Griffiths’s interest in revolutions of all stripes — a self-appointed playwright-provocateur, he once said he was keen “to teach through entertainment.” (The play was seen briefly Off Broadway in 1982.)
In “The Party,” Laurence Olivier played John Tagg, a Glaswegian Trotskyite who finds himself at an upscale London dinner party discussing the other meaning of that word — party politics. “It was a fantastic thing to see him hold the stage with a Marxist lecture for 20 minutes,” the Tony Award-winning playwright David Edgar, who saw the performance, said in an interview.
Mr. Griffiths’s original work for TV included “Through the Night” (1975), prompted by his wife Janice’s experience with breast cancer, and “Bill Brand” (1976), an 11-part series covering a year in the life of a Labour Party member of Parliament. “Country” (1981) was a family drama influenced by Mr. Griffiths’s previous adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and was screened as part of “Play for Today,” the influential BBC series devoted to socially engaged new writing.
He wrote the 1986 Ken Loach film “Fatherland,” about a German singer-songwriter, and had long hoped to get a film made with Richard Attenborough about the American revolutionary Thomas Paine; that material instead ended up in a 2009 play, “A New World,” at Shakespeare’s Globe, in which John Light played the passionate pamphleteer.
Mr. Griffiths’s adaptations included “Sons and Lovers” (1981), a six-part version for the BBC of the D.H. Lawrence novel, and “Piano,” a 1990 play for the National Theater adapted from a 1977 Russian film that itself takes as its source the early Chekhov play “Platonov.”
The London-based Turkish director Mehmet Ergen directed the Turkish premiere of “Piano” in Istanbul in 2010, as well as the London stage premiere of Mr. Griffiths’s “Cherry Orchard,” which had until then been seen only regionally and on TV.
That Chekhov revival ran at Mr. Ergen’s own Arcola Theater in East London in 2017 and turned out to be the last major staging during Mr. Griffiths’s lifetime of one of his plays in London.
In an interview, Mr. Ergen spoke affectionately of Mr. Griffiths. In his later years, he said, Mr. Griffiths was “still thinking that art played a particular role in social change: Everything was political for him.”
Or, as Mr. Griffiths himself put it in a 2008 talk at the University of Manchester, his alma mater, with regard to the impetus for societal awareness and improvement that was always present within him: “An army of principle will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. It will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.”
Mr. Griffiths married Janice Stansfield in 1960; she died in a plane crash in 1977. He is survived by their three children, Sian, Emma and Joss, and by his second wife, Gill (Cliff) Griffiths, whom he married in 1992.
“Ride” recounts the epic journey of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world. Opening Friday at the Old Globe in San Diego, the ambitious musical features six characters, spans numerous years and traverses multiple countries — all with just two actors.
It might seem a surprising choice to stage a globe-trotting, 19th-century-set bio-musical with just a pair of performers. But for “Ride,” as for an increasing number of regional stage productions across the country, necessity is the mother of invention — and for most theater companies, already strained by the COVID-19 pandemic and facing tightened budgets, the main necessities are “sell more tickets” and “lower costs.”
“We’ve always been resolute that this is how it has to be,” Freya Catrin Smith, who co-created “Ride” with Jack Williams, tells The Times. “As newer writers, you want to serve the work and the idea, but at the same time, you now have to have this awareness about what producers might want to take a risk on. And the reality is, they’re going to be way more likely to take a risk on something with fewer actors and fewer costs.”
Musicals with such small casts are potentially big business, in part because it can be easier to recoup their streamlined production costs compared with a traditional stage extravaganza, with savings on actors’ salaries, costumes, sets, makeup and more. “Hit musicals can come in all different sizes,” says theater historian and producer Jennifer Ashley Tepper. “And generally, you might be able to make their capitalizations lower with smaller musicals — a number of which do well for years in licensing for regional theaters and school performances.”
Producers are prioritizing these considerations since the pandemic shutdowns, as theaters grapple with unstable audience attendance and soaring costs due to inflation. For example, “The Last Five Years” has remained “perennially popular” over the 20-plus years that Music Theatre International has licensed the Jason Robert Brown musical, but requests notably increased in 2021, according to MTI director of marketing Jason Cocovinis, as “the show was a great, safe option for theaters to produce because of its small cast size and minimal set requirements.”
“Ride” book writer and composer-lyricist Freya Catrin Smith, composer-lyricist Jack Williams and director Sarah Meadows.
(Jim Cox)
That “Ride” is a two-actor musical is actually a strategic expansion. Smith and Williams, who met as preteens and began writing musicals together after college, first conceived “Ride” in 2019 as a solo show, since Londonderry’s cycling was mostly a solitary endeavor. But extensive research provided by her great-grandnephew, author and journalist Peter Zheutlin, shifted their storytelling needs.
“The more we learned about Annie, the more we realized she’s quite a tricky, knotty and flawed character, with this interesting backstory that she tried to hide a lot of the time by entertaining and deflecting,” Smith says of Londonderry, a Jewish Latvian immigrant in Boston who learned to ride a bicycle only days before departing on her journey and changed her last name for a cycling sponsorship. “She would never reveal the other sides of herself voluntarily, so we needed somebody else to push her buttons, and lean into that tension of who she was versus who she said she was.”
“Ride” largely takes place in the meeting room of a major newspaper, to which Londonderry, now an international sports star and feminist icon, is pitching herself as their next must-read columnist. Throughout the presentation to the unseen executives, Londonderry vividly recalls her record-breaking trek with the help of Martha Smith, the paper’s sheepish (and fictional) secretary, who plays key figures in Londonderry’s anecdotes: the men betting against her endeavor, the French customs agent who becomes a friend, the intriguing man who forces her to face her past.
“We could’ve had different actors playing each of these characters, but by having Martha play all of them and say things as other people that she wouldn’t be able to say to Annie herself, she experiences her own growth,” Williams explains. “I think most producers can tell when you’re sacrificing the story for [cost-saving] reasons, but we feel this is the best vehicle to tell Annie’s story.”
Livvy Marcus and Alex Finke in ‘Ride’ at The Old Globe.
(Jim Cox)
Beyond the creative challenges, such productions can also be a tougher ticket to sell, undermining the cost savings on the production end. But it doesn’t help to run away from the form, says Tepper: “Sometimes marketing tries to hide it a little bit because some audiences have preconceived notions about two-person musicals, that it’s not going to be as dynamic of an evening.”
For the musical’s U.S. debut, “Ride’s” creative team is set on presenting a spectacle — whimsical bicycle sequences, intricate harmonies, lush orchestrations, fantastical location changes — alongside the piece’s intimacy.
“It’s a two-actor musical, but it’s massive, so yeah, the money’s gone elsewhere,” says director Sarah Meadows, who also helmed the U.K. runs. “But any theater that’s good is really based on the strength of the characters and their relationships. Musicals can have as many ensembles kicking their legs and doing amazing dancing [as they like], and that’s impressive, but do we leave feeling like we’ve learned anything? Do those characters stay in our minds forever because we were so moved?
“The most surprising thing about this show is the fact that both of these women are written with such detail and depth,” she continues. “And because we don’t have to give attention to choreographing huge numbers or the other to-dos of bigger musicals, we can really focus on these two characters and build that strong emotional connection with the audience.”
This two-actor musical can be strenuous to execute too: In “Ride’s” case, each performer only leaves the stage for about a minute total in the 90-minute piece.
“You’re hyper-aware of the entire stage, you’re problem-solving in real time when things go wrong,” says Alex Finke, who portrays Londonderry opposite Livvy Marcus as Martha. “You have to be consistent not only for yourself, but for your scene partner, because their show depends on you in every aspect. It’s simultaneously challenging and fulfilling to be so dependent on only one other person.”
Alex Finke and Livvy Marcus in “Ride” at the Old Globe.
(Jim Cox)
Smith and Williams are certainly devotees of the small musical’s artistic possibilities: The 2021 winners of Adam Lenson and Katy Lipson’s chamber musical prize for pieces featuring five actors or less, the pair are writing another two-actor musical, as well as a five-actor musical about self-taught mathematician Sophie Germain and a four-actor musical about “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott. But they’re far from alone in the warm embrace.
When “Gutenberg! The Musical!” reunited “Book of Mormon” breakouts Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad on Broadway last fall, ticket sales were initially soft, despite a marketing campaign that featured clever merchandise and photo shoots. But “word of mouth was so strong, becauseeveryone was in awe of what Josh and Andrew were doing, playing thousands of characters without leaving the stage,” says producer Bee Carrozzini. “It felt like a premium Broadway experience while also being so completely unlike anything else that was out there.”
The result — a 20-week run that broke box office records before ending in January — didn’t just recoup its initial investment. According to producer Kristin Caskey, it also sparked a resurgence of licensing requests to writers Scott Brown and Anthony King, despite the fact that “Gutenberg!” was initially developed nearly 20 years ago.
Two-actor musicals are still relatively rare, and only a fraction of those are penned for both rolesto be played by women. But an indisputable Broadway hit has a way of changing perceptions, and newer shows like “Ride,” which runs through April 28, can only help cement the form’s post-COVID rise.
“I think it’s a testament to those two people,” says Aubrey Matalon, who understudies both “Ride” roles. “And as an audience member, it’s really exciting — like, holy s—, these people must be so talented to be doing so much. We’re witnessing some masterful work.”
'Ride'
Where: Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage, The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
When: 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through April 28 (subject to change)
Howard Atlee, an eclectic publicist who represented award-winning shows during a now bygone Broadway era and, as an avocation, also bred dachshunds that won best in show at dog competitions, died on March 15 in Silver Spring, Md. He was 97.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his friend and caretaker, Harpreet Singh.
Transplanted from an Ohio city of 10,000, Mr. Atlee set his sights on Broadway after attending his first professionally staged production while serving in the Navy in Boston. After he was discharged, he was a theater major in college.
As a publicist, he would help launch the career of the playwright Edward Albee by promoting his first full-length play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” at the Billy Rose Theater in 1962. Some critics dismissed it as salacious, but Howard Taubman raved in The New York Times that it was written by “a born dramatist” and “marks a further gain for a young writer becoming a major figure of our stage.”
Mr. Atlee also helped found the Negro Ensemble Company, which offered opportunities to fledgling Black actors and other theater professionals, including would-be publicists.
In 1956, when he was 30 and working as a press agent for a summer theater in Camden, Maine, Mr. Atlee began what became more or less a behind-the-scenes gig, even for a press agent accustomed to operating backstage.
“One day driving to the theater I saw a kennel,” he told The New York Times in 1970. “I stopped, and when I left I owned a smooth dachshund.”
He started to show dogs in 1962. Four years later, Ch. Celloyd Virginia Woolf, a dachshund he had gotten as a birthday present, was a top winner. He later donated a bronze sculpture of her to the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog.
“I named her for the hit show ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,’ which I was handling,” Mr. Atlee told The Times. “The play ran for 18 months and my little dachshund was constantly in the headlines, for she was doing her big winning.”
Mr. Atlee and Mr. Albee had been associated since Mr. Albee’s early days at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. When the producers Richard Barr and Clinton Wilder gave Mr. Atlee a copy of “Virginia Woolf,” which, even when trimmed, would run for a loquacious three hours, they declared, “Here it is, if you can get through it.”
“Atlee read it through at one sitting and immediately telephoned Barr and Wilder and told them they were going to win a Tony Award for the play,” Mel Gussow wrote in “Edward Albee: A Singular Journey” (1999).
“‘I was just so sure about it,’ said Atlee,” Mr. Gussow continued. “‘It was so dynamic on the page.’” (As Mr. Atlee predicted, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” won the Tony Award for best play.)
Howard Atlee Heinlen was born on May 14, 1926, in Bucyrus, in northern Ohio. His father, Howard E. Heinlen, was at various times a cabdriver, a firefighter and a real estate agent. His mother, Blanche (Neumann) Heinlen, managed the household.
Howard graduated from high school in 1944 and then attended the Ohio State University. He was drafted and joined the Navy during World War II and, after serving, enrolled in Emerson College in Boston, where he earned a degree in theater in 1950.
In New York, where he became known professionally as Howard Atlee, he briefly worked as an actor and theater manager before becoming a publicist for a range of productions, from Off Off Broadway to Broadway, including the 1969 revival of “The Front Page” (1969), “Bette Midler’s Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), the Neil Simon-Marvin Hamlisch-Carole Bayer Sager musical “They’re Playing Our Song” (1979) and “Children of a Lesser God” (1980).
He was also a press agent for the Theater of the Absurd and the Women’s Interart Center.
Mr. Atlee began breeding dachshunds in his Manhattan penthouse; he later bought in upstate Stone Ridge, N.Y., where he also kept two Salukis he imported from Sweden; two whippets, one from England and the other from Puerto Rico; three golden retrievers; two bassets; and one bloodhound.
He founded the Knickerbocker Dachshund Club and served as a judge at many competitions, including five times at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
He retired as a press representative in the 1990s and returned to acting, appearing onstage in “Dancing at Lughnasa” and other plays and in bit parts on television series like “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”
He met Barbara Anne Schumacher, an Amoco Oil Company marketing executive, at a competition where she was showing her Salukis; they married in 1977. She died in 2013, after the couple had moved to Maryland, her home state. His closest survivors are nieces and nephews. Six siblings died before him.
For several years, Mr. Atlee lived in Laurel, Md., with the family of Mr. Singh, who was a taxi driver when he befriended Mr. Atlee and now makes custom shirts.
For Mr. Atlee, breeding dogs and competing in shows was a serious pursuit. But as an occasional actor, he rarely took himself too seriously.
He was often credited with suggesting what became a Westminster Kennel Club tradition: feting the winner at Sardi’s, the landmark theater district restaurant, where he or she is served, seated at a table, with paws resting on a white tablecloth.
Mr. Atlee was also the president of the Dog Fanciers Club of New York, whose regular meetings included one at which a talent scout advised owners on how to get their pets into show business. But, he explained to The Times in 1993, the members of his club did not engage in the sort of envious rivalry that some dog owners display.
While there are a ton of Broadway shows to choose from this season, going off the beaten path is sometimes well worth it.
The Worst Cafe in the World, a new, creatively interactive Off Broadway production, is one such show. The show actually gives audience members a menu of theatrical moments to choose from, and based on their selections, the cast will piece together the show. Menu items include an inspiring monologue, an improvisation calling for audience involvement and a digital experience focusing on the power of technology.
According to a press release, ticket holders should also expect different nightly specials to define their experience: think pop-up guests, delectable food and more. Even better, every guest will receive a complimentary beverage and snack upon entry—treats that sound even more exciting given that tickets only cost $25.
Photograph: Courtesy of The Worst Cafe in the World Photograph: Peter Nash
The unique show will make its North American premiere at Ryan’s Daughter at 350 East 85th Street by First Avenue on the Upper East Side on April 17 as part of Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish Festival.
Performances will be held through April 21 from Wednesday to Friday at 6:30pm, and at 2pm on Sunday.
The show sounds a bit like a choose-your-own-patch adventure, a form that remains relatively unexplored even when it comes to Broadway's crowded April schedule. For what it’s worth, the production feels very much New York, although it premiered in Belfast and will move to Philadelphia after its run here.
We're using all these words to tell you that we're enthralled by the proposition of The Worst Cafe in the World and suggest you consider venturing out to the Off Broadway creation when it comes to town next month. There’s just something about theater in New York, right?
After a year-and-a-half-long search, a church chapel in Gramercy Park was the only affordable space Domig, the artistic director of the Off Off Broadway company Sea Dog Theater, had been able to find to mount a production of “Tuesdays With Morrie.” Chairs would have to be arranged on a set of risers on the altar. The props would be a piano, a couple of chairs, a walker and a wheelchair.
The company also had almost no advertising budget.
But it did have Len Cariou, an elder statesman of the theater who in 1979 won a Tony Award for originating the role of Sweeney Todd on Broadway. He would play Morrie, a former sociology professor who, after receiving a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., reconnects with one of his students in what becomes a series of weekly meetings.
Cariou, also known for his turns in musicals like “A Little Night Music” and “Applause,” had been taken with the character of Morrie ever since he read the 1997 memoir by Mitch Albom on which the 2002 play is based.
“I said, ‘One day, I’d love to play that part,’” Cariou, 84, said last month during a joint interview with Domig at St. George’s Episcopal Church, where the recently extended “Tuesdays With Morrie” is set to run through April 20. “It’s such a rich role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death are not the end? What if there’s something more?’”
But one major hurdle remained, Domig said: How were they going to pull off the play with only a handful of props?
Cariou didn’t miss a beat.
“Len was just like, ‘You know what, we don’t need any of this,’” Domig said. “‘We can do it as a memory play that takes place in Morrie’s head.’”
That attitude is typical of Cariou, said Erwin Maas, the director of “Tuesdays With Morrie” and Cariou’s longtime friend and neighbor in West New York, N.J. “He doesn’t need a big theater or feel like anything is beneath him,” Maas said in a recent phone conversation. “What drives him is a passion for the work.”
During his more than six-decade stage and screen career, Cariou has also played the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law in the 2015 film “Spotlight,” and, for 14 seasons and counting, starred as a former New York City Police commissioner on CBS’s “Blue Bloods.”
But the challenge of playing Morrie is that it isn’t a role that’s easy to leave at the stage door each night. Many older actors, Domig said, might be reluctant to grapple with a subject — facing the end of life with grace — that might hit a little too close to home.
But for Cariou? “It was easy,” he said.
“It’s kind of like what Morrie says in the play when he gets the news that he has A.L.S.,” he continued. “He says, ‘I asked myself, am I going to withdraw from the world, like so many people do, or am I going to live?’ And he decides, ‘I’m going to live as long as I have left.’ And that’s pretty much what I’m doing.”
Domig, who plays Morrie’s former student, Mitch, opposite Cariou each night, just shook his head.
“It’s such a courageous performance,” he said. “Len has no fear about saying, ‘Let’s see where this lives in me.’”
After rereading the play during the pandemic, Domig said, he had been struck by its rawness and candor. He enlisted Cariou and Maas in 2022 for what was initially a one-night reading of the play in the basement of the church.
Around 60 people sat in folding chairs in the church basement, with Cariou and his wife supplying wine for the reception afterward. “Everyone was in tears at the end,” Domig said. “I had person after person tell me, ‘You guys should do this play as a production.’”
Asking Cariou — who was shooting scenes for “Blue Bloods” during the day — to do a one-night reading was one matter, but enlisting him for a full run was another. (Domig knew, he said, that whatever he could manage to pay Cariou for an Off Off Broadway production could in no way compare with a TV contract — but that didn’t seem to matter. “We wrote him a check for $100 for doing the reading,” Domig said. “But in the end, he didn’t cash it.”)
Plus, Domig knew he had something special on his hands — and hoped Cariou thought so, too. He made the ask.
And Cariou said: Yes.
He was not, it turned out, dissuaded by the play’s frank discussions about dying — even as someone who was himself in his twilight years.
“You’re fighting the age question,” he said. “Morrie’s in his 70s when this happens, so I said, ‘Well, then I’ll be in my 70s.’ That’s what you have to tell yourself.”
Neither was he fazed by the demands of remaining onstage for the entirety of a 90-minute show,six times a week, while raging, screaming, sobbing, falling out his wheelchair and inhabiting the body of a man suffering from progressive respiratory failure.
“I’ve found it invigorating,” Cariou said. “The muscles you need to do a play are ones you must use. It’s like when Morrie talks about having A.L.S.: When your muscles no longer get the message, they wither and die. I’m making sure the message does get through to mine.”
Domig interjected: “There have been multiple days he’s on set for ‘Blue Bloods,’ and then he comes and does this show. He has incredible energy and stamina — he’s concerned about my energy and whether I’m getting enough sleep!”
Cariou’s commitment to his craft is no surprise to his former “Sweeney Todd” castmate Victor Garber, who, along with Angela Lansbury, appeared with Cariou in the original Broadway production.
“Being in the rehearsal room with Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury; I couldn’t imagine anything greater,” Garber, 75, said in a phone conversation. “Watching Len and Angela do “A Little Priest” at the end of Act I will never be equaled.”
“Len is a consummate actor; he lives and eats and breathes it,” he added. “It’s lucky for New York he’s doing it.”
“Tuesdays With Morrie” sold out the final 11 performances of its original three-week run, and the first show of its extension.
“We’ve had quite a few young people in the audience, and I think they’re surprised how much it resonates with them,” Cariou said. “And the same goes for their parents, the adults. They’re reminded of a mentor or a teacher they had growing up who influenced or inspired them, and who, like Mitch, they may never have seen again.”
Others, though, who have read the book, Domig said, have told him they are apprehensive about seeing the show, either because they have recently lost a loved one or because someone close to them is going through a similar struggle.
“Yes, the man dies at the end every night,” Domig said he tells them. “But the way he goes on that journey — the resilience and joy and encouragement and hope along the way — it doesn’t get more essential than that.”
The show is slated to run a few more weeks, though Domig hopes that may not be the end of its life.
“We’re happy to do it as long as people show up,” he said. “And if I could somehow conceive of a Broadway transfer …”
Well, that’d be just fine with Cariou.
“I’m going to play whatever I can, for as long as I can,” he said.
From the outside, the Center Theatre Group headquarters, a nondescript building across the street from the Music Center, is spectacularly unimpressive, the kind of place your mind wouldn’t even register as existing. But inside, the buzz of puzzle-solving energy might make you think you’ve stumbled onto the set of “Oppenheimer.”
CTG Managing Director and Chief Executive Meghan Pressman and Artistic Director Snehal Desai aren’t cracking nuclear codes. But they are working out a theatrical Rubik’s Cube that is harder than ever to solve.
An announcement is coming in the next few weeks about the new CTG season, and the big news is that the Mark Taper Forum, which suspended programming last summer amid a spiraling budget crisis, will be back in business (likely by next winter and possibly as early as the fall). The exact timeline and number of productions are still being worked out, but the idea is to consolidate offerings under one CTG banner rather than spotlight separate seasons at each of CTG’s three theaters.
This strategy is a sign of constriction, but it’s also an indication that old habits and expectations have to give way to stringent new realities.
Gordon Davidson, the founding artistic director of Center Theatre Group, built Los Angeles’ flagship theater organization in a vastly different era. The three venues — the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles and the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City — each with its distinctive profile and following, don’t easily cohere in the best of times, and this period is one of the most difficult in the company’s history.
The Ahmanson in recent decades has dedicated itself to Broadway touring productions, with an emphasis on musicals. The Taper, the place where Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” had its two-part world premiere, has long been the city’s most coveted stage for public-minded drama. And the Douglas, the smallest of the three venues and the one with the shortest history, is the Westside outpost that’s most hospitable to theatrical risk-taking.
As the money-making operation, the Ahmanson helped make possible the artistic ambitions of its less practical brethren. But those days were waning even before COVID-19wreakedunfathomablehavoc on performing arts institutions.
The post-pandemic picture is improving but from such a low that no one can feel confident about moving forward. Theater attendance hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, production and administrative costs have skyrocketed with inflation, and donor fatigue has turned to exhaustion.
Nonprofit theaters nationwide are contending with this perfect storm. But CTG has an additional set of challenges that stem from its disparate three-part structure.
The Ahmanson can no longer be counted on as the cash cow, as the subscription model has become less reliable and competition for Broadway tours has grown more intense. Shows that might once have been expected to play at the Music Center are booked into the Hollywood Pantages or the Dolby instead. When CTG signs on as producer to improve its competitive standing, as it did for the wilted revival of “The Secret Garden,” it exposes the entire company to seismic financial shock when the show turns out to be a flop.
Playgoing has suffered acutely since theaters have reopened. Serious drama without a celebrity draw is an extremely tough sell in this era of entertainment-on-demand and social media hypnosis. For a large playhouse like the Taper with punishing built-in costs and an audience that has grown understandably fickle after seasons of muddled vision and earnest mediocrity, the producing picture can seem like a fast track to insolvency.
Finally, the Douglas is facing a temporary closure of its own. An impending construction project of a neighboring property will force the theater to halt operations for a few months next year, making programming extremely difficult to plan, as anyone who has dealt with the shifting calendar of a renovation project knows all too well.
Artistic Director Snehal Desai, left, and Managing Director Meghan Pressman photographed last year after the announcement of Desai’s appointment.
(Kim Newmoney)
No wonder Pressman and Desai have the air of emergency aid workers who have settled into the long daily haul of rebuilding after the initial phase of catastrophe. When I met with them last June, after CTG announced that it was pausing programming at the Taper, the interview was tense and at times chaotic and contradictory.
Newly appointed Desai, treated to a baptism by fire, hadn’t even signed his contract at that point. Pressman, furiously working to keep the lights on, deflected questions about artistic decision-making and financial management that harked back to leadership issues predating the pandemic fallout.
Nine months later, they presented a calmer front. The mood of the interview was sober. Progress has been made on the $8-million projected budget gap that prompted CTG to postpone the premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s play “Fake It Until You Make It” and suspend plans for the 2023-24 season at the Taper. But this is no time for phony exuberance.
It seemed almost impertinent to ask whether they believed a sustainable path for CTG was feasible in this uncertain environment, but the question needed to be asked. Pressman answered in the affirmative, but before she did there was a pause as lengthy as any in a Harold Pinter play.
“I think it’s feasible, otherwise I wouldn’t want to ask for people’s money right now,” Pressman eventually replied with quiet conviction. “I believe in the art we’re doing. I think [a sustainable path] is feasible, but I just don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like.”
A battle plan, however, is being refined. The Taper hasn’t been dormant in this period of hiatus. Experiments in the form of special events, community gatherings and legacy celebrations have been tried. The most high-profile of these offerings, comedian Alex Edelman’s solo show “Just for Us,” was such a big hit that it has already had two return engagements.
Alex Edelman brought his hit “Just for Us” to the Mark Taper Forum.
(Matthew Murphy)
“We’re introducing shorter and more nimble programming models,” Pressman said. “We’ve been exploring different ways of engaging the community. I think those are all elements of a future sustainable Center Theatre Group, but we just don’t know how it will all settle.”
“I think the value of what we do is clear,” Desai said. “I just think it’s going to look very different.”
“And yet it’s got to feel the same,” Pressman interjected. “We have these venues that have this promise of high production value, of great American theater, the next best new play — all of that is still part of the DNA.”
Outstanding work, Desai agreed, has to be the raison d’etre of their collective efforts. He’s drawn to theater that is “timely, relevant and urgent,” even when offering a much-needed escape. Laughter and pleasure, he acknowledged, must be part of the equation. Theatergoers shall not live by moral instruction alone. But the nub of the issue for him is “how” they produce this art, the range of artists they’re inviting in, the openness to new forms and collaborative modalities.
“When we announce the season, you’ll see what the priorities are,” he said. His list, which he reeled off the top of his head, includes centering L.A. artists, adjusting the balance of how much CTG is producing versus presenting, expanding co-productions and making the Taper not just a writer’s theater but a director’s theater as well. His first season, he said, will give audiences a good indication of the direction he wants to head in.
Building the audience for the Desai era is not going to happen overnight. “It will take three to five years to establish,” he said. “That’s what I learned at East West Players. That’s how long [Pasadena Playhouse producing artistic director] Danny Feldman told me it took him.”
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Pressman added, “That’s what it takes to teach them your taste. You have to give them like one element at a time. If you want to change up two or three elements in the way that you produce or the vocabulary you teach the audience, you can’t do it all at once. They’ll freak out.”
A winter production at the Taper is more or less set, but whether there will be a fall offering is still a question. When I inquired what it would take to open the Taper before next year, Desai asked if I could write a check for $3 million. He was joking, but fundraising is a crucial piece of this fraught puzzle.
CTG’s multimillion-dollar budget gap is smaller but not zero. “This is a multiyear effort,” Pressman said. “And this is still the recovery story.”
How much would CTG need to be whole? “We are in active fundraising mode for our next season and are just a couple of million dollars shy of our goal,” Pressman said. “What we’re building toward is long-term sustainability, which will mean a change in how we operate and an increase in support.”
The bed on the set of “Slave Play” in an empty Mark Taper Forum, photographed in February 2022.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
“This is a marathon, and I would say we’re coming upon a big relay point,” Desai said. “As we announce next season, we want folks to be there and support us, especially those who said they were so bummed out about the Taper. I hope they’re the ones that right away reach out to us and subscribe. We hope there’s something for everybody at CTG — that is our goal each season.”
“Our partnership has been really fulfilling,” Pressman said of her working relationship with Desai. “And you know this is hard work. We feel a lot of trust and belief and understanding in each other’s vision and strategy. And that is part of the strong base we’ve been building to be able to do these difficult things with a great senior team and with great support from the community. We’re right around the corner from a really big announcement, and a lot of deep thought and planning went into it.”
And is the board of directors doing everything it can? “Our board is perfect!” Pressman replied, theatrically enunciating the words into my digital recorder.
Desai echoed this diplomatic sentiment in his own remarks: “We’ve been internally having conversations about what we need and board members have been the first folks to step up. They have been great stewards.”
What about boards in general? I asked, looking for candor on a subject that has been something of an obstacle for nonprofit theaters struggling to evolve institutionally and culturally. But the last thing any leader wants to do is alienate those who hold the power of rescue in this make-or-break moment.
A strong advocate of CTG’s “significant civic role,” Desai wants the Taper to once again be a forum for public dialogue. But he knows he can’t do it alone.
“We were just in London,” he said. “And they were telling us that theater in London is back. The numbers are higher than they were pre-pandemic. But they don’t have to compete with the 405, right? It’s also cold and rainy there. We just have a different ecosystem. I do hope we live in a city where the theater can be central.”
If I could write that check for $3 million that Desai was ostensibly kidding about, I would. Not because success is guaranteed. But because CTG leadership is rigorously grappling with its fate, testing new possibilities and committing itself to moving forward with as much integrity as fiscally possible.
And because I don’t want to live in a city that turns its back on those cultural pillars that took generations to build.
A now-faded note card taped above my desk reads: “Art, like light, needs distance.” Years ago, I wrote down that line from William Gass’s “On Being Blue,” and over the last few months it was a comforting reminder as I finished my new play “Corruption.” What was to be a history play about a media scandal in Britain has become a political thriller about some of the forces that seem to be upending our own country right now.
The inspiration came in 2012, while reading “Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain,” a book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman.Watson, a former member of the British Parliament, and Hickman, a former reporter for The Independent,had written of how Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers and tabloids, including News of the World, were illegally hacking the phones of thousands of citizens — from celebrities to former prime ministers and even a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found dead — all to get sensational stories that would sell newspapers. As the book made clear, more papers sold meant more profit; more profit meant more power to influence the levers of government.
The further I read, I realized that this could be a remarkable play. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” “Dial M” told a riveting story in granular detail about the use and abuse of power as a small group of vivid characters seeks to expose crimes that threaten their very democracy. Onstage it could become a sweeping tale in which the main characters take huge risks for their beliefs.
In an effort to adapt the book, I sent the authors two of my plays — “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts” — that are also about politics and power. Then I flew to London, and went down the rabbit hole.
Most of the key players would talk to me off the record only if they were certain that the Murdoch machine was unaware of our meeting. Even though News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s media empire, was under investigation and Rupert and James Murdoch had apologized for their company’s actions in testimony before Parliament, people were afraid of speaking out because of the fear of retribution.
In places like the members-only House of Commons Library and a curry shop northwest of Birmingham, I spoke with journalists, politicians and lawyers who were working to expose journalistic malfeasance. My sources repeatedly described feeling as if they had entered an alternate reality. Or rather, that they were living in reality while their fellow citizens were living in News International’s hall of mirrors, where lies and half-truths mingled with facts. In Britain, libel laws are such that if you sued News International and lost, you would have to pay the company’s legal bills. The fear of bankruptcy kept people silent.
All spoke as well about Brooks, who resigned from News International after her arrest on suspicion of illegal phone hacking and obstruction of justice. She was one of the most admired and feared people in British media, the visionary behind her newspaper’s dominance.
When Watson, who later served as the parliamentary whip for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, publicly called for Tony Blair to step down as prime minister, Brooks, according to “Dial M,” saw this attack on Blair, her favored prime minister, as an attack on her power as well. In response, her papers linked him to a conspiracy to promote damaging rumors about members of the Conservative opposition even though Watson had no knowledge of the plot. Reporters descended on his home and hounded his family, he wrote in his book. The struggle between Watson and Brooks would be the heart of my story.
The other characters would include Charlotte Harris, the fast-talking lawyer who sued News International and won a million-pound settlement for her phone-hacked client; the suave, wealthy Max Mosley, whose sex life was secretly filmed by Murdoch’s journalists, and who then bankrolled the legal fight against News International; and Bryant, now one of the stars of the Labour Party, who, according to “Dial M,” was targeted by a stalker after those photos were published.
I remained determined to bring this to the stage, but I couldn’t crack it. So, I set it aside. Even as I wrote other works, I kept in touch with the people I’d interviewed and followed the story’s developments. In 2012, it seemed as if the phone hacking scandal would break Murdoch’s British media empire, that Brooks would be found guilty of conspiracy to hack voice mail messages, and that Prime Minister David Cameron and his government would be run out of office for their cozy relationship with News International.
None of this came to pass. In fact, News International’s media influence grew. Brooks, after being acquitted, resumed running that company (now named News UK); Cameron remained in power; and Murdoch’s media helped lead the push for Brexit. And in the United States, with Murdoch’s Fox News helping bolster Donald Trump’s presidential bid, it seemed as if Murdoch’s outsize influence on politics was happening here.
The director Bartlett Sher, a longtime collaborator, had been watching it all unfold as well. During a call last spring, we agreed that the phone hacking scandal felt like a precursor to our own country’s struggles with pure falsehoods being pushed into the public sphere and throughout social media as a way to demonize political opponents, and a media empire wielding incredible influence as it pushed a political agenda. Distance and time had only made the story more fascinating, and somehow even more timely.
We approached André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, who programmed the play. The words then poured forth, fueled by a clarity gained from my conversations with Sher, an urgency of needing to talk about this story during an election year, and an actual deadline.
Now a cast of actors is relating the story that I crafted from “Dial M for Murdoch,” the interviews I conducted in England as well as follow-ups, and transcripts from parliamentary hearings.
I also invented scenes whole cloth — a dramatist’s privilege — to compress and convey what it took to stand up to a powerful adversary, what motivated them to press on. The theater remains a place where we can learn how our history illuminates our present. The goal of this play is to remind us that such knowledge can inspire us to cherish our democracy.
J.T. Rogers’s new play, “Corruption,” is onstage at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 14.
The way critics are depicted in pop culture, you might mistake them for mortal enemies of the striving artist (or at least as the shadowy nemeses of plucky rat chefs in Paris). But the reality is that the relationship between artists and those who magnify and examine their work is much more symbiotic. Take it from New York Times critic Wesley Morris, who put it beautifully in his Pulitzer Prize remarks in 2021: “Criticism champions, condemns, X-rays, and roots out,” he said. “It explains and appraises and contextualizes. It also dreams and marvels and mourns. You need some kind of knowledge to do it, sure, and maybe (hopefully) some humor, but really—truly—you need feeling. You need feelings.”
This emotional connection between the theatremaker and the theatre digester is all the more poignant of late, as journalism and the arts have both been struggling for their very existence over the last few decades, with the sustained pattern of cutbacks in state and federal funding for the arts, the corporatization of local media, and then—boom—the pandemic.
Measured in layoffs, this past year was the worst year to date for journalists. According to employment firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, as of December 2023, the media industry had already slashed 21,417 full-time jobs.
The good news, though it’s cold comfort to anyone out of a job, is that people continue to appreciate the arts—as an idea, at least. This has been confirmed by the latest economic and social impact study from the nonprofit organization Americans for the Arts. Their report found that 86 percent of attendees to arts and culture events state that “arts and culture are important to their community’s quality of life and livability.” The report also noted that 79 percent of that same group think the arts are “important to their community’s businesses, economy, and local jobs.”
This belief in the arts, of course, doesn’t necessarily translate into widespread support for full-time theatre critics. Many major theatre markets no longer have anyone being paid to write about performing arts at all, let alone for a legacy publication. But just as there is still theatre to cover, there are still folks finding ways to cover it.
Amid these daunting financial and industry realities, what does forging a path in theatre criticism even look like these days? Where does one go to learn best practices? To learn how to craft an expert pitch? Is it all learning by doing? If so, how and where do you get started?
To examine these questions, we spoke with six rising critics, all graduates from one of three theatre criticism programs, each designed to give cohorts real-world, boots-on-the-ground experience. They are:
• The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Critics Institute (NCI), a two-week workshop designed for arts writers and critics to sharpen their tools of the trade. Founded in 1968 and based in Waterford, Conn., the program is framed as a “boot camp” experience, owing to the intensive amount of writing and workshops with a variety of leading industry professionals.
• The BIPOC Critics Lab, a program run through the Public Theater in Manhattan. Founded in 2020 by veteran arts writer Jose Solís with the mission to train and create work by emerging critics of color, it was originally hosted by the Kennedy Center.
• The Kennedy Center’s Institute for Theater Journalism and Advocacy (ITJA), launched with the mission “to provide writers the opportunity to grow at the same pace as the artists whose work they review, celebrate, and interpret.” Eligible college students are required to be enrolled at a learning institution at the time of the program, or to have graduated within the last year. This program also provides a national scholarship to attend the NCI.
What have young writers learned from these programs? What have they learned on their own out in the market? And what new opportunities, if any, remain in this shrinking market?
Throw Your Best Pitch
Billy McEntee.
When Billy McEntee was studying theatre at Boston College, it was a feature writing class with critic Don Aucoin that sparked his interest in criticism. Mentorship from an experienced writer “opened the door to the potential of arts journalism, criticism being a thing that I could pursue,” McEntee said.
Like many young critics, McEntee was a theatre kid. Growing up in New Jersey, he quipped, “I was not the best at sports. And I was fortunate to grow up in a school system that had pretty good arts extracurriculars.” His grandfather would also take him to see “Golden Age” musicals like Oklahoma!, Paint Your Wagon, and South Pacific—trips that were “kind of my gateway drug, so to speak,” McEntee said.
McEntee attended the National Critics Institute (NCI) in 2018, about three years after moving to Brooklyn, having completed a fellowship at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. At the time he relocated, he was attempting to freelance as a writer while working a day job as a communications associate at Playwrights Horizons, an Off-Broadway theatre focused on new work.
While he had assembled a few clips at HowlRound before NCI, that program opened McEntee’s mind about what was possible—not only in terms of how and where to pitch his wares but also in terms of how he could up his game as a writer. The writing boot-camp aspect of NCI, in which young critics must file a review every night for two weeks, gave him a chance “to see a show, get out at 10 o’clock, file a review that night, and then look at it with everybody the next morning at 10 a.m. That was foundational and helpful.”
He recalled a few high-pressure moments—like the time a critic from The New York Times was going to be the evaluator the next morning, and the play McEntee had under consideration was eluding his comprehension.
“That was definitely my worst writeup, and I felt so upset,” McEntee recalled. He needn’t have worried: The Times critic “gave very candid, honest, and helpful feedback,” he said. Gaining access to and feedback from seasoned writers through the program “made the bridge between my career and theirs feel shorter, and that was really meaningful.”
Since then, his writing has made it into The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Playbill, the Washington Post, and American Theatre. But even a thriving freelance career still involves cobbling together a myriad of hustles. While stringing as a writer, McEntee also works as theatre editor for the nonprofit publication The Brooklyn Rail, teaches and tutors, and occasionally writes copy. His main part-time teaching gig is with the School of the New York Times, which hosts students in high school and those doing a gap year before college.
One thing he teaches all his students is to be relentless with where and how many times you pitch—something he learned both from conversations and networking with the contacts he built at NCI, and by simply trying and failing, over and over again, until he finally landed assignments. One rule of thumb McEntee has picked up: Send your ideas to what may seem like an absurd number of outlets before you throw in the towel. “I think my record was, I sent a single pitch to nine different publications before I said, ‘Okay, fine, nobody wants this story. I’ll move on,’” he said.
Be a Fan First
Brittani Samuel.
Journalism wasn’t something Brittani Samuel thought she’d pursue when she started college at SUNY Geneseo. On the other hand, she said, “I’ve always had a fascination with art in all capacities.”
Fast forward to today, and journalism is what Samuel is all about: She’s co-editor of 3Views on Theater, a contributing critic for Broadway News, and a freelance theatre reviewer for The New York Times. She participated in the BIPOC Critics Lab when it was hosted by the Kennedy Center, as well as the National Critics Institute. In 2022 she was the inaugural recipient of the American Theatre Critics Association’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism.
It was a winding path that brought her here. Immediately after graduation, she had a “ridiculous job in the fashion industry that I was unqualified for,” which she left pretty quickly. She picked up blogging and landed on the radar of a woman who owned an e-commerce site that sold Tarot and affirmation cards and was looking for content. “I would write articles for her about pop culture or about women in the arts or anything that was kind of trendy in bringing people to her website to ultimately buy her products.” At some point, she recalled, “It just kind of clicked for me that all the articles I’m reading online are written by regular people. You don’t have to have a PhD in writing for the internet to do this.”
She then moved into a marketing assistant role at Signature Theatre and began to build up her connections and pitched her first article to American Theatre. Arts journalism at first was an opportunity to engage with work “that I would’ve probably been talking about all night anyway.”
Most of the practical nuts and bolts of freelancing, Samuel said, were self-taught: how to seek out editors online, how to create and send invoices. Through it all, she said, “I was very against the notion of calling myself a critic. I thought they were the enemy.”
What changed her mind was building a network of like-minded peers through the BIPOC Critics Lab and then the NCI, where she realized “we all come to it as champions and fans first, but the job is to critically engage. It’s a wonderful privilege to have your thoughts be the labor that you do.”
What’s more, Samuel sees tremendous value in the historical record that criticism creates around theatre, especially given that by its nature it is fleeting, only living onstage for a short time before it closes. “In that way,” she says, “you’re contributing to a kind of archive that people can turn back to in a hundred years.”
Take a Chance on Yourself
David Quang Pham.
David Quang Pham is all about reaching for the stars, literally and figuratively. As a kid, he attended both theatre and space camps, and was encouraged to aspire by his parents, both of whom emigrated to Michigan from Vietnam.
An astrophysics and theatre major at Michigan State University, Pham went on to apprentice with the 2020-21 New Play and Dramaturgy cohort of Working Title Playwrights, based in Atlanta, where he said he absorbed the value of being “open with your quirks or niches, because there will always be someone out there who wants to hear another unique thought.”
Then, in 2021, Pham was a moderator of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas’ “Dramaturging the Phoenix” Zoom forum, the topic of which was “BIPOC Reflections: Critic/Dramaturg Relationship.” Jose Solís of BIPOC Critics Lab and David John Chávez of the American Theatre Critics Association were the guest speakers at that virtual event. Pham connected with Solís, who shared that the BIPOC Critics Lab application was open-ended—you could send in a sample work “of literally any kind,” as long as it was personally connected to your interests.
“As an astronomer-songwriter, I wrote a music composition expressing my desire to be a part of Solís’s orbit,” Pham said. He got in, as the program is by design extremely open to a wide range of creative responses to theatre.
Throughout the course of the 10-day program, Pham discovered that journalism can be a lot like the scientific fields of astronomy or physics, in that they both involve “a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of meticulous, careful consideration to make sure the facts are right, everything’s correct,” as well as bringing in context and empathy for those doing the work you’re looking at.
It was through this program that he got his very first shot at an interview with an artist: Carrie Rodriguez, the composer and lyricist of the musical Americano, when it ran Off-Broadway. The BIPOC Critics Lab partnered with TheaterMania to compensate Pham and cover his trip to complete the article. Originally, he told his family that he’d be back in Michigan in a couple of weeks.
Then another week went by, then another. Enchanted, as many writers have been, by the artistic delights at one’s fingertips in the Big Apple, he signed a one-year lease to stay in the city. Since then, he’s been working as a playwright and arts journalist. Of course, relocating to an expensive town like New York City takes some financial finagling, and Pham combined his income from a yearlong Playwrights Foundation Literary Fellowship, freelance dramaturgy work, and a full-time job at Great Performances Hospitality toward a move to Washington Heights.
Thinking back to his inaugural trip to New York, Pham recalls taking in The Music Man revival on Broadway, a canonical American show that he’d never seen before.
“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t know this play was about scammers,’” he said with a laugh. Pham realized that many of his fellow critics may have seen “thousands of plays and dozens of versions of The Music Man,” but that he could bring a fresh set of eyes to the well-worn subject.
One angle Pham could bring to the brass-heavy show, though as yet no one has hired him to write it: As it happens, he is an accomplished trombonist.
Write for Your Community
Kelsey Sivertson.
At 32, Kelsey Sivertson knows she’s an outlier from her classmates at Hope College in Holland, Mich. But there are some benefits to going through undergrad after several years in the working world. Now a senior, Sivertson said that taking time in her 20s to work full-time in economic development while taking courses at Grand Rapids Community College taught her valuable time management skills. And it gave her the room to realize her true passion: creative writing.
To pursue that calling, she quit her full-time job, trying to ignore the pain point of losing the full-time income. After all, she had grown up most of her life grappling with factors well out of her control. Her mom died when she was 13, and she grew up in “survival mode” economically. Her early exposure to performance came through her family’s church, which would “put on these big productions for Easter or Christmas, like a Passion Play or a commemorative drama. That truly was my theatre,” she said.
Sivertson didn’t become a Shakespeare fan until her mid-20s, but it happened thanks to a community college literature professor. “I’m such a dork, but King Lear changed my life. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what theatre can be,’” she said, remembering how she thumbed through a thrifted copy of the 500-year-old tragedy, marveling at the writing.
“From a more allegorical lens, what Shakespeare is saying about sight and blindness and mental capacity is fascinating,” she added. “I think it was a credit to my professor for illuminating the text to us.”
Through her advisor at Hope College, Sivertson connected with Kennedy Center’s ITJA, winning the competition for her region, which allowed her to attend the program. “I just said yes, which has been the philosophy of my life the last couple of years—just saying yes to the opportunities that check the boxes of what I’m even slightly interested in,” she said.
When she attended NCI later, she began to realize that she was most drawn to criticism as a way of getting to write for her community and those like her, who might not automatically feel comfortable articulating their thoughts on art. In communities like the one that raised her, Sivertson said there can be a great deal of stigma around the art of live performance. People don’t want to feel dumb or uninformed, like they “didn’t get it,” she said.
“I found myself wanting to write in a language that people like me could understand,” she said. “The idea of making a review accessible to people who may come from backgrounds like mine, who were not afforded the opportunity to go see theatre growing up but have a desire to understand it, and to engage in that critical conversation—that is what I’m most interested in.” She added, “Writing in this way would’ve helped me growing up.”
The growth continues: Sivertson is looking into MFA programs to pursue after she graduates from Hope.
Mind the Margins
Sravya Tadepalli.
For most of Sravya Tadepalli’s life and career, she’s been keenly aware of how social justice and art are interwoven—and also cognizant of the unequal amount of attention that some artists get over others.
Since elementary school, she’s been writing plays, and in fact writing theatrically stretches back through her family roots. Her great-grandfather, a playwright in India, wrote works condemning British colonialism—something she said landed him in jail for four years and got his plays banned. “To this day, we don’t know what the plays said or where they’re at, because they were probably destroyed by the British,” she said.
Tadepalli will tell you that she does not consider herself a theatre critic, but a journalist and a writer. Under that broader umbrella, she contributes regularly to Prism Reports, an independent nonprofit newsroom run by journalists of color, focused on reflecting “the lived experiences of people most impacted by injustice,” including people like her great-grandfather. “One of the things I’ve tried to do is figure out ways that journalism can be used to help whatever entity I’m writing about,” she said.
When she was in college at the University of Oregon, she said she “really loved journalism,” but realized that it would require long, intense hours in return for an insubstantial salary if she decided to pursue it full-time. Not only that, but the pace and amount of work in a full-time gig seemed “super, super intense” and “exhausting,” especially the prospect of daily assignments she wasn’t necessarily interested in.
Tadepalli said that one of the valuable questions she was able to examine when she attended ITJA as a college senior was the question of what constitutes the theatrical experience for populations outside of hubs like New York City.
“Almost all Americans have an experience with theatre, but it’s not Broadway—it’s not even a professional theatre,” she said. “It’s maybe their high school theatre or part of a festival. What does that kind of theatre, and theatre that most Americans experience—what does that look like? What are those trends?”
It all came full circle last year when she wrote for American Theatre about Off-Kendrik, a Bengali theatre company in Boston that strives to make Bengali stories from the early 20th century relevant to contemporary culture in the United States. Raising awareness of this kind of theatre company is mission critical for her.
She also said that working jobs outside of journalism while freelancing gave her “breathing room” to be able to pitch what she wanted when a story truly interested her. It has also helped pay the bills lately, while she pursues a Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Full-time graduate coursework at Harvard combined with freelance journalism sounds like it might get hectic, and Tadepalli affirmed that the juggling act can sometimes get overwhelming. “I feel like I’m constantly not doing something I should be doing, or like I’m behind on things,” she said. “I think editors have been really generous with me about deadlines, so that’s really helpful, because in the non-freelance world, you don’t have that.”
Dissect, Don’t Dismiss
Ana Zambrana.
Writer, director, and actor Ana Zambrana’s dad was a doctor, so naturally she gave pre-med a shot at the very start of college. But—“clearly,” she jokes—it didn’t last. She was already way too invested in theatre.
Since her earliest days as a Puerto Rican kid growing up in South Dakota, Zambrana recalls being enamored with the way theatre allowed her to communicate in “real time” with a gathered crowd. “The feedback you get immediately from the audience as a performer—that’s the thing that got me.”
While she was still completing her undergraduate studies at UCF, she connected with the Kennedy Center to do a couple programs with them. It was through the Kennedy Center that she met Solís, who encouraged her to apply for the BIPOC Critics Lab. Zambrana said that one of the major highlights from her time as part of the Lab cohort was being reassured that her “voice and opinion were valid,” she recalls. Before the program, if you had said “critic,” Zambrana might have conjured a stock image of a “man with white hair and a beard and a little pipe,” she said.
One of Zambrana’s first assignments through the Critics Lab dispelled that image forever: She was assigned to interview Carmen Rivera, a playwright whose La Gringa has been running for more than 25 years at Repertorio Español on East 27th Street in Manhattan. Though she didn’t know Rivera’s work going in, Zambrana said she went to see the show with her mom and walked out sobbing. “It was exactly the experience I had gone through as a Puerto Rican woman born in the United States and the trouble I had connecting with my roots,” she recalled.
Zambrana, who is now based in New York City, has also come to realize the value of her background as an artist in fostering empathy and respect when she’s writing a critical appraisal of a theatrical work.
“When I see a show, I know what it’s like to be in the creative process,” she said. “I know if something gets messed up here and there, I don’t chalk it up as like, ‘This is the worst show I’ve ever seen.’ Putting up a show is hard work.”
Still, she has also come to appreciate the need to speak up when something onstage is offensive or demeaning. “Sometimes women of color who are critics, there’s a fear of talking about things that should be criticized, like, maybe I’m not going to get work after this,” she said. “I think it’s important for us to never be afraid to use our full voices, because odds are, if we’re thinking it, there’s probably someone else in the audience thinking the exact same thing.”
The Last Word?
The uniting aspect of all of these emerging arts writers’ journeys is that our careers as theatre critics, or as freelance journalists, are constantly in flux. Life sometimes places opportunities in our path that demand to be pursued. Sometimes a voice cries out for us to take a pause or to go in a different direction for a while.
Coming out of the pandemic lockdown, with the move toward more sustained remote work, ideas are continuing to shift around what the structure of work in general even looks like. Arts journalists and freelancers know this gray area well, which may give us the nimbleness to adapt.
As audiences slowly but surely return to theatres, they will seek out new voices to guide them. And just as there is no single linear path to recovery for our nation’s theatres, there is no one way to become a critic or arts journalist. Writers who do make a go of it share three key traits: talent, drive, and a belief that even the seemingly impossible and thankless career path is worth pursuing.
Alexis Hauk (she/her) is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Bitter Southerner, Time, Mental Floss, Washington City Paper, ArtsATL, and more.
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That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”
Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.
Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.
Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.
Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.
To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.
To solve that problem, and demonstrate his dissociation, the authors split Tommy into three coexisting incarnations. The 10-year-old version (Quinten Kusheba, alternating with Reese Levine) is, if possible, even more unresponsive, baffling many doctors who apparently failed their psychiatry courses. Seeking a cure, his anguished father brings him, as one does, to a prostitute and heroin addict called the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). Only after she promises “to tear his soul apart” does dad think better of it.
But if Tommy remains what the famous (and now problematic) lyric calls “that deaf, dumb and blind kid,” he is not without feeling. In his teens, his ability to respond to vibrations turns him into a “pinball wizard” and somehow thus a celebrity. Emerging from the broken mirror of his childhood, he becomes, in Ali Louis Bourzgui’s cool portrayal, a symbol of the possibility of reintegration, recovery and rock stardom: a young adult with a cult.
This parade of odd plot points and narrational perplexities passes quite swiftly — perhaps, at little more than two hours, too swiftly, as the story is hard to follow and harder to swallow.
That’s why I find it more profitable to think about “Tommy” not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala. That person would of course be Townshend, who grew up in London at 22 Whitehall Gardens — not far from Tommy’s home at 22 Heathfield Gardens. He recently told The Times that “Tommy” is probably “a memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.” Though his abuse, he said, was at the hands of his “awful” grandmother, not his “neglectful and careless” parents, he evidently suffered from enough trauma and exploitation to make himself a model for Tommy.
The earworm tunes and weird lyrics through which the adult Townshend processed that trauma make the show moving when offered at the right scale. Ambivalence is the keynote. There’s no excusing the damage done to him by others, and yet, as with Tommy, that damage is also what provided him with his gift. (“Sickness will surely take the mind/Where minds can’t usually go,” the boy sings in the aptly named “Amazing Journey.”) On the other hand, Townshend, or at least his avatar here, finds that “freedom lies in normality.” This is the opposite of rock’s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem “Listening to You” is not a crowd of admirers but his mother.
McAnuff’s production does not traffic in such subtleties. The entire warm, emotional end of the show’s spectrum has been lopped off, leaving only black, white and garish yellow. Even the string quartet that was part of the 1993 orchestration has been eliminated. Also missing from that version: the flying that was so effective and poetic as a representation of Tommy’s inner aspirations.
Instead, the top staging note is provided by Peter Nigrini’s projections, including live video, that tumble across David Korins’s skeletal, shape-shifting set. (The pinball machine is so spindly it looks as if it is made of K’nex.) The lighting by Amanda Zieve is deliberately cold and harsh.
Nor is there any attempt at complexity within the production’s strict parameters. The imagery is a catalog of clichés. Tommy’s security guards wear SS-style greatcoats by Sarafina Bush. A projection of a giant box of Lux soap flakes looms over the otherwise unidentifiable spot where Mrs. Walker is doing laundry. Racks of obviously fake test tubes are relayed hand-to-hand when Tommy is being examined by doctors. I’ll grant that the Acid Queen’s spinning wheel is an unexpected gesture, but it’s bewildering. Is she a Fate?
If so, her message to her fellow characters perhaps should be: You will be overwhelmed. However loudly and well the performers sing, however frenziedly they dance Lorin Latarro’s dystopian choreography, they rarely surface from the production’s flooding of the senses with any expressiveness intact.
Still, lovers of rock concerts with tons of effects may yet like “Tommy,” even if it seems self-defeating to parrot arena-show aesthetics in a musical that implicitly criticizes arenas as sites of thoughtless idolization and fascistic violence. What I missed in the middle of all that overemphasis was some sense of humanity, a couple of violins balancing the guitars, a touch of real Townshend. Because when everything’s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special.
The Who’s Tommy At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; tommythemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
