To Virgil, the audience’s guide through Dael Orlandersmith’s slender, searching new solo play, “Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance,” there is something hellish in the sight of the miserable masses commuting to dreaded jobs that bring them nothing more than the ability to survive.
With the passion and cockiness of youth, Virgil at 20-something regards “these bitter, hard, close-to-dead people” with contempt, puzzlement and the certainty of escaping a similar fate.
Yet finding a purpose in life proves harder than it looks. By middle age, Virgil feels “lost in a dark wood,” much like the narrator of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” Orlandersmith’s Virgil, however, is very much of this earth: a Bronx native transplanted to Manhattan, who has adolescent memories of hanging out among the dead at Woodlawn Cemetery.
Performed by Orlandersmith at Rattlestick Theater in Greenwich Village, and directed by Neel Keller, her longtime collaborator, “Spiritus” is not shy about death or dying. It is, in fact, the rare play that will teach you something about embalming and other mortuary skills.
Virgil’s journey toward a beneficent existence starts with a family member’s funeral, continues through another relative’s hospice stay and then achieves fulfillment with our hero’s compassion-driven decision to look after the dead.
Whether that makes you lean in or recoil, any gruesomeness in “Spiritus” will depend on the vividness of your imagination. Takeshi Kata’s circle-inspired set and Nicholas Hussong’s crisp projections contribute elements of naturalism to the production, but Orlandersmith largely lets her language paint the images. (Understated costume design is by Kaye Voyce, aptly murky lighting by Mary Louise Geiger and sometimes surreal sound by Lindsay Jones.)
Orlandersmith’s writing is not at its most potent and incisive here; “Spiritus” doesn’t have the richness of her plays “The Gimmick,” “Yellowman” or “Until the Flood.” Yet I followed her raptly, curiously through this strange, surprising and somewhat too spare show. A meditation on living that seems also like a curveball response to loss, it is a mere hour long.
With her customary fluidity, Orlandersmith slips in and out of the characters around Virgil: Jimmy, a funeral director who ministers to Virgil’s family and takes Virgil under his wing; Peggy, a hospice nurse, about whose goodness the script gets slightly sappy; and Virgil’s father, one of the people Virgil regrets not having gotten to know better while there was still time.
In performance, the play’s poetic ending felt abrupt to me, but I’m not sure that it is. I suspect I got hung up on something that Virgil says shortly beforehand, about a dead infant. The lines come across as false sentiment — secondhand memories of the little girl as she was when she lived, presented as Virgil’s firsthand experience.
“Spiritus” stuck with me afterward, though, as did Virgil. A few nights later, seeing Kate Douglas’s very different play “The Apiary” at Second Stage, I couldn’t stop thinking about its thematic overlap with “Spiritus”: Both works are deeply concerned with death, caretaking and leading a meaningful life. If you’re building your own two-show day, they would make quite a pair.
Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance Through March 9 atRattlestick Theater, Manhattan; rattlestick.org. Running time: 1 hour.
In the current staging, Sweeney’s barbershop is above the stage; when he slits a customer’s throat, he pulls a lever that sends the victim down a slide into Mrs. Lovett’s basement. Under the tag “A Bad Idea Worth Considering,” Rebecca Alter points out that slide’s underutilized revenue potential. Wheeeeee! – Vulture (MSN)
After months of anticipation and some delays, it’s actually official this time—Second City, Chicago’s prestigious comedy club that is responsible for incubating talent like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Steve Carrell, is opening the doors of its New York location today.
The new site of Second City, located at 64 N. 9th St. in Williamsburg, is less of a traditional comedy club than it is a sort of small campus for comedy aficionados. The 12,000-square-foot, two-floor complex includes two cabaret-style live theaters, a training center charged with raising the next generation of iconic comedians, and a restaurant bar called The Bentwood.
The comedy club is opening with two productions. One is The First City Revue, an original sketch comedy and improv show that is developed and performed in collaboration with the audience, as well as another show that highlights some of the greatest hits from The Second City’s colorful history, performed by New York City comedians. You can go watch The First City Revue Wednesday through Sunday starting this week and The Best of Second City on Mondays and Tuesdays as well as Saturdays and Sundays.
The mainstage shows will be performed by the venue's New York City ensemble, which includes Jackyln Uweh, Ashley Leisten, Ben Rameaka, Yazmin Ramos, Drew Reilly and Jordan Savusa, and is directed by Jen Ellison, creative director of The Second City. Alan Kliffer, known for Titanique the Musical, will serve as artistic director of NYC, Jeff Bouthiette as musical director, and Kayla Freeman as stage manager, with technical direction from Kurt Cruz. Matt Prigge will serve as Producer.
Photography: By Noah Fecks
The Bentwood, Second City’s Bar and Restaurant, will serve American classics made with local ingredients as well as a selection of cocktails, and you can make reservations here. If you feel like having a bite during performances, they will have plenty of Chicago classics to choose from, too, including those Chicago-style hot dogs, Italian Beef, and plenty of snacks.
One of the most unique features of the complex will undoubtedly be its training center, which will include seven studio classrooms spread throughout the two floors of the complex. Classes on offer include comprehensive comedy training, writing, storytelling, acting and more. You can check their full offerings and book a class here.
The New York City opening is happening on the club’s 65th anniversary. Originally slated to open last year, New Yorkers have been eager to enjoy this comedy paradise—so run, don’t walk, to Second City in Brooklyn.
Who knows you might just see the next Bill Murray, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Jordan Peele, Stephen Colbert, Cecily Strong, or Aidy Bryant on this Brooklyn stage.
Rehearsing at a studio space in Times Square earlier this month, Marc Summers was crouched low, engaged in a conversation with God. Such scenes are staples of one-person shows like the kind that Summers is bringing to Off Broadway, but his arch tone suggested he wasn’t approaching this existential moment too earnestly.
“What is my purpose in life?” Summers called out, wondering what he should do if he encountered disappointments or impediments on his journey.
A booming, recorded voice answered that life may be full of pain and regrets, but it also offers humor and joy. “The only question,” the voice said, “is are you ready for it?”
After further contemplation, Summers answered confidently. “I think I’m ready,” he said, pausing for effect. “I think I’m ready to take the physical challenge!”
Summers is 72 with a head of mostly white and gray hair, but his toothy smile and exuberant cadence still make him easily recognizable to the generation of television viewers who were introduced to him as the host of the children’s game show “Double Dare.”
“Double Dare,” which debuted in 1986 on Nickelodeon, blended a trivia competition with outrageously messy obstacle courses. A team of two youthful contestants could dare a rival duo to field a question, but their opponents, of course, could double dare them back. In that case the original team had to either answer the question or submit to a physical challenge.
Throughout the show’s seven-year run of just over 500 episodes (which included incarnations like “Family Double Dare” and “Super Sloppy Double Dare”), Summers was there, often wearing a pastel suit or a sports jacket and jeans, encouraging players as they rummaged for flags inside a giant nose or dived headfirst into a kiddie pool of green slime.
This is a substantial part of the unpredictable showbiz career recounted in “The Life & Slimes of Marc Summers,” which opens on Feb. 22 at New World Stages, but it is not the entirety of the show.
Written by Alex Brightman, the Tony Award-nominated star of “Beetlejuice” and “School of Rock,” “Life & Slimes” also tells how Summers emerged from suburban Indianapolis, idolizing entertainers like Johnny Carson and Soupy Sales, to become a TV personality in his own right. The show chronicles how he grappled with obsessive-compulsive disorder throughout his life and battled chronic lymphocytic leukemia (which is now in remission).
Summers has gone on to host other shows on Nickelodeon, Lifetime and PBS, as well as host “Unwrapped” and produce “Dinner: Impossible” for Food Network; he is a husband (he and his wife will celebrate their 50th anniversary in June), a father of grown children and a grandfather. He is grateful that “Double Dare” helped put him on the map, though he still wonders if it will forever overshadow these other accomplishments.
A press representative from Nickelodeon did not respond to requests for comment.
On a recent visit to New York from his home on the central coast of California, Summers explained in an interview how, even in the heyday of “Double Dare,” he bristled at being described as a kids’ show host. “I used to hate that, because I was more than that,” he said.
As Nickelodeon shifted its focus to animation and tween-oriented sitcoms and dramas, Summers has felt the sting of neglect from the network. “I made Nickelodeon,” he said. “I’ll be the first to say that, and they’ve never actually said that to me. I changed that network. And nobody’s ever said thank you.”
But bringing his biographical show to Off Broadway is an achievement that Summers has found to be as satisfying as riding down a spiraling slide into a giant ice-cream sundae.
Comparing himself to a minor-league baseball player, Summers said: “I’ve always wanted to get in the majors but could never make it. I’m that guy who’s been riding the bus all those years, who got close but not quite there. And now, somehow, I’ve managed to get there.”
Over a lunchtime conversation at Joe Allen, the restaurant and theater-district hangout, Summers recalled a truism he had been told about who achieves success in the entertainment industry. “It’s the people who have lesser talent but more determination, more passion and more drive to get there,” he said. With audible self-deprecation, he added, “I never thought I had an ounce of talent.”
Even so, Summers had the moxie to become a teenage stage magician in the mid-1960s; a writer for Bob Barker on the game show “Truth or Consequences”; and a fitfully employed standup comedian in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s.
When he learned about an audition in 1986 for the “Double Dare” host — from a ventriloquist friend who didn’t want the gig — Summers had been making money helping to sell a South African brand of smoked salmon to delis and warehouse retailers.
Amid an ’80s-era boom for cable TV, “Double Dare” helped establish a rebellious identity for Nickelodeon and made a star of Summers, who easily grasped why the show appealed to its target audience.
“The kids were living vicariously through their parents, watching ‘The Price Is Right,’ but they didn’t have their own game show,” he explained. “Their whole lives, they’re told, ‘stay neat, stay clean’ — now we’re rewarding them for getting messy.”
Though Summers was in his 30s and 40s at the time, he could be more like a goofy older brother to the young “Double Dare” players. He would entertain them with his impersonations of vintage Hollywood stars like Ethel Merman and Paul Lynde, and look for ways to connect with the contestants, who had been recruited largely from the Philadelphia area. (The show was initially filmed in Philadelphia, and then in Orlando after Nickelodeon opened a studio there.)
“The Philly accent, I couldn’t figure out,” Summers recalled. “I’d say what do you like doing? ‘Go downa Shore.’ Excuse me? ‘Go downa Shore.’ I’d stop tape and say, What did he just say? ‘We go down the Shore.’ I had to learn what that meant.”
Brightman, who was nine or 10 when he first met Summers at a live “Double Dare” event in San Jose, Calif., said that the host has always been motivated by a genuine curiosity about the world and the people he encounters.
“He was asking kids slightly complex but accessible questions that made them feel like friends, and not lesser than that,” Brightman said. “I thought that was a masterful quality in him.”
When he has heart-to-heart conversations with Summers now or sees him talk to other people about their lives, Brightman said: “He’s not asking because he’s performing for you. He’s genuinely interested in what you’re doing.”
As an actor, Summers has mostly been cast as himself on sitcoms and animated shows, though he made a foray into regional theater, playing Vince Fontaine in a 2011 production of “Grease” at the Surflight Theater in Beach Haven, N.J. It was there that he befriended one of his co-stars, Drew Gasparini (now a composer and lyricist whose projects include the musical adaptation of “The Karate Kid”).
Gasparini, a friend of Brightman’s, reconnected him with Summers, who proposed the idea of putting his life story on the stage. Brightman admitted to some skepticism at the time — “I think you’re interesting, but do you think that would translate to anybody else?” he recalled asking Summers.
Gradually he and Gasparini were won over by Summers’s seemingly boundless reserve of showbiz stories and the theme of endurance that ran through them.
“We found this core of a sweet, wonderful story of redemption and hope, and never saying no,” Brightman explained. “Whether he was interesting or not didn’t matter — he is — but the story became extremely interesting and personal and unique.”
Life & Slimes” evolved as the collaborators observed Summers’s strengths and proficiencies. Gasparini, who created the original music for the show, said, “We quickly pivoted from making him sing 10 songs in the show to making this a one-man play that is supported by musical motifs and themes.”
Brightman and Gasparini spent weeks interrogating Summers about his personal history, searching for material for the show. “I know when Marc Summers lost his virginity,” Gasparini confided. “That didn’t make it into the show, but I love that I know that.”
“Life & Slimes” was first produced in 2016 at the Bloomington Playwrights Project in Indiana, and has had runs at the Adirondack Theater Festival in Glens Falls, N.Y., the Mt. Gretna Playhouse in Pennsylvania, and the Alleyway Theater in Buffalo, N.Y.
Over the years, as their individual careers pulled them in different directions, the “Life & Slimes” team members said they had to find motivation in their passion to tell Summers’s story.
“This was so niche and so weird, about a quirky little corner of television and a person that not everybody has heard of,” said Brightman, who is currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Spamalot” and performing in a workshop for a stage musical adaptation of the TV series “Smash.”
But, Brightman added, “Marc’s dream is to be onstage, and there’s something about that. He’s not a young dude and he’s being brave enough to be vulnerable onstage for over an hour. To be able to give him that shot, I couldn’t imagine a better outcome for this.”
Despite the nostalgic draw that Summers and “Double Dare” offer to a certain demographic of theatergoers, no one quite knows what to expect when the show opens in New York, which Brightman called “the judgy-est place on earth for theater.”
In the rehearsal space in Times Square, Summers was working with the show’s director, Chad Rabinovitz, on one of the segments in which the host will interact directly with audience members in a recreation of a “Double Dare” contest.
The full set of the show includes a faithful recreation of the old “Double Dare” stage, including a garishly colored podium for Summers to stand behind, though the “Life & Slimes” creative team was coy about whether they had Nickelodeon’s blessing for the production. “It is not the story of Nickelodeon,” Rabinovitz said. “It’s the story of his life.”
Summers has lost none of his well-honed aptitude for playing off the unpredictability of a live crowd — onstage, if he sees a contestant with his hands in his pockets, he is liable to say, “I’d shake your hand, but I can see that you’re busy.”
As much as he appreciates the opportunity to share his personal journey with audiences, Summers said he is looking forward to engaging with them again in some old “Double Dare”-style antics and being able to relate to them, finally, as one adult to another.
“When these people get onstage, they’re orgasmic,” he said. “It’s insane to watch. So that’s fun for me. And now I can say things to them that I’ve always wanted to say to them, that I couldn’t say when they were 8 or 9. So we have a lot of fun, we really do. And we get a little messy.”
As an actor and teacher of method acting, as well as a mother, I was surprised by Natalie Portman saying in a recent interview that method acting is a ‘luxury women cannot afford’. The actor was questioning how acting processes – most of which have been created by men – clash with parts of the female experience, such as motherhood.
Referencing her experience with the 2016 film Jackie (for which she was Oscar-nominated), Portman explained: ‘I don’t think that children or partners would be very understanding of, you know, me making everyone call me “Jackie Kennedy” all the time.’ However, having used the method style successfully for more than 15 years, I believe there is a way to make it work for women.
Portman was speaking to promote her new film, May December, in which she portrays Elizabeth, an actor cast in a biopic as a sex offender who went on to marry and have children with the underage boy she had seduced.
Elizabeth is presumably a method actor – at one point in her preparation, she sleeps with the victim herself, who is now a grown man. But immersion into the life of a character is not the only way to apply method acting.
No one acting method works for everyone. Most accounts of the method style focus on male actors misbehaving under the guise of the character. For example, when Jared Leto starred as the Joker in Suicide Squad (2016), media coverage focused on his decision to gift his costars a range of disturbing items, including used condoms.
However, as I argue in my recent research, method acting can empower marginalised social groups including women. This is because it prioritises the actor’s internal process and real-life experience over scripts and fictional characters.
This highly influential technique requires self reflection from the actor, in particular exploring what moves and excites them. Alongside movement and voice exercises, visualisation exercises offer a unique approach to developing the actor’s imagination.
Through visualisation exercises, method actors can blend their real memories with those of their character. This then informs the characterisation processes.
My own method training was accompanied by reading Russian theatre director Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s writing about the actor’s process. I believe the Vakhtangov-informed version of the method is most beneficial for female actors.
For example, Vakhtangov said: ‘We don’t need characters, characterisations. Everything you have makes up your characterisation; you have individuality – this is your character.’ This contradicts the idea that a method actor would lose themselves into a character, going to the extreme of asking family members to call them Jackie Kennedy, for example.
Similarly, Vakhtangov considered ‘an actor’s own appearance, plasticity, and voice [as] more appropriate than the manufactured characterisation’, urging the actor to ‘transform by the power of their inner impulse’, while preserving their ‘God-given face’ and ‘God-given voice’.
Vakhtangov considers it key for the actor to find emotional and experiential associations between themselves and their character, so they can bring their own authentic experience to their acting. Through the visualisation exercises, actors discover their own emotional ‘buttons’ which they can then push as appropriate for a role.
The above understanding of the method does not align with Elizabeth’s immersive, literal process in May December. Using the Vakhtangov approach instead, Elizabeth would invent and visualise controversial actions from her own life and her own emotional responses to such actions, to consider which could benefit her performance.
So even though the audience watches a sex offender at ease with their sexual crime, the actor’s private creative reality would orient around moments drawn from her own experience.
The benefits of method acting
Method acting develops actors who know themselves well enough to trigger emotional responses when acting, while protecting themselves from emotional harm. Self-care is an important part of this. Actors are discouraged, for example, from thinking of loved ones who have recently passed away during visualisation exercises.
In May December, if Elizabeth remained within her own sphere of experience, she would protect herself from the disturbing visualisation of the sex offence that could be traumatising. Keeping the visualisation in control would also keep in check the emotional responses that she would lend the character, allowing for a repetition of the process for the multiple takes.
I suggest that my students use method acting only to solve a problem, such as an emotionally demanding scene – not throughout a film or play. This means that they can choose when to let go of their own emotional buttons.
Contrary to Portman’s comments, I believe that method acting can deepen women’s experiences both on and off screen. A role could inspire an actor to find in themselves a more self-caring mother, for example, or a more assertive partner. Method acting should be envisioned, not as taking work home, but as taking home a playful sense of self-knowledge and self-exploration.
COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip Gefter
What a document dump!
The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)
That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)
From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center,Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.
Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.
Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”
Casting Liz and Dick, then the world’s biggest celebrity couple, in the movie — after Jack Warner had promised Albee that Bette Davis and James Mason would do it — also came with risk (and paunchy middles; the glamorous Taylor was instructed to gain 20 pounds).
While Burton’s delicious diaries barely mention the production, much of its agita is familiar from Mark Harris’s recent and thorough biography of Nichols. But Gefter pulls in for a tighter focus. He’s not quite the “phrasemaker” that Martha calls George — locutions like “garnering his own notoriety” and “actual lived behavior” mush up an otherwise tight book, as does a scattered epilogue on other marriage movies. But he does, as George puts it, get to the marrow: of male ego, rushing into new projects with hubris and jostling for posterity.
“Hacks only imitate,” Nichols declared, binge-watching Truffaut and Fellini flicks in anxious preparation for the shoot. “We artists steal."
The novice director and the veteran writer bantered in the back of a limo to the airport about being jealous of each other’s publicity. Nichols had been to Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartment for lunch (and would use her promised endorsement to prevent himself getting fired); Lehman, who contributed to “The Sound of Music,” which was thriving at the box office, had quietly arranged for a profile of himself in Cosmo.
Dramatic alterations, like opening on a pair of fornicating dogs and making George and Martha’s imaginary son real, were roundly rejected by Nichols, who also clashed with the seasoned cinematographer and composer assigned by the studio. He was determined to keep the movie in arty black-and-white rather than commercial, modern color, and wanted to hire André Previn or Leonard Bernstein to do the score. (“Mike likes them young and hip,” Lehman sighed.)
Meanwhile, Burton tried to get the assistant director fired on his wife’s behalf — “it’s rather like talking about changing one’s housekeeper, isn’t it?” — and worried that the project, like Nick when he tries to have sex with Martha, would be “a flop.”
He was mollified by a pond stocked with trout on location and a birthday present of Francis Bacon essays. Still, Lehman recorded, the cast and crew were a “discontented bunch” and, understating the case: “‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ is not exactly a happy picture.”
Gefter, a former Times picture editor, has written formal biographies of the photographer Richard Avedon (Nichols’s close friend) and the curator Sam Wagstaff. This is something different: a shot glass filled with one work that, alongside contemporaneous books like Richard Yates’s novel “Revolutionary Road” and Betty Friedan’s polemic “The Feminine Mystique,” showed how the “cartoon versions of marriage” long served up by American popular culture — Doris Day movies, the Cleavers, etc. — always came with a secret side of bitters.
His interest in “Woolf” dates back to when he was 15 and, apparently the only teenager in America who read Playboy for the articles, encountered an interview with Nichols in his father’s copy.
Gefter peeks at the unpublished memoir of Gerard Malanga, a poet and Andy Warhol associate, to elaborate how George and Martha were at least in part inspired by Willard Maas and Marie Menken, teachers at Wagner College about whom Warhol made a 1965 film called “Bitch,” which was recently screened at MoMA.
He distills a lot of secondary material, including interviews published and unpublished conducted by the critic Mel Gussow (also a longtime Timesman), Albee’s friend and biographer. The playwright saw the phrase “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in dry soap on the mirror of a Greenwich Village bar around 1954, when he was an aspiring novelist running with a crowd of talented bohemians.
“Woolf,” which Gefter calls “an existential provocation that serves up a range of fundamental truths about marital attachment,”got its creator on the cover of Newsweek by 1963. Such a hall of mirrors is American culture that Martha’s famous “what a dump” line quoted an unfamous one in a minor Bette Davis noir, “Beyond the Forest.” Davis, among the actresses lobbying to play Martha in the movie, then reclaimed it as a catchphrase for the rest of her years.
Albee was a purist about his characters, repeatedly refusing the chance to revive “Woolf” onstage with gay male couples. Terrence McNally, an early boyfriend, thought he wrote like a composer. If so, though, there was a hint of jazz there. According to one actress who played Martha, Albee “always said that Act IV of the play was when the audience leaves the theater, and the couples argue all the way home.”
Hey, it beats lying in bed with our laptops.
COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” | Philip Gefter | Bloomsbury | 368 pp. | $32
The cast of Starlight Express at the purpose-built Starlighthalle in Bochum, Germany. Photo: Detlef Overmann
Hallo and welcome to Jaques, your weekly guide to the global theater industry. New to Jaques? Learn more here, and if you’re looking for the most recent edition of ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS, my roundup of international theater headlines, it’s thisaway:
When I tell people the real reason I started this newsletter was to give myself an excuse to go to Germany to see Starlight Express, I’m only half kidding. And honestly, the surprising fact of the show’s status as Deutschland’s Phantom of the Opera—in a town that’s not Hamburg, the third largest musical theater market in the world—is one of the head-turning global success stories I’ve been most excited to dive into. This week: It’s finally happening. To celebrate I’m making this SPOTLIGHT STORY free for all readers.
Train for Bochum, now departing.
London, 1985: Pre-teen me sees Starlight Express on the West End and it blows my little adolescent mind.
So when, decades later, I interviewed the Lord himself—Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber—as part of Variety’s annual Broadway breakfast in October 2021, I finished our conversation with a question that I mentioned was very important to me personally. It boiled down to, “Starlight Express revival: When?”
He responded, “Can I ask you why it’s important to you personally?” Which I thought was a pretty graceful deflection from a creator who, as his subtext implied, wasn’t interested in devoting much brainspace to his nearly 40-year-old musical about roller skating trains. He said as much a moment later: “It was great fun in its time, but I really want to move on. I want to write something new.”
However, he did tell me: “You could go to Bochum and see it in Germany there. It’s in its own little stadium. It’s very good there now.”
I had heard vaguely of the German production (although if you had asked me I would have told you it was in Stuttgart), so I said off-handedly, “Oh, yeah, it’s been running there for years, right?”
Reader, it has been running there for 35 years. Technically, 35 and a half—which means it’s just surpassed the New York lifespan of The Phantom of the Opera, Broadway’s longest-running production ever. And it shows no sign of running off the rails anytime soon.
The story of how Starlight Express became a cultural touchstone in one of Germany’s lesser-known cities is the story of a big producorial swing, a unique site-specific opportunity and an early recognition of the tourism potential of large-scale musical theater.
In this SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight:
how the show ended up in Bochum—and why it’s a perfect fit,
the dire first six months of the run and what turned it around,
a timeline of the surprisingly frequent revisions,
all the jaw-dropping stats you amass when your roller skating musical has been running for decades, and
the universal takeaways of the show’s Bochum success.
Let’s roll out.
The immersive roller derby vibe at the Starlighthalle. Photo: Detlef Overmann
Even if Lloyd Webber had little interest in revisiting Starlight Express in 2021, producers clearly had other ideas. Two years after that Variety breakfast, in September 2023, Michael Harrison of Lloyd Webber Harrison Productions—the company behind the recent, buzzy revival of the composer’s Sunset Boulevardnow on its way to Broadway—announced a new London production of Starlight Express launching this June.
Everyone involved is keeping mum for now, but we do know that it’ll happen in a specially designed “Starlight Auditorium” at Wembley Park Theater, with a creative team that includes director Luke Sheppard (& Juliet), set designer Tim Hatley (Back to the Future), projection designer Andrzej Goulding (Life of Pi), and costume designer Gabriella Slade (SIX). Ashley Nottingham provides new choreography with original choreographer Arlene Phillips on board as creative dramaturg, and Lloyd Webber promises a “big new plot twist.”
Over here in the States, it’s easy to think of Starlight Express as a short-lived cult artifact, largely because the Broadway import of the original production had a relatively brief lifespan of 22 months (1987-1989). But many New Yorkers—including this one—forget that on the West End the show ran for 17 years. Add that to its decades in Bochum and the string of tours through Asia, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., as well as one-off runs around the world (Johannesburg, Mexico City, Vegas), and estimations of the show’s total earnings ring up at more than $1.4 billion.
Not bad for a musical that started life as a 1970s pilot for a Thomas the Tank Engine cartoon.
As a kid Lloyd Webber had loved The Railway Series, the books that introduced Thomas the Tank Engine, and soon after the release of the Evita concept album he began work on an animated adaptation. Voice and music tracks for the pilot were recorded in 1977, but by the next year the project was deemed too costly and too uniquely British to have any global appeal. (The separate, long-running series that proved otherwise, Thomas & Friends, didn’t premiere until 1984.)
Not long after, Lloyd Webber worked on an eccentric animated retelling of Cinderella in which Cinderella was a steam engine and the two ugly stepsisters were a diesel and an electric train, all competing for the chance to pull a prince in his royal carriage across the U.S. That one didn’t go anywhere either.
In both those projects you can see the beginnings of what would become the simple, family-friendly story of the musical, framed as a young boy’s dream about a sweet but obsolete steam engine named Rusty competing in a high-stakes series of races to impress a new observation car (later a first-class car) named Pearl. His Cinderella-style transformation comes when he gets a power-up from the mystical Starlight Express.
With Cats mania dawning on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1980s, this incipient lark of an idea from Lloyd Webber and lyricist Richard Stilgoe exploded into the kind of mega-production that would become the composer’s signature. Set designer John Napier came up with the idea for the roller skates and designed a race track that wound through the theater and a bridge that spun 360 degrees. Directed by Trevor Nunn, the show’s 1984 West End debut at the Apollo Victoria Theatre rang in at a costly-at-the-time £2.25 million.
The Broadway production (with a cast that included Jane Krakowski and Andrea McArdle) didn’t recoup its $8 million capitalization costs over the course of its 22-month run, but that West End staging did just fine. It stuck around through 2002, with a 1992 overhaul that incorporated some significant creative changes from productions around world.
In 1988, the show rolled into Germany.
Back then, Germany wasn’t quite the musical-theater hotbed it is today. But according to David Savran, a CUNY professor and author of the new book Tell It To the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad, Germans in general had developed a fondness for Broadway-style musicals ever since local productions of Kiss Me, Kate and My Fair Lady caused a sensation in Berlin in the 1950s and 60s. By the 1980s, Hamburg hadn’t yet become the epicenter of the German musical theater business, but it already had one Lloyd Webber musical, Cats, going gangbusters there.
With Starlight in international-expansion mode—the U.S. road version, capitalized at $5 million, was described as “the most expensive touring show ever”—the producer of that German-language Cats, Friedrich Kurz, caught the show in London and wanted to bring it home.
But he faced a major hurdle. With its rich history of music, performance and opera, Germany had a robust inventory of theaters and opera houses nationwide—but at the time, nearly all of the large-scale venues were state-operated and government-subsidized, and none of them would have been keen to entirely remodel their buildings to accommodate an open-ended run of a show that the country’s cultural elite considered to be of questionable artistic value.
What Kurz needed was a brand new theater. To pay for it, he sought out municipal money—and found it in Bochum.
Located in northwestern Germany about 50 miles from the Dutch border, Bochum is part of a coal-rich region of the country known as the Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr area). It’s one of 50+ cities that sprang up in a cluster in the late 1800s to exploit local coal resources, and the region—which also includes the larger, better-known cities of Essen and Düsseldorf nearby—soon evolved into one of the nation’s most vital and populous centers of industry.
But the second half of the 20th century brought a decline in coal and mining that left the entire Ruhrgebiet struggling. Which explains why, in the mid 1980s, the city of Bochum was on the lookout for a tourist attraction that might boost the local economy.
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Kurz and the city made a pact: Kurz would produce Starlight Express in Bochum, and in exchange, the city would pony up to construct a custom-built venue just for the show. It did, to the tune of 24 million Deutschmarks (a whopping $14 million in 1988 dollars).
It was, to say the least, a controversial use of taxpayer money. But on a plot of land conveniently located next to a highway exit, the Starlighthalle—a 1,650-seat venue with a track running in a ring through the middle and another weaving among pockets of seats toward the front of the house—was fast-tracked and swiftly built in about a year.
“Optimists thought that the show might run for four to five years,” recalls Meinolf Müller, the director of the Starlighthalle who’s been involved in the production since nearly the beginning. After the musical’s closing, he adds, “the idea was to change the interior of the building into a local town hall. Nobody expected that this show would run for ever.”
And early on, things didn’t look good. “The first six months were terrible,” Müller admits.
The turnaround came when the production’s promoters persuaded a long-running German TV sports newsmagazine, Das aktuelle Sportstudio, to film episodes live from the theater. The host, and some of the guests, were on skates.
The day after that first episode, Müller says, “the ticket hotline collapsed” from overwhelming demand. For the next five years the show was sold out months in advance.
Since then, it’s been sustained by a local and national affection for the musical. In fits right in with an area steeped in the history of industry, and in a town that has both a museum dedicated to trains and one to mining. Some 50% of audiences live less than 150 km (93 miles) from Bochum; the rest is filled out by theatergoers from other parts of Germany as well as international audiences from the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and the U.K., among other countries.
“Starlight Express is one of the first wave of big musicals that really created the interest for many Germans in this art form, particularly as something commercial that had any financial value,” says Kevin Clarke, the German musicologist, curator and author of the book Breaking Free: Die wunderbare Welt des LGBTQ-Musicals (The Wonderful World of LGBTQ-Musicals).
There’s an elaborate production infrastructure to keep things going onstage, most notably the in-house training program and facilities for incoming actors. Performers work one-year contracts, and “Skate School” can last a grueling 16 weeks before a new cast rolls over into the production each year in late May or early June. Actors come from all over the world; the cast I saw in late 2023 included several performers from the U.K. and Australia.
A regular series of creative changes has also been made as revisions and new material from other productions have been incorporated over the years. (David Yazbek, the Tony-winning songwriter of The Band’s Visit, contributed new lyrics for touring versions of the show in the early 2000s.) By 2017, the production was so changed that a visit to Bochum prompted Lloyd Webber to give the show a creative overhaul in a workshop later that year, penning new material and updating many of the gender dynamics including switching the role of Poppa, an old steamer with a connection to the Starlight Express, to Momma.
Through it all, Starlight Express has stuck it out in Bochum long enough to become a family tradition.
“When I visit Starlight Express, it brings back memories that are precious. Memories of people I attended the show with or memories of my childhood,” says Marie Christin Trittschack, a 22-year-old superfan who has seen the show 15 times. “The experience is passed down through the generations.”
Bettina Koopmann, who saw Starlight the night I was there, brought along her 15-year-old daughter. A resident of Nordhorn (distance from Bochum: ~140 km), Koopmann had first seen the show with her parents in the 1980s, and had gone a second time as part of an early date with the man who is now her husband.
“It seemed to me like something people do with their families,” she says. As a youngster, she recalls being thrilled by the music and the immersive staging. “With the knowledge of today, I would not say it’s the greatest musical ever,” she adds. “But it’s still something that should be seen. And not only to see, it’s an experience.”
NUMBER OF CITIES IN THE RUHR REGION (1,712 SQ. MILES): 53
POPULATION OF THE RUHR: 5.1 million
TOTAL ATTENDANCE AT STARLIGHT EXPRESS SINCE 1988: 18 million
PERCENTAGE OF AUDIENCE FROM WITHIN 150 KM OF BOCHUM: 50%
ECONOMIC IMPACT OF STARLIGHT EXPRESS TOURISM: €60 million per year
STARLIGHTHALLE CONSTRUCTION COST, CIRCA 1988: 24 million Deutschmarks ($14 million in 1988 dollars)
METERS OF BAND-AIDS APPLIED TO MINOR INJURIES: 28,293 (17.5 miles)
CUES CALLED BY STAGE MANAGEMENT: 983,471
Carrie the luggage car, Dinah the dining car, Pearl the first class car, and Belle the bar car. Photo: Detlef Overmann.
1988 The show that opens in Bochum is largely based on the arena touring version created for the 1987 Japan and Australia tour, including a simplified story that reduces the number of train races to four (from the original five).
2002 Addition of the Trax, two stunt skaters (on inline skates, aka rollerblades) who perform tricks throughout the show.
2003 Creative changes incorporated from a major 1992 revision of the West End production. Three new songs are folded in, including the “Megamix” finale.
2007 Pyrotechnics added to the production’s SFX.
2013 Multiples changes from a 2012 UK tour incorporated, including the replacement of the song “Next Time You Fall in Love” with “I Do,” written by Lloyd Webber’s son Alastair.
2018 For the Bochum production’s 30th anniversary, a fresh overhaul brings in many of the revisions from the 2017 workshop at the Other Palace in London.
new costumes, orchestrations, lighting and sound design introduced
changes made to the overall gender balance, both in cast makeup and in character dynamics
the major character of Poppa, the wise old steam train, genderflipped to Momma
multiple songs moved around and rewritten
train names updated, including the Japanese train (now called Manga) and the U.K. train (renamed Brexit)
drones added to create new special effects
I realize I can’t get off this train without answering a crucial question: Is Starlight Express… good?
Look, I dunno; it was in German. But it’s certainly true that even in a foreign language its roots as a simple children’s story are pretty evident, and plot doesn’t really seem the point. The show’s been described as “Cats with trains,” and from what I could tell, that’s not wrong.
Did I have a great time at a bonkers spectacle that exists nowhere else in the world (at least until that London production starts up)? I sure did.
The success of Starlight Express in Bochum seems such an anomaly that it can be hard to lift lessons from it that might be of value to readers in the industry sifting for clues to international success. Still, there are a few takeaways.
MUSICAL AS LANDMARK? BOCHUM GOT ON THAT TRAIN EARLY. On Broadway, the longevity of The Phantom of the Operaeventually endowed the show with something akin to landmark status. It became part of the checklist for a visit to New York: See the Statue of Liberty; see the Empire State Building; see Phantom. By now The Lion King and Wicked have achieved similar prominence.
Back in the 1980s, it wasn’t so obvious that a musical could become a landmark with a massive economic impact. Bochum, then, made a bet that was ahead of its time—and it won them a €60 million annual boon to the local economy.
“People don’t go to Bochum because it’s such a nice place to visit,” Clarke says with a laugh. “It’s an ugly town in Ruhrgebiet. You go because you book the show, you get the pre-show dinner, you stay in the hotel, maybe you take the spa opportunity.”
TARGET THE RIGHT DEMO Kurz knew Starlight Express was never going to win over his country’s high-art crowd, so he aimed wider—and took advantage of the fact that he was promoting one of the few musicals with even the remotest connection to sports. That sports-news showcase unlocked the audiences that have powered this locomotive for years.
IT NEVER HURTS TO KEEP THINGS FRESH These days it’s not uncommon for a long-running show to incorporate the incremental changes instituted by the creative team in other productions around the world. Often these changes don’t draw much notice; for Starlight Express, though, a couple of the overhauls were major enough to give the show a publicity boost—and tempt back repeat viewers.
SOMETIMES A BIG SWING PAYS OFF To Germans in the 80s, the prospect of spending 24 million Deutschmarks on Starlight Express—on the theater alone—must have seemed as unhinged as the ever-mounting price tag of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark did two decades later. Spider-Man, of course, became a prime Broadway example of the high cost of hubris, but Starlight Express serves as a reminder that sometimes it’s the wildest ideas that hit it big.
AND, OF COURSE: THE THEATER INDUSTRY IS A LOT BIGGER THAN 12 BLOCKS IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN The thesis of this newsletter as a whole is that the international theater business is so broad and varied that success can be found in some of the most unexpected places. That’s the story of Starlight Express in a nutshell, and it goes to show you can have a hit far, far beyond Broadway—which means that somewhere in the world, there might be a home for even a show that doesn’t draw crowds in New York.
Somewhere close to the four-hour mark in “Bark of Millions,” the polychromatic cavalcade of splendor that is Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s new rock opera, I finally realized why the woman in front of me had been reading on her phone throughout the performance. And why she had looked at me like I was way out of line when I couldn’t bear the glowing screen any longer, leaned forward and implored her to stop.
The words on her phone were excerpts from the show’s lyrics, a free digital version of the printed fan deck on sale at concessions. More than 50 songs in, she was grasping at that text in an attempt to follow along. Because the great frustration of “Bark of Millions,” which continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, is that there are far too many songs in which the music drowns out the lyrics, making the meaning a bafflement. (Sound design is by Brendan Aanes.) In those moments, time decelerates.
If “Bark of Millions” were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble. Those are plentiful in Ray’s genre-hopping music, richly interpreted by the band he directs, and in Machine Dazzle’s ingeniously odd costumes, such as the sparkly pastel number in which Mac begins the evening, looking like Weird Barbie as an acid-tinged sprite, dressed for Versailles by way of ’60s Vegas.
But Mac’s vivid, often poetic lyrics are not incidental. In the creation of the score, they were the starting point, each of the 55 songs inspired by a figure in queer history. It is a mosaic of a show, inherently political in its affirmation of queer heritage and community, though as Mac tells the audience, it is not a history lesson: “We beg you not to Google in your seats.”
Still, there are degrees of mystery, and I do not believe that “Bark of Millions” — which Mac, its principal director, describes aptly in a program note as “an opera-concert-song-cycle-musical-performance-art-piece-play” — means to leave us so much in the dark.
When it lets the light in, when the vocals are allowed to reach us unimpeded, this intermissionless show becomes glorious. Not in the way that “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” was, because it does not place Mac at its center and requires no audience participation, but more in the way that Mac and Ray’s “The Hang” was a couple of years ago: a crowded cast sharing the stage, taking turns strutting their considerable stuff, frequently sitting back to watch one another.
Mac nonetheless will break your heart at least a couple of times, particularly with the wistful, elegiac “Patterson’s Lovers,” a portrait of a Manhattan age that AIDS erased, and make you laugh with the silly-sweet “Margaret Cho,” an ode to the comedian tucked inside an anecdote about Cowgirl, a West Village institution.
Machine Dazzle is the one who blindsides, though. Best known as a designer, but a performer as well, he sings the devastatingly desolate “Greta Garbo,” with silent-movie expressiveness, from one of the Harvey’s peeled-paint upper boxes. Of the numerous other standouts, here is a sampling: Thornetta Davis in the bluesy “BDB Women”; Ray in the spare, piano-bar style “Stormé DeLarverie”; Wes Olivier in the rafter-shaking “Audre Lorde”; Le Gateau Chocolat in everything.
Co-directed by Niegel Smith and Faye Driscoll, who is also the choreographer, “Bark of Millions” ends gently, with Mac and Ray in tender duet. But the show as a whole is not finished yet. Mac writes in a program note that it started with 54 songs, “one for every year since the world’s first Pride Parade.” Movingly, elegantly, the idea is that the piece will grow each year.
Just please, in the next stage iteration, greater sonic clarity?
Bark of Millions Through Feb. 10 at the BAM Strong Harvey Theater, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 4 hours and 15 minutes.
