“So friends, this is the way we were in our growing up and in our marrying and in our doctoring and in our living and in our dying.”

Pull out a copy of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and, depending upon the vintage of the edition, if it’s old enough, you can find that line. That’s how it read in the 1938 hardback edition, which was drawn from the original rehearsal manuscript. But at this moment, with theatres dark, with people fearing illness and falling ill, the ultimately excised “doctoring” as a key element in our lives holds unfortunate resonance.

While we cannot presently take refuge in theatres, people have done so for countless years, and in America, since 1938, Our Town has proven to be one of the most enduring of works. Contrary to many people’s misapprehension of it as a valentine to a bygone era, the play is a deep meditation on mortality. It starts dropping hints about its true concerns, beyond baseball games and ice cream soda-fueled romance, virtually from the start, when we’re introduced to one character by immediately learning about when he will die. 

That character happens to be Doc Gibbs, who so far as the play tells us, is the only medical professional in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, where the story is set. He practiced in an era before personal protective equipment was standard issue, before private health insurance and Obamacare – and he ministered to everyone equally. The play begins with him having just delivered twins in the less affluent part of Grover’s Corners that the audience never sees.

The mundane, commonplace events of the play’s first two acts give way in the third to a metatheatrical and metaphysical exploration of what comes after earthly life. However, it is explicitly non-denominational and non-religious, ultimately designed not to have us contemplate what comes next, but rather how much we must appreciate what we have in life, even if it seems inconsequential, and perhaps at this moment, frightening.

For those who have never encountered the play, Emily, the play’s female lead, is lost to a medical crisis. She realizes only when it is too late what she has been forced to leave behind. As we shelter in place, as we quarantine, as our medical professionals work tirelessly and selflessly without all of the resources they need, it’s hard not to think about Our Town, which speaks so directly to the futility of regret and the value and interconnectedness of every aspect of life.

It also speaks to community, with the lives of the people of a small town inextricably interwoven, through education, through prayer, through dining, through sports, through singing. There’s not, we’re told, much culture in the town, but there’s great appreciation for the natural world, for the weather, for that which we often take for granted. Wilder constantly has his characters looking to the skies. Even children contemplate their place in the universe.

For those already chafing at the strictures of an invisible scourge, we long to return to our daily lives as they have been, consumed with getting back to work, to school, to income, to not fearing the proximity of others. When we do, and we will, but not without pain and loss, perhaps we will have a newfound pleasure in clocks ticking, food, coffee, sunflowers, and new ironed dresses, to recount Emily’s memories, as well as in live performance and greeting friends and strangers alike. Wilder had to imagine passings and an afterlife to get us to contemplate these things.

Now, more than ever, we are all Emily Webb. Biology is writing the story from which we must learn. As a character says in Our Town, “My, wasn’t life awful – and wonderful.”

My book, “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21^st Century,” will be published in February 2021 by Methuen Drama.

While the phrase “public domain” may hold little meaning for you (or make your eyes glaze over), January 1, 2019 will mark a significant milestone in that seemingly arcane distinction. That’s because at the beginning of the new year, creative works will once again begin to enter the public domain – that is to say that they will no longer be subject to copyright protection or restrictions – for the first time in 20 years.

Why the gap? Because in 1998 Congress enacted an extension on copyright protection (named for entertainer and congressman Sonny Bono, who fought for such legislation). So while works from 1922 have been in the public domain for two decades, it is only now that 1923 works move out of copyright. This means they can be produced, adapted, copied as anyone sees fit. If you’ve always wanted to create a radical modern retelling of Felix Salten’s Bambi, it’s all yours – provided you don’t accidentally incorporate elements which were unique to the Disney animated film, because those bits belong to Disney and they’re likely to vigorously protect their intellectual property.

While there have been various articles and web essays about what enters the public domain imminently, they have tended to concentrate on books, movies and songs – for example, you will no longer have to pay for the rights to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” going forward, should you be inclined to use it. You’ll also be able set Robert Frost’s “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” to a hip-hop track and not owe his estate a dime.

When it comes to theatre, the most notable work – and it has been noted elsewhere – that will come into the public domain is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. That means if Manhattan Theatre Club had just waited a year to produce the play, they would have saved, assuming a 6% author’s royalty, about $125,000 on their production. That said, Shaw’s Saint Joan is just one of many versions of the story, so keep your hands off everything from Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and Jane Anderson’s very recent Mother of the Maid.

This prompts the question: what other theatrical work is about to be up for grabs for all takers? 

Certainly nothing as quite as classic as the Shaw work, although Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine is widely acknowledged as an important work by an important playwright, even if recent outings are few. There was a musical adaptation that found success a decade ago.

A flip through the pages of the venerable Burns Mantle Best Plays books for 1922-23 and 1923-24 is a great survey, and while the synopses that appear for most plays suggest there’s a lot that’s best left in the past, there are some plays that might be worth looking at again, either to produce on a budget (no royalties), or adapt for modern audiences. Mind you, there’s no racial or ethnic diversity to speak of in the mix, unless you count Hungarian, but of course now anyone can set that right. Maybe there are shows out there ripe for musicalization, with no strings attached?

Here’s a cursory sampling, in no particular order:

• Will Shakespeare by Clemence Dane, which posited a love triangle in which Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe fight for the affections of one Mary Fitton, lady in waiting. It climaxes with a fight between Will and Kit which climaxes with (spoiler alert) Kit falling on his own knife. One can never have to many plays chronicling a life which went largely unrecorded by history.

• Mary the Third was a mid-career work by Rachel Crothers, a highly successful playwright whose greatest success would nonetheless come with her last produced piece, Susan and God in 1937. Mary the Third looked at marriage across three generations of women in the same family.

• Humoresque by Fannie Hurst was the story of a an up-from-the-slums violinist, and had already been a silent film based on Hurst’s short story. It was later considerably reworked by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold into a film released in 1946, with the violinist now caught in a romance with his wealthy patroness, played by Joan Crawford.

• My Aunt from Ypsilanti was “adapted from the French” and while the play seemed entirely negligible, you gotta love that title, the only Broadway show to ever use the place name Ypsilanti. Of course, titles can’t be copyrighted, so if no one stole this one by now, it’s unlikely to see  a resurgence.

• Swashbucklers weren’t reserved for the screen, and 1923 saw the stage debut of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. One Sheldon Stanwood played the French hero, later embodied in 1952 on the screen by Stewart Granger. No records survive (actually, just didn’t look) as to whether the title character did the fandango.

• Frederick Lonsdale was a successful writer of musical librettos, but it’s his plays that have lived on, including The Last of Mrs. Cheney and On Approval,which will come into public domain in 2021 and 2023 respectively. But his Aren’t We All? from 1923 was in fact his last show to be seen on Broadway, in a starry 1985 production led by Claudette Colbert and Rex Harrison. 

• The sharp-eyed might question the inclusion of Outward Bound by Sutton Vane, but while it premiered on January 7, 1924, the Best Plays book notes that it was copyrighted in 1923. This metaphysical mystery, a thematic precursor to the TV’s Lost (oh, right, spoiler alert), was sufficiently popular to yield two movie versions, first in 1930, with Leslie Howard reprising his stage role, and again with Paul Henreid in the Howard role in a 1943 version called Between Two Worlds (oops, again, spoiler alert).

• The same “Say, wasn’t that a 1924 show?” query might be applied to Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly but once again, while it premiered on February 12, 1924, its copyright was 1923 – the same year as another collaboration by the duo, the musical Helen of Troy, New York, which had songs by the team of Kalmar and Ruby. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s the play which seemed to have legs, as it turns up now and again on various stages, though its last Broadway run was in 1970.

• Ferenc Molnar had a solid run of hits between 1902 and 1941, including Liliom (which later became Carousel) and The Play’s The Thing (later adapted by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing). His 1923 fantasy of royalty, The Swan, translated by M.P. Baker, would become a film in 1956, starring Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. It was one of two Molnar plays to debut on Broadway in October of that year, the other being the more tragically-minded Launzi, adapted by Edna St. Vincent Millay, about a young woman, rebuffed in love, who tries suicide, fails, is romantically rebuffed again, then acts as if she were dead, taking to wearing an angel’s wings.

• Not to be outdone by Kaufman & Connelly and Molnar, George M. Cohan wrote two shows that premiered in 1923, doing the book, music and lyrics for The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, which gave Ruby Keeler her Broadway debut, a musical, and The Song and Dance Man, a play. Just to one up the competition, Cohan starred in the latter piece – and the two shows opened in the same week, the former on Christmas and the latter on New Year’s Eve.

• Cervantes’s Don Quixote predates concerns like copyright, so the material has actually long been available for free use. But for those who have grown tired of Man of La Mancha, they might want to delve into some archive and find out if there’s anything to be salvaged from Sancho Panza, the 1923 musical by Melchior Lengyel, with a score by Hugo Felix, which seems to have emphasized the wrong character, no doubt contributing to its brief run. Even 95 years ago, marketing mattered.

• Years before Hedy Lamarr worked her white-washed wiles on Walter Pidgeon, Annette Margulies embodied the “native girl” Tondeleyo in the potboiler White Cargo, itself adapted from a novel called Hell’s Playground by Ida Vera Simonton. A British film of the play preceded the Lamarr version, and faced censorship for sensual content, even in the pre-Production Code days.

Those with forethought may have already been working on resurrections or revivals of some of these works, but have kept silent until the copyright fully expires at 12:00 am on January 1. But if we’ve had dueling The Wild Partys and both a play and musical called Hamilton, who’s to say there might not be multiple Aunts From Ypsilanti in our future. Dramaturgs and literary managers, playwrights and composers, artistic directors: start your engines. The new year will be here before you can say “Scaramouche”!

Update, December 31, 2018: Subsequent to the publication of this post, I was contacted by Glenn Fleishman, who wrote the excellent Smithsonian piece linked above. According to his research, while Saint Joan debuted in 1923, it was not copyrighted until 1924. So if this Shaw play is on your theatre’s schedule for 2019, you may want to delve deeper into its copyright history before deciding not to pay royalties on it.

Željko Ivanek, Zakes Mokae and Danny Glover in the 1982 U.S. premiere of Athol Fugard’s “MASTER HAROLD …and the boys” at the Yale Repertory Theatre (photo by Gerry Goodstein)

After its US debut at Yale Repertory Theatre in March 1982, and before it opened on Broadway in early May of that year, Athol Fugard’s MASTER HAROLD…and the boys played a one-week engagement at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia. During that brief run, one critic wrote of the play, in part:

Fugard, who also directed the Yale Repertory Theater production, has fashioned a play of compactness and clarity. Running without intermission for a rapid one-and-three-quarter hours, the play manages to develop and destroy this idyllic refuge for Hally while still taking time to comment on the human condition. To Fugard, life is a ballroom dance, but the humans who are on the floor are often tragically unaware of the steps.

The cast is exemplary. Danny Glover, with a minimum of dialogue, creates in Willie an admirable man whose emotions are obviously trapped by the racial system that restricts him. As Hally, Lonny Price captures the essence of a youth caught between two fathers and the pains of growing up. Price, who has replaced the explosive Željko Ivanek from the original Yale production, brings a gentle and more melancholy tone to the character of this young and misguided protagonist.

Dominating the show is Zakes Mokae as Sam. Mokae provides an ideal father figure for Hally, a man who painfully endures the insults of his “son” in an attempt to salvage the boy’s self-respect.

I recall this review distinctly because I wrote it. I also remember fighting angrily to insure that it appeared in The Daily Pennsylvanian, my college newspaper, because having seen the original run at Yale, I believed Master Harold to be a major work of theatre that students should know about. However, because my actual “beat” was writing theatre and film reviews of activities off-campus for the weekly entertainment magazine, 34^th Street, shows at the on-campus Annenberg Center were the purview of others – though no one had asked to or been assigned to cover Master Harold. In some ways, it was a conflict of interest for me to write about Annenberg shows, because my work-study job was in the box office there, and in addition I had taken over running the Center’s post-show discussion series.

My fight to write about Master Harold was less because I was so eager to opine on it, but because I thought better me than no one. That’s not to say the play was struggling up from obscurity. On the same page where my review appeared there was an ad for the production, noting positive reviews by, among others, Frank Rich and Mel Gussow of The New York Times, Jack Kroll of Newsweek and Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News. But I doubt many Penn students at the time, even the theatre crowd, had read those.

I met Fugard that week in 1982 when he was on campus, albeit briefly, when I led a post-matinee discussion with him (two years earlier, also at Yale Rep, in a fleeting opportunity for me, he had signed my copy of A Lesson From Aloes). The event was to a degree derailed, first by the retirees in attendance, who used the opportunity to chastise the many high schoolers present for their inappropriate behavior during a pivotal moment in the play. Then more responsible students then took offense and spoke out to distance themselves from their less mature peers. Let’s just say I had no quality time with Athol on stage or off, as he disappeared immediately after the talk, which had squandered his presence.

It would be 28 years before I had the opportunity to speak with Fugard again, occasioned by my podcast “Downstage Center.” I had long wanted to talk with him, to revisit the Master Harold that I had seen both in New Haven and Philadelphia, and later on its national tour. Despite the fact that Fugard continued his relationship with Yale Rep into the latter part of the 80s, even as I began to work at Harford Stage, our paths never crossed, until October of 2010 for the podcast session.

Based upon what I had seen in 1982, I had been harboring a long unanswered question. However, what I wanted to discuss was so specific, that I didn’t bring it up during the 65 minute interview (which you can listen to here), because so few listeners might be interested. But once I turned off the recorder, I finally had my chance. I asked Fugard if he minded answering a very particular question almost three decades on, and he generously encouraged me.

As it was widely acknowledged, at the time and ever since, Ivanek could not stay with Master Harold because he was already committed to appear in a movie, The Sender, his first significant film role. Lonny Price, as he told me himself both back in 1982 at the Annenberg Center and again when we met as adults years later, had gone into the show with only 10 days preparation.

But as I intimated in my review, there was a shift in the play with the change from Ivanek to Price. Specifically (and if you don’t know the play, you may want to stop reading now), at its climax, Hally (as Harold is called throughout the play), spits on Sam, his surrogate father, and the two must confront the anger and shame that brought them to that moment and its aftermath. The play ends relatively quickly thereafter, with Hally making an emotional departure from the tea room where the play is set.

“When Željko played the role,” I related to Fugard in 2010, “it felt to me like there had been an irrevocable break. That Hally had become his father, embittered and racist, and that his friendship with Sam would never be repaired. With Lonny in the role, the moment seemed to be one that was more ambiguous, more confused, and even though he stormed off, you had a sense that they might work things out. Was that,” I then asked, “simply the result of the differing nature of the two actors, or was it a change in the intent of the moment and the play?”

“Well, the second way is truer to what really happened,” Fugard explained. As he had said previously in interviews over the years, he was Hally and there was a Sam. However the actual incident had taken place when Fugard was younger, a pre-teen, as opposed to the older teen as portrayed in the play. “We did become friends again,” he said.

“But,” he mused, “what you say is very interesting. Because what we ended up showing may have been the truth, but what you saw originally may have actually been the more dramatically interesting choice. I didn’t necessarily see it, because I knew what happened and that’s what I wanted to show. But perhaps I missed an opportunity.” And with that, since I had already kept Fugard past my allotted time, he was whisked off to some event where he was slated to put in an appearance.

I tell this story in part because while my question was birthed in 1982, it was with perseverance and luck that I was able to get an answer in 2010 – and because that’s an awfully long time to walk around with what was, in essence, a burning dramaturgical inquiry. But I also tell it because, for the first time in some 30 years, I’ll be seeing MASTER HAROLD…and the boys later this week at Signature, in a production once again directed by Fugard. Having seen it so often, and done so well, in the first half of the 1980s (including with James Earl Jones as Sam in the national tour), I have shied away from subsequent productions – and I wasn’t yet living in NYC when Lonny Price directed a revival for Roundabout in 2003. I’ve also never seen the TV version with Matthew Broderick, John Kani and Mokae from 1985 or the 2011 film (directed by Price) with Ving Rhames and Freddie Highmore.

It is now six years since I interviewed Athol, 34 years since I first saw Master Harold, and a few days before I see the play again. Perhaps Athol will be lurking at the back of the house, since I’m seeing a late preview; even if he is, I doubt he’ll remember me after our three brief meetings spread over so many years. I find myself wondering about what Hally I’ll see: the one who eventually reconciles with his friends or the one hardened into racism fueled by apartheid, or someone in between. But no matter what, I’m ready to spend an afternoon in the tea room with Willie, Hally and Sam, all of whom were theatrical mentors to me, teaching me how much one actor, and a shift in emphasis, can so change a play.

Margaret Hughes

It is quite possible that, when the English stage was officially opened up to allow women to perform alongside men, most likely in 1660 when Margaret Hughes played Desdemona, some argued against it, on the grounds that young boys had been successfully been playing women for years, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. After all, only 30 years earlier, a French touring troupe met with disdain for daring to employ women, and even once English women were permitted to act, men did not immediately cease playing women’s roles.

Ira Aldridge

When Ira Aldridge became the first black actor to find fame on the stages of Europe, having left America, which offered him no opportunity, there were at first people who took exception to the breaking of the color line, feeling that blackface had been more than sufficient for the portrayal of non-white characters and that a black man speaking the words of Shakespeare was “blasphemous.” One critic wrote that “with lips so shaped that it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English,” while another objected to his leading lady being “pawed about on the stage by a black man.”

Phyllis Frelich

After Phyllis Frelich won a Tony Award in 1979 for Children of a Lesser God, might some have dismissed her honor as resulting from a sympathy vote because she was a deaf woman playing a deaf woman, or that her achievement was somehow less simply because she used sign language, which was how she communicated every day? After all, one critic, praising Frelich, took note of her “affiliction.”

Invented scenarios? Only in part. And certainly none are implausible, at distances of hundreds of years or just a few decades. They are, after all, representations of the breaking of a status quo, the altering of a dominant narrative, and the much too easy ways of diminishing significant achievements at the time that they happened.

The stage remains a place where certain practices, steeped in tradition, persist. Despite being seen by many as a bastion of liberals and progressives, the arts are dominated by white Eurocentric men, whether it comes to the stories being told or the people placed in the positions of authority who are charged with making work happen. While the not-for-profit arts community has begun in recent years to explore equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives designed to give voice to a broader range of gender, race, ethnicity and disability, the field is still dominated by white structures and white professionals “opening doors” to other stories.

That’s not to be dismissive of those efforts, but only a means of contextualizing them and reflecting how nascent they still are in so many places. Let’s not forget, it was only in 2015 that the Metropolitan Opera dropped using blackface on the actor playing the title role in Otello, an original Broadway musical featured an all-Asian cast, an actor with a mobility disability in life originated a role in a Broadway production using a wheelchair. How was it possible that this hadn’t happened sooner?

The changes on our stages, the efforts to assert of a broad range of identity where it was previously denied, is reflective of society as a whole. While it has been 51 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 26 years since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, there are still legal battles being fought to insure and protect their full and proper implementation. However, in the past decade, with the rise of social media, advocates for change have had the opportunity to make their cases ever more swiftly and directly, without adjudication by the media as to what concerns will be permitted to reach a critical mass of awareness, with people driving the story, not the story driving the people.

As efforts towards fairer and truer representations of racial and ethnic identity in theatre have resulted in particular shows becoming flashpoints – with The Mikado in Seattle and New York, with The Mountaintop at Kent State, with Evita and In The Heights in Chicago, The Prince of Egypt in the Hamptons and so many more – one of the more frequent and derisive responses has been, “It’s called acting.” That is to say, ‘Oh, it’s all make believe,’ all little more than ‘let’s pretend,’ and as such shouldn’t be held to the same scrutiny or standard as say, the make-up of juries or the population of schools. It says that since the discipline is about taking on a persona, the reality of the person doing so shouldn’t be considered, shouldn’t matter. The phrase condescends to anyone who dares think otherwise.

Those who would reduce efforts toward equity in the arts might wish to isolate them as being the result of identity politics or political correctness. The “it’s called acting” claim is, make no mistake about it, an argument for the status quo, for tradition, for the denial of opportunity, for erasing race. It expresses the thinking that gives awards to people who pretend to be disabled on stage and screen, while making it difficult for people with disabilities to attend cultural events, let alone be a participant in creating them. It is the mentality that loves West Side Story, but cries foul when songs sung by characters who speak Spanish are translated into and performed in Spanish.

“It’s called acting” is the response of those who perceive their long-held dominance, their tradition, as threatened, their own position as being at risk. “It’s called acting” sustains systemic exclusion. After all, as the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality looks like oppression.” Privilege abounds in the arts, on stage, backstage and in the seats.

If we lived in a society, a country, where everyone was indeed equal in opportunity, then the arguments for paying heed to the realities of race, ethnicity, gender and disability might be concerns that could be set aside. But that’s far from the case, and if the arts are to be anything more than a palliative, they must think not just of artifice, but also about the authenticity and context of what they offer to audiences.

For the arts to survive, they must move forward, lest they become antiquated. In a society where the balance of ethnicity and race is shifting, it is incumbent upon the arts to at last fully welcome and support all voices and allow them to portray and tell their stories as well as the stories of others, instead of being forced to assimilate into some arbitrarily evolved template. There should to be an acknowledgment of how the lived experience can contribute to the arts, rather than denying its presence or validity, along the lines of the canard, “I don’t see color.”

There is no absolute in the arts, no definitive good or bad, right or wrong. The act of creation and the response to that act exist simultaneously in the eye of the creator and beholder (the audience). Consequently, the arts give rise to phalanxes of arbiters at almost every level – teachers, directors and artistic directors, and critics – who seek to guide and even control training, practice and opinion, each in their own way. When those arbiters have disproportionate influence, or in fact become gatekeepers, they assume a greater responsibility, one that goes beyond themselves into the field as a whole. How they are empowered, what they believe, becomes essential to sustaining – or diminishing – the arts.

When it comes to respect and recognition, diversity and inclusion, there is a new arts narrative being written right now. Within that process there are progressives making change, late adopters who are coming to understand, and reactionaries who want to hold on to the past. If we believe that art has value, so do the ethics and process of making it. Being unaware, or worse still, dismissive of how the arts are changing and how the arts reflect society, would keep the field trapped at a moment in time, one already mired in the past, as the world advances. That’s the road to irrelevance, which the arts cannot afford.

Howard Sherman is interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

While much will be written about the passing of Muhammad Ali, he does leave us with a theatrical footnote. I’m speaking of his single Broadway role, as the lead in the musical Buck White. Oscar Brown Jr. directed (with Jean Pace) in addition to adapting Joseph Dolan Tuotti’s play Big Time Buck White, and writing the lyrics and music. It lasted only five days in 1969, during the period when Ali had been suspended from boxing due to his refusal to join the Army and fight in Vietnam.

It’s interesting to note that while he had taken on the name of Muhammad Ali several years earlier when he joined the Nation of Islam, his Broadway appearance ultimately saw him billed by his earlier name, which he had denounced as his slave name, Cassius Clay, though ‘Muhammad Ali aka’ appeared in smaller type above it. He had also recorded an album, I Am The Greatest, as Clay.

While the review in the New York Times for Buck White carried a sub-headline which declared that “Champion Does Himself Proud in Musical,” the Times critic Clive Barnes, who generally didn’t care for the show, was somewhat more guarded in description of Clay/Ali’s performance in the review itself, writing, “How is Mr. Clay? He emerges as a modest, naturally appealing man; he sings with a pleasant slightly impersonal voice, acts without embarrassment and moves with innate dignity. You are aware that he is not a professional performer only when he is not performing.”

Although it was promised on the title page of the play, there is no evidence that a cast recording of Buck White was ever made. However Ali’s performance was partially preserved thanks to The Ed Sullivan Show, which featured a number on its then dominant Sunday evening broadcast:

https://vimeo.com/76187446

There’s also footage of Ali performing a number from the show, possibly in the theatre or perhaps at another venue. Intriguingly, there are cuts to another character who seems to almost unmistakably be played by the original Man of La Mancha, Richard Kiley, even though Kiley didn’t appear in Buck White. The footage is found in a documentary about Ali, and the voice of a narrator, an interview clip with Ali and even some offstage footage, punctuate the clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgD24xmkP7E

Ali made a very few other forays into acting, but never again on stage. He played himself in the poorly received bio pic The Greatest, as well as appearing as himself on an episode of Diff’rent Strokes. He did play one more dramatic role, co-starring with Kris Kristofferson in the TV movie Freedom Road.

Ultimately, Ali expressed himself best as himself… in the ring, in his often hilarious interplay with sportcaster Howard Cosell, as an entertainer who sometimes spoke in verse, and as a man who spoke and traveled constantly as a messenger of goodwill and philanthropy. His greatest role was that of Muhammad Ali, and he was sublime.

The achievements of Lin-Manuel’s Hamilton are significant and expansive, so much so that I need not add to the proliferation of reviews, essays, parodies, think pieces and so on engendered by his landmark work. However, I feel that, in light of my increasingly senior status and the years of theatre history stashed in my head, I must point out that Lin was not the first to merge rap and American politics on the New York stage.

Travel back with me over 30 years, to an Off-Broadway venue in Greenwich Village known as The Village Gate. A cabaret theatre, it was home a number of acclaimed revues in its day including Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the 1960s, National Lampoon’s Lemmings (with Chevy Chase and John Belushi) in the 1970s and Tomfoolery in the 1980s. Closed in 1994, today the building that housed The Village Gate is, last I noticed, a CVS pharmacy.*

“Rap Master Ronnie” on vinyl

But for a very short time in 1984, thanks to composer Elizabeth Swados and lyricist Garry Trudeau (yes, of Doonesbury fame) then-President Ronald Reagan could be found on stage rapping away, while he was simultaneously in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The opus that provided this platform? An hour-long revue called Rap Master Ronnie, with actor Reathel Bean in the title role.

An off-shoot of the Broadway Doonesbury musical that Trudeau and Swados had created just the year before, in truth Rap Master Ronnie had only a single rap number, the title tune (which then-Times critic Frank Rich cited as a high point). But while its musical styling wasn’t really beatbox-based overall, the show did interrogate Reagan’s presidency pointedly and musically in the weeks leading up to the 1984 election (which would ultimately see Reagan win a second term).

Speaking to Stephen Holden in The New York Times, when the revue began performances, Trudeau talked about the impetus for his theatrical advocacy, four years before his HBO series Tanner 88 and decades before his Amazon series Alpha House:

”I don’t know if there’s anything artistic being done about this election – it is either being ignored or given up on,” Mr. Trudeau observed. ”It didn’t seem right to me to let it go without trying to say something. The piece is enormously challenging because, as everybody knows, Reagan has proven unusually resistant to frontal assault. That’s a very difficult target to take aim at.”

It’s an interesting statement to read in an election year 32 years later, no?

I digress. I also admit to making the Hamilton link in perhaps my BuzzFeed-iest ploy for attention, just to lure you in to learn of largely forgotten bit of theatrical agitprop, that has nevertheless left one wonderful artifact: the music video version of the title track of Rap Master Ronnie. So I apologize for making you wade through everything up until now, and invite you to see a rapping political figure from days gone by – when everyone’s friend and role model Lin-Manuel was but two years old.

More trivia: Rap Master Ronnie’s limited run at The Village Gate was succeeded by another musical about a politican, Mayor, which portrayed then-NYC mayor Ed Koch in a decidedly more lighthearted lampoon. It was created by composer and lyricist Charles Strouse and marked the first significant credit for a young writer named Warren Leight, who would go on to win a Tony for Side Man and has been steering the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise for several years. But again, I digress.

* Update: I am informed by reader Rafael Gallegos that the one-time Village Gate is now the nightclub Le Poisson Rouge. I swear it was a pharmacy for a time, but this shows you the last time I sought either medication or entertainment on Bleecker Street.

I am not given to reveries about bygone days or a review of my life choices on my birthdays. The same holds true for New Year’s eve and day. But just in time for my birthday this year, I was forced to look back on a small portion of my past, thanks to an archiving project undertaken by my college newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania. I suspect that many other alumni of The Daily Pennsylvanian are having this experience right now. It just so happens that its debut timed out just prior to my birthday.

From roughly September 1981 to April of 1984, I wrote for The DP, after breaking through the cliquish barrier that didn’t afford me much opportunity during my freshman year. But once I began writing in earnest, I turned out some 70 pieces over three school years, a pretty good count considering my writing was limited almost entirely to 34th Street, a weekly magazine insert to the main paper where I was also arts editor for two semesters. Unlike the main newspaper, 34th Street of that era was focused on news and entertainment beyond the campus itself.

With my friend John Marshall (l.) at an annual DP dinner circa 1982

It’s worth noting that at the time I wrote for The DP, the internet was inconceivable and there was no prospect that my writing would last more than a couple of days, save for a few bound volumes that might gather dust in the paper’s archives. While I do have a stack of old papers stashed away in a drawer, I never anticipated that my thoughts on entertainment from ages 19 to 22 would ever be generally available to those who wished to seek them out.

Of course, dipping into the archive proved irresistible, and I quickly discovered pieces I remembered rather well, notably my first celebrity interview, with a not yet knighted Ian McKellen, which I had retyped and added to this website a few years ago. I found a number of film and theatre reviews, all written with the hauteur and certainty that one can perhaps only muster at that age. But as I browsed headlines, I was quickly reminded of some pieces, despite a distance of over 30 years, while others were so unfamiliar that I wondered if someone else had written them.

The most surprising pieces are the ones where, while my language may have been infelicitous and is now outmoded, with some unintentional sexism in evidence, it seems my perspective on the arts wasn’t all that different from what it is today. These are the ones from which I want to share a few bits and pieces.

In March 1982, I attempted to address both student performers and critics, tired of the endlessly repeated patterns of a review one day, followed by outraged letters from the subjects of those reviews a couple of days later. In “For Reviewers and Reviewees,” I counseled critics:

If you feel that there is something wrong with a show, say so, but don’t be nasty about it. The search for exciting prose should not extend to slandering the performers. They are, after all, fellow students. A negative observation about an actor is fine, but avoid excess, it does neither the performer’s nor your reputation any good.

Lights, sets, costumes, and, most importantly, direction are all critical elements of a show and involve great commitments by those responsible. These factors of production deserve much more than an offhand summation of “good” or “bad.”

To provide balance, I advised those involved in student theatre:

Remember that the reviewers also try to be as professional as possible. That means they must say what they feel, be it pleasant or uncomplimentary. Just as a director can choose to emphasize any facet of a script in production, a writer can focus on any element of a show that he deems worthy of mention.

Getting reviewed is an unavoidable part of performing (unless a producer decides not to let reviewers in). Right or wrong, intelligent or irresponsible, reviews are almost inextricably linked to the performing arts. Also, reviewers must speak with authority, since only they can justify the personal opinions that they write about. If a writer hates, for example, the score of West Side Story, he should say so, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Two days after he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for A Soldier’s Play, I had the opportunity to attend a small press gathering with Philadelphia resident Charles Fuller, held at Freedom Theatre, a company focused on work by African-American artists. I reported the event, in part, as follows:

Fuller says that at first he wasn’t sure everyone would like A Soldier’s Play, which is currently being staged by New York City’s Negro Ensemble Company. “We wanted to take a chance,” he says. “It begins to deal with some of the complexities of black life in this country.”

Fuller is only the second black playwright to win the prize. “It’s an important step for me as a playwright – I don’t know what effect it will have on theater as a whole.” As for Fuller’s own effect on theater, he wants to “talk about black people as human beings. We’ve been talked about as statistics for so long.”

Fuller says that his writing develops from his hopes for society. “It’s a severe racial pride. But it’s not racist.”

I presumed to opine about the state of Philadelphia theatre from a historical perspective, in the days before many of the vibrant companies that now occupy the city had begun. This was hubris, of course. But take note of my concern about ticket pricing.

Philadelphia theater ain’t what it used to be. Thank God.

After skyrocketing financial restraints severely depleted the number of pre-Broadway tryout productions here, Philadelphia in the 1970’s was left with but a few large Broadway-type houses and very little to put in them. Smaller companies tried in vain to bridge the gap, failing for a variety of economic and artistic reasons. And Andre Gregory’s Theatre of the Living Arts – the city’s only interesting theater of the 60’s – got too weird for patrons and fizzled out over a decade ago.

Pre-Broadway tours still come around every so often, with Anthony Quinn’s Zorba revival highlighting the past season and an Angela Lansbury Mame promised for the summer. Less discriminating theatrical patrons will probably be sated with the national tours that appear regularly with watered-down versions of Broadway smash hits, although paying 35 dollars for Andy Gibb in the otherwise wonderful Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat should be considered a criminal offense.

I had the opportunity to interview Spalding Gray, relatively early in his solo performing career, in conjunction with one of his monologues that few people have even heard of. It was performed at a venue called The Wilma Project, now known at The Wilma Theatre.

“I am a sort of actor-anthropologist, a mixture of story-teller and monologuist,” Gray says, summing up his unique performing style. He talks directly to the audience from memory, using no script. Unlike previous one-man shows. Gray portrays no one other than himself as he “re-remembers” his life experiences for audiences.

Gray will deliver his piece, In Search of the Monkey Girl, for a live audience the first lime this weekend. He has performed it four times into a tape recorder, in order to provide a text for a series of sideshow photographs shot by Randall Leverson which were printed in Aperture magazine. “It was strange,” Gray says. “He had worked for ten years and I only took ten days.”

In the course of his journey to the state fair, Gray was attracted to a trio of middle class preachers. “They had lost their drug rehabilitation center as a result of the Reagan cutbacks and were working in the sideshow in order to save up enough money to reopen it.” he says. In the meantime, Gray adds, “they were geeks, sucking on the heads of fifteen foot snakes.”

I am glad to find that I was concerned about the portrayal of women on screen at a young age (while completely misunderstanding a film’s genre), writing the following about 48 HRS, the Walter Hill movie that introduced Eddie Murphy to the big screen:

Compounding this inept rehash of the hard-boiled detective genre is the incredibly sexist treatment of women. The few females presented are either climbing into or out of bed, making 48 HRS the most callously anti-feminist film in years.

Even live theatre, or taped productions, something that is once again a current topic, caught my eye, and my thoughts today aren’t all that different than these from 1982:

First, in the case of NBC’s offerings, is it really necessary for T.V. to air the programs live? Granted, live productions were the rule in the fifties, but now editing allows for choosing the best of many takes. Finer quality could be attained from editing together several different performances of the same work. Nowadays live broadcasts are novelties masquerading as high art.

Second, judging by the cable tapings of stage shows, can true justice be done to a work that is primarily staged for one viewing perspective? The limitations imposed by stage architecture result in a radical lessening of camera angles, which have traditionally been used by T.V. and cinema to add to a production. One play shown on HBO included shots from the back of the theater, rendering the figures on the stage almost invisible. Stage shows should be directed again if they are to be adapted for the camera.

Third, what of realism: will a T.V. audience accept “theatricality’?…

…It is commendable that T.V. is attempting to bring theater to a mass audience, but it is a shame that the artistic qualities and capabilities of both media are being compromised in the process. While the public should strongly support the revival of television drama, perhaps theater is belter off where it belongs: on the stage.

I do remember my lengthy feature on the issue of book banning and censorship, which presaged some of my work at the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School on arts censorship. I spoke with figures I didn’t care for at the time (and still don’t), such as Phyllis Schlafly and a spokesman for Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Frankly, I wish I’d spoken to more anti-censorship figures as I look back at the article, but my summing up wasn’t bad, though I deeply regret the absence of two asterisks at the time, or my use of a racial slur at all, when referring to Mark Twain’s character of Jim in Huckleberry Finn:

In Texas this past August, a couple who spend their time reviewing school books for “questionable” content voiced disapproval of a textbook that describes the medicinal qualities of the drug insulin. They said that the reference will lead students to believe that all drugs are sale and beneficial.

Earlier this year Studs Turkel visited a high school in Girard, Pennsylvania, to talk with students and teachers about the movement to remove Working from twelfth grade reading lists. His appearance convinced authorities to restore the book temporarily, but they are still seeking a means by which Working can be banned.

The above examples are not isolated incidents. The rapidly rising wave of book banning and censorship threatens to engulf the U.S.’s entire elementary and secondary education system. There are ten times as many books banned today as there were only a decade ago. Books are being withheld or purged from classrooms and school libraries according to the dictates of various parental and political interest groups…

…No matter how big the issue becomes, the controversy boils down to three issues; what rights the Constitution guarantees to students, what parents want their children to read, and what censorship means. Is it the removal of traditional values from books or the removal of books from libraries? And who will decide?

Finally, in a piece I had completely forgotten, I find that my work at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts was not something that emerged late in life, but had actually been on my mind a long time ago as well. It’s important to remember that at the time, “handicapped” was still emerging to replace “crippled”; “disabled” was not yet identified as the best term. There’s some hyperbole here, and outmoded and awkward expression, but the core of my thinking, I hope, rings true.

An actor’s greatest fear, short of death, is probably of being disfigured in some terribly obvious way. A facial scar, a missing limb, even something so simple as nodes on the vocal cords can send the finest actor into oblivion. But a handful of actors over the past several decades have proven that the handicapped are still superb performers who do not deserve to be shunned by an industry that has based itself on physical perfection…

…Currently, Adam Redfield is touring in the play Mass Appeal, despite an obvious case of neuralgia which has paralyzed the right side of his face. While the condition is temporary, it is to the producers’ credit that they have allowed Redfield to continue in the role. It also proves that the handicapped should be allowed to perform in “normal” roles, even if they do not quite fit the character description, it is sobering to remember that had Redfield had the neuralgia before his audition, he probably would have been quickly discarded.

Are we fully formed as people in college? Certainly not. But it seems that many of the same interests and issues that moved me to to write 30 years ago remain important to me now. I wonder if anything I said in the 80s, or today, will still hold up another 30 years on. But I’d like to still be writing, and I wonder what will be in my mind in 2046.

If you happen to know of any young people who you’re trying to dissuade from careers in the creative arts, you might want to casually leave around two new books for them to find. Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash: The Killing Of The Creative Class (Yale University Press, $26) and Michael M. Kaiser’s Curtains?: The Future Of The Arts In America (Brandeis University Press, $26.95) both paint dark pictures of the state of the creative arts and where they’re headed, enough to send one right into investment banking if it remains a choice.

Timberg, a former arts journalist at the Los Angeles Times who writes the “Culture Crash” blog for ArtsJournal, predominantly focuses on the music industry and the state of legacy media and journalism, with nods to architecture and literature, while Kaiser, former head of the Kennedy Center and now leader of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, concentrates on the world of symphonies, opera and dance. As an avid consumer of music and journalism, my interests run closer to those explored by Timberg; professionally my background comes closer to the disciplines discussed by Kaiser, but (troublingly) neither book spends much time at all on theatre, my actual profession and leisure time avocation as well.

As a result, neither book reveals a great deal to me that I’ve not read about before, or experienced personally in some cases. But while both are published by academic presses (perhaps its own comment on broad-based interest, or lack thereof, in arts and culture), neither seems targeted at industry insiders. Instead, they are surveys of where we are now and how we got here, with a limited amount of prescriptive suggestions for how the tide that favors mass entertainment over the rarified or personal might be turned or at least survived in new forms. Both place a great deal of blame on technology for the woes they recount.

Of the two, I was more drawn to Timberg’s book, which, no doubt due to the author’s experience as a professional writer, is the more elegant, immersive read, peppered throughout with specific stories that support his thesis of cultural decline, a vision notably counterpointed with Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (with a book cover designed to evoke that oft cited book). Timberg particularly worries about the loss of a wide range of social influencers who could guide existing and potential audiences to works that might interest them, from knowledgeable record store clerks to professional (paid) reporters and critics. While it’s a valid point, Timberg falls prey to making it seem, at times, as if he’s bemoaning his own employment status and that of his many colleagues who have been decimated by the contraction in print journalism, never more so than when he cites the decline in the popular portrayal of critics as having slid from George Sanders as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve in the 1950s to Jon Lovitz as Jay Sherman in the cartoon The Critic in the 1990s. That said, he does make strong points about the fracturing of a common culture even as a blockbuster mentality has overridden many creative industries, a seemingly oxymoronic concept. He also cites a wide array of sources, both from other writing and newly conducted interviews, and his fields of interest are admirably broad.

Kaiser’s book resembles a series of lectures about the state of the performing arts – a look at a golden era in the latter half of the 20^th century, where we are now, where we may be in 20 years time, and how we might make things better. Unfortunately, the lectures seem to spring wholly from Kaiser himself, as he quotes no experts, provides no data, and doesn’t include either an appendix or bibliography. It seems we are to take what Kaiser tells us simply on faith, even such sweeping statements as “While the outlook for the performing arts is dire, museums have better chances for survival” or “Theatre organizations should fare better than symphony orchestras.” In the case of the latter statement, much as I would dearly love it to be true, it flies in the face of recent studies from the National Endowment for the Arts, cited by Timberg but AWOL from Kaiser’s survey. Given how much of his brief book is taken up with prognostication, its unfortunate that Kaiser doesn’t extrapolate from existing data; in imagining 2035, it’s surprising that ongoing demographic shifts, especially in regards to race and ethnicity, in the country play so little role in his thinking. That’s not to say he doesn’t have some interesting observations, among them the thesis that while the end of Metropolitan Opera touring gave rise to more regional opera companies in the 80s, the success of the Met Live cinecasts may now be undermining those very troupes.

Reading the two books back to back, I was struck by the fact that both hit some similar themes (the loss of shared cultural language and experience, the impact of electronic media) yet diverge in their exemplars. While Kaiser’s book also doesn’t include an index, I did a fast pass through to see whether certain areas came up frequently, and found 14 references to The Kennedy Center and eight to the Alvin Ailey Dance Company (both of which Kaiser led) and a whopping 19 mentions of the Metropolitan Opera – all organizations which appear nowhere in Timberg’s index, which lists its greatest citations for areas of discipline rather than particular purveyors (the film industry, the economy, the indie music scene to name three). Both books may focus on the state of culture and its future, but their respective attentions are essentially balkanized.

If I were teaching a survey course in arts leadership, I might well assign both books early in the semester, albeit with a restorative break between them to replenish some sense of optimism. But both are merely starting points for a conversation, each in their own way raising areas of concern, yet stinting on any semblance of how those concerns can be addressed, battled or even embraced. To be fair, Timberg is a reporter, recording and interpreting, but Kaiser is training arts leaders, so its more incumbent upon him to offer something prescriptive. We can bemoan the fact that Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts are a thing of the past, or long for the one on one counsel of record and bookstore employees, but that’s not likely to bring them back. If our cultural appreciation and literacy has fallen, can it get back up – and if so how? That’s the book I need to read. Soon.

Perhaps you knew it as a place to cool off, use the bathroom or grab some free wi-fi. You may have passed through it on your way to an office in the building known variously as 1560 Broadway, 165 West 46th Street, or the Equity Building, for which it has been a lobby while construction shut down the regular side street entrance. I’m referring to the Times Square Visitors Center, which closed its doors suddenly three weeks ago.

In recent years, it has hosted meetings and events, allowed tourists a close up look at one of the Waterford crystal New Year’s Eve balls, and had a small exhibition of Broadway memorabilia. But if you looked beyond that, you could see the vestiges of the intimate Embassy Theatre, a movie house which opened in the pre-sound era of 1925, a bit ahead of many of the grand movie palaces that were about to proliferate. Landmarked in 1987, it was the smallest of the more than 300 theatres designed by Arthur Lamb. Of particular note is that it was built as a high-end theatre for women, with an all-female staff.

Throughout its days as the Visitors Center, from 1998 to 2014, its exquisite details remained intact, if you looked beyond the tourism information booth, the endlessly replayed newsreel highlights clips, the faux peep show and the glowing ball in the center of the space. Given its landmark status, these features should remain preserved, even as the space is converted, reportedly, into a retail opportunity of some kind. Just in case some of the features are protected but obscured in the space’s newest incarnation, here’s a small selection of photos from this lovely gem, taken just after it was closed to the general public and sat in semi-darkness, while those of us who worked above passed through it for a few more days.

All photos copyright Howard Sherman

Looking up and staring while walking around in Times Square sounds like the classic stance of a gawking tourist, but should you happen to be at the northeast corner of Forty-Sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, I suggest you take a few moments to do just that. At a time when every square inch of the area seems to be covered by video screens, the owners of the one-time I. Miller building have beautifully restored a rather unique feature of a bygone era.

Gaze above ground level along Forty-Sixth Street and you’ll spy four gold-flecked alcoves with statues of four famous women entertainers – famous by 1920s standards. Shoe entrepreneur I. Miller, in renovating the existing building in 1926 as an outlet for his growing shoe store chain, made the decision to honor great women in the performing arts, and so each alcove is dedicated to a paragon of her field: Ethel Barrymore for drama, Marilyn Miller for musicals, Mary Pickford for film and Rosa Ponselle for opera. They first appeared in 1928.

Although the building received landmark status in 1999, by 2008 The New York Times described the state of the statues as follows, “Today, Israel Miller’s building has descended to a sorry state, with brutish plastic signage in minimal box frames, broken marble trim and the limestone stained by dirt. Miss Barrymore gazes up, as if pleading for a hot shower.” That description no longer applies, as the photos on this post attest – they were taken just yesterday after scaffolding around the building came down, affording the best view for some time.

The sculptures, incidentally, aren’t merely the work of a journeyman artist. They are by Alexander Stirling Calder – the son of Alexander Milne Calder, a premier artist of Philadelphia who crafted the statue of William Penn that caps Philly’s city hall, and the father of the Alexander Calder whose mobiles and wire sculptures are renowned in the sphere of modern art.

Times Square has been an advertising mecca dating back to the days when I. Miller unveiled his store and sculptures, so it’s foolish to inveigh against encroaching commercialism. But it is comforting to know that these great ladies have been restored to their rightful place, grace notes in a riot of color and light.

Note: by clicking on each photo in this post, you can bring up a larger version of each one, affording a better view of each great lady in her perch above the Times Square fray. All photos © Howard Sherman.