When the Tooting Arts Club set up its immersive Sweeney Todd at Harrington’s Pie and Mash in 2014, I doubt it was expecting the production to become the longest-running professional production of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece. But that’s what happened, with the New York incarnation having recently passed 558 performances on its way to a total of 636 when it closes in August. If you tack on the London runs, it has lasted even longer.

Nit-pickers can say that the so-called Tiny Todd only had to fill 130 seats per performance in Manhattan, while the original Broadway run at the Uris, now Gershwin, Theatre had 1,800 or more (seating in the venue has been altered over time). But the record is for longevity, not admissions. After all, no one quibbles with shows like Théâtre de la Huchette’s The Bald Soprano, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, or The Fantasticks at the Sullivan Street Playhouse over their house size. Instead they applaud in amazement at their longevity.

For a die-hard Sweeney fan like myself – it has been, without question, my favourite musical since I first saw the original Broadway production late in its run – it’s heartwarming to know that for the past year and half, the mad barber has been wielding his razor in Greenwich Village eight times a week. It is a nightly affirmation of my own affection.

When Sweeney was new, my adoration of it struck some as downright odd. During my first year at university, my roommate must have been convinced that I too, like the musical’s title character, was a bit off, so obsessively did I play the original cast recording (especially side two of the first disc in that two-record vinyl set).

My father was utterly mystified until he saw the show almost two decades later and admitted that he now understood its appeal for me. Like many, he couldn’t fathom a musical with such a sanguinary plot.

To brandish my bona fides, as well as the original Broadway production, I have also seen Sweeney on its first national tour, its first New York City Opera production, its first Broadway revival (a transfer from the Off-Broadway York Theatre known by aficionados as Teeny Todd), the Goodspeed Opera House production for which I was general manager, John Doyle’s Watermill production at Trafalgar Studios, Doyle’s Broadway production with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris, Jonathan Kent’s production with Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball, and the Tooting Arts version at the Barrow Street Theatre, which I plan to see once more before it closes. I’ve probably forgotten a couple.

I have also seen several secondary school productions, including one in New Hampshire where I helped faculty, parents, and students get the show back on the schedule after it had been cancelled by school administrators. One of the greatest joys of my professional life was reading aloud to the cast of that restored production, without them knowing until the very end who their correspondent was, a letter from Stephen Sondheim, praising them for their perseverance.

I have long known that my unswerving dedication to Sweeney puts me in a minority compared to those among my generation who cite A Chorus Line, Les Miserables, or The Lion King – and those of all generations who now declare Hamilton – as their favorite.

To a degree, loving Sweeney Todd deeply is a cult choice – not so obscure as say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but hardly as mainstream as The Music Man. The things we love aren’t predicated necessarily on what others think. Rather, they are about what affects and appeals to us alone, what moves us, and somehow Sweeney spoke (and sang) to me, and hasn’t stopped in 38 years.

It is the very dissonance between my personality and the show that suggests why it might have a hold on me. There is something unknowable about Sweeney Todd, that makes some of us watch its Grand Guignol repeatedly, tapping a dark part of our heart perpetually, both horrified and thrilled, adjudicating and complicit.

If Sweeney Todd is the musical theatre’s equivalent of a violent film or video game (American Psycho notwithstanding), I should point out that it has never made me violent or even desirous of revenge. What I take from it is the beauty of its music, the propulsion of its plot and the brilliance of its construction. You may not want to get me started on how the musical contains three different songs called “Johanna,” which reveal more about the men who sing them than the woman about whom they supposedly sing.

Having seen many Sweeney Todds, the Teeny Todd, and the Tiny Todd – the latter two part of an ongoing de-escalation of scale for a work of soaring emotion and drama – I cannot help but expect that a one-actor version of the show may yet be on the horizon. That might sound facetious, but don’t rule it out. After all, Sondheim has allowed many variants on Sweeney, including a prog-metal version and alt-folk version among them. So long as the script and score stay intact, it appears Sweeney can wreak his havoc in many different arrangements, both physical and musical.

When I return to the Tooting Arts Club Sweeney at Barrow Street once more in the next few weeks, I will again savour a meat pie before the show, opting for the chicken rather than the vegetarian version. Indeed, tasty as the pies are, they are also my only disappointment from that production, because there wasn’t a beef option on the menu when I first saw it. After all, when having a meat pie at Sweeney Todd, one wants its juices to run bright red – and not from the presence of beets inside, if you know what I mean.

Originally published in The Stage

At The Playwrights Center Ubu Bake-Off, Paula Vogel and Jeremy B. Cohen (Photo by Whitney Rowland)

Four days ago, the US theatre community fostered the birth of more than 100 new short plays, on our federal holiday of Presidents’ Day. These were not, however, created in a spontaneous outpouring of national pride, but rather a coordinated – if entirely voluntary – effort that specifically sought to conflate the current presidency with Alfred Jarry’s absurdist and profane play Ubu Roi.

Held at nearly two dozen theatres and theatre-related organisations, the Ubu Bake Off was the brainchild of award-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who, please pardon the expression, cooked up the idea while musing on Facebook just five weeks ago. The interest from her Facebook friends and acolytes was immediate.

The Ubu Bake Off followed guidelines Vogel has previously used in her teaching career. It was an exercise designed to prompt people to quick, instinctive creativity, helped along by a 48-hour writing time limit, coupled with a five-page limit. Vogel also provides a set of ingredients, so that the resultant playlets are all variations on a theme.

For Monday, the ingredients included Pa Ubu 45 (supposedly 6ft 3ins, a trim 239 lbs, in “excellent health”, and, yes, the hair is his and real), angry ambassadors from every country that Pa Ubu has insulted, a strange use of the English language that sounds like it is supposed to be English (ie, words for ‘shit’ are prolonged like ‘pshitte’), covfefe, and a double-triple-quadruple-octahedral cheeseburger with special sauce.

Among the companies that participated were the Vineyard Theatre (a creative home for Vogel) and the New Ohio Theatre in New York; the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis (which Vogel attended), Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago and Crowded Fire Theatre Company and Antaeus Theatre in California. I even got into the act, hosting a small group under the auspices of my day job at the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

This decentralised, far-flung realisation of Vogel’s idea means that no one person saw, or even read, all of the one-act plays that emerged. Almost like carefully organised insurgent cells, each location, each playwright, was part of a larger whole, carrying out their own missions, not knowing what else might be happening for the benefit of the cause elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, we were secure in the knowledge that other partisans were fighting the good fight in the same manner at the same time.

In my little troupe, we read nine plays over two hours, with playwrights and actors joining to give voice to the texts brought into the room, none adjudicated in any way. The Playwrights’ Center deployed eight actors to read all of the plays – in this instance, an astounding 41 plays by 44 playwrights in an event that lasted more than five hours. No doubt the solutions were as varied as the locales.

Based on the circle at my office, and the plays read, the Bake Off inspired instant camaraderie (I had previously met only one of the participants). It was great fun, in the name of expressing frustrations with our present leadership, while concurrently paying homage to a literary classic. The low-pressure, everyone-is-welcome spirit also stripped away any sense of theatrical hierarchy or critical judgement. It even freed me to try my hand at playwriting for the first time in about 40 years.

But perhaps most importantly, Vogel’s inspiration and recipe yielded a great deal of work in a very short time, demonstrating that her educational tool offers a significant opportunity for involving many voices on the same subject.

Without the demands of rehearsal, staging, ticket sales and fundraising, Vogel’s Ubu Bake Off stripped theatre to its most rudimentary essentials, yielding experiences that were, if my own metaphorical kitchen was at all representative, unifying and cathartic. It certainly provides a model for rapid-response theatre applicable to almost any topic. I suspect we have more national Bake Offs in our future.

Donald Trump (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)

If I were given to cynicism, and if I thought I could get away with it, this week I would have submitted the same column as the one published on March 24 of last year. Why? Because we return to the same topic: President Trump and his antagonism of the arts.

The president has, for the second time in his presidency, submitted a budget to the US Congress eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Never mind that the new budget will balloon the national debt above and beyond the long-term damage done to the US by the tax cut passed in December – a plan that rewards the ultra-rich while penalising the rest of the country.

No, the president and his henchmen still want to make a statement against creativity, arts and scholarship. It would be a meaningless save in the context of the budget itself. But it’s catnip to those perceived as his core supporters.

Underlying Trump’s effort to wipe out the NEA, NEH and CPB is the fact he failed to do so last year. He’s hardly the first politician to use these entities as a political punching bag; they have long been convenient targets for the right who see them as pursuits limited to those who are politically on the left.

Certainly if the right, which always proclaims the value of free markets and self-sufficiency, wanted to prove that the arts don’t need federal support, they might have produced a conservative version of Sesame Street for commercial TV. Or perhaps we would have a wildly successful theatre company dedicated to works based on the writings of Ayn Rand and her acolytes. But as we know, that’s not the case.

Oh, sorry, but maybe I am getting cynical. It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.

Nowadays, I get calls to action to defend funding for these tiny slices of the federal budget via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and occasionally still from the post office. But I can recall the era when mail, phone calls and faxes – remember those? – were the organising tools of choice to face down these perennial assaults, whether they came from within the Oval Office or under the Capitol dome.

There’s no question that the efforts to minimise or eliminate these agencies have had an effect, since funding today is less than it was 25 years ago. Even with relatively steady funding of late, the net effect is to reduce the federal impact, since costs rise while the available monies remain the same. Should we hit a period of inflation, the impact would prove even greater, even if the numbers on the ledger remain the same.

All these efforts to wear down the agencies’ advocates must take its toll on the detractors too, right? But instead, each side plays its designated role, battling to, more or less, a draw.

Not to diminish the importance of the funding situation, but this exercise in political gamesmanship is almost like some vintage cartoon series, with antagonists fighting in endless variations on the same theme, only to take up their enmity again in the next instalment.

But fight we must. The identity of the wolf at the door may vary, but the goal is the same. The arts, the humanities and the public broadcasting outlets and their supporters cannot let the government wipe an entire professional discipline from its attention and funding programme.

This year, the battle even faces a new twist, since the changes in the tax code have reduced the tax benefits of charitable deductions for many citizens and the impact of that policy won’t be fully known until donations are tallied at the end of 2018.

And so we organise to hold back those who would overrun us. We make the case for our value spiritually, creatively and economically, as inventively, persuasively and as loudly as possible.

While some political pundits have already suggested the president’s budget is dead on arrival and Congress will assemble something at least marginally more saleable – to each other and to the public – we can’t take the risk that this is the year when our interests might get bargained away.

Yet again, to the barricades (to be very clear, not a wall). And to the phones, the computers and maybe even the fax machines.

The 30th anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

By celebrating its 30th anniversary on Broadway last week, The Phantom of the Opera marked what now seems a never-ending series of milestones, having run longer than any show in Broadway history.

The seeming permanence of Phantom may mask its achievement, though it has an eight-year lead on the revival of Chicago and nine years on The Lion King. Even if it were to close tomorrow – and that’s not about to happen – it would take the better part of a decade before either of those surpassed it, if they could.

Congratulations are due, of course, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, but also to Richard Stilgoe, Charles Hart, Harold Prince, Gillian Lynne, Cameron Mackintosh and so many others.

There is a certain irony to Phantom’s stupendous run on Broadway, in the West End and around the world – as pointed out in Harold Prince’s autobiography Contradictions, recently revised and expanded as Sense of Occasion.

In the original 1974 book, Prince predicted that no show would ever run as long as Fiddler on the Roof, which he produced. In Sense of Occasion, he allows that he was wrong, with many shows having surpassed Fiddler – A Chorus Line, Rent, Les Misérables, Wicked and the aforementioned productions to name a few.

Last summer, Prince was quick to contradict a question I asked him about whether shows were being engineered for longer runs. He cited the international market for musicals, and for tourism, as the engine behind the longest-running shows.

What was happening wasn’t a creative decision, but rather a product of changing and expanding opportunities. Shows were running longer because ever more people wanted to see them, the new modes of marketing and because there were successive generations of new audiences.

Certainly long-running shows existed before Phantom and its brethren, but they weren’t in theatres as large, they didn’t play in as many cities, and they didn’t necessarily tour as extensively.

In the West End, The Mousetrap has run for longer, but it is a play, not a musical. In Paris, a revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano has been running at the tiny Theatre de la Huchette for some 60 years. In the late 1980s, I saw a production of The Three Sisters at Moscow Art Theatre that had been in the repertory since the 1940s. It may yet still be there for all I know. The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse.

Coming back to Broadway, the expanding list of long runs is something to marvel at, especially if you are among the fortunate who invested in the shows.

But just as the growing markets, according to Prince, expanded the sense of what a Broadway show could achieve, they have also fundamentally changed Broadway itself. I have heard more than a few people remark that they have been in the Majestic Theatre, home to Phantom, only once – or not at all – in their lifetimes.

That is obviously due to the Majestic having had only one show playing for 30 years; the previous tenant, 42nd Street, ran for six years before that.

I should note that Phantom has been around long enough that I saw it on a discounted student ticket. (Though it opened a while after I graduated from university, the friend who bought the seats was only six months past graduation.)

It is possible to applaud Phantom, Chicago and The Lion King and all of those who have made them possible and bask in their success, but also temper that appreciation with caution.

While only a handful of shows each decade will even approach Phantom’s phenomenal run – Hamilton seems poised to be the latest to join that esteemed pantheon – and maybe some will run for only a decade, the impact has already fundamentally changed Broadway.

With a finite number of theatres, hovering at about 40 despite the openings and closings, these hits end up restricting the opportunities for new Broadway work. It’s great news for theatre owners, but limiting for works that might truly benefit from the awareness and opportunity that Broadway affords as a result of its legacy.

Unlike some countries, where we read about purpose-built theatres for each new extravaganza, Manhattan affords little space for new venues, especially in the theatre district.

The Shubert Organization announced, not so long ago, that it would not pursue a new theatre in the area because the costs were prohibitive. Meanwhile, the new venues coming to Manhattan are performing arts centres, designed to house a variety of work.

Only if works can set up in other cities with populations and tourism that approach those of New York, and only if the media affords comparable attention to that devoted to Broadway, might we see an expansion of large-scale work.

Perhaps Chicago, Boston, Washington DC and Philadelphia, to name but four, could become home to long-term work that doesn’t need to play Broadway to ultimately reach vast audiences.

We must accept that the model has changed, as Prince noted, and so change the opportunities for production accordingly. Even leaving aside significant concerns about pricing and accessibility, Broadway’s own success may be limiting new Broadway-scale work.

Ethan Slater and company in SpongeBob SquarePants The Musical (Photo by Joan Marcus)

‘Jukebox musical.’ For musical theatre purists, it’s a term of derision. For producers, it’s the promise of marketing the music of a well-known star, with songs that audiences already love and are happy to hear again. For songwriters, it’s a chance to have their work on Broadway, in some cases creating a new earning stream and in other cases even revitalising their careers.

But let’s forego our value judgments and even our commercial appraisals. What about the term itself?

‘Jukebox musical’ has been applied to a range of shows. Mamma Mia! used the songs of Abba in the context of a new story unrelated to the band’s history. Jersey Boys deployed the songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in recounting the group’s own history. Rock of Ages featured an array of 1980s rock songs in an original story set in that era. In retrospect, some now even consider revues to be jukebox musicals, including Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Movin’ Out.

The number and – don’t scoff – variety of these shows reveals that we’ve been collectively using the term too profligately.

After all, jukeboxes initially were designed to hold a wide array of music to be selectively programmed by those with spare change. Their capacity grew when the devices switched from vinyl singles to CD albums. But the underlying result was typically eclectic, with the patrons of diners and bars serving as their own DJs, in the era before that meant mixing and scratching, mingling existing recordings with new beats.

So while the horse has already fled the stable, and the expansive use of the term ‘jukebox musicals’ is likely to stick, it makes the most sense with a show such as Rock of Ages or the new SpongeBob SquarePants musical, opening in just over a week’s time on Broadway. The latter show features a score by, among others, John Legend, Panic! at the Disco, Joe Perry and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and David Bowie and Brian Eno. Yes, you heard me correctly.

That’s certainly a diverse jukebox but, it should be noted, most of the songs are original to the show (which I haven’t seen yet, as it’s still in previews), not tunes yanked from catalogues. Instead of mining the work of a single composer, the show opted for a variety of musical voices, rather than any singular style, yoked together by orchestrator and arranger Tom Kitt.

Another musical that deserves to be put in the ‘jukebox’ category, without judgment, would include Urban Cowboy, which combined pre-existing country tunes with original songs by Jason Robert Brown and Jeff Blumenkrantz.

So what might best serve as the proper nomenclature for those shows that take deep dives into the work of a singular composer or songwriting team? After all, we are in the age of personal music devices and streaming, where we commune with music one-to-one via headphones as we go about our day, curating our own soundtrack, with no jukebox required. The era of streaming subscription music services even negates the need, and market, for physical albums.

Even if the term is slightly old-fashioned, and I confess unlikely to catch on, I would place Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia!, Lennon, Good Vibrations, Beautiful, Movin’ Out and their kin under the rubric of ‘box-set musicals’, invoking those multi-disc packages that allowed both avid fans and budget-conscious newbies to really explore the work of a single artist or band.

It’s a vastly more accurate term for most of these shows, and even boasts its own – admittedly snarky – theme song, Box Set, from the band Barenaked Ladies. Some sample lyrics from said song:

“I never thought words that like product / 
Could ever leave my lips / 
But something happened to me somewhere 
/ That made me lose my grip / 
Maybe it’s a lack of inspiration
 / That makes me stoop
 / Or maybe it’s a lack of remuneration / 
I can’t recoup
 / But if you want it folks, you got it / It’s all right here in my box set.”

Does theatre have room for distinguishing between jukebox and box-set musicals? I think so. After all, they’re not going away, so we might as well give them their due. And if SpongeBob really hits, its multi-composer approach may prove very popular.

For producers, however, it will become ever harder to come up with new box sets, as all of the best-known catalogues are snapped up, for good or ill. Though, come to think of it, a Barenaked Ladies musical could be lots of fun.

Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub in The Band’s Visit (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

If drama is, according to one of its dictionary definitions, “a state, situation, or series of events involving interesting or intense conflict of forces,” then one could say that several shows in New York right now – two of them being Broadway musicals – are undramatic.

The Band’s Visit, which opened last week, is the story of an Egyptian police band. Due to confusion surrounding the similar pronunciation of two Israeli towns (for those who don’t speak Hebrew), the band ends up in the wrong one and is forced to stay overnight in a tiny desert community with no hotel.

There are personal interactions, friendships are born, a hint of romance, but barely a whisper of the kind of Middle East conflict that fuels the play Oslo and so much conversation about that part of the world. Indeed, the Band’s Visit may be the most apolitical piece of fiction about the Middle East ever devised – which is, of course, its own kind of political statement.

Come from Away, which opened in the spring (full disclosure: my wife is one of the producers) is the story of aeroplane passengers bound for New York on 9/11 who were diverted to the tiny town of Gander, Newfoundland when the attacks resulted in the closure of US airspace.

Not unlike The Band’s Visit, this fact-based story is about people arriving in a location that wasn’t part of their itinerary and how they are taken in by the locals. Unlike what most might anticipate for a 9/11 story, the horror of the day and those after it are somewhat distant; the show does not seek to put its audiences through the pain of the events once again or consider the ramifications of terrorism.

In terms of significant action, very little happens overtly in these musicals. They are small slices of life, prompted by error or tragedy. But having watched The Band’s Visit twice (I saw its original Off-Broadway run as well) and Come from Away once, I can attest to the enthusiasm with which audiences appear to genuinely embrace the shows. I have a deep appreciation for the reminder of humanity’s best impulses that they evoke in me. But even trying to delineate a plot does them a disservice.

Jenn Colella and company in Come From Away (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

Also on stage in New York is Richard Nelson’s Illyria, a play based upon a slice of theatrical history; namely the earliest days of the New York Shakespeare Festival, now known as The Public Theater.

It focuses on a moment of crisis in the company’s early years, when it appeared that the primary director might be defecting. Yet, the show’s mood is one of consideration, reverie and even melancholy rather than the sound and the fury one might expect from young artists such as Joe Papp and Stuart Vaughan. In tone, it is as if the Apple family, from Nelson’s famed quartet of plays, were having dinner to discuss forming an amdram troupe.

While all of these shows were developed over several years, it is worth noting that these gentle stories of kindness, camaraderie, sympathy and decency have arrived at a moment when American life on the public stage is fraught with drama – a time when the moods of many citizens are often inflamed to anger or despair by a single tweet from the White House’s Oval Office.

While I have read that horror films are often popular in times of national crisis, that they offer a safe catharsis that provides a release valve for anxieties, these shows seem to be the opposite. They offer a respite from the onslaught of news and opinion, not by suggesting that we tap our troubles away like a light musical, but rather that we remember the things we share, instead of the things that tear us up or tear apart.

Tectonic Theatre Company’s Uncommon Sense (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Attending last week’s opening night of Uncommon Sense, a new play about people on the autistic spectrum, I was delighted to see the following message under the cast listing in the show’s programme:

“The production will be presented in a judgement-free and inclusive environment. At no point will anyone be shushed or asked to leave due to noises, movements, or behaviours related to a cognition or developmental disability. The Sheen Center is committed to welcoming audiences of all abilities and appreciates your support in that commitment.”

For a show about neurodiverse people, this certainly made sense and distinguished the production from relaxed performances. Those specifically designated performances will temporarily alter a production, particularly lights and sounds, to better accommodate audience members with autism, while making others aware of their intent.

While the show is running at the Sheen Center, it is a creation of Tectonic Theatre Project, the company known for creating such works as Gross Indecency and The Laramie Project.

I wondered whether this approach to audiences just applied to the run of Uncommon Sense, and whether it was a policy of the Sheen Center, of Tectonic or mutually determined by both. Will it apply to future Tectonic shows?

I asked Tectonic’s founder and artistic director Moisés Kaufman, who wrote: “There was never any question that this play was going to make its performance inclusive of the audience which it is portraying. The Sheen was on board with that from the very beginning. As for inclusion, it is a core value of the company. We want everyone to experience our plays and we will always strive to make that possible.”

Less than a week after I saw Uncommon Sense, I saw a second announcement regarding the welcoming accommodation of audiences with disabilities, this time coming from the Broadway League, representing its members who operate theatres on Broadway. By the summer of 2018, all Broadway theatres will have equipment in place to make captioning services and audio description available at every performance for any audience member free of charge.

Using voice-recognition software, the services will be automated so that shifts in timing from performance to performance will be matched by the services. For Broadway, this will signal an end to blind or low-vision audiences and deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences being offered only a handful of performances each year that accommodate them. For each new production, services will become available approximately one month after opening, allowing for new programming for each show.

Making theatre fully and consistently accessible for all of the approximately one in five Americans with a disability will remain an ongoing challenge. Disability, after all, is a vast catch-all phrase which encompasses a wide range of physical and cognitive conditions.

But if more theatres commit to inclusion as Tectonic has, if touring houses and regional companies follow the lead of Broadway theatres – and if funders at last recognise the necessity of supporting such efforts – not only will there be less stigma for audiences with disabilities, but a wider audience base will become available. Accessibility really can be a two-way street if theatres stop and think about it.

As a reminder, however, that theatre needs to focus on accessibility on both sides of the proscenium arch, so to speak, Uncommon Sense also featured a cast member with autism (the show’s married authors have an autistic family member as well).

Additionally, the Indiana Repertory Theatre’s current production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time features Mickey Rowe, an actor on the autistic spectrum, in the central role of Christopher, quite possibly the first such actor to play the part.

Maybe these advances in diversity will lead us to the day when audience members with disabilities can regularly experience performances by professional artists with disabilities. Perhaps with authentic casting, theatres will prompt yet more young people with disabilities to know that theatre is viable career option for them too.

Madison Ferris, Sally Field, and Joe Mantello in The Glass Menagerie (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Sam Gold’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie produced a wide range of critical responses when it opened last week, and that surely wasn’t unexpected. Based upon Gold’s 2015 staging for Toneelgroep Amsterdam, it is a radically deconstructed version of the play, different in look and feel than most (presumably) of those that came before it.

Where Gold’s staging likely differs from the vast majority of its predecessors is in the director’s decision to cast Madison Ferris, an actor with a mobility disability (in her case deriving from muscular dystrophy) in the role of Laura. Williams’ text certainly made clear that Laura had a mobility disability, but it has been traditionally played with a limp, or perhaps a leg brace.

Ferris uses a wheelchair, on stage and in daily life. There is no question that the physicality of Laura in this version is different than what Williams’ described, but so is much of the production. The casting of Ferris, like any other element of the production, is certainly fair game for critical consideration. But some of the language that emerged in critics’ efforts to talk about Ferris’ performance is striking.

We read that Laura, or the actor who plays her, is “physically challenged”. She has a “physical handicap”. She is “wheelchair-bound”. She “suffers” from muscular dystrophy. That these terms are largely eschewed by the disability community, which finds such terminology patronizing, insulting, archaic, misinformed or some combination of all four, seems to have escaped many writers (these examples are all from different reviews, from major outlets) and their editors.

Another review, after explaining how Ferris negotiates a set of steps with some help from other actors, describes the act as “an agonizing process, painful to watch, and a forceful symbol of the physical burden Amanda has to shoulder”. Still another wonders, “Why is Ferris’ disease called upon to generate a spectacle?” One critic says that the casting “blurs the boundary between character and actress.”

Performers with visible disabilities are rarely seen in the commercial world of Broadway, with notable exceptions being the Deaf West Theatre productions of Big River (2003) and Spring Awakening (2015), the latter casting Broadway’s first wheelchair-using actor. So the unfamiliarity that arts journalists now display regarding how they write, or speak, about disability is perhaps understandable, but that doesn’t excuse it.

To declare someone with a disability a burden on their parents, no matter the circumstance, is judgmental ableism. Does a disability that blurs the line between actor and role blur it in some undefined way that all other acting performances manage to escape? How can someone be “wheelchair-bound” in a production where the actor and character regularly move in and out of the chair?

While most, but not all, of the quotes above are from negative notices, they demonstrate the degree to which the writers are perhaps uninformed about or uncomfortable with disability. It reveals much more about them than about the production, displaying their lack of personal experience and perhaps even their fear of disability and people with disabilities.

In a week when British audiences have learned that Mat Fraser will play Richard III, and a call has gone out in the US theatre community seeking an actress of color with a mobility disability for yet another Glass Menagerie, artists with disabilities and those who advocate for them (and until recently, I was employed as the latter) have reason to be encouraged. But arts journalists owe it to the artists they cover, and the audiences for whom they report, to get up to speed with language surrounding disability. They can like what they see or not, but perhaps they would do well to avoid giving (often significant) offense where, I would hope, none is intended.

This post originally appeared in The Stage newspaper.

Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Carolyn McCormick in A.R. Gurney’s Family Furniture at the Flea Theater. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Playwright AR Gurney would have found great irony in the fact that his life was commemorated at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre this week because, despite his success, Broadway was never much of a home to him.

Only four of his nearly 40 plays ever made it to the Great White Way, and the longest run was for his 1987 work Sweet Sue, which eked out six months including previews. Gurney attributed that entirely to the presence of Mary Tyler Moore and Lynn Redgrave in the four-strong cast.

The playwright, known to one and all as Pete for reason long lost to his family lore, had a career that flourished Off-Broadway and in regional theatres. When he died in June at the age of 86, there were the appropriate obituaries for such a successful and prolific man of the theatre. But there were few critical surveys of his career, or think pieces about what his plays had meant, like those that followed the deaths of Edward Albee and Sam Shepard.

Gurney’s work was never groundbreaking, but it resonated strongly with audiences of many ages, even though it was steeped in the lore of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had dominated America for many years.

From the very start, Gurney was quietly, subtly rebelling against his genteel upbringing, simultaneously taking pleasure in the traditions that had surrounded him growing up while poking fun at them theatrically.

At Tuesday’s memorial, it was noted that his father took genuine displeasure at Gurney’s chosen career and the sentiments expressed in his plays. Despite that, until his father’s death, he was always billed as A.R. Gurney Jr., out of respect.

As it happens, I first had the opportunity to meet and work with Pete in 1984, when I was only two weeks out of college. He had only truly broken through in his career two years earlier, at the age of 52, with his comedy The Dining Room.

While he was fond of noting the critical reception for Scenes from American Life in 1971, it was The Dining Room that made his name, and allowed him to stop teaching full-time – that alternate profession had sustained him for two decades. He didn’t fit the model of an emerging playwright in appearance, demeanour or choice of dramatic subjects.

I didn’t quite realise this at the time, and I treated him as I treated every artist I met in my earliest years: with something approaching awe. But Pete’s warmth and genuine interest in every person he met led to a professional friendship that lasted the rest of his life, even though he was only three years younger than my dad. When I took a new job in 2003, he called me to say he was proud of me – the most paternal gesture I can imagine, and one that I will never forget.

Being a younger, Jewish man, Pete’s works held a certain anthropological fascination for me. As I watched his plays over the years, often with audiences that seemed to have stepped out of his plays – as did much of the crowd at his memorial – it struck me that they were coming to see their way of life satirised, criticised and – perhaps against their will – eulogised.

Pete’s particular gift, lost to the casual observer, was that he managed to do this without giving offence. I liked to say that his audiences recognised his characters as the family down the street, but never as themselves.

At the memorial, actor Holland Taylor, who had worked with Pete often, said: “He may have hung his heritage out to dry, but he was always dressed in it the next day.”

Pete’s greatest success was certainly his play Love Letters, which was translated into 24 languages and produced in 40 countries. In its simplicity, it was perhaps his most structurally daring play: two actors, seated at a table, reading from their scripts, never looking at one another until the penultimate moment, requiring no rehearsal, consisting entirely of a life-long correspondence of unrequited love.

What few recall is that Love Letters followed his uncharacteristic work The Snow Ball. While his plays typically called for a single set and perhaps six actors at most, The Snow Ball took place in multiple locations, called for a cast of about 16, and if memory serves, about 80 costumes.

Yes, I worked on his most technically complex play, and one of his least seen. At the memorial, director Jack O’Brien railed against a now-deceased Boston critic who had derailed its path to New York.

I will miss Pete always, and with that I will miss the Off-Broadway era that allowed him such great success. While his regional productions were legion, and presumably will remain so, we no longer see the days when plays would transfer from Playwrights Horizons, the late Circle Repertory or other not-for-profit venues to sustained commercial runs Off-Broadway, as Pete’s did.

Now plays either move on to Broadway or they finish their limited runs and are lost to New York, more often than not setting the stage for larger audiences and bigger royalties outside of the city than in it.

Pete didn’t mourn the passing of the world in which he was raised; he told me it was culturally bankrupt when I interviewed him in 2015. But with his death I mourn the passing of an era when plays didn’t have to move to Broadway in order to have a chance of survival in New York, and could find ongoing homes in smaller theatres.

Without that, I fear we lose the opportunity to foster emerging playwrights most fully, whether they’re 20-year-old tyros or, like Pete, 50-year-old overnight successes.

Game of Thrones: The Rock Musical – The Unauthorized Parody

Earlier today, I received an invitation to an Off-Broadway show called Game of Thrones: The Rock Musical – The Unauthorized Parody. While I appreciate the offer, I’m not putting the show on my theatre calendar.

The simple reason for this is that I’ve never seen Game of Thrones. So spending time with a spoof of something I know only from a deluge of comments on social media seems unappealing. Yet it’s only the latest in a line of shows which exploit similar territory, creating a theatrical sub-genre: a veritable unauthorized parody parade.

I can think of a few predecessors, including Thank You for Being A Friend (a musical Golden Girls spoof), Showgirls! The Musical!, Friends the Musical Parody, and Bayside! The Saved By The Bell Musical. I’m sure there are more.

I’ve never seen or read the source material to any of these (apart from Friends, which long ago lost its appeal), so I’ve not checked out the shows. Why put myself in the position of being the odd man out when all around me people would be having a good time (presumably) and getting all of the references?

I had an experience much like that at an entertainment called Drunk Shakespeare (I don’t consume alcohol) and attended only because a young former colleague was among its producers. But it simply reminded me of high school and college parties where I felt awkward and out of place.

Of course, anyone can do anything they wish to Shakespeare, whose works haven’t been in any way eligible for even a whisper of copyright protection for centuries. In general, though, even for works under copyright in US law, such as Game of Thrones, there’s a carve-out specifically for parodies. The law insures we can make fun of things, which is a pretty terrific protection.

That said, I can’t help wondering whether many of these shows are emerging less from a creative impulse but rather a baldly mercenary one – that the principle of fair use prompts the creation of works that exist mainly to capitalise on the underlying work. It’s entirely legal, but I have to ask whether it’s a case of commerce over creativity.

I love parody when done well. My friends at the Reduced Shakespeare Company have decades of experience spoofing broad targets – sports, books, US history and the Bible, among others. I thoroughly enjoyed a fringe show called Pulp Shakespeare several years ago, which rendered Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction in iambic pentameter. I regret missing the one-man show in which the performer enacted Macbeth in the voices of characters from The Simpsons.

Forbidden Broadway has become beloved for taking the theatre itself down a notch, using the tunes of the shows it toys with. But it’s worth noting that its newest incarnation, Spamilton, while taking on more than simply the show its title implies (one of its best jokes comes from a late appearance by a character from a 40-year-old musical), surely benefits from a strong, singular parodic association.

Terry Teachout, drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, has taken to referring to the endless churn of works based on movies that arrive on Broadway as “commodity musicals”.

My bias against some of these spoofs is that I fear they are commodity parodies, judging solely by their marketing. After all, if they must deploy lengthy titles for the specific purpose of ostensibly distancing themselves from their source while simultaneously exploiting it, they’d seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it.

I don’t begrudge the creators of these shows any success nor do I wish to condescend to their audiences. I’m not their target audience as shown by my unfamiliarity with the works they’re sending up.

But even though they may succeed, I suspect that in proliferation, they run the risk of saturating the market, much as movie parodies like Hot Shots and Scary Movie devolved from the heights of Young Frankenstein and Airplane and burned out the genre.

So I forgo certain parodies based on gut instinct, while admittedly delighting in others. For those I skip, perhaps I’ll take the occasional evening off to leaf through my volume of vintage MAD magazine spoofs. After all, even Stephen Sondheim wrote for Off-Broadway’s The Mad Show back in the 1960s. You never know where a parodist could end up someday.