Ricky Falbo and David Rosenthal in Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Photo by Dan Norman)

The day before the new musical Diary of a Wimpy Kid began previews at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, a headline in the St Paul Pioneer Press asked whether it was “bound for Broadway.” A month before the new musical Anastasia, based on the animated film, begins previews at Hartford Stage, the trade publication Variety (among many publications) has announced that it “aims for Broadway next season”. The list of shows reportedly headed to Broadway goes on.

That’s not to suggest that these shows won’t reach Broadway, especially as they already have commercial producers attached. But at this point in time, every new musical one hears about is headed to Broadway, whether implicitly or explicitly. No one seems to ever announce plans to write or produce a new musical and accompany it with the statement “bound for regional theatre.” That doesn’t have the same marketing zip or overall ambition.

There are nuances to the construction of these declarations. ‘Going to’ has a more definite implication than ‘aims for’. ‘Bound for’ has lots of wiggle room. But the message is clear: that people associated with the show have designs on the commercial realm of New York’s 40 theatres designated as Broadway houses, with all of the media attention and awards potential that entails.

For regional theatres, having a show reach Broadway is a feather in their cap, as is, of course, winning awards in Manhattan. Even shows that don’t run very long or succeed commercially are still touted for years as having made the trip in companies’ marketing materials, as a badge of honour. It’s more concrete than reminding people that they may have loved the show in their hometown, and no one necessarily cares about how much the theatre made (or in certain cases, lost) on the New York venture.

Of course, here in the city, Off-Broadway companies do their best to tamp down even rumours that they might have a show headed to Broadway until it’s a done deal. There’s certainly no stopping fans and journalists from guessing what might happen, but it seems that Off-Broadway companies want to keep the clamour to a minimum for fear that a hit show might not ultimately transfer, since that would be perceived – unfairly – as a failure. In contrast to regional theatre, where no one seems to check the stats, lots of people keep score on such things here in New York, some with regret and some with schadenfreude.

With the 2015/16 Broadway season having come to an official close just last night, thoughts inevitably turn to what will in fact be Broadway’s new productions in the coming year. There are a handful of firmly committed projects, both new and revivals (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Falsettos, Groundhog Day and Les Liaisons Dangereuses among them). The industry newsletter Theatrical Index lists 52 shows under ‘future Broadway plans’, some circling for a theatre, some still nascent, some for even later seasons. In only a few days, the musical Dear Evan Hansen will open at Off-Broadway’s Second Stage and it has had Broadway buzz behind it since it played at Washington DC’s Arena Stage. Once the critics weigh in starting Sunday night, it could shortly appear in ‘now playing Off-Broadway’ lists as well as ‘coming soon on Broadway’ rundowns. The landscape can change that quickly.

The company of Dear Evan Hansen at Second Stage (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

I have to say I lean towards the approach favoured by Off-Broadway theatres, rather than those of regional companies or commercial producers trying to gin up interest: just do the show, just let the play be the thing. Let audiences enjoy on its own merits, rather than have everyone thinking about its future. If it books a Broadway house, if it actually is produced there, that’s great, and be sure to let me know. But in the meantime, for the good of the projects and the artists involved, respect and appreciate shows where they are and for what they are, not solely for what they might be.

Lanford Wilson

Exiting the subway at Christopher Street, turning south on Seventh Avenue, my eyes always turn to the brick building on my left, with the word “Garage” inlaid near the peak of its low-rise roof. The site of restaurants for the past two decades, currently plastered with a “For Lease” sign, this building always triggers the same series of thoughts, in more or less the same order: What a shame. Circle Rep. Balm in Gilead. Lanford Wilson.

I most recently walked by this location seven days ago. As I thought about Lanford, I was prompted to Google how long it has been since the playwright had passed away. As I write, it is five years ago to the day. I barely knew Lanford personally (I spoke with him a few times in the early 90s, and interviewed him in 2008), but I knew many of his plays, and I find myself missing him and his work.

Danny Burstein and Sarah Paulson in Talley’s Folly

In New York, there have been two revivals of Wilson plays in recent years, both in 2013: The Mound Builders at Signature Theatre and Talley’s Folly at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre. But prior to those runs, you have to jump back a decade to find significant Manhattan productions of Wilson’s work, when he was a Signature playwright with a season devoted to his plays. There has not been a Wilson play on Broadway since 1993, when Redwood Curtain played a short run.

I find myself wondering whether Wilson – Pulitzer Prize recipient, Obie Award-winner, three-time Tony nominee – has fallen out of favor. It happens to some authors, perhaps more than anyone realizes: after several Broadway failures, Edward Albee faded somewhat in the 1980s, only to roar back as one of the nation’s most admired playwrights in the mid-1990s; late in life, Arthur Miller was perhaps more acclaimed in London than on New York stages, but he has rebounded in critical and popular opinion.

Looking at the list of upcoming Lanford Wilson productions on the website of Dramatists Play Service, which licenses his work, one finds two “pages” of his plays, a seemingly healthy list. But it’s worth noting that of the nearly four dozen planned productions, only two are by professional companies, both of those being Talley’s Folley, probably Wilson’s most popular play, due in part to being a two-character, single-set play. Of the non-professional productions, the most-produced play is The Rimers of Eldritch, which requires a company of 17, ideal for high schools seeking large-cast plays.

Swoosie Kurtz, Richard Thomas, Jeff Daniels and Amy Wright in Fifth of July

I have many distinct memories of seeing Lanford’s plays, though oddly enough, I first became aware of his work because his first significant success, The Hot L Baltimore, which ran for more than 1,000 performances, was turned into a short-lived sitcom in 1975. Lanford had nothing to do with the show and didn’t much care for it, but as I once told him, it prompted me to find a copy of the script of the play, so it had a small lingering impact on at least one impressionable youth; surely I was not alone. A few years later, I saw Christopher Reeve (succeeding William Hurt; preceding Richard Thomas), Swoosie Kurtz and Jeff Daniels on Broadway in Fifth of July. I was introduced to Talley’s Folly in a production at the Philadelphia Drama Guild, with an actor named Jerry Zaks as half of the cast. I was mesmerized by the landmark Steppenwolf-Circle Rep revival of Balm in Gilead, directed by John Malkovich and featuring Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf, Terry Kinney and Giancarlo Esposito, among many others. I did publicity for a production of Serenading Louie at Hartford Stage during my time there.

Lanford Wilson outside Circle Rep

It is worth noting that Lanford was also one of the four founders of Circle Rep. While it’s hard to perpetually recall the broader legacy of a defunct theatre company and those who created it, it’s worth noting that among the plays produced by Circle Rep during its 20 year lifespan, above and beyond Wilson’s own, were Craig Lucas’s Prelude to a Kiss, Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, Jon Robin Baitz’s Three Hotels and William M. Hoffman’s As Is.

Five years after his passing, some 20 years after his period of greatest success and productivity ended, what will be the legacy of Lanford Wilson? Will he live on only at high schools, colleges and community theatres – while that is certainly perpetual life? Is he already seen as a writer of his day, like Maxwell Anderson or even William Inge, remembered more in history books than in professional production? Or will it take just a single, significant production to prompt artistic directors and literary managers to reread his many works and begin mining his trove of plays once again?

I hope it’s the last scenario, because for all of Lanford’s plays that I’ve seen, there are plenty more that I only know from the page. But whether set among the denizens of the grungy New York of the late 60s and early 70s, or on the Talley family property in Wilson’s native Missouri, his plays evince a compassion for the foibles, flaws and eccentricities of humanity that I like to think transcend their era, and put me in mind at times of Horton Foote, not in subject or tone, but in spirit.

There’s no plaque on that building at 99 Seventh Avenue South to mark the work that began life there and ultimately the production those plays means more than a small metal plate attached to the brick of yet another restaurant. Nonetheless, I’m going to reroute my walk to work today to pass the building once again as a small tribute to Lanford Wilson, and hope that his work will be returned to professional stages very soon, not to supplant the essential new work to which he was himself devoted, but to sustain the voice of a quintessentially American author, but to remind theatregoers of the lives of the Talley family (beyond just Matt and Sally) and the residents of The Hot L Baltimore.

Empty display cases at the Longacre Theatre (Photo by Howard Sherman)

The fact that Nerds, a musical about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs which has been in development for a decade, cancelled its Broadway run less than a month before its first preview, shouldn’t be entirely shocking. After all, the marquee of the Longacre Theatre, where it was to begin performances, still carried the logo for Allegiance, the musical that closed there in February. At 5 pm on March 8, the day of the announced cancellation, the lighted display cases on the front of the building were empty and dark.

By the same token, the box office lobby was crammed full of equipment boxes for the show’s load-in. The cast was already in rehearsal. Presumably there was a nearly finished set somewhere, costumes on racks, and so on.

What happened to Nerds seems to happen every so often, but it’s one of the lesser discussed examples of a show going awry on Broadway. It doesn’t have the ignominy of closing immediately after its opening night (like the musical Glory Days) or the gossip page-worthiness of shutting down in previews (like the Farrah Fawcett vehicle Bobbi Boland). It’s not a case of a show that announced plans to happen, but never really came together, like Pump Boys and Dinettes did two years ago.

It’s not a saga like the cursed, headline-making musical Rebecca, twice underway and twice cancelled, with a con artist posing as the representative of a fictional investor behind its undoing. Because Nerds never began performances, it will never enter any of the history books or databases that would preserve its brush with Broadway.

Nerds was simply a lower profile show that, like a number before it, couldn’t survive the withdrawal of a key investor late in the game – or at least it stated that was the reason. The same thing happened to a revival of Godspell in 2008, although that one managed to get on three years later, with much of the same creative team and even a few of the same cast, albeit under the aegis of a different producer. But that’s more the exception.

The fate of Nerds is a reminder that for all of the bullish words about Broadway’s health – highest attendance! highest revenue! – many of the shows that get there may be doing so while playing a game of brinksmanship, racing the clock to get in the entire capitalisation by the legally mandated deadline. After all, if shows feature 10, 15, even 20 producers above the title, how many individual investors stand behind them, to make up budgets that can now be $4 million for a play, and in some cases four times that for a musical?

With Nerds, there are people who have suddenly been put out of work with no warning, there are people on the hook for expenses for a show that had its last full performance for a small invited audience on Wednesday in its rehearsal hall, there are creators whose dreams have been dashed. Nerds may quickly fade from the memories of the relatively few who were familiar with it, and it joins a list of other shows to meet the same fate. But it’s also an important reminder – in the era of juggernauts from The Phantom of The Opera and The Lion King to The Book of Mormon and Hamilton – of how many pieces have to come together to make a show a success, and just how fragile a new production can be.

The cast of Hamilton accepting the Grammy for best cast recording (Photo by Howard Sherman)

I guess my dash from row O to row A the other night pretty much erased any pretence of professional distance. Especially once Entertainment Weekly magazine saw fit to write about it.

My so-called sprint was occasioned by my attendance at Monday night’s live broadcast of the opening number from the musical Hamilton, which was being performed at its home at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York as part of the recording industry’s annual Grammy Awards. My seating shift was in response to a request for someone to fill an empty front row seat. I was happy to help out, and I received a round of applause for my selflessness.

Online, my efforts prompted a number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends to call me a “fanboy”, and while it’s not a term I’d apply to myself in middle age, there are worse things that could be said of me. Since I have always maintained that I am not a critic, seeing myself as someone of the theatre who sometimes writes about the theatre, I’m actually a bit reassured to find that my fandom is showing. Thirty-six years after I first went to work in a box office, there’s something rejuvenating about finding that I am indeed still an enthusiastic fan of theatre, although a long way from starstruck.

Hamilton has certainly been the most public expression of my fandom, as evidenced by the 48 Ham4Ham videos that I’ve shot on the street outside the Rodgers, having begun them simply as material for a blog post I wrote in August, and never stopped. Just this week, my cover story on the musical’s protean creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, comes out in Dramatics magazine, the only national US publication for high school theatre students. But I am not without self-control: I’ve seen Hamilton only twice, and I’ve never entered the ticket lottery for day-of-show seats.

By the standards of die-hards, I am an amateur. I have not committed the Hamilton cast recording to memory, like many fans who have yet to even see the show. While I would like to see it again at some point, I am not given to seeing shows numerous times; barring professional commitments, I rarely see any show more than twice, unlike fans I know and read of who happily see the same show dozens of times. My theatre fandom drives me to predominantly see that which I have not seen before. So little time, and so many shows.

As it happens, my front row experience, which also included witnessing Hamilton win the Grammy for best cast recording and a rapped acceptance by Lin-Manuel, came only four days after my latest opportunity to see perhaps my favourite stage performer work his magic once again. Bill Irwin, a gifted actor, clown, mime and so many other things, has returned to New York’s Signature Theatre with his sometime partner David Shiner for a second run of Old Hats, perhaps the 10th or 11th time I’ve seen Bill in a show of his own singular creation. I have been an unabashed fan of Bill’s since I first saw him in the mid-1980s; his particular gifts have the effect of making me grin the moment he walks on a stage (save for his career-changing turns in Albee’s The Goat and Virginia Woolf). Privileged to have first met him 15 years ago, when I greeted him excitedly by ticking off the litany of his work that I’d seen, like Kathy Bates in Misery, I take unbridled joy in seeing him at work – and now going backstage to see him along with an always intriguing mix of acting and circus royalty. I have long been a proselytiser to the cult of Bill, and I’m not in the least ashamed of it or subtle about it.

I think there’s something to be said for maintaining the enthusiasm of a fan even as the realities of raising money, balancing budgets, serving and collaborating with artists and staff, and so on, can abstract and distract from the very reason that drew us to work in the theatre in the first place. Given my career, I’m no longer the teen who stood in awe as James Earl Jones signed a programme for me, but I am also far from a jaded aesthete who deploys 35 years of theatregoing to decry the theatre of today. If you spot me by a stage door awaiting an audience with Laura Benanti or Audra McDonald, or at an event with camera phone at the ready (the better to feed my social media activity), don’t think less of me. After all, I’m still in touch with the kid who fell hard for theatre and never wanted to do anything else, and can still be thrilled by it and the people who make it.

Theatre needs fans not just in the seats, but in its offices, its rehearsal rooms and on its stages as well. After all, it’s not as if we’re in it for the money.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

“I have a guy.”

I used to hear this phrase a lot, from various people not in the theatre industry, who always seemed to be able to acquire tickets to sold-out Broadway shows with ease. I don’t hear it so much anymore, because now everybody has a guy, whether ‘he’ goes by the name of StubHub or Ticketmaster Fan-to-Fan resale or something along those lines.

In 2007, when New York State lifted caps on the amount that ticket resellers could charge over face value, long-standing opposition from the commercial theatre community had gone silent. Only six years after The Producers had introduced ‘VIP’ or ‘premium’ pricing, using the argument that these higher priced tickets would make it possible for productions and artists to realise more income via direct sales, most shows followed suit, with their sales success directly correlated to audience demand. Resellers jumped into the fray, more openly than ever before. But now, with the rise of automated bots that gobble up tickets for sale online, it seems to be getting even harder for the average ticket buyer to acquire seats at something close to a reasonable price, even from the official ticket outlet, in the already expensive Broadway arena, if they can get them at all.

In “Why Can’t New Yorkers Get Tickets?,” a report issued last week by the state attorney general, the results of which surprised no one familiar with what’s been generally evident for some time, it was affirmed that a combination of preferred sales that limited the number of seats actually made available to the public, along with mass acquisition of tickets by bots, were biting into ticket inventory in a big way. While there are laws in New York against the use of bots by resellers, and a few fines have been levied, it’s going to take a lot more scrutiny to police such sales. As it seems in so many aspects of modern life, the people determined to get a leg up on everyone else, even when their actions are criminal, seem to be further ahead of the technology curve than those chasing them.

Theatre is not alone in this struggle; the same holds true for rock concerts and sporting events. But any given theatre is so much smaller than those venues that the problem seems more pronounced, as does the heightened demand that drives prices up, a situation most apparent today with Hamilton, which is enjoying demand that’s comparable to those experienced, in my theatregoing life, by, among others, Cats, Phantom, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, the 1992 Guys and Dolls revival, Rent, Jersey Boys and The Book of Mormon.

So this isn’t a new story, even if it has been turbocharged by technology and made more apparent by the rise of online sales. It’s based in the fundamentals of supply and demand. Some theatre buffs might feel some small sense of pride that theatre is able to generate this kind of interest and desire. But in the process, it only emphasises how expensive theatregoing can be, even when only a few shows command eye-popping prices on the open market.

Broadway is a predominantly commercial enterprise, so it’s unlikely that capitalistic efforts will ever return ticket sales to something close to accessible for the majority; the real battle is over who gets their hands on the most significant part of the revenues being generated. However, just as dynamic pricing spread from the commercial realm to subsidised companies, one can’t help but wonder what’s happening when celebrities appear in regional houses, or when 200-seat theatres such as New York Theatre Workshop start selling tickets to Othello with David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig in the leads this fall. While NYTW made an effort to limit resales during its run of Lazarus by requiring photo ID to pick up seats, that will only go so far.

As someone who was extremely surprised when the commercial theatre industry ended its opposition to resale caps almost a decade ago, I certainly applaud efforts to put all ticket buyers on a level playing field and stem the tide of unbridled price hikes, both official and illicit. At a time when income inequality continues to divide America in so many things, it’s a worthy effort, though I fear a losing battle which has probably already had an insidious and deleterious effect on the perception of theatregoing as an entertainment option for all, even beyond the confines of Manhattan.

Somehow, some way, people with the means to do so will manage to get the tickets they want, when they want. They will always have a guy, even if their guy is now a silicon chip.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.

From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.

I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.

On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.

What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.

I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.

While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.

Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.

WestEndCon, anyone?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

It’s a reflex action for those in the arts to recoil and get angry when creative work is described as “intolerable blasphemies.” But it’s probably worth giving a small shout out to the America Needs Fatima organization as they protest the production of Colm Toíbín’s The Testament of Mary at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown MA. Why? Because amidst repeated variations of “blasphemy,” “blasphemous” and “blasphemies” in their rhetoric, the group is careful to call for “respectful but firm protest” at one point, and asks that people speak out against the show “legally and respectfully.” I hope that those who hear and choose to answer their call heed those cautions.

America Needs Fatima (ANF) has taken issue with The Testament of Mary before, both in its Broadway production and in a subsequent San Francisco run. They claim that their efforts helped cause the Broadway show to end early and that they prompted many to “turn away” from the San Francisco engagement. Of course, there’s no proof that either is the case. As someone who saw and admired Fiona Shaw’s Broadway performance as well as the play, I recall that it opened during the usual spring crush of new Broadway shows and, without sufficient critical praise, it was indeed closed quickly. But anyone who knows Scott Rudin, the show’s lead producer, knows full well that he wouldn’t back down from protests and his decision was entirely pragmatic and fiscal.

Fiona Shaw in The Testament of Mary on Broadway

For those who don’t know The Testament of Mary, or Toíbín’s book from which it’s drawn, it is a one-person play about Jesus’s mother, who recounts her son’s experiences both of faith and tragedy. It does show the character questioning the motives of some of Jesus’s associates and reacting with great distress to his crucifixion. While it is certainly does not comport with any of the gospels, it is a serious-minded imagining of what might have been her thoughts, rather than a satire or parody of religious issues, like the film Dogma or the musical The Book of Mormon.

ANF managed to get their newest protest noticed by The Boston Globe, which published an account of their efforts on January 21. The article, by Don Aucoin, spoke with Jim Petosa, artistic director of New Repertory and director of the production. It’s somewhat curious that ANF did not make their organization’s director available to Aucoin for comment, which seems pretty basic protest protocol when dealing with the largest newspaper in the region. As the Globe reported, Petosa and the company stand by the decision to produce Testament of Mary, and so the article simply presented the views of both sides as they were available.

However, there was the potential for the article to engender further protest, by bringing ANF’s view of the show to a larger audience. So I asked Petosa about the response since it appeared.

“There’s been more of a positive response from people,” he said. “I’ve gotten e-mails that say things like ‘I’ve been a devout Catholic all my life and I’m glad you’re doing this.’ We’ve gotten more people who are sympathetic than opposed.”

Petosa said that New Repertory’s staff has created a map to show where expressions of support and opposition were coming from, and it shows that there’s local support, with opposition coming from outside the greater Boston area. He observed, “Most of the negative comments are coming from people who couldn’t possibly get to New Repertory.”

I asked Petosa whether he had heard of any plans for in-person protests at the theatre and he said no, but commented, “They’d be more than welcome and we’d invite them in to see the production.”

Petosa chalks the communications against The Testament of Mary up to “a misunderstanding about the intent of the writer and the intent of the theatre,” saying that the goal of the company’s work for audiences was “to enhance their lives, not diminish their convictions.” He also ascribed the rhetoric against the show to being reflective of “the polarity of political discourse,” that it was “born out of orthodoxy.”

Petosa did acknowledge a recurring theme in some communications he’d received opposing the show, saying, “In a couple of letters, there were some intolerant but not surprising statement about Colm Toíbín’s sexuality, but that’s not pervasive. It is people equating blasphemy with homosexuality, revealing their own homophobia.” In one of its online documents about the play, during its Broadway premiere, ANF made a point of noting that it was “being performed and directed by open lesbians.”

The first previews of The Testament of Mary this weekend will overlap with the final performances of New Rep’s production of David Hare’s Via Dolorosa, and Petosa said he wished the two plays could have run concurrently for much longer. “They are thematically connected,” he noted. “They are pilgrimage plays, both journeys to Calvary. I’m eager to see how the dialogue around Dolorosa is affected by Mary, and the other way around.”

ANF’s website asks people to sign a petition urging New Rep to cancel their production, as is their right. But by using their own petition engine, rather than a third party site, it’s impossible to know whether the 30,000 signatures the group claims are genuine, repetitious, or merely coded. In any event, since I first looked at the page several days ago, the signature count is virtually unchanged, so there doesn’t appear to be a groundswell of support for their position.

So ANF will continue to express their opinions against The Testament of Mary, consistent with their past efforts against Taylor Has Two Mommies, Jerry Springer: The Opera and the artist Andres Serrano, among others. As long as they keep their efforts legal and respectful, even an activist with opposing views wouldn’t suggest that they aren’t entirely within their rights, because they are. But perhaps people in the arts community, and in theatre audiences, will drop a note to Jim Petosa and the staff and board of New Repertory, and congratulate them for being unbowed by ANF, and wishing them the best with their newest production.

Thanks to Jacqueline Lawton for her research assistance with this post.

Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts.

Bruce Willis in Misery (Photo by Joan Marcus)

It’s a tad too early to announce the emergence of a new trend, but two recent announcements suggest that there’s something brewing in the theatrical zeitgeist.

The announcements to which I refer are Quentin Tarantino’s repeated references to adapting his newest film The Hateful Eight for the stage, and Warner Bros Theatre Ventures’ announcement that Stephen Adly Guirgis will adapt the 1974 film Dog Day Afternoon for Broadway. I’m more sanguine about the latter than the former, because Guirgis is a proven theatrical talent who is likely to assert his own unique take on the true-life story that fuelled the Sidney Lumet film. While some have noted that The Hateful Eight is, if you strip away the profanity and slurs, the widescreen, and the protracted running time, really a western equivalent of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery.

The potential wave of which I speak is the movie-into-play adaptation, which seems poised to supplant the movie-into-musical and jukebox musical trends of recent years. This isn’t a brand new idea, and has actually been more common on British stages than American ones, with Chariots of Fire, The Shawshank Redemption, Cool Hand Luke and The Ladykillers among the examples. But when British exemplars have crossed the Atlantic, they haven’t set Broadway afire, with Festen and Elling being blink-and-you-missed-them failures. The Graduate ran for a year, but it closed more than 12 years ago.

Misery, now on Broadway in a different version than the UK one in the early 1990s, has held its own in the face of negative notices, buoyed no doubt by the Broadway debut of Bruce Willis, but its fortunes have been declining. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Time To Kill both closed particularly fast.

Experts will be quick to note that in many cases, the movie-to-play adaptations are often based on an original book from which the film and play have been adapted separately. But it’s usually the movie’s success and familiarity that prompts the theatrical version. The same impulse that has driven the trend for musical adaptations of movies seems to be behind these play efforts, with movie companies eager to exploit even properties that perhaps don’t lend themselves to musicalisation.

The problem is that drama into drama efforts often aren’t transformative enough to make the new stage versions compelling. When assembling songs into a story (like Mamma Mia!) or adding songs to one (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), there is inevitably a change in the source material. But the play into play paradigm doesn’t necessarily undergo the same kind of revision and rethinking – even though it’s essential to making great theatre. And of course without fundamental change, the inevitable comparisons are easier to make.

The best film into stage adaptations (The Lion King, Once) create something that is an altogether new way of looking at the preceding work. If film companies’ only goal is to generate more income from existing material, and to trade on our affection for it, then this incipient genre may well prove an unsatisfying one, as so many jukebox musicals and movie-to-musical adaptations have been before.

Having also produced Misery, Warner Bros’ choice of Guirgis is a heartening one, particularly if they give him room to let his own imagination and language truly create a new work for the stage, rather than a photocopy. While I never want to see them lured away for long from original work, I can only imagine what artists like Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Stephen Karam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mike Lew, and Tarrell Alvin McCraney could do with some classic and – better still – not-so-classic films. But only if it interests them creatively – not just for the money.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage, under a slightly different title.

Ian McKellen as King Lear (Photo by Simon Farrell)

Oh, British theatre, you’ve bested your American counterparts again, and you likely don’t even know about it. I should explain.

In late October, a new streaming service called BroadwayHD came online, to a flurry of press attention, likening the offering to Netflix or Hulu for the stage. As the holiday season often affords the opportunity to seek out online entertainment, I finally had the opportunity to peruse the offerings on the nascent BroadwayHD. To my surprise, I found remarkably little US theatre, let alone material from the Great White Way.

As of now, the relatively limited repertory of the service is comprised overwhelmingly of BBC offerings, tilted towards Shakespeare. Now, there’s no question that the selection is choice, featuring esteemed actors such as Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Juliet Stevenson, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and others, but the fact is, few of the shows on offer ever played Broadway.

Rifling through the categories of comedy, classics, drama and musicals yields a decidedly anglicised view of theatre. The category of musicals, which one would expect to be a strong suit, is the most American of sections, but also particularly thin, with only nine offerings, the most recent being Memphis and the oldest being Tintypes from 1980. One of the titles is the Bette Midler made-for-television Gypsy, which was never performed on stage.

That’s not to say there’s no value in the service, because I’m eager to explore some of these pieces – Daniel Craig in Copenhagen, anyone? But for now, it remains largely a US subscription-based version of BBC’s iPlayer with a cache of older titles. It also points out, once again, how behind US theatre is in adapting to the newly pervasive video reality, whether broadcast into movie theatres like NT Live is, or available on a mobile device.

I will always say that filmed theatre is not true theatre because it alters according to what the video camera finds. The live experience is unparalleled. But until all of the parties concerned – producers, writers, directors, actors, designers, craftspeople and crew – get together to hammer out an agreement that makes it possible for more US theatre to be recorded and distributed electronically, us Americans will be runners-up to our British colleagues (and soon our Canadian ones as well). Without that commitment, access to theatre will remain out of the reach of swathes of our population, for geographic and financial reasons.

Meanwhile, less attentive users of BroadwayHD will be left wondering why all of these ‘Broadway’ shows were performed with British accents.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

If the location of your office compels you to visit Times Square regularly, you are confronted at least twice a day (going to work and on your way home) by a crush of people, gaping tourists, perpetual construction and, of course, by opportunists dressed as cartoon characters, Marvel and DC superheroes, Star Wars figures and, here and there, barely dressed at all. The common reaction to all of this is to keep one’s head down and push through, muttering about the madness, wondering where all the people have come from and why they won’t get out of the way, and even entertaining a small incursion on the first amendment that might rid the pedestrian plazas of the tip-seeking fictional personages.

As someone who works in Times Square, I have taken an alternative perspective. I have elected to find it all very funny.

As a result, instead of looking away from the costumed hustlers, I look right at them, because at times this third-rate cosplay can offer some truly absurd tableaux. With my iPhone in hand, I record these bits of urban incongruity, posting them to my Facebook page as “Times Square Weirdness, my continuing series.” Instead of rushing across Times Square with my head down, I walk to my assorted destinations with a surveying gaze, my camera at the ready, hoping to catch Dora The Explorer dancing with Mickey Mouse, while three Spider-Men look on.

Were I a parent on holiday with children in tow, I’d likely take a less indulgent view of the situation. I have even gone so far as to offer a practical plan that might at least reduce the costumed populations (with no constitutional breach whatsoever). But in the meantime, I choose to find the whole thing deeply ridiculous and while I will not ever offer even $1 as a gratuity, and while in turn many of the “characters” quickly lift their cut-rate visages to foil my photos, I’ll chronicle Times Square Weirdness for as long as it lasts.

I should note that for all of the Elmos, Olafs, Minnie Mice and Spider-Man who appear daily (and even form packs), some characters (or costumes of said characters) appear only once or twice, never to be seen again. I guess some people decide it’s not really for them. I often wonder what happens to the costumes. But I try to save their appearances for posterity.

Here’s a scrapbook of some of my favorites.

“Come Closer

“Very Scary Minion”

“Cookie Monster Likes My Corn”

“15 Minute Break”

“Worst Mascot Ever”

“Wabbit Season”

“Rodent Infestation”

“Elmo Eats His Hand”

“Jesus Loves, Hulk Smash”

“Not Cast in The Wiz”

“The Spider of Liberty”

“The Demon Grinch”

“Chewbacca and The King”

“It’s No Use, Jim. The Balloons Have Got Him.”

“Homer”

“End Of Shift”

All photos © 2016, Howard Sherman