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Forbes
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Lincoln Center Theater Celebrates Four Decades Of Impact And Artistry
The cast of Falsettos with director and co-writer James Lapine. From left: Christian Borle, Brandon ... More Uranowitz, Betsy Wolfe, Andrew Rannells, Stephanie J. Block, James Lapine, Tracie Thoms and Anthony Rosenthal Ruthie Ann Miles will never forget how she felt when she saw the Light In The Piazza at Lincoln Center Theater. At the time, she was a student at New York University and purchased a rush ticket. 'The minute the orchestra and harp started to play, I began to feel emotional,' says Miles, who ultimately made a big splash on the very same stage making her Broadway debut in the King And I, winning a Tony Award for her performance as Lady Thiang. 'I began to feel swept away. It really did solidify for me that this is what I want to do. This is the kind of storytelling that I want to project out into the world,' added Miles of the Lincoln Center Theater production. 'That I got to play here at all, to start my career and do the King and I as my Broadway debut, has spoiled me for life. Coming to Lincoln Center Theater is like coming home.' Last week, at Lincoln Center Theater's Ruby Jubilee Gala, the theater's great artists who have performed on its stages shared their own reflections of being swept away at Lincoln Center Theater (LCT). Over four decades, the theater continues to bring that sense of joy on its three stages: the Vivian Beaumont, the Mitzi E. Newhouse, and its newest stage, the Claire Tow. 'This theater is the closest we have in this country to a national theater, and working here, you feel the history of the artists that you are sharing space with,' said Gabby Beans, who performed in two LCT shows, the Skin Of Our Teeth and Marys Seacole. One of her favorite memories working there was during the Skin of Our Teeth when the cast first entered the Vivian Beaumont Theater. '19 of us were making our Broadway debut. And seeing the set for the first time was so magnificent,' says Beans. Then Lileana Blain-Cruz, our director, played Drake's 'Started from the Bottom'and we were dancing in the theater and it felt like we were living that song.' Just by sheer numbers, LCT's contribution to American theater has been colossal. Since they began in 1985, they have produced 243 shows with nearly 28,000 performances shared with 16 million audience members. The productions have garnered 342 Tony nominations, 87 Tony awards, and a Pulitzer Prize. Their current production, Floyd Collins, is nominated for six Tony Awards. 'But beyond numbers, and perhaps much more important, our incredible artists over the past 40 years have evoked in our audience countless laughs and tears, endless debate and discussion, untold moments of angst and joy, and, infinite sparks of inspiration and creativity,' said LCT's board chair, Kewsong Lee. Over the years, writers and composers like Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, Adam Guettel, William Finn, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lynn Nottage, Stephen Adly Guirgis, John Guare, Sarah Ruhl, Ayad Akhtar, J.T. Rogers, David Rabe, Suzan-Lori Parks, Michael John LaChiusa, Wendy Wasserstein, Jason Robert Brown, Terrence McNally, and on and on, have worked there. The epic celebration, which honored producing artistic director André Bishop, was fitting for a Lincoln Center Theater production. Directed by Jason Danieley, the one-night-only gala featured songs from LCT productions spanning four decades. The cast of Falsettos reunited to perform 'The Baseball Game.' Nathan Lane and Roger Bart sang 'Invocation and Instructions to the Audience,' from the Frogs. Victoria Clark performed 'Fable' from the Light In The Piazza. Kelli O'Hara did a dreamy rendition of 'Hello, Young Lovers.' Norm Lewis sang 'I'd Rather Be Sailing,' from A New Brain. After Marc Kudisch performed 'I Was Here' from the Glorious Ones, an emotional André Bishop, who is stepping down after 33 years, took the stage. As the fitting lyrics of that song go: 'All that I have are my skill and my name/And this chance/To make both of them known/This is my key to the portal/How I can leave something immortal/Something that time cannot make disappear/Something to say I was here.' Bishop shared that LCT provided 33 years of 'great happiness, occasional terror, and constant, constant amazement,' he said. He went on to pay tribute to LCT's first leaders, Gregory Mosher and Bernard Gersten, and saluted the theater's incoming leaders, Lear deBessonet, Bartlett Sher, and Mike Schleifer. 'And I thank all of you, all of you here tonight—artists, staff, board members, friends, members of the audience. We all play a part in American theater,' said Bishop. 'And aren't we lucky?' Lileana Blain-Cruz and André Bishop Fitting for the Ruby Jubilee, the David Koch Theater lobby was bathed in ruby red for the dinner ... More after the performance in the Vivian Beaumont Theater From left: J.K. Brown, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin From left: Jenny Gersten and Lear deBessonet
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How a Kentucky Man Trapped in a Cave Became a Broadway Musical
When Roger Brucker heard that the story of a trapped Kentucky cave explorer who slowly starved to death was being turned into a musical, he was doubtful. 'Aren't musicals supposed to be fun?' he thought. Brucker, 95, knows more than most about the doomed explorer Floyd Collins. He co-wrote the book 'Trapped!,' which is considered the definitive history of the events that unfolded during the so-called Kentucky Cave Wars, a period of rapid subterranean exploration in the 1920s when the state commercialized its extensive cave systems for tourism opportunities. Collins was an accomplished spelunker in 1925 when he entered Sand Cave alone, only for a 27-pound rock to pin his ankle and trap him underground. Over the course of 14 days, he died of thirst, hunger and exhaustion, compounded by hypothermia. Turning that story into 'Floyd Collins,' which made its Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater this week, was an exercise in bringing a bleak history to life through song. Tina Landau, the show's director, bookwriter and additional lyricist, was an undergraduate student at Yale University — decades before she conceived 'SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical' and 'Redwood' — when she came across a blurb about Collins in an anthology on American history. It focused on the media circus around the failed rescue, one of the most prominent national news stories between the two world wars. Landau, 62, said her perspective on the story was different from when she wrote the show, which premiered in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons, in her late 20s. She understands it now as an individual confronting his mortality. 'When we began, I was more attached to Floyd's hopes and dreams and aspirations,' she said. 'Now, I just personally am more invested with the journey that takes him to a place of surrender and letting go.' Brucker, who has seen at least 20 productions of 'Floyd Collins' since 1996, has firsthand experience interviewing some of the event's central characters, such as Skeets Miller, the young Louisville Courier-Journal reporter petite enough to descend into the cave and interview Collins directly. At a technical rehearsal, he spoke with the actor who plays Miller, Taylor Trensch, to stress the reporter's empathy in writing about Collins. 'He changed an anonymous farmer into a real live person called Floyd Collins,' Brucker said. Collins, of course, was not alive for an interview when 'Trapped!' was written, but Brucker has a good sense of how the man compares to the musical's character. Earlier actors in the role of Floyd, Brucker said, were too tall, too short, too leaden in affect or overly enthusiastic (Collins was generally reserved, he said, but lit up when talking about caves). But he thought the actor Jeremy Jordan, a Broadway heartthrob who recently starred in 'The Great Gatsby,' combined the best parts of Collins the character with Floyd the man. One cannot sing show tunes while beneath a rock, so Jordan spends the portion where he is resting on a tilted platform belting and yodeling. 'I thought he was the best Floyd character I've seen,' Brucker said. The musical's original title, 'Deathwatch Carnival,' came from the headline of the blurb Landau read at Yale, referring to the spectators and vendors who visited the mouth of Sand Cave while Collins was trapped inside. Journalists hungry for a scoop exaggerated details such as the size of the rock trapping Collins. As 'Floyd Collins' developed, Landau said, she and Adam Guettel, the show's composer-lyricist, leaned more into Floyd the man. The musical has been particularly lauded for its songwriting, with a final song, 'How Glory Goes,' that sees Collins accepting his death and imagining a heaven with his mother waiting for him. (The song is the name of the second studio album by Audra McDonald, who covered it.) When Landau and Guettel were in Kentucky doing research, Guettel was inspired by the cave to incorporate echoes from Collins's singing as a kind of chorus into the score. While in the state, they also came across 'Trapped!', written by Brucker and the historian Robert K. Murray, who died in 2019. The book, first published in 1979, was both a vivid and comprehensive account of the story, Landau said, which she used as a resource and inspiration. But she said turning all of that history into a musical required editing, like cutting the women who gathered at the cave mouth to propose to Collins. She synthesized a wide range of people, including Collins's extended family, into more central figures like Homer and Nellie, two of his siblings. The show is split between the cave's interior, represented by set design components that evoke the Mammoth Cave system, and its mouth where rescuers and spectators gathered. But although Sand Cave and the tight, muddy squeeze that trapped Collins are on the grounds of what is now Mammoth Cave National Park, it was not even a true cave. 'Sand Cave is presented as a giant panorama of stuff, and it isn't,' Brucker said of the show. 'You have to start thinking of it as the opening under a kneehole desk.' David Kem, who worked as a guide for the National Park Service leading tours of Mammoth Cave for more than 15 years, saw a recent touring production of 'Floyd Collins' in Bowling Green, Ky., in an audience that he said included many approving spelunkers. 'That's a unique challenge to try to convey the cave environment onstage, a place that's so cramped and otherworldly,' he said. (He had one nitpick: 'By and large, nobody walks around singing in the cave.') Kem said he appreciated that the musical presented a broader picture of Collins. 'It isn't flippant with the whole topic of Floyd's death,' he said. 'I think it does do him service.' A new edition of 'Trapped!' was published this month in honor of the 100th anniversary of Collins's descent into Sand Cave. Landau wrote the foreword. 'For me today, a hundred years after his death in Sand Cave, Floyd lives,' she writes. 'He lives in this book; in our musical; in our imaginations; in our fears and aspirations; and in the questions we continue to ask of ourselves, each other and of the universe.'
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
William Finn, Tony Winner for ‘Falsettos,' Is Dead at 73
William Finn, a witty, cerebral and psychologically perceptive musical theater writer who won two Tony Awards for 'Falsettos' and had an enduringly popular hit with 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,' died on Monday in Bennington, Vt. He was 73. His longtime partner, Arthur Salvadore, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was pulmonary fibrosis, following years in which Mr. Finn had contended with neurological issues. He had homes in Williamstown, Mass., and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Mr. Finn was widely admired for his clever, complex lyrics and for the poignant honesty with which he explored character. He was gay and Jewish, and some of his most significant work concerned those communities; in the 1990s, with 'Falsettos,' he was among the first artists to musicalize the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, and his musical 'A New Brain' was inspired by his own life-threatening experience with an arteriovenous malformation. 'In the pantheon of great composer-lyricists, Bill was idiosyncratically himself — there was nobody who sounded like him,' said André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. He presented seven of Mr. Finn's shows, starting at Playwrights Horizons in the late 1970s and continuing at Lincoln Center. 'He became known as this witty wordsmith who wrote lots of complicated songs dealing with things people didn't deal with in song in those days,' Mr. Bishop added, 'but what he really had was this huge heart — his shows are popular because his talent was beautiful and accessible and warm and heartfelt.' Mr. Finn played varying roles across his career, as a composer, a lyricist and sometime librettist. His songs often feature 'a wordy introspective urbanity,' as Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times in 2003. In 'A New Brain,' Mr. Finn seemed to distill his passion for the art form, writing, 'Heart and music keep us all alive.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Ghosts' Review: The Sins of the Father, Visited on Everyone
As if under the weather, Jack O'Brien's production of 'Ghosts,' the 1881 Ibsen drama about medical and moral contagion, coughs three times to get started. First, as work lights illuminate a handsome study representing the home of Helena Alving, the cast arrives in rehearsal mode: Lily Rabe carrying a slouchy bucket bag and Billy Crudup a copy of The New York Times. Levon Hawke grabs a mint-green script from the library table as Hamish Linklater and Ella Beatty run the opening lines of the play — tonelessly, as if feeling all of its 144 years. Then comes a restart. Now the scene between Linklater (playing Engstrand, an alcoholic carpenter) and Beatty (playing Regina, Mrs. Alving's maid) seems less perfunctory. They look at each other a little, instead of just their lines. Finally, as the work lights disappear into the flies, the scene is repeated and we are given the real, often remarkable, thing. The play's opening argument — for Regina is not just Mrs. Alving's maid but Engstrand's estranged daughter — is now fully polished: lit, costumed and performed, in the Lincoln Center Theater manner, to a high upper-middlebrow sheen. I don't know why O'Brien chose to place such a stock contemporary frame around the timelessly alarming 19th-century action. (The device returns briefly at the end of the show.) Perhaps he means his version of 'Ghosts,' which opened Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in an adaptation by the Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe, to honor the process of repetition and refinement by which old ideas become new again as they are brought to life by succeeding generations. Certainly his casting suggests that. Rabe is the daughter of the playwright David Rabe, whose work has frequently been produced in this building. Linklater, her partner, is the son of the theatrical vocal coach Kristin Linklater. Hawke's father, Ethan, played Macbeth and Hotspur here; his mother, Uma Thurman, played Mrs. Alving at Williamstown. Crudup has been a house star since 'Arcadia' in 1995. And if Beatty's connection to the company is less clear, well, she's a daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Enough said. But productive inheritances are the opposite of Ibsen's story. Written just after 'A Doll's House' and before 'An Enemy of the People' — each recently revived on Broadway — 'Ghosts' is in some ways the most unsparing, neither offering its heroine escape nor, in the end, leaving her a heroine at all. Instead, it dramatizes the moral turpitude that, with the dour assistance of church and society, represented here by Crudup as the oily Pastor Manders, is passed inescapably from parent to child, pulpit to pew, century to century. Even Mrs. Alving, who in Rabe's riveting performance is a fierce advocate for freethinking, is ultimately, and with Ibsen's apparent approval, brought low by it. The scandalous books on her library table — 'Madame Bovary,' 'On the Origin of Species' and, anachronistically, the 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' — cannot protect her from the kaleidoscope of ambient hypocrisy we call convention. Give her credit for trying, though. Forced as a girl to marry a wealthy pillar of the community who was secretly an incurable reprobate, she finally, as a widow, freed herself from his grip. His money she has diverted to an orphanage being built in his name, as if to forever perfume his reputation. Their son, Oswald, has likewise been diverted; she sent him abroad when he was 7, thus sparing him his father's depravity. Or so she thinks. But as the play begins, Oswald (Hawke) has returned, now 25, with the depravity having found him anyway. Knowing nothing of his father's infidelities, he has inherited their fruit in the form of congenital syphilis. Oswald is thus one of the play's living ghosts, restless and doomed. But even with just five characters, Ibsen invokes many others, spun out in an astonishing feat of dramatic construction. Oswald falls for Regina, Regina rebuffs Engstrand, Engstrand all but blackmails Manders, Manders blames Mrs. Alving for everything. Incest, euthanasia and fire insurance come into it. Some of this tips dangerously close to melodrama. But especially in the scenes between Manders and Mrs. Alving, the crackling argumentative heat of Ibsenism dries out any dampness. That you root for her and disdain him, even as you learn of their own secret past, does not make the fight feel unfair. He has the weight of society on his side; she has merely her wits. Saying things like 'I think you are, and will always be, a great baby, Manders,' she voices something we still want voiced today, if less to priests than politicians. Except that she doesn't say it here. That line, from the first English translation of the play, by William Archer, is fatally softened in O'Rowe's adaptation as 'You have such an innocence in you, Pastor.' Nor is that example an outlier. Of society's rigid, stifling morals, O'Rowe has Mrs. Alving complain, 'You only have to pick up the paper and there they are confounding and blinding and overwhelming us.' Though I don't read Danish, I do read English, and Archer's version is much richer: 'Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea.' That O'Rowe's is a prosy 'Ghosts,' avoiding even the word 'ghosts' itself, might not have mattered on its own. But in favoring the play's (iffy) logic over its (haunting) poetry, and denying Manders the vigorous invective of a petty tyrant, it creates an imbalance that Crudup can only finesse. Rabe's Mrs. Alving is clearly the winner on points, even if Ibsen undermines her in the final scenes, suggesting that she, not her husband, brought disaster upon everyone, by prioritizing her will over the world's. Distasteful though that is, it's good drama, and 'Ghosts' remains a provocative, engrossing work, to which O'Brien's production does justice. It also does justice to the idea of provocative, engrossing work in the first place. 'Ghosts' is the 14th and presumably final collaboration between O'Brien and André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater's producing artistic director, who is stepping down at the end of this season after 33 years with the company. Their notable productions of Hellman, Stoppard, Shakespeare and others have earned them this warm valedictory moment. And yet not totally valedictory. As 'Ghosts' demonstrates, men's imprints do not fade so easily. And nothing is ever as haunted as a stage.
