Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

A Los Angeles Theater Is Renovated, Relieving Headache-Inducing Quirks

From The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — Two months ago, Michael Ritchie, who was almost finished shepherding the renovation of the Mark Taper Forum here, woke in the middle of the night in a panic.

“In my waking up or in my dreaming I believed we had forgotten to design and put in bathrooms backstage,” Mr. Ritchie recalled. He drove downtown from his house in the Los Feliz neighborhood, walked inside, saw the bathrooms, wiped his brow and drove back home.

Mr. Ritchie, the artistic director of Center Theater Group, which runs the Taper, could be forgiven for having doubts about what could fit inside the distinctive, mushroom-shaped structure in downtown Los Angeles. Over four decades the building has become a cultural landmark, while its quirks have given its staff headaches. On Saturday the Taper will reopen with a revival of John Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves” after a yearlong, $30 million renovation that Mr. Ritchie predicts will solve those lingering difficulties.

Opened in 1967, the Taper was designed by the Los Angeles architect Welton Becket as part of the Music Center, the West Coast’s equivalent of Lincoln Center. Mr. Becket put the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Ahmanson Theater at opposite ends of a plaza and plopped the Taper between them. (The Walt Disney Concert Hall joined the center in 2003.)

Mr. Becket designed the center in the style of New Formalism, which emphasized geometric shapes. “The overall site plan of this rectangle, this sort of square and ‘let’s have a circle’ — I, frankly, think it’s not a lot more than that,” said Bob Hale, a principal at Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the firm that led the renovation. Though the Taper is considered one of Mr. Becket’s best works, Mr. Hale said, “it also comes with huge limitations that come from conceiving a building as a pure circle.”

And Mr. Becket designed the building not knowing who would use it. At one point it was considered for chamber music, or even grand jury meetings. Ultimately Ms. Chandler, the Los Angeles cultural leader, took the young theater producer Gordon Davidson to lunch at the top of her eponymous pavilion. As Mr. Davidson recalled, “She looked out the window and said: ‘See that round building? How would you like to rent it?’ ”

For 38 years Mr. Davidson was the artistic director of  Center Theater Group, which also ran the Ahmanson and eventually the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. The Taper became known for its thrust stage, jutting into a classical, semicircular amphitheater, which creates an especially intimate relationship between audience and performer. That design, Mr. Davidson said, was proposed by the theatrical designer Jo Mielziner, who consulted on the project (as well as Lincoln Center’s similarly shaped Vivian Beaumont Theater).

But the site is a case study in what happens when a theater is built without a tenant in mind. Packing the auditorium into a circular building left a tiny backstage and only a thin, curved hallway for a lobby. “I talked to the architect; I said, ‘My God, this lobby is small,’ ” Mr. Davidson recalled. “He said, ‘Well, it’s Southern California, people will go outside,’ forgetting about the rainy days and cold weather” — they do occur, however infrequently.

Bathrooms are a problem for many theaters, but four women’s stalls for a 750-seat hall is particularly egregious (two more were added later). As Mr. Davidson recalled, “I didn’t get any complaints about the plays — yes, I did — but the real complaint was, ‘Mr. Davidson, when are you going to fix the bathrooms?’ ”

There were other problems patrons never saw. Stagehands had to cart set pieces across the plaza on dollies, up five steps and through a door that was a mere 4 feet 10 inches wide by 7 feet tall. They still managed to carry in a Mustang (on its side), a bus (in three pieces) and the towering backdrop for “Angels in America.”

“Watching a show load into this building was like watching a snake swallow a rodent,” said Jonathan Lee, the Taper’s production manager for the last 20 years.

Mr. Mielziner designed several devices that were considered experimental in the 1960s but turned out to be annoyances. Most problematic was the treadmill, a 90-foot-long, 7-foot-wide wooden conveyor belt that curved around the back of the stage and could be used to allow sets to drift into the scene at the push of a button. But it has been dormant since 1970, when, while bringing out actors during a curtain call of “Paul Sills’ Story Theater,” Mr. Lee recalled, “the treadmill was almost louder than the thunderous applause of the audience.”

The backstage had a makeshift quality. Lights were poked through tiny slits in the ceiling, which prevented workers from seeing where they were pointing. The costume department was a shack in the middle of a hallway. And the outdoor reflecting pools leaked onto cars in the underground parking lot.

After Mr. Ritchie replaced Mr. Davidson in 2005, he and his colleagues decided to solve these problems, enlisting Rios Clementi Hale, the local firm that has also worked on a continuing Music Center makeover.

Mr. Hale and his team gutted and updated almost everything that was not concrete. To create more lobby space without disrupting the building’s circular shape, they went underground, taking out 30 parking spaces to create a stylized lounge with gold, curved couches and mosaics of mirrored tiles that fit the era in which the building was designed. And yes, there are more bathrooms: 16 stalls for women.

Backstage, flexibility was the mantra, as the designers nixed the treadmill, created a modern lighting grid, cleared out old air-conditioning equipment to allow space for a wardrobe room and widened the load-in door to 6 feet by 9 feet.

Though Mr. Lee is overjoyed to have better amenities, he is proud of what the old Taper was able to accomplish within its limitations. “Lots of plays with swimming pools,” he gave as an example. “Now, of course, we have a drain under the stage, so that when the pool leaks we don’t have to bail it out with a vacuum cleaner.”

Next on His Docket: A Supreme Challenge

From The New York Times

LOS ANGELES

LAURENCE FISHBURNE first read the one-man play “Thurgood” while flying last year from New York to Boston, where he was being honored as the Harvard Foundation’s artist of the year. After checking into his hotel, he walked down a hall lined with portraits of Harvard alumni and paused in front of one of them: Charles Hamilton Houston, a Harvard Law graduate who was Thurgood Marshall’s mentor. “I thought to myself, well, I really don’t have a choice about whether I should do this play or not,” he said.

Much of what Mr. Fishburne does — onstage, on screen and in life — is driven by intuition rather than deliberation. “Most actors are nervous, they’re timid, they find their way sideways into the role, they find every reason not to actually do the scene, they’d rather talk about it for a hundred years,” said Leonard Foglia, the director of “Thurgood,” which opens Wednesday at the Booth Theater. “Laurence is a very visceral person.”

Sheldon Epps, who directed Mr. Fishburne in “Fences” at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2006, said, “The first word that comes to mind is fearless.”

Mr. Fishburne’s impulses have led him to play a wide range of roles. He was a king (“The Lion in Winter”) and an ex-con (“Two Trains Running”) on Broadway. He received an Oscar nomination for playing Ike Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It” in 1994.

At a lunch interview in a Los Angeles cafe, Mr. Fishburne — who arrived on his BMW GS1100 motorcycle wearing jeans and a tight, black long-sleeve shirt adorned in tattoo art — recalled a high school field trip to Broadway to see James Earl Jones in a solo play about the black actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson.

“He was never mentioned in any classroom I had been in, and I learned a great deal,” he said. “I was inspired.”

Before reading George Stevens Jr.’s script for “Thurgood,” he knew little about Marshall’s early career as the civil rights lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that ended official segregation in public schools. “My only real knowledge of him was that he was the first black man appointed to the United States Supreme Court,” Mr. Fishburne said. “I thought that this would be an opportunity for me to educate people.”

Fittingly, Mr. Fishburne is taking over a role originated by Mr. Jones, at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in 2006. It’s a familiar path for him: in “Fences,” he played Troy Maxson, the role for which Mr. Jones won a Tony Award.

Mr. Jones decided not to continue with “Thurgood” and is now on Broadway in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Through a publicist, he declined comment, except to say that he admires Mr. Fishburne’s talents and wishes the production good luck. “Thurgood” is presented as a lecture at Howard University, where Marshall attended law school. Marshall, 83 years old and retired, takes the audience on a journey through his career, with a focus on his fight for integration.

Mr. Fishburne is 46, three decades younger than Mr. Jones but only a year older than Marshall was when the Brown decision was announced. “I hope to be able to play it with a kind of energy that he would have had at that time,” he said.

Mr. Fishburne had little experience with segregation. Though he was born in Augusta, Ga., in 1961, at about 4 he moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, a melting-pot neighborhood where he played with children from many backgrounds. “I learned tolerance at a very early age,” he said.

He does remember his mother dropping him at his grandmother’s house before flying to Atlanta to attend the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. Currently, in his home in the French Quarter of New Orleans (he also lives in Hollywood and New York), he keeps Jim Crow-era signs on the wall as a reminder.

Mr. Fishburne never went to college and shunned acting lessons, preferring to learn through experience, from mentors like Francis Ford Coppola (who directed him in “Apocalypse Now” and other films) and by emulating his idols, including Mr. Jones, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. “I work with my instincts,” he said. “I don’t have a process that I learned in an acting class whereby I break a script down or whereby I do a certain kind of research.”

Marshall is akin to Mr. Fishburne’s many mentor-teacher figure roles, among them Furious Styles in “Boyz N the Hood” and Morpheus in the “Matrix” movies. In these roles, through his poised demeanor and his precise, confident intonation, Mr. Fishburne exudes intelligence and moral authority. For roles at the other end of the spectrum, like the casino enforcer in the recent film “21,” he puts on a swagger and gives his voice more of an edge.

Similarly, Marshall, a world-class raconteur, would adapt his speaking style to his audience — exaggerating his drawl while in Southern courtrooms, for instance. “The voice he spoke to his wife with would have been very different from the voice he would have used when he was arguing Brown,” Mr. Fishburne said.

Toward the end of lunch Mr. Fishburne’s wife, the actress Gina Torres, showed up, and the couple cooed over their baby daughter, Delilah. Were the three of them all going home on the BMW? “Never,” Ms. Torres said. “She is never going to ride her daddy’s motorcycle.” Minutes later Mr. Fishburne put on his helmet, got on his bike and sped off toward Hollywood.

Give Their Attitude to Broadway

From The New York Times

DAVID JAVERBAUM and Adam Schlesinger are boyish-looking guys who grew up seven miles apart in Essex County, N.J. Each went to an elite Massachusetts college, moved to New York, got married, had two daughters and contributed to some of the wittier works of pop culture of the last decade.

But until they wrote the songs for the Broadway musical “Cry-Baby,” scheduled to open April 24 at the Marquis Theater, they had never met.

“He just seemed like a guy I would have already been friends with,” said Mr. Schlesinger, 40, best known as the bassist and a songwriter for the pop group Fountains of Wayne.

After John Waters’s film “Hairspray” became a Broadway smash, Mr. Waters and some producers got the idea to adapt his 1990 movie musical “Cry-Baby” — about a James Dean-style bad boy in 1954 — with all new songs. “Cry-Baby” is “ruder” and “more of a satire” than “Hairspray,” Mr. Waters said, and they wanted comic songwriters with an offbeat point of view.

Mr. Javerbaum, 36, best known as the executive producer of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, wowed the producers with his some of his lyrics. They paired him with Mr. Schlesinger, and the two hit it off.

Though they share a contemporary style of humor very different from that found in classic Broadway musicals, their intention was not to turn the medium upside down. “Even though we try to come up with absurd lines or wacky premises, we’re also sticklers for playing by the rules of theatrical songwriting,” Mr. Schlesinger said. “We want the rhymes to be real rhymes, and we want the characters to move forward.”

The two wanted the show to acknowledge the clichés of 1950s teenagers while avoiding outright parody, and not to use the meta-humor of shows like “Spamalot,” in which the characters are aware that they are in a musical. “It’s more like having word choices be odd or just coming at things with a fresh take,” Mr. Javerbaum said. “What if, for example, you took a classic song about a woman who says she’s crazy for you, and the twist is she’s actually crazy?”

The men were more prepared for Broadway than their day jobs might suggest. After writing two Hasty Pudding shows at Harvard, Mr. Javerbaum attended New York University’s graduate musical theater writing program, was a writer of the 2001 Off Broadway musical “Suburb” and won the 2005 Ed Kleban Award for most promising lyricist.

And while Mr. Schlesinger had never written a musical, his songs for Fountains of Wayne, including the band’s biggest hit, “Stacy’s Mom,” frequently feature well-developed characters.

“I’ve always had an easier time writing songs that are linear and have a story,” he said. “It’s atypical for pop songs. In theater it’s a requirement.”

Before joining “The Daily Show” as a writer in 1999, Mr. Javerbaum wrote for The Onion. (His satirical headlines included “U.S. Ambassador to Bulungi Suspected of Making Country Up.”) His current projects include a musical about the former interior secretary James Watt and a baby-book parody called “What to Expect When You’re Expected.”

Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show,” said what distinguished Mr. Javerbaum was “his ridiculously encyclopedic knowledge, combined with a rather ‘Rain Man’-esque ability to turn a phrase.”

Mr. Schlesinger says the constraints of Broadway songwriting appeal to him. A few years after graduating from Williams College, he and his Fountains of Wayne band mate Chris Collingwood used to sit at a bar in the West Village scribbling titles for songs on napkins and challenging each other to write them.

Mr. Schlesinger moonlights in the melancholic band Ivy and has written jingles and movie music, including the title song for “That Thing You Do!” “I can imagine him being equally comfortable with a tampon commercial or the national anthem of a fledgling Eastern European country,” Mr. Collingwood said in an e-mail message.

“The more specific an assignment, the easier it is for me to nail it,” Mr. Schlesinger said. “I’m a pretty good chameleon.”

In “Stacy’s Mom,” the 2003 hit about a teenager lusting after an older woman, the singer’s delusion is funny in part because it’s in the style of a straightforward ’80s love song like “Jesse’s Girl.”

Similarly, the songs in “Cry-Baby” combine the rockabilly style of Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson and early Elvis Presley with lyrics that are a little off track. The song “Baby Baby Baby Baby (Baby Baby Baby)” uses a simple chord progression, while the lyrics go a bit overboard. “It’s about playing with the tropes: something that musically sounds familiar right away but lyrically does something that you don’t expect,” Mr. Schlesinger said.

For “Cry-Baby,” the songwriters worked off an outline written by the book writers, Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell, and would start each song by coming up with a title or a concept. Sometimes Mr. Javerbaum would write the lyrics and e-mail them to Mr. Schlesinger. Other songs were completely collaborative. Though Mr. Javerbaum was originally hired to write lyrics and Mr. Schlesinger to write music, they now share a “songs by” credit.

During previews they’ve continued tinkering. “Girl, Can I Kiss You ...?” contained a line Mr. Javerbaum disliked: “It’ll serve to reveal all the things that you feel, like my braces, my tonsils, my lung.” He rejiggered it to “It can swish; it can swirl; it can twist; it can twirl; it can tickle the top of your lung.” “It’s more specific about the subject matter,” he said. “I also like the alliteration.”

“I imagine it’s like a grease monkey under a car with a wrench and oil: it’s like a paradise down there,” he added. “That’s what I feel like I get to do with words and writing these days.”

No Cellphones or Clapping

A letter to The New York Times about my entrance applause article, published July 8, 2007

To the Editor:

Re ''Enter Acting, Pursued by Applause'' by Zachary Pincus-Roth [July 1]:

In addition to directors and, less so, actors, a substantial number of audience members also object to entrance applause, finding it diverting and annoying as well as obsequious and self-congratulatory. I suggest that the now ubiquitous pre-curtain admonition concerning cellphones include a request that the audience withhold all applause until conclusion of the act.

H. Richard Penn

New York, N.Y.

Enter Acting, Pursued by Applause

From The New York Times

LAST spring, the cast of “The Drowsy Chaperone” found a mysterious sign taped to a backstage television monitor. The letters “TN” were followed by a series of tally marks that grew by one every night. Later, “TW” appeared, followed by more tally marks.

The actress Beth Leavel eventually learned that the crew had been charting the number of nights the audience applauded her entrance after her Tony nomination and, later, her Tony win. On Nov. 1, after 11 and 99 tallies respectively, she took the sign home as a birthday gift.

Entrance applause, the seemingly obligatory practice of clapping at the first glimpse of movie stars or Tony-honored performers, is an odd thing. While it provides a sense of communion between performer and audience, and an ego boost, it can also be disruptive to the show.

“ ‘That damn, damn entrance hand’ — you hear that much more often than ‘How are we going to get an entrance hand here?’ ” said Doug Hughes, director of the current revival of “Inherit the Wind” with Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy. “There’s something wonderful, by the same token, about an audience saying to a performer, ‘We’re thrilled to see you, we’re on your side, we wish you well.’ ”

Frank Langella, fresh from winning a Tony for “Frost/Nixon,” said he had mixed feelings about the phenomenon. “In the best of all possible worlds it really would be wonderful if there were no entrance applause and even no applause within a show,” he said. “But it’s part of the enthusiasm of American audiences.”

Most objections tend to come from directors. “Almost every good director I know doesn’t want it,” the producer Emanuel Azenberg said. “The whole rhythm of the play has to stop.”

Much of the applause goes to Hollywood celebrities, like Julia Roberts or Denzel Washington, when they make a rare foray into live theater, but it is not limited to them. In “Curtains”  David Hyde Pierce, best known for his role on “Frasier,” certainly gets it, but so do some of his Broadway veteran castmates, like Debra Monk and Karen Ziemba.

An entrance hand can signal that a performer has finally reached a certain threshold of recognition, as it did for Ms. Leavel, or for Kelli O’Hara, who started tearing up when she first got entrance applause after her 2005 Tony nomination for “The Light in the Piazza.” Ms. O’Hara said she was nervous about leaving that show for “The Pajama Game,” to play opposite Harry Connick Jr., but felt validated when she got entrance applause in previews: “I could do my work instead of having to prove myself.”

Sometimes entrance hands reflect the staging as much as the performer. In “Legally Blonde” the relatively unknown Laura Bell Bundy got applause even before her Tony nomination, partly because she is first seen grandly rising to the stage in a big pink box.

At “Spamalot” Monty Python fans go crazy at the introduction of the French Taunter, the Knights Who Say “Ni” and other characters from the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” on which the show is based, even props like a puppet killer rabbit.

Sets and images will get applause. Billy Crudup and Ethan Hawke did not usually get it when entering amid an ensemble in “The Coast of Utopia.” But the sweeping opening of the first play in the trilogy — when an ocean effect of swirling curtains is transformed into a stage full of serfs — frequently elicited applause.

Vladimir Konecni, a professor of psychology at University of California, San Diego, who has studied the psychology of theater, noted that while the “joiners” of the entrance applause are most likely engaging in a simple case of imitation, the applause starter is harder to explain. “Elitism is absolutely the issue,” Professor Konecni said. “I have good taste, I have money, I have sensitivity, I am rewarding myself mentally.” One feels a giddy sense of accomplishment, he said, for having made it into the same room as Kevin Spacey.

Another factor is the concept of “impression management,” in this case impressing your date. “You’re telling her, ‘I belong here, I know the rules,’ ” Professor Konecni said.

Those rules vary from place to place. John Mahoney, who played the father on “Frasier,” got an entrance hand regularly at “Prelude to a Kiss” last spring on Broadway, but it rarely happened when he was in “I Never Sang for My Father” in 2004 at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, where he is an ensemble member. Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s artistic director, said her audiences “would be less inclined to clap, because they feel like they have a conversation with our actors that’s kind of ongoing.”

On the other hand regional audiences are sometimes quick to applaud local favorites. Ever heard of J. Fred Shiffman? They certainly have in Washington. He frequently gets entrance applause at Arena Stage.

In London entrance hands are much harder to come by. Daniel Radcliffe in “Equus”? Nothing. Maggie Smith in “The Lady From Dubuque”? Not a peep.

Mary Parker, a spokeswoman for the National Theater, said she could not recall having heard entrance applause in more than 10 years with the company, even for Ian McKellen or Michael Gambon. Michael Billington, the chief theater critic of The Guardian since 1971, said he could remember only one recent example of it on the West End: for Nathan Lane, who flew in to replace an ailing Richard Dreyfuss in “The Producers” just before it  opened in 2004. 

Mr. Billington recently went to see Patricia Routledge, a popular British television star, in “Office Suite” at the Chichester Festival Theater. When she entered, he said, one person clapped, and was promptly shushed.

In Japan traditional kabuki theater is known for kakegoe: shouting at actors upon their entrance, and throughout the performance. When an actor strikes a traditional pose along the entrance, audiences will shout out his yago — literally “shop name” or theatrical studio — or lines of encouragement like “You’re better than your father!,” referring to the tradition of passing roles down through the generations.

Kakegoe makes up for the nonexistence of curtain calls. “There’s a saying in kabuki theater that if you wait until the end of the performance, it’s too late,” said David Furumoto, who teaches theater at the University of Wisconsin.

Early-20th-century comedies were staged to amplify a star’s entrance applause, as supporting characters would discuss the lead character before the star finally entered in a flourish. Even Shakespeare’s actors would take bows as the audience applauded their arrival.

In presentational styles like these, entrance applause is part of the experience. But in more naturalistic works it can be disruptive. The critic and former artistic director Robert Brustein, now a senior research fellow at Harvard, said he could see how adherents of Stanislavsky’s acting system would disapprove. “You can get jolted out of your hypnotic state that helped you in developing a character,” he said.

Richard Thomas, best known as John Boy on “The Waltons” in the 1970s, gets it on tour in the jury drama “Twelve Angry Men.” “It’s easier to enter onstage as a character when they’re not recognizing you as a performer,” he said. “For the actor Richard Thomas, it’s entrance applause. For Juror No. 8, it’s ‘What’s that?’ ”

Mr. Thomas said he savors the handful of performances in recent months in which he didn’t get it. “The play really begins the way it’s supposed to begin,” he said, “which is 12 strangers walking into an absolutely silent room.”

Actors and directors grapple with how to handle entrance applause and sometimes try to manipulate it. In “Julius Caesar” on Broadway the director Daniel Sullivan added a short, silent stroll across the stage by his star, Denzel Washington, so his entrance applause did not disrupt the performance.

“The genius of it,” said Mr. Washington’s co-star Colm Feore, “was being modestly straightforward about the fact that it’s going to happen and preparing for it, so we never got derailed.”

Paula Schwartz contributed reporting.

No Smoking in the Theater, Especially Onstage

Published in The New York Times

"Hand me a cigarette ... lover,” Martha says to her conquest Nick in the second act of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The stage directions then read: “He lights it for her. As he does, she slips her hand between his legs.”

This scene cannot take place as written in Lincoln, Neb.; Colorado; Scotland; or, starting April 2, in Wales. Smoking bans are so strict in these places that actors cannot legally light even herbal cigarettes onstage.

In Colorado three theater companies — the Curious Theater Company and Paragon Theater, both in Denver, and Theater13 in Boulder— have gone so far as to sue the state, arguing that smoking in the course of a play is a form of free expression. The claim echoes the arguments once made to defend the nudity in the musical “Hair” against indecency laws. “It will deny residents in Colorado access to great prior works, and cutting-edge new plays as well,” said Bruce Jones, the lawyer representing the theaters.

In October a judge ruled against the theaters. The companies are now awaiting an appeal, although they have not decided what they will do if it fails. Paragon is committed to staging “Virginia Woolf” in July, though it has not decided whether to follow the antismoking law or not. A spokesman in the Colorado attorney general’s office said he could not comment on an active case.

Not all smoking bans are quite as rigid. In Ireland herbal cigarettes, which do not contain tobacco and which actors frequently use as an alternative, are permitted. England’s ban, which begins July 1, allows actors to smoke only “if the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for them to smoke.” In New York City theaters, which fall under a statewide smoking ban in place since 2003, actors may smoke herbal cigarettes. If they want to use the real deal, the production has to apply for a waiver from the city.

Many productions, like “Chicago” on Broadway, use herbal cigarettes instead of bothering to get a waiver.

Abbie M. Strassler, the general manager of the 2005 Broadway revival of “The Odd Couple,” in which Oscar Madison is constantly chomping his cigar, did decide to apply for a waiver. The entire process, starting from when she first inquired, took four months, she said, calling the procedure “absurd.” But she admitted that she did not get approval for a three-week Broadway run of Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight!” in June 2005. “I figured I’d take my chances,” she said. No legal action was taken.

Actors aren’t technically allowed to smoke onstage under the ban in Chicago, but when they do, the law is simply not enforced. Tim Hadac, a spokesman for the Chicago Public Health Department, said that the enforcement was complaint-driven, and that he had not heard of any complaints about actors puffing away onstage.

In Colorado, where no version of a lighted cigarette is permitted onstage, aggrieved producers argue that tobacco is an integral part of the work of playwrights like Mr. Albee, Henrik Ibsen and Noël Coward. The company Next Stage canceled planned productions of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” by Terrence McNally, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, which takes place partly in a smoky Dublin pub in the 1960s, and Stephen Belber’s play “Match,” in which a pivotal scene involves characters smoking hashish, causing the revelation of crucial information.

Theater13 — which has a bigger budget and can risk a fine — defied the law by staging “Match” with herbal cigarettes in September. “We put up signage, it’s written in the programs, and then we make an announcement before the show,” said Judson Webb, one of the company’s founding members. “We give people four or five chances every step of the way to make their own decision. If they walk out of the room, we’ll give them a full refund.” In 10 performances no one did, and no charges were brought.

When the touring production of the Broadway revival of “Sweet Charity” visited the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in December, Molly Ringwald, playing the title character, used a special cigarette that doesn’t light but emits a cloud of powder. But Randy Weeks, the president and chief executive of the center, has had to cancel “Mark Twain Tonight!”

“Samuel Clemens had a cigar in his mouth 99 percent of his waking hours,” Mr. Weeks said. “It is part of our history that people smoked.”

In Scotland, Keith Richards famously flouted the law in August by lighting up at a Rolling Stones concert in Glasgow. Since the local authorities are in charge of enforcing the ban, the city council simply declared the hall exempt. That same month in Edinburgh, where the fringe festival presented more than 1,800 shows, all performances had to be smoke-free. The festival had lobbied the Scottish Executive, Scotland’s governing body, for an exemption, but to no avail.

“If you start to make exceptions, you start to have loopholes and so on and you start to have a debate over what is or isn’t covered,” a spokesman for the Scottish Executive said. Regarding herbal cigarettes, he said, “We wanted to ensure that the law was as comprehensive and enforceable as possible, even if new products come onto the market.”

The actor Mel Smith got some attention for defiantly smoking a cigar during one of his performances as Winston Churchill in “Allegiance: Winston Churchill and Michael Collins.” But Paul Gudgin, the director of the festival, said that to his knowledge no other performer knowingly disobeyed the law, and the ban didn’t prevent any shows from being performed.

“Opinion was very divided amongst performers,” he added. Some were unfazed, arguing that “it’s acting, and you work around it,” he said. “They feel there’s very few plays, really, where it’s absolutely fundamental to the plot.”

Molly Ringwald, a nonsmoker, said of her Broadway role of Sally Bowles in “Cabaret,” “At that time every woman who’s cutting edge, a little bit fashionable, unconventional, is going to smoke, and that’s Sally Bowles.” Of her one smoking scene in “Sweet Charity,” she said, “This whole thing that I do lasts all of 10 seconds, and the theaters that we’re playing are so huge that it’s not realy affecting anyone so much except for me.”

As for Theater13, it is planning to produce “My Life Is My Sundance,” based on a memoir by the Indian activist Leonard Peltier, who comes from a culture in which tobacco plays a large spiritual role. It is unclear if smoking will be involved.

Still Mr. Webb points out that his company is not blindly pro-smoking. “We’re a bunch of non- or ex-smokers,” he said. Other than his one complaint, “I think the smoking ban is fantastic.”

Devoted Worshipers in a House of Glorious Decay

From The New York Times

The composer Scott Frankel was walking down Commercial Street in Provincetown, Mass., when an angry young man approached him. The stranger was a fan of “Grey Gardens” — the 1975 documentary about two eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy living in a filthy, raccoon-infested East Hampton mansion — and had heard Mr. Frankel was planning to compose a stage musical version.

“He went on this screaming diatribe about ‘How could I? How could I desecrate, dilute, defile and destroy their lives?,’ ” Mr. Frankel recalled. “I dutifully invited him to a performance, and he’s now a convert.”

Mr. Frankel and the other creators of the musical “Grey Gardens,” which reopens on Broadway Nov. 2 after a successful Off Broadway run, were aware that fans of the mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, called Big Edie, and of her daughter, who had the same name and is called Little Edie, were extremely sensitive. “People who are rabid fans,” he said, “are fiercely protective of Little Edie in particular, and her legacy.”

The movie “Grey Gardens” attained cult status, in part, by attracting social outsiders who saw its quirky heroines as kindred spirits. The film’s following spread through costume parties as Little Edie’s outlandish style of dress turned her into a fashion icon. Within gay circles, bootleg VHS copies of the film were passed from person to person. These days, fans pass around DVD’s and engage in occasionally heated debates on the “Grey Gardens” Yahoo discussion group, which has received more than 8,000 posts this year. They create videos on YouTube, one of which has images of Little Edie dancing synched up to Madonna’s “Hung Up.”

Clearly, the musical has already won over some fans. “I was ready to massacre it, but I ended up enjoying it,” said the openly gay singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who wrote and performed a song called  “Grey Gardens” for his 2001 album, “Poses.”

During the show’s original run, at Playwrights Horizons, a group of women flew in from Seattle dressed as Little Edie, with pinned brooches or scarves over their heads. A mother and daughter from Raleigh, N.C., both named Carolyn Houy, saw it nine times off Broadway and booked nine Broadway performances. The younger Carolyn raved about everyone involved. “Her voice shimmers like moonlight on the waves of East Hampton,” she said of Christine Ebersole, who plays Big Edie in the first act, set in 1941, and Little Edie in the second act, set in 1973. Of Mr. Frankel, she said, “He could have walked with Puccini, Mozart and Verdi.”

Ms. Ebersole said that at Playwrights Horizons she was constantly receiving backstage admirers, one of whom had seen the show 13 times. Of such visitors, she said, “a lot of times people will be uncontrollably crying.” She added, “My response is to sort of hold them in my arms.”

David Hanbury, an actor who says he has seen the film at least 20 times, embraced the musical. “I’m used to watching ‘Grey Gardens’ with one or two people,” he said. “To sit in an audience and see that it’s not just this cult thing, that everyone gets it, is inon the joke, is thrilling.” Some fans did not like the creators toying with the scenes they knew well. “The moments that bother me are the ones where the dialogue has been extended for dramatic effect,” said Kevin Hertzog, a prop stylist and a friend of Mr. Frankel, who said he cannot go two months without seeing the film.

Eva Weiss, a fan who signs her posts to the Yahoo group “Little Evie,” said some sections felt “strange,” like Ms. Ebersole’s impersonation of Little Edie during the song “The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” which is based on a famous scene in the documentary. “It’s very cartoony, it’s almost like a caricature of Little Edie,” she said. Ms. Weiss said she felt more comfortable later in the show, when Ms. Ebersole is “not imitating Little Edie’s voice, and she’s just singing these beautiful, sad songs.”

Winning the loyalty of the original “Grey Gardens” fans is a hurdle that the film director Michael Sucsy also faces. He is making a movie about the Beales, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. Mr. Sucsy said that he had done extensive research, poring through Little Edie’s private letters, journals and poetry, and that his film, which will stretch from the mid-1930’s to 1979, will be faithful to her story.

“It’s not an exploitation,” he said. “We’re not doing ‘Grey Gardens: The Action Movie’. “

Albert Maysles, one of the directors of the original documentary, has no problem with either the musical or the film. “The more people who react to it with whatever they have to say about it, the better,” he said. He is even planning to turn audio clips from the movie into cellphone ring tones. He recently compiled unused sequences from “Grey Gardens” into a new film, “The Beales of Grey Gardens,” which is now in a handful of theaters nationwide and will be on DVD in December.

In the end, though, given the harsh realities of Broadway, the problem won’t be appeasing the fans but appealing to everyone else. Ms. Ebersole said that while she could detect when fans were in the audience, there were also plenty of performances when it was clear that not everyone got it: “There were nights when I would come out there and you could feel that the audience didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

The producer Margo Lion, who is not involved with “Grey Gardens,” said that her show “Hairspray” was successful because it appealed to “a broader market“ than the cult film it was based on. “You’re not doing something with a brand name that’s going to drive groups and individual ticket buyers in large numbers,” she said.

Based on his observations of the Broadway audiences’ reaction so far, Mr. Frankel said, “I would think the vast majority have not seen the documentary.” He suggested that the show has enough universal elements to appeal to a larger public and pointed out that it does not only appeal to gay males but also to older women, a big theatergoing demographic. “They’re responding to the notion that these women are able to express themselves, and they’re able to be more authentic versions of themselves and not having to please men,” he said. And what about the Beales? How would they have reacted to this? In “The Beales of Grey Gardens,” Little Edie says, “I don’t want anybody playing me.” But Walter Newkirk, a publicist in New Jersey and a fan who befriended Little Edie before she died in 2002, said she knew a musical was planned.

“She thought it would be a smash on Broadway,” Mr. Newkirk said. “Those were her words to me.”

Art by Numbers

From The New York Times

No fewer than five art fairs converged on New York last weekend, led by the Armory Show extravaganza. When it's all over, market watchers will take close note of sales totals. But when the doors are open, there are other things to count. Herewith, the art crowd by the numbers.

THE ARMORY SHOW
WALL LABEL Contemporary art fair at Piers 90 and 92.
GALLERIES 154
SALES Last year it was $45 million, and a representative said this year’s total would top that but it wasn’t available at press time.
VISITORS Estimated at 48,000 to 50,000.
OSCAR NOMINEES OR WINNERS ON HAND At least 6 (Dustin Hoffman, Glenn Close, Natalie Portman, Matt Dillon, Sam Mendes, Adrien Brody).

DiVA
WALL LABEL Digital and video art at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Battery Park City.
SALES No figure available.
GALLERIES 29
VISITORS 5,000 to 7,000
NUMBER OF ROOMS THE ARTIST PETER FINNEMORE DECORATED TO LOOK LIKE A MILITARY CAMP 1

LA ART IN NEW YORK
WALL LABEL Galleries from Los Angeles showing their works in the Altman Building.
SALES No figures but “far better than I would have expected for a first-time fair,” said Daniel Weinberg, one of the fair’s principals.
GALLERIES 16
VISITORS over 2,000
NUMBER OF MONTHS TO CONCEIVE AND ARRANGE THE EVENT: 5

PULSE
WALL LABEL A show at the 69th Regiment Armory.
SALES As much as $300,000 to $500,000 a gallery.
GALLERIES 61
VISITORS 7,300
AMOUNT PAID FOR MILTON ROSA-ORTIZ’S ‘THAT’S NOT ART,’ WITH SHELL CASINGS SUSPENDED IN MIDAIR $40,000

SCOPE NEW YORK
WALL LABEL A showcase, in Clinton, for emerging artists.
GALLERIES 80
SALES $7 million (estimated total).
VISITORS 14,000
NUMBER OF PEOPLE EVACUATED DURING A PRESS PREVIEW WHEN CARBON MONOXIDE WAS DETECTED 150

The Few, the Proud, the Ensemble

From The New York Times

In Hollywood, directors of war films have been known to send actors to boot camp. Toughen them up, give them a taste of military life. In the theater, productions about the service rarely go to such great lengths to ensure accuracy. But the team behind the new Off Broadway drama "Defiance," set at the North Carolina marine base Camp Lejeune in 1971, did everything short of enlisting.

Not coincidentally, the playwright, John Patrick Shanley, was a marine at Camp Lejeune in the early 1970's. He insisted on authenticity, but not only because of his military background. To him, an errant detail jars the theatergoer. During early previews for "Defiance," he received an e-mail message from a lieutenant colonel just back from Iraq. She wrote that at the performance she saw, the lieutenant colonel character entered with his bootlaces untied, and the chaplain had the wrong insignia on his cover, or hat. "She was traumatized and thrown completely out of the play," Mr. Shanley said. "It was like the play was over."

Just as he and the director Doug Hughes consulted a nun about the Catholic school in "Doubt," their previous collaboration, they turned to experts for their latest Manhattan Theater Club production, which opened on Tuesday.In October, Mr. Hughes and his associate director, Mark Schneider, spent three days at Camp Lejeune, touring the grounds, talking to officers and reading back issues of the base newspaper.

In December, an actor, Jeremy Strong, spent three days there living in the barracks, eating meals with enlisted men and learning how to fire an M-16 rifle and a grenade launcher, among other skills.

Then the production hired Maj. David C. Andersen, from the Marines' New York City public affairs office. He put the actors through drills and taught them how to stand, march and salute.

Major Andersen spent an afternoon scrutinizing the costumes. One actor was wearing his campaign ribbons upside down. Another whose character was coming off a field exercise needed some mud and sweat stains. A third was wearing a Navy belt, not a Marine one. The major told the men how to roll up their sleeves and pants and suggested that they polish the black visor of their cover with lemon Pledge or Windex.

Pointing to an actor, Mr. Hughes asked, "How do you rate the captain's shoeshine?"

"Looks like he did it with a Hershey bar," Major Andersen replied.

One to Watch: Stephen Lynch

From The New York Times

The songs of the guitar-strumming stand-up comic Stephen Lynch cover just about every sick fantasy imaginable: Wishing a rich grandfather would die. Sticking a gerbil in a certain bodily orifice. Performing an abortion on a pregnant girlfriend. One of his songs, "Kill a Kitten," provoked outrage from animal rights activists.

His style may be a far cry from Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Mr. Lynch's musical prowess has landed him a choice role on Broadway: Robbie Hart in "The Wedding Singer," the part Adam Sandler played in the 1998 film version. The show begins previews on March 30 at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, where it opens on April 27.

Mr. Lynch's comedy has been compared to that of Mr. Sandler, who made his name in part by performing tunes like "The Chanukah Song" on "Saturday Night Live." And he shares Mr. Sandler's penchant for juxtaposing gentle melody with crude subject matter. It wasn't until Mr. Sandler came to the show's pre-Broadway tryout in Seattle that the two met.

Margo Lion, a producer of "The Wedding Singer," said Mr. Lynch has "got this cherubic look, but he has a dangerous side to him."

"A lot of actors feel they have to be liked by the audience all the time," she continued, "and, given his act, he's not afraid to make an audience uncomfortable at certain moments."

Mr. Lynch, 34, says that he did not spend his childhood burning ants with a magnifying glass — his songs spring from conversations and observations as opposed to any subconscious rage.

In fact, he says he has always liked good old-fashioned musicals. He grew up in Saginaw, Mich., where his parents were teachers and where he and his father performed together in community theater productions. The first time he saw a musical he was watching his father play the Padre in "Man of La Mancha," a classic he still enjoys. His own early roles in college and regional productions included Huck Finn in "Big River" and Jesus in "Jesus Christ Superstar."

Mr. Lynch didn't take to his childhood piano lessons. But at Western Michigan University, he lived in a house with a bunch of guys in punk bands and started fiddling around with a guitar.

"We'd go downstairs and get some beer and play songs," he says. "For me the fun in that was just trying to make them laugh."

When he moved to New York, a friend invited him to perform songs at the West Bank Cafe on 42nd Street. His first number that night was a song he still performs, "Lullaby," in which a father tells his son "why your mommy left us" (it involves the father's penchant for pornography, prostitution and homosexual pedophilia).

Mr. Lynch went on to perform in clubs and colleges around the country, make regular appearances on the "Opie & Anthony" radio show and rack up three albums, a live DVD and a Comedy Central special.

"I woke up one day, and that was my new career," he says. "It was something I'd never planned on doing."

Mr. Lynch, who is making his Broadway debut, says he is still getting used to the "exhausting" rehearsal process, which involves "singing the same thing over and over and over again." Still, the choreography is more of a challenge since, as he puts it, "I have never danced willingly in my life."

Bend It Like A Hell Knight

From The New York Times

Video games may look increasingly realistic but they still have a ways to go. By having live actors mimic game characters, the Chocolate Factory, a theater group in Queens, has set out to show what the average gamer probably doesn't care to notice: just how unnatural the action can be.

The show, "Gun Play," which opens Thursday, is less play than performance piece. It combines actors, cameras, projections and actual scenes from video games in a collage that draws from games like Doom 3 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as well as the video game-like styles of "The Matrix" trilogy and the hunting movies of the rock star and gun advocate Ted Nugent.

Though no one involved in the show started off as a fanatic gamer, the cast and crew spent hours playing Xbox titles, just part of their research into how to move like futuristic fighters or California carjackers:

WALKING Using CJ, the protagonist in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as a model, the actors try to capture the robotic way characters walk. Brian Rogers, who conceived and directed the show, said the movement was both jerky and graceful, akin to moonwalking, with feet that don't leave the ground. "The upper and lower bodies feel disconnected," he said. "Certain things stick out - the way the legs bend sticks out a lot more."

STANDING Make that not standing. CJ and other game characters "don't really stand still," Mr. Rogers said. "There's this hypnotic sway that they do. Periodically they'll adjust themselves. They'll twist their shoulders and raise their elbows in this really strange way and return them. It's like they're shaking something off."

STOMPING In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, CJ repeatedly stomps on a victim in a scene "Gun Play" projects life-size on the back wall. CJ's arms are spread wide and bent at the elbow, and they jerk downward with every stomp. Mr. Rogers said the combination had such a strong rhythm, "you could sync it up to a beat."

SHOOTING Who knew figure skating and Doom 3 had anything in common? In one scene, a Hell Knight starts to throw a fireball before a gunshot knocks him into the air, his right arm snapping back around his body. The actress Sheila Lewandowski, a former figure skater, said that to get that airborne feel, "you have to really ground yourself on one leg and use the other leg to pull you up and around, like you would do in an axel or a camel."

DYING No matter the game, death visits in similar ways. Even demons and zombies are blown backward after being shot, for instance. To stage this, three mattresses are pinned to the back wall. An actor runs toward the wall, jumps up, spins in the air and collides, with back to the mattress. The actress Paula Wilson drew on her Lester Horton-style dance training, which emphasizes flat backs. To lessen the impact, she said, "you hit with as much body surface as possible."

REALISTIC DYING One by one, the actors kneel with their hands behind their backs and simply fall forward. For research, the actors watched security camera scenes from the shootings Columbine High School. When a person is shot at close range, Mr. Rogers said, his body simply collapses: "What's really chilling about it is how it's visually not interesting."

Enter, Stage Left

From The New York Times

Lefty playwrights are not hard to find, but recent weeks have seen a rare flurry of theatrical news from three of the world's most eminent antiwar writers -- Joan Didion, Harold Pinter (above) and Dario Fo. That doesn't necessarily mean the stage is listing to port, however. Pro-military views may be harder to find, but they're out there for those willing to look.

'The Room,' 'Celebration' and 'The Homecoming'

Antiwar point of view: In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature on Dec. 7, Mr. Pinter called the invasion of Iraq ''an act of blatant state terrorism'' and said, ''The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless.''

Productions: Double bill of ''The Room'' and ''Celebration,'' Mr. Pinter's first and most recent plays, respectively, now running Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company; a Broadway revival of ''The Homecoming'' expected for the 2006-07 season.

Current political resonance: Before the speech, slight. (''They're like politicians. They love power.'' -- ''Celebration'') After the speech, unavoidable.

'The Year of Magical Thinking' .

Antiwar P.O.V.: In an influential essay published in The New York Review of Books, Ms. Didion accused the Bush administration of ''initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.''

Production: The play will be her own adaptation of the book by the same name, her account of her husband's death and her daughter's fatal illness. Projected Broadway opening: spring 2007.

Current political resonance: Little or none, save for the author's reputation.

'Peace Mom'

Antiwar P.O.V.: Mr. Fo has loudly criticized the British prime minister, Tony Blair, for the ''disastrous'' decision to go to war in Iraq.

Production: A one-woman play, which had its premiere on Dec. 10 in London, is about Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen soldier who led a protest at President Bush's Texas ranch last summer.

Current political resonance: Overwhelming.

'The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial'
Pro-war P.O.V.: The writer, Herman Wouk, is known for being deeply patriotic, and the play is based on his experience in the Navy during World War II.

Production: Revival of the 1954 play begins on Broadway in April and stars David Schwimmer.

Current political resonance: The play has been interpreted as having a conservative, pro-military bent.

'Monty Python's Spamalot'

Pro-war P.O.V.: King Arthur and his chainmail-covered cohort engage in asymmetric warfare in strange lands.

Production: Musical now on Broadway at the Shubert Theater.

Current political resonance: The musical showcases British military might, while portraying the French as petulant and cowardly.

'Hamlet'

Pro-war P.O.V.: Famous tale of vengeance ends in combat and bloodshed.

Production: Off-Broadway revival at Classic Stage Company closed last week.

Current political resonance: The son of a ruler finishes off his father's former foe.

Sweeney Todd's Game of Musical Chairs

From The New York Times

During performances of the new pared-down Broadway revival of ''Sweeney Todd,'' the 10 members of the cast also double as the orchestra. But an even more pared-down version takes place in the dressing rooms on the sixth floor, where the standbys practice their instruments note for note in time with the performance.

In this production of the tale of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and his fellow conspirator, Mrs. Lovett, the standbys have to learn not only multiple roles, but also a confusing array of musical parts that they -- unlike most orchestra musicians -- have to play from memory, with no conductor to guide them.

As of press time, no standby has taken the stage (and the production declined to make any available for interviews). But figuring out how they might is like assembling ''an enormous jigsaw puzzle'' said John Doyle, the director and designer.

For instance, at a typical performance, Donna Lynne Champlin, as the Italian barber Pirelli, handles the keyboard, flute and accordion. Patti LuPone, as Mrs. Lovett, performs on the tuba (see above), orchestra bells and other percussion instruments. So Dorothy Stanley, the standby for both roles, would seem to need superhuman talent: act, sing and play all those instruments, too.

In reality, Ms. Stanley doesn't have to know all those instruments. Should she go on as Pirelli, she would play Pirelli's keyboard part. She wouldn't play the flute, though; she would play a similar part on the viola. The accordion would fall to another standby, Elisa Winter, who would remain onstage throughout the show, in costume. If Ms. Stanley fills in as Mrs. Lovett, the tuba would be nixed: its part is already mimicked by the bass, which another actor already plays.

Should Ms. Winter play Johanna, the yellow-haired lover, though, the role would not change: Johanna plays the cello and so does Ms. Winter. ''Everything, on one level or another, gets covered,'' Mr. Doyle said. ''You never lose the honesty of the storytelling.''

Some of the standbys were discovered at the main cast auditions, to which Bernard Telsey, the casting director, invited ''any performer who says they can play,'' he said. The lobby became a band room: the performers hauled in their instruments -- one brought a shopping cart full of them -- and warmed up. Mr. Telsey also scouted music schools but said that didn't work out well.

  Mr. Doyle explained, ''They have to be actors first and foremost.''

  The production was planning to hire two more standbys -- for a total of seven -- which might make switches less complex.

  Still, Mr. Telsey said, the standbys ''are more heroic in this show than most.''   

Duck! It's Andrew Lloyd Webber in 3-D

From The New York Times

When the Lumière brothers first showed the film ''Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat'' in Paris more than a century ago, the shot of a locomotive pulling into a station was supposedly so startling that much of the audience jumped back from the screen in fright.

Simon Lee probably has a good idea of how they felt. He was conducting the orchestra in London for ''The Woman in White'' -- the new $8.5 million Andrew Lloyd Webber musical -- when he first saw the show's computer-animated train barreling toward him from a dark tunnel, its wheels rumbling and whistle screaming. He ducked.

''I want the theater to have some of the visual scope and sense of movement that cinema has,'' said William Dudley, the show's set and video designer, and the creator of the novel animation effects. ''Directors often talk about breaking through the fourth wall. I want to break through the second wall, the back wall.''

Mr. Dudley may have achieved his goal with ''The Woman in White,'' currently in previews at the Marquis Theater in Manhattan. It is the first Broadway show in which computer-animated images completely dominate the stage.

Projections appear on six, 16 1/2-foot-tall curved gray screens that move around the edge of the stage in a circle. Think of the computer animation in a Pixar movie like ''Toy Story,'' with a more realistic, less cartoonish look. The setting can change instantly: as two characters tour an estate, the actors stay put as the background dissolves from one room to another. Or, the animation can take the audience through a three-dimensional environment, over fields, houses, churches and graveyards.

Spectacles, of course, are nothing new to Lord Lloyd Webber and the ''Woman in White'' director, Sir Trevor Nunn. The two teamed up on ''Cats,'' ''Starlight Express'' and ''Sunset Boulevard,'' and individually tackled ''The Phantom of the Opera'' (Lord Lloyd Webber) and ''Les Misérables'' (Sir Trevor).

For ''Woman in White,'' adapted from Wilkie Collins's 1860 novel, Lord Lloyd Webber wanted so many locations, Sir Trevor said, that elaborate physical sets would not work. One option was to use a spare, turntable set like that of ''Les Misérables.'' But Lord Lloyd Webber saw Mr. Dudley's animations for Tom Stoppard's 2002 play ''The Coast of Utopia'' at the National Theater, directed by Sir Trevor, and he was hooked. Mr. Dudley recalls that when he first showed Sir Trevor a moving image he planned to use -- a pan across a Russian country estate -- Sir Trevor told him he felt like ''Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk.''

The reception from critics was more mixed when ''The Woman in White'' opened in the West End in London in September 2004, though the sets were nominated for an Olivier Award. Benedict Nightingale in The Times of London declared that ''the décor justifies itself in a pretty, Merchant-Ivory way,'' while Linda Winer of Newsday wrote, ''never before have I wished that vertigo pills were sold in the lobby.''

Mr. Dudley subsequently made revisions, and some critics returned last month. Matt Wolf wrote in Variety that the projection ''seems, thank heavens, to have simmered down.'' But Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph still said, ''What's required, surely, is an authentically Victorian atmosphere, not something that looks like an out-of-focus video game.''

Nonsense, says Mr. Dudley, who insists that his 21st-century technology is compatible with a 19th-century aesthetic.

He said he got the idea for using three-dimensional animation onstage after watching his son play a video game. He became fascinated by the power of moving images to draw in viewers. He also thought video-game-style animation might attract young people to the theater.

Experimental theater groups like Complicite and the Wooster Group have used video for years, as do many dance shows, operas and rock concerts. Broadway musicals have increasingly included snippets of moving images. Wendall Harrington, a projection designer whose use of animation for ''The Who's Tommy'' in 1993 was groundbreaking, said that many productions today insert video to save money on scenery or to show off. Ms. Harrington, who has not yet seen ''Woman in White,'' said designers must first ask themselves, ''Does it in any kind of way deliver the story better than anything else.''

Sonia Friedman, a producer of ''The Woman in White,'' said ''If people think we are doing this to save money, think again.''

No sculptors or painters toiled over banisters or crown molding. But Mr. Dudley hired a team of about 10 people, including video editors and computer specialists. Ms. Friedman thought that while labor costs in London would initially be high, the ability to store the animated images on a computer would save her money on future productions. ''That was my dream -- a design in a handbag,'' she said.

But New York proved as costly as London, as Mr. Dudley had to change his animation to match the script and music changes, and redesign the equipment to fit a new theater. A British tour begins in a year and Ms. Friedman is still working on how to make the show portable.

Mr. Dudley, who studied landscape painting at St. Martins School of Art in London in the mid-1960's, said he drew inspiration for ''Woman in White'' from 19th-century British art, including the nocturnal cityscapes of John Atkinson Grimshaw and the romanticism of Pre-Raphaelites like William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.

He also turned to the Victorian equivalent of animation: the zoetrope, a hollow cylindrical toy that spins to create a moving picture. Mr. Dudley not only opens the show with an image of a ghostly zoetrope, but he also arranged the curved screens in a partial cylinder to evoke a big zoetrope in which the action takes place.

''None of what I'm doing is anti-actor,'' he said; he wants the background to enhance the characters' actions and emotions, not to serve as a distraction. While the villagers dance, the camera swoops through the street, so the dancers appear to be moving down it. When a character is lost in the foggy London alleys, the backdrops change rapidly to enhance her disorientation.

Mr. Dudley first started experimenting with animation when Sir Trevor hired him for Mr. Stoppard's ''Coast of Utopia.'' That enormously ambitious nine-hour epic was split into three plays and jumped among Russia, Paris, London, Geneva, Germany and Nice in time periods between 1833 and 1865.

''Tom was unquestionably writing filmically,'' Sir Trevor said.

Animation would allow backdrops to change quickly, without huge sets to truck on and off. The play was a learning process for Mr. Dudley, who soon found himself hunched over a software manual while motorcyclists waited outside his house, ready to deliver the discs to the theater. (His dial-up Internet connection was too slow to send large files by e-mail.)

Mr. Dudley, who has worked on more than 50 plays at the National, went on to apply his technique to David Hare's ''Permanent Way'' there, a revision of Roman Polanski's production of ''Dance of the Vampires'' in Germany, and Terry Johnson's ''Hitchcock Blonde'' at the Royal Court Theater and the West End, which won Mr. Dudley an Olivier Award.

His next project is a play by Brian Clark about Rembrandt that will combine moving images with live actors to bring the painter's subjects to life.

Other shows have started using similar techniques. Michael Clark's projections for ''Ring of Fire'' -- the Johnny Cash musical that arrives on Broadway in February -- will have computer-animated landscapes of rural America. The Menier Chocolate Factory, a London company, is using video for Stephen Sondheim's ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' which begins on Friday. The production will make the Georges Seurat painting at the heart of the show -- ''A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte'' -- come alive by integrating the actors with moving images of trees, dogs, water, boats and other objects from the painting, which will be projected onto drapes, doors and other set pieces.

For Mr. Dudley, there is no question that cinema and theater can coexist on a single stage: ''One shouldn't be such a poor relation to the other.''

On the stage of the blind

From The New York Times

Extreme method acting alert: in the Vortex Theater Company's production of ''The Blind,'' Maurice Maeterlinck's 1890 play about sightless people in a forest waiting for their caretaker to return, the three actors wear opaque contact lenses that make them unable to see. Newly adapted by Bathsheba Doran, the play runs at the Classic Stage Company from Wednesday to next Sunday. Zachary Pincus-Roth talked to the company about learning to walk, talk and act blind.

THE BLINDFOLDS - For about three weeks the actors wore blindfolds during rehearsal and practiced listening to one another to orient themselves on the mostly empty stage. They also had to lose habits blind people don't have, like pointing and turning to look at a sound source.

THE CONTACTS - When Libby King first put them in, she started to cry. ''It was an empathy thing,'' she said. ''It was just a really jarring, upsetting thing.'' The lenses, made by Vision Direct and called Blind Eye (they're usually sold for Halloween use), make the eyes look completely white. The actors see a whiteness but can detect light and dark somewhat. For the first rehearsal with contacts, the director, Kristjan Thorgeirsson, made the actors walk from 11th Avenue and 23rd Street to Ninth Avenue and 22nd Street. It took an hour. ''We'd say, 'Are we on 23rd Street?' and no one would answer,'' Hannah Kenah said. A homeless man finally told them when to cross the street. Joshua Randall, the artistic director, intervened only when Robert M. Johanson was about to step in dog feces. The excursion also drummed up publicity, as Mr. Randall passed out fliers to bemused onlookers.

THE PERFORMANCES - In an earlier run at the Frying Pan, the former lightship moored near Chelsea Piers, the actors performed on a metal floor among planks, pits and other obstacles while distracted by creaks, construction noise and helicopters. It was still better than the Classic Stage Company's smooth indoor stage. ''The floor of the boat acted like Braille, because there were so many beams and bumps and indicators,'' Ms. Kenah said. Mr. Thorgeirsson noticed that many audience members did not appear to know that the actors could not see until the curtain call, when they grabbed for one another's hands. Late in the run, the contacts were lost and the actors performed with sight. ''It was awful,'' Mr. Johanson said. Ms. Kenah, who at one point has to run into audience members, had to watch them cringe. ''I've kind of fallen in love with performing blind,'' she said. ''It strips away a layer of self-consciousness.''

The crucifixion that also cures epilepsy

From The New York Times

Playing a film villain can often be a thankless job. But just try portraying the Roman soldier who mercilessly flogs Jesus in Mel Gibson's ''Passion of the Christ.''

When Dario D'Ambrosi, the 45-year-old Italian actor who had the part, took his family to see the film in Rome, everyone in the theater turned to glare at him; his two daughters cried. The girls told his mother not to see it, and she took their advice. People on the street shoved and cursed at him, and students confronted his daughters, 12 and 14, at school. Mr. D'Ambrosi, a Roman Catholic, says he still has dreams in which Jesus -- with the face of Mel Gibson -- assures him that it was all worth it.

The entire experience ultimately inspired Mr. D'Ambrosi to write and direct a play, ''The Pathological Passion of the Christ,'' running through next Sunday at La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan.

The word ''pathological'' may seem odd unless you know that Mr. D'Ambrosi founded the pathological theater movement, which explores the relationship between the mentally ill and the rest of society. This was a major issue in the Italy of Mr. D'Ambrosi's youth, and he found it so gripping that at age 19, in the midst of what was a promising professional soccer career, he decided to spend three months in a mental hospital learning about the patients. His soccer career ended and his theatrical career began.

Mr. D'Ambrosi has created 14 original shows in this vein for La MaMa over the past two decades, including one about a man obsessed with a trout and another that envisioned Captain Hook as a pedophile.

In broken English, he explains that his ''Pathological Passion'' is based on the idea that many of Jesus' contemporaries considered him insane. The work portrays Judas as a sexual compulsive, Pontius Pilate as an ex-convict and Jesus as an epileptic. At the show's climax, Jesus has a seizure and is rushed off in an ambulance. A video shows him having brain surgery to treat his epilepsy.

Mr. D'Ambrosi said the procedure is a contemporary twist on the Crucifixion. Cured of epilepsy, which was once thought to be a sacred disease, Jesus becomes normal, a symbol of how the world has become more secular.

Mr. D'Ambrosi was thinking of Mr. Gibson when he decided to play the doctor in the video; in the film, Mr. Gibson's hand, in a cameo, was the first to hammer a nail into the prosthetic hand of Jesus, who was played by Jim Caviezel.

To Mr. D'Ambrosi, Mel Gibson is ''a genius'' who, despite being a movie star, had a sincerity and a wide-eyed innocence that reminded Mr. D'Ambrosi -- in a good way, Mr. D'Ambrosi said -- of the mentally ill people he has worked with. Although he and many of his fellow actors were initially skeptical of the enterprise, he said Mr. Gibson's charisma lured them in and bound the cast together.

Still, the filming was difficult. To stay in character, Mr. Caviezel didn't talk to him on the set. At one point during filming, Mr. D'Ambrosi accidentally hit Mr. Caviezel with a piece of wood, splitting it in two.

During the actual flogging scene, Mr. D'Ambrosi would whip the ground for an entire 10-minute take, staring at the face -- not of Jesus, but of Mr. Gibson, who would be lying on his back, looking up, yelling encouragement and squirting fake blood.

On the whole, said Mr. D'Ambrosi, making the film was ''like when you make love with a woman.'' At the time, ''You really don't understand so much, because you don't really leave the moment. But after, you understand how much was beautiful.''

The extreme makeover of "Bombay Dreams"

From The New York Times

When "Bombay Dreams" opened on the West End in June 2002, The Times of London criticized the musical for its "trite lyrics," "cardboard characters," "dialogue that would test the patience of Mother Teresa" and "the lamest ending in West End history." The Guardian called the show's book "clumsy" and "overplotted." The Independent said the production was "crippled by formula and mediocrity."

Despite the criticisms — the reviews, over all, were mixed — the show has become a popular hit, recouping its costs in 14 months. But when the principal American producers Anita Waxman and Elizabeth Williams signed on to take it to Broadway, where it opens on April 29 at the Broadway Theater, they knew it needed a major overhaul.

Though it is typical to tweak London imports like "Mamma Mia!" for Broadway, the "Bombay Dreams" revision is one of the most drastic in recent memory, along with the Broadway flop "Taboo" this season. Andrew Lloyd Webber, who produced the London production, has announced that the Broadway version is such an improvement that he will close the London version on June 13 and reopen it next year, in a different London theater, with the Broadway revisions in place.

In a series of recent interviews, the creative team discussed the changes they are making for Broadway.

The Narrative

The Broadway producers hired the book writer Thomas Meehan (who won Tony Awards for "The Producers," "Hairspray" and "Annie") to help retool the story and to remove a number of Indian cultural references that would be more familiar to British than American audiences. Meera Syal, a well-known British Indian comedian who had no previous experience with musicals, wrote the book for the London production. "Bombay Dreams" tells the story of Akaash, an untouchable — the lowest level of India's caste system — who rises from the Bombay slums to become a star in Bollywood, the name for India's film industry in Bombay. He falls in love with Priya, an aspiring film director from a higher caste.

The creative team agreed that the London production had too many "side shows," as the director, Steven Pimlott, called them. "It was a bit of a potpourri," he said. "We threw a lot into the melting pot."

One tangent involved a Bollywood impresario operating from jail with the help of an organized crime boss. The script also had a smattering of quirky jokes, like one about "a woman getting curry stains off her cat."

At certain times during the London production, Mr. Meehan said, "people around me were laughing and I wasn't." Mr. Meehan streamlined the story to focus on the principal characters, especially the hero, Akaash. To bolster Akaash's back-story, his grandmother, Shanti, is now a full-fledged character. The writers thought audiences would identify with Priya and the celebrity actress Rani, a temptress who encourages Akaash to forget his past — so they beefed up those roles and sharpened Akaash's choice between the two women.

Mr. Meehan also brought out the show's universal themes, like India's stark class distinctions. They provide the same moral force as did the racial divide in "Hairspray," Mr. Meehan said, which made that show "more than just a lollipop musical."

The Score

"It's been a long time since there has been a score as good as this," said Lord Lloyd-Webber about the work of A. R. Rahman, 38, a leading Bollywood composer who wrote the music. To bring Mr. Rahman's work to the West, Lord Lloyd-Webber commissioned him to write the score for "Bombay Dreams," hiring his own frequent collaborator Don Black ("Sunset Boulevard") to write the lyrics. For the American version, the producers hired the songwriter David Yazbek ("The Full Monty") to help rewrite some of the lyrics. As the book changed, several songs were omitted and new ones added. Mr. Yazbek wrote a song in the style of bhangra, a hybrid of Indian folk and pop dance music, which Akaash sings on television, propelling him to fame.

Mr. Black tightened the lyrics in existing songs. "Songs in Bollywood movies don't really further the plot," Mr. Black said. "I have re-jigged a lot of the lyrics so that they do carry the weight of the story."

The London production uses only 10 musicians, backed by recorded samples. The Broadway version has 19 musicians — the minimum for the theater, as prescribed by the musicians' union's agreement with the producers. In London, the cast lip-syncs to three of the songs because, Mr. Pimlott said, they did not have time to learn the specialized form of Indian singing required. The Broadway version uses taped singers on only one of the songs — "Shakalaka Baby," the show's signature tune — in which the cast is portraying Bollywood actors, who often do not sing their own songs.

The Director

In London, Mr. Pimlott said, "there was more satire, more pastiche of a Bollywood movie." At times, he noted, the audience didn't know whether to laugh at the characters or to feel for them. Now, he added: "The tone is clearer. We do, I think, engage and sympathize with and go on a journey with the characters." According to Lord Lloyd-Webber: "We were going through an area that was probably less sensitive than I thought it was going to be. We thought we needed to spend a little more time tipping our hat to certain Bollywood traditions." He added, "We probably tipped our hat too much."

While British actors tend to be more ironic and reserved, Mr. Pimlott said, American actors are more "visceral" and "passionate." The new Broadway cast is no exception. "That serves us very well," he said, "because I don't think an ironic standing back is terribly useful if you're engaged in the full-blooded, rather gorgeous over-the-topness that Bollywood is."

The Design

The show's London home, the Apollo Victoria, had very little fly space or room in the wings for storage, said the show's scenery and costume designer, Mark Thompson. That meant the sets had to be small and horizontal. The Independent criticized the stage's "meager, empty look."

In New York, the Broadway Theater had enough room to store a helicopter for "Miss Saigon." The main set piece for the slum in which the hero grows up is a tall, anthill-like colony that comes down from the fly space.

To bolster the book's new focus on Akaash, Mr. Thompson designed a new series of sets — Akaash's cramped slum hovel, Rani's apartment (where Akaash lives as her lover) and his palatial mansion — to reinforce his journey from rags to riches. "It was the notion of home to home to home," Mr. Thompson said. "It's my way of subliminally controlling the visual thought process."

Mr. Thompson recently visited Las Vegas, where the fountains outside the Bellagio Hotel, he said, "made me cry — they were so fantastic." The fountain that splashes the actors during "Shakalaka Baby" now has 32 nozzles, as opposed to 13 in London — to keep up with Broadway's glitz factor.

The lighting designer Hugh Vanstone tailored his cues for this production's more direct approach, dimming the lights, for example, during a sorrowful ballad sung by Priya.

The Money

As far as finances are concerned, the Broadway producers have reason to worry. The London version recouped its capitalization of 4.2 million pounds ($7.6 million), two-thirds of which Lord Lloyd-Webber financed, but the Broadway version costs $14 million. The show has a modest advance of more than $5 million, with group sales adding another $1 or $2 million.

Early on, Lord Lloyd-Webber said, a vast majority of the London audience was South Asian. "Without the Asian community in London, it would have closed within three weeks," he said. But the crossover factor kicked in and now, Lord Lloyd-Webber estimated, the audience "is probably 95 percent white on most evenings."

The Broadway version, however, cannot fall back on a South Asian audience. According to the United States Census Bureau's Web site, New York City has 241,000 residents of Indian descent, while Britain's equivalent site says London has 437,000, plus a larger Bangladeshi and Pakistani presence.

Ms. Williams's main goal, therefore, is to bring in non-South Asian audiences early. She wants them to view the show as a descendant of "Fiddler on the Roof" or "The King and I" — musicals with an ethnic milieu that have universal appeal.

For example, while posters in London used Bollywood icons — a villain surrounded by snakes — in New York they depict more universal scenes, like a smiling Indian couple. They also point to India's exoticism, with the tagline, "Somewhere you've never been before."

Broadway preview audiences have been only 15 percent to 20 percent South Asian, Ms. Williams estimated. On Broadway, Lord Lloyd-Webber observed, the reception has been good so far. One reason is that in New York the "white audience," he said, has been "wanting it to work, embracing the thought that it is musically from a different culture."

Or perhaps, as he has already recognized, it's that the show is better.

David Auburn's burden of "Proof"

From The New York Times

Young playwrights dream of having a runaway success like "Proof." David Auburn's drama ran for 917 performances at the Walter Kerr Theater before closing on Jan. 5, 2003, making it the longest-running Broadway play in two decades. "Proof," which originally opened Off Broadway in 2000 at the Manhattan Theater Club and then transferred to Broadway, won the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize. It has been performed from Iceland to the Philippines in more than 30 languages, according to Mr. Auburn's agent, William Craver. The Goodman Theater in Chicago is staging an African-American production beginning Saturday. The film version, which Miramax will release in December, stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, the unstable daughter of a renowned mentally ill University of Chicago mathematician.

Mr. Auburn, 34, now follows that enormous hit with "The Journals of Mihail Sebastian," a one-man portrait of a Holocaust survivor, set in Bucharest from 1935 to 1944. Currently in previews, it opens on Tuesday at the 99-seat Theater at 45th Street.

Right after "Proof," Mr. Auburn wrote a play that didn't quite please him and that he showed only to friends. It now sits in a drawer. In an interview at a coffee shop at Broadway and 85th Street, he declined to reveal the title or subject but said he might return to it eventually.

He was also reticent about the movie version of "Proof." Mr. Auburn wrote the screenplay for Hart Sharp Entertainment, the film's production company. Sometime after Miramax signed on as distributor, it hired Rebecca Miller (daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller) to retool the script.

"I'd sort of not like to talk about it," Mr. Auburn said. "I'm satisfied the way it got resolved." The final version, he said, is "very close to the play." A Miramax spokesman said that the Writers Guild recently ruled that both Mr. Auburn and Ms. Miller will share the screenplay credit.

While one could speculate that "The Journals of Mihail Sebastian" is an attempt to ease back into theater with a low-profile play whose sensitive subject matter ensures a respectful reception, Mr. Auburn would disagree. "It was just the next thing that came along that grabbed me," he said. "Whatever standards you have for yourself, they don't change because your show is a hit or a flop. If anything, I felt less pressure. `Proof' gave me opportunities to try things I normally wouldn't have been able to try."

For example, he could afford to write a play like "Sebastian" for the small Keen Company, whose artistic chief, Carl Forsman, is directing. The two men met in 1996 while teaching in a summer theater program in Houston, and subsequently collaborated on several one-acts. Mr. Auburn said he wanted to return to the sense of "joy and experimentation" he felt at a time "when we had nothing and really knew nothing."

Stephen Kunken, an actor who met Mr. Auburn when they were both students at Juilliard and who played Catherine's suitor Hal in "Proof" on Broadway and on the road, said that Mr. Auburn is "thrilled" by his success, "but it's not as if he went and bought a Bentley."

"I went to his house," said Mr. Kunken, who is portraying Sebastian in Mr. Auburn's current play, "and I'm, like: `Where's the Tony? Where's the Pulitzer?' " ("In a box in a closet," Mr. Auburn said when asked.)

The box has moved — from a tiny apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Mr. Auburn lives with his wife, Frances, a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University, and their daughter, Rebecca, 18 months.

Like "Proof," much of Mr. Auburn's work has a scholarly tinge to it. His 1997 Off Broadway play, "Skyscraper," was about architecture. He studied the 1930's while writing "Myra Lennox," an original screenplay he is beginning to shop around, about a sheltered young Midwestern woman who falls in love with a man who wants to fight in the Spanish civil war. He went to Romania to research "Sebastian." Mr. Auburn, who grew up in Ohio and Arkansas college towns, was encouraged to read by his father, an English professor. "I'm a writer because I'm a reader," not vice versa, he said.

One day, Mr. Auburn said, he picked up the 628-page published diaries of Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish literary figure in Romania, titled "Journal 1935-1944," read it, and then immediately read it again. "It was a perspective on the war and the Holocaust I had never encountered," said Mr. Auburn, who was brought up a Unitarian; his mother's family was Jewish. "But much more than that, I was captivated by his personality on the page, his humor, his incredibly incisive intelligence and his self-deprecation."

Iosef Hechter's story — Sebastian was a pen name — differs from many Holocaust narratives in that he never set foot in a concentration camp, though he lived in constant fear of being sent to one. Sebastian survived the war, but was hit by a truck in 1945 and died at 37. The diaries, with their undisguised portraits of anti-Semitic Bucharest intellectuals, caused an uproar in Romania when they were published there in 1996.

In adapting the book into a play, Mr. Auburn has used Sebastian's words almost verbatim, he said, piecing the entries together to create a dramatic arc. "As with anybody's life, things happen and expectations build up, then dissipate," Mr. Auburn said. "Having some of those things I thought would be true to the life experience, but you can't afford too many of those in a play."

Or the life of a playwright, for that matter. Mr. Auburn, however, does not seem too worried about expectations.

Spring Theater: Star Power

From The New York Times

The relationship between celebrities and Broadway shows goes both ways. Ideally, a clever bit of stunt casting will draw audiences to a show, and the right material will allow a star -- a refugee from film, television or pop music -- to establish a reputation for genuine, non-camera-enhanced acting talent. The results are hard to forecast: “The Graduate” suffered when it cast Lorraine Bracco, from “The Sopranos,” one of the most beloved shows on television, while “Rent” benefited from the addition of Joey Fatone, who isn’t even the most famous member of ‘N Sync, a slowly fading pop group. This spring, a new crop of stars will arrive on Broadway: Sean Combs (better known as P. Diddy), making his stage debut in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun”; Richard Dreyfuss and Elizabeth Berkley in “Sly Fox,” Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche in “Twentieth Century,” Ray Liotta and Frank Langella in “Match,” Laura Linney in “Sight Unseen,” Christopher Plummer in “King Lear,” Alfre Woodward in “Drowning Crow” and Alfred Molina in “Fiddler on the Roof.” How will they and their shows fare? There’s no way to predict, of course. But here’s a look at the track records of some of their recent predecessors. ZACHARY PINCUS-ROTH

STAR: Farrah Fawcett
BROADWAY ROLE: Bobbi Boland in “Bobbi Boland”
DATES PERFORMED: Nov. 4-9, 2003
REVIEWS: Not reviewed; closed before opening.
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Show closed after seven previews, taking in exactly $100,389.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Her manager, Mark Berg, says that despite the play’s failure, Ms. Fawcett “hasn’t lost her marketability.” Though she’s not aggressively pursuing acting roles, he said, she’s still getting offers, and is starring as Danny Glover’s wife in the indie comedy “The Cookout,” scheduled for an August release.

STAR: Ashley Judd
BROADWAY ROLE: Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”
DATES PERFORMED: Oct. 9 to present
REVIEWS: Some critics agreed that Ms. Judd “understands the rhythm of Williams’s music, but she doesn’t yet swing it” (John Lahr, The New Yorker). Others felt she “doesn’t know where her own voice box is located, or how to support the tone it produces, or much of anything else about acting” (Michael Feingold, The Village Voice).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Limited run, which ends March 14, has done better business than any other play this season except “Henry IV” and has recouped its costs.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Though her co-star Ned Beatty openly critiqued her acting ability in an interview in The Times and her reviews were on the negative side, Ms. Judd’s movie career continues with the forthcoming thriller “Twisted” and the Cole Porter biopic “De-Lovely.”

STAR: Hugh Jackman
BROADWAY ROLE: Peter Allen in “The Boy From Oz”
DATES PERFORMED: Sept. 16 to present
REVIEWS: Critics panned the show but praised Mr. Jackman, calling him “an indisputably authentic star” and a rare “matinee idol” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times) in “one of the breakout leading man musical debuts in recent Broadway memory” (Linda Winer, Newsday).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Without Mr. Jackman, “Oz” would probably have closed by now, but instead it has raked in more than $800,000 most eight-performance weeks, and the producers simply put the entire show on hiatus during his vacations.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: By single-handedly saving weak material, Mr. Jackman has only added to his star quotient.

STAR: Melanie Griffith
BROADWAY ROLE: Roxie Hart in “Chicago”
DATES PERFORMED: July 11 to Oct. 5, 2003
REVIEWS: Critics agreed that Ms. Griffith “is no more singer and dancer than she is stage actress” (John Simon, New York), and while some found these flaws fatal, many felt that her “natural vulnerability” gave her a refreshing authenticity (Charles Isherwood, Variety), making her stint “one of the most bizarrely successful debuts in Broadway history” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Her stint broke house records at the Ambassador Theater, but the film version of “Chicago” had lent the show so much publicity that it racked up 13 straight weeks of at least 95 percent attendance right before she arrived.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: After her run she told The Times that she was in negotiations to play a lobbyist in a television series, and that she hoped her success in “Chicago” would persuade the show’s producers, Barry and Fran Weissler, to give her the title role in their future Broadway revival of “Sweet Charity.”

STAR: Toni Braxton
BROADWAY ROLE: Aida in “Aida”
DATES PERFORMED: June 30 to Nov. 16, 2003
REVIEWS: The few critics who saw her gave her mixed but respectful notices, ranging from “confidently taken on the role” (Clive Barnes, The New York Post) to “Braxton is no stage singer” and “swallows her phrases but is proud, happy and hard-working” (Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: The week Michelle T. Williams of Destiny’s Child replaced her, box office plummeted $270,753 -- 34 percent, while Broadway as a whole dropped just 6 percent.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: During her run, Ms. Braxton signed with the William Morris Agency for film and television jobs, but she is putting her acting career on hold until she finishes her new album. Her “Aida” stint also helped promote her greatest-hits album, “Ultimate Toni Braxton,” released on Nov. 4, although it entered the Billboard chart at only No. 119.

STAR: Antonio Banderas
BROADWAY ROLE: Guido Contini in “Nine”
DATES PERFORMED: March 21 to Oct. 5, 2003
REVIEWS: Most critics raved, finding him “innocent and charismatic enough to charm an audience into liking a self-obsessed adulterer” (Jason Zinoman, Time Out New York), and many enjoyed his “powerhouse baritone” (Malcolm Johnson, The Hartford Courant), while acknowledging that his accent made the faster lyrics “come out sounding like instant Esperanto” (Charles Isherwood, Variety).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Standing room only for the last 19 weeks of his run; gross plunged $207,063 (27 percent) the week John Stamos took over, while Broadway as a whole went up 10 percent, not counting new shows.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Mr. Banderas gained respect from a stunned theater community but will continue to do films, like the forthcoming “Shrek 2” and “Zorro 2.”

STAR: Paul Newman
BROADWAY ROLE: Stage Manager in “Our Town”
DATES PERFORMED: Nov. 22, 2002, to Jan. 26, 2003
REVIEWS: While some thought his low-key approach “doesn’t provide the show with the propulsive force it needs” (Jeremy McCarter, The New York Sun), most praised what may be “the most modest performance ever by a major American star on a Broadway stage” (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Thanks to Mr. Newman, the play sold $3 million in tickets and recouped its $1 million capitalization, all before the first preview.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Both before and after “Our Town,” Mr. Newman has enjoyed enduring popularity. He will appear in HBO’s forthcoming film “Empire Falls,” and will lend his voice to the Pixar animated film “Cars.” According to his publicist, Warren Cowan, Mr. Newman said that the Thornton Wilder play would be his last stage appearance.

STAR: Lorraine Bracco
BROADWAY ROLE: Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate”
DATES PERFORMED: Nov. 19, 2002, to March 2, 2003
REVIEWS: Reviews were mixed, ranging from “lacks variety and depth” (Howard Kissel, The Daily News) and “a lethargic bore” (Adam Feldman, Broadway.com) to “just enough vulnerability” (Linda Winer, Newsday) and “she’s simply sensational” (Clive Barnes, The New York Post).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Gross dipped 36 percent, with Broadway down 4 percent, the week she took over from Kathleen Turner. Ms. Bracco’s stint eventually closed the show, but the play itself -- which got scathing reviews -- may have simply lost its legs.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Ms. Bracco moved on to the Graduate tour and continues until March 14, when she hands her role to Kelly McGillis. That’s one week after Ms. Bracco returns to HBO in the premiere of the fifth and penultimate season of “The Sopranos.”

STAR: Joey Fatone
BROADWAY ROLE: Mark Cohen in “Rent”
DATES PERFORMED: Aug. 5 to Dec. 22, 2002
REVIEWS: The few critics who saw him had mixed opinions, ranging from “a sweetly sincere, fully committed performance” (Ken Mandelbaum, Broadway.com) to “too bland and too cool” (Mark Evans, Associated Press).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Gross increased $105,144 (30 percent, with Broadway up just 8 percent) in his first week.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Mr. Fatone got more acting jobs, including Danny Zuko in an Orlando production of “Grease” and the Big Bad Wolf in a yet to be released film version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” He turned down an offer to play the beast in Broadway’s “Beauty and the Beast” this spring to continue auditioning for television and film.

STAR: Molly Ringwald
BROADWAY ROLE: Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”
DATES PERFORMED: Four months in 2001-2 and six in 2002-3
REVIEWS: Though some thought her performance was “absolutely dazzling” and “carefully nuanced” (Clive Barnes, The New York Post), as a result of “the vulnerability that Ms. Ringwald still radiates” even a decade and a half after her heyday (Ben Brantley, The New York Times), some felt she was “competent but calculated and consistently obvious” (Charles Isherwood, Variety).
FINANCIAL EFFECT ON SHOW: Small, if any. Gross went up $20,664 (6 percent) during her first week, while Broadway as a whole went up less than 1 percent, but several other shows had similar increases that week.
EFFECT ON STAR’S CAREER: Ms. Ringwald next starred in the unsuccessful Broadway play “Enchanted April” (for which she received mixed reviews). She recently had her second child and is now looking for television roles.

Scientology child's play

From The New York Times

Most children would be content to play a shepherd in their first Christmas pageant. Max Miner gets to play John Travolta. The 11-year-old also portrays a robot and other roles in "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant," now Off Broadway through Jan. 4 at the John Houseman Theater after a sold-out run at the Tank, also on West 42nd Street.

Conceived and directed by Alex Timbers, with text and songs by Kyle Jarrow, the 55-minute show purports to tell the story of the life of L. Ron Hubbard (played by Jordan Wolfe, 13), including his stints as a science fiction writer and World War II Navy man, culminating in his founding of the Church of Scientology in 1954.

Hubbard called Scientology a religion but its critics have considered it a lucrative business. Adherents say it is not based on the worship of a god, but is a method of counseling and courses that helps individuals break free from unnecessary emotions to lead more rewarding lives. High-profile followers include Mr. Travolta, Tom Cruise (portrayed in the show by Daren Watson) and Kirstie Alley (Stephanie Favoreto Queiroz).

As if Hubbard wasn't an unusual enough subject for an atheist (Mr. Jarrow) and a non-practicing Roman Catholic (Mr. Timbers) to tackle, the two men decided to portray his life story in the form of a children's Christmas pageant — a clash of substance and style that is typical of their past projects.

Last January, Mr. Timbers, 25, and two fellow Yale graduates, Jennifer Rogien, 25, and Aaron Lemon-Strauss, 22, formed the theater company Les Freres Corbusier, named for fictional grandchildren of the architect Le Corbusier, who figured in a show that Mr. Timbers conceived at Yale. The company's aim, Mr. Timbers said, is to both celebrate and satirize historical icons by examining conflicting interpretations of them. Its previous show, Mr. Jarrow's "President Harding Is a Rock Star," depicted one of the worst-ever chief executives as a babe magnet in black leather pants.

In this vein, and because the pageant concept was already ironic, Mr. Timbers said, he wanted to "juxtapose that with a straightforward retelling of the life of L. Ron Hubbard, for the kids not to wink back at the audience but perform it very genuinely, with as much honesty and integrity as a real Scientologist would."

In a recent interview, however, the Rev. John Carmichael, president of the Church of Scientology of New York, said "these guys just don't understand the subject."
After visiting a rehearsal and sending a letter of protest, Mr. Carmichael saw the show and was not amused. "These folks have a right to write whatever play they want," he said, but "they've sunk to clichés." Hubbard, who died in 1986 at 74, is portrayed in the show, Mr. Carmichael said, as an authoritarian demagogue whose methods create emotionless followers. "We believe it's up to you," he emphasized. "Salvation depends on the individual."

Mr. Jarrow, 24, said that for his text he drew from both Scientology literature and journalistic accounts that criticize it.

Using a cast of 10 children, ages 8 to 13, Mr. Timbers's production mimics a Sunday school class's earnest attempt at holiday theater, complete with stiff line readings and blocking. Its portrayal of Hubbard's birth even parodies a Nativity scene, with little L. Ron surrounded by parents and barnyard animals as an angel (Alison Stacy Klein) proclaims, "Billions of years of evolution had climaxed with his birth."

The same juxtaposition is visible in Ms. Rogien's production design, which combines a pageant's low-budget style with science fiction imagery: costumes of white robes and rainbow-striped socks. Similarly, Mr. Jarrow's songs use video game music, "Free to Be You and Me"-style kiddie rock and beats from a child's keyboard synthesizer with the otherworldly sound of the symphonic band Polyphonic Spree.

Amid this zaniness, the tone can turn poignant, as when Sophie Whitfield, 11, who plays a struggling actress named Annie, lip-synchs to a ballad about giving control of oneself over to someone else.

After all, Mr. Timbers concluded, Scientology is "about clearing your mind — almost embracing the mind of the child."

Are the toughest crowds on Broadway online?

From The New York Times

Saw the Wednesday matinee, upper mezz, right side, and concluded Hugh is a total stud. But I agree with ChitaRivera4ever: cut the reprise of "Not the Boy Next Door" or else the critics will bring their wrecking balls. You hear that, producers? Is anyone listening?

This isn't a real post from a Broadway message board, but it might as well be. With the fall season starting, these Internet forums are humming with gossip about the new round of shows (especially "The Boy From Oz," featuring the Broadway debut of Hugh Jackman).

Though nobody knows exactly who posts, message boards and their faithful "chatterati" have become fixtures of Broadway culture. Their significance is sometimes hard to see, however, as anonymous Walter Kerr and Winchell wannabes like "PigletH13" and "The Cosmic Anchovy" flood a site with gripes, the onstage location of Bernadette Peters's secret water bottle and dream casts of fantasy revivals (Kim Cattrall as Mame, anyone?).

"Every person in every Broadway show goes onto the chat rooms," says the "Hairspray" star Marissa Jaret Winokur, who ignored her fellow Tony winner Sutton Foster's advice to avoid them. "Everyone's scared to admit it."

If you've ever referred to Liza Minnelli by her first name, chances are you've been to All That Chat (talkinbroadway.com/forum), which began in 1997 when its founder, John Gillespie, led an exodus from a now-defunct forum on the Tony Awards site. Today, All That Chat's main Broadway forum and its West Coast, Las Vegas and British offshoots receive up to 8,000 posts by 300 to 500 people each day, along with more than half a million page hits from readers, said Michael Reynolds, who runs the main Broadway forum. One-third of the site's registered posters are students, one-third are rabid fans and one-third work in the industry, Mr. Reynolds said.

Despite monitoring and registration rules, many believe that shills who praise their own shows run rampant. "It's very amusing to watch a 17-year-old in the Midwest arguing with someone about a show," Mr. Reynolds said, "and he doesn't realize he's arguing with the star or the director of that show."

Site personalities include the notoriously hard-to-please "Danny," who competes with other posters to weigh in first on every Broadway musical. During intermission at the first preview of the musical "The Full Monty" in 2000, "Danny" ran down 49th Street to an Internet cafe, posted a review and returned in time for the second act (which he reviewed shortly after).

While All That Chat has doubled its traffic every year, competing boards are also on the rise.

BroadwayWorld.com began in May and now receives 10,000 daily visitors, said its founder, Robert Diamond. Specialty locales like Backstage.com, Sondheim.com and Musicals.net have forums, as do shows' official sites. Show People magazine began its message board (internet.showpeople.com/forum) in July.

But though message boards promote theater in general, harsh attacks by posters, news leaks and lack of accountability can infuriate those in the industry. "We were mind-boggled that every day they were announcing who was in `Little Shop,' and we hadn't even made the offers quite yet," said the casting director Bernard Telsey.

What is unclear is whether the boards affect a show's fate. Conventional wisdom says, for instance, that bad Internet buzz about the Boston tryout of the 2000 flop "Seussical`' killed the show's Broadway run. Some disagree, however, saying reviews and, of course, the shows themselves still matter far more than online opinions.

Do posts influence shows' creative teams? If so, no one involved in a production would ever admit it. "They have said things with which we agree and think that we are working on," said Richard Frankel, one of the producers of "Little Shop of Horrors," "Hairspray" and "The Producers." "But do we change things because they said them? No."

The phenomenon isn't exclusive to theater. For example, television writers consult forums at TelevisionWithoutPity.com, and test screenings are a film industry way of life.

But theater is uniquely suited to the use of Web sites as reporting mechanisms. Productions can differ from night to night. Since theaters hold a few thousand people at most, and reviews don't appear during previews, there is a lot of pent-up curiosity about, say, Bernadette Peters's performance in "Gypsy." Fan memories are sometimes the only records of live performances, which are as ephemeral as posts on All That Chat (they fall off the site after a few days).

"I wish I was above it, I wish I could believe that I don't care what they think," Ms. Winokur said. "It's like instant gratification — you instantly know what people are thinking about you. We're constantly trying to look for that kind of validation."