Photographed by Anton Corbijn, Vogue, 2019 Brown’s production, which will fuse theatrical elements, offers her unique interpretation of Shange’s vision of a unified “choreopoem” and will make her the first Black woman to both direct and choreograph a play on Broadway.Īdrienne Warren stars in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Brown’s new production of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange’s 1976 paean in poetry and dance to the vulnerability and resilience of Black women. And now, as New York City’s summer of rebirth winds down and a new theater season is poised to kick off, it feels like the right moment to look back at what we’ve lost and ahead at what’s to come-including two productions in particular that signal the first glimmers of change on Broadway: Thoughts of a Colored Man, Keenan Scott II’s clear-eyed and lyrical look at contemporary Black manhood, which offers a snapshot of 24 hours in the lives of seven Black men in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and Camille A. Then Shakespeare returned to Central Park, where it remains the hottest ticket in town, with Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Delacorte. James-and Broadway-reopened when Bruce Springsteen returned for an encore run of his revelatory bildungsroman in music. Sitting among 150 other audience members in a theater that normally accommodates 1,700 only added to the unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere.Īfter that, spring and summer, sped along by Pfizer and Moderna, came fast. “And believe me, I need it.” As I entered the lobby, I immediately noticed the lack of pre-show chatter, though the hush was punctuated by an occasional “I see you under that mask!” After a largely isolated 13 months, during which the it-couldn’t-happen-here tropes of dystopian science fiction became our shared reality, the scene felt at once familiar and alien, as if either a single day or 1,000 years had passed. “This is like my spring training,” Miramontez told me. James, where I was greeted in quick succession by the stylish, lushly maned theatrical impresario Jordan Roth and the dean of theatrical press agents, Rick Miramontez. It would be the first live performance on a Broadway stage since New York theater, and the city itself, went dark last year on March 12.Īn hour later, I was standing outside the St. James Theatre for an iteration of NY PopsUP, the citywide initiative to start bringing back theater, music, and dance to its culture-starved citizens. A negative result would let me join a lucky few at the St. But on a sunny, not-quite-warm Saturday in early April, I found myself in a fluorescent-lit exam room at an urgent-care clinic in Hell’s Kitchen, on the receiving end of a rapid-antigen COVID test. I would either meet a friend at Sardi’s for a quick martini and a ramekin of orange cheese or else find myself sprinting out of the Times Square subway station at 7:59 to make an 8:00 curtain. Once upon a time, whenever I had seats for a Broadway show, my pretheater ritual involved one of two activities.
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