Michael Paulson

Lin-Manuel Miranda and three of his collaborators on “Hamilton,” seeking to breathe new life into the cherished but challenged Midtown retailer, said they will reopen it in the spring on West 39th Street, in a garment district storefront just a block south from its previous location.

“It was both a destination for tourists and it was also our hub, and so we wanted to keep it close to the theater district,” Miranda said. “And, too, we’re in the business of creating community, and that’s another thing the Drama Book Shop does, and that’s incalculable — I can’t tell you how many creative teams on theater companies say ‘Let’s go meet at the book shop and talk there’.”

The book shop is a century-old mainstay of the city’s theater community, selling scripts and books about the stage. But recently it has struggled to stay afloat in a pricey real estate market.

Earlier this year, after the book shop’s owners said they were being forced out of their most recent home on West 40th Street, the “Hamilton” team purchased the operation in an effort to rescue it. The new owners are Miranda, who wrote and starred in the blockbuster musical; Thomas Kail, who directed it; Jeffrey Seller, who was the lead producer; and James L. Nederlander, whose company operates the Broadway theater where the musical is running.

They closed the store at its previous location in January, moved its contents into storage, and, with the assistance of city officials eager to preserve an arts-related business in Midtown, looked for a new location.

Miranda and Kail have a particular affinity for the store because they worked on “In the Heights,” their first musical together, in its basement. “If I was ever stuck, I was surrounded by the greatest plays and musicals of all time,” Miranda said.

Another “Hamilton” connection: The store’s designer is David Korins, who created the musical's set. The store’s new centerpiece, Korins said, will be a large spiral worm-shaped sculpture of dramatic literature, bursting out of the back wall and corkscrewing into the space.

The store, expected to open in March, will now be located at 266 W. 39th St. With a look inspired by European cafes and a reading room atmosphere, it will sell coffee, merchandise and writing materials, along with play scripts, librettos and books about the arts. A basement level could be used for classes, readings or other gatherings.

The new owners saved the old-fashioned sign and an upright piano from the previous location.

“Early on, Jeffrey sent me an article about European cafes of 100 years ago, and how they were beautiful spaces where people would sip coffee and exchange ideas,” Korins said. “We wanted to create a space where we were looking back into the past and into the future, so the space is carved up like a reading room cafe, with a tin ceiling, aged with patinas, and mix and match furniture.”

The manager of the 40th Street location has agreed to manage the new store; the operation will be overseen by a “Hamilton”-related company that already oversees another Midtown business — the musical’s merchandise shop.

This article originally appeared in

Drama Book Shop Sets a Fresh Start in a New Locale

NEW YORK — The Drama Book Shop has a new home.

The boy wizard — actually, he’s all grown up now — triumphed in the worlds of books, movies and theme parks. But he’s having a tougher time on Broadway.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the two-part play set 19 years after the conclusion of the final novel, has seen a steep drop in its box office performance.

Weekly grosses have plunged by more than 50% since their peak; last week, for the first time, the show’s weekly box office grosses slipped below $1 million, according to figures released Monday by the Broadway League.

The average ticket price is now just 47% of what it was a year ago. That’s good news for families and fans eager to see the show but challenging for the producers, who spent a record $35.5 million to capitalize the play and have been banking on a long, strong run to recoup those costs.

The show’s slump comes at a time when Broadway, which has been booming, is looking at a down season. Overall grosses are nearly 7% below where they were at this time last year, and the box office for several other big brand shows, including stage adaptations of “Frozen” and “Mean Girls,” have also drooped.

But “Cursed Child” stands out because of the scale of the investment — it cost more to bring to Broadway than any other nonmusical play — and because it is part of one of the most popular, and profitable, storytelling sagas in years.

The show imagines Harry Potter as a father, employed at the ministry of magic, and is centered on his relationship with his son, a student at Hogwarts. Written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by JK Rowling, John Tiffany and Thorne, it has plenty of plot twists, stage magic and shiver-inducing effects, and has been widely acclaimed; it won the Olivier Award for best new play in London, where it opened in 2016, and the Tony Award for best new play on Broadway, where it opened last year.

There are also productions running in Melbourne, Australia; and San Francisco and forthcoming in Hamburg, Germany; and Toronto.

But the show has a built-in challenge: It is being staged, and sold, as a two-parter, generally seen two nights in a row or in a matinee-plus-evening marathon. That means cost is a hurdle for some — to see both parts, you have to buy two tickets — while for others, the running time is daunting — Part 1 is 2 hours and 40 minutes, and Part 2 is 2 hours and 35 minutes.

“It’s a big time commitment, and for people who don’t go to theater all the time it seems like a really big time commitment,” said Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theater Development Fund. “And there’s a perception that Broadway is really expensive, so unless you’re reaching people who want to go and telling them that there’s a price point that is manageable, there are people who assume ‘I can’t afford that.’ ”

The producers, who would answer questions only in writing, insist that they are not worried. Their weekly grosses are now near their weekly running costs, but they should rise over the coming weeks as Thanksgiving and the Christmas season bring more tourists to town.

“Given the two-part nature of this unique theater production, we always anticipated that there would be a time when the sales would level off, and we have now settled into a viable business-as-usual weekly sales pattern, if ‘business as usual’ is ever something that’s possible to say in the theater,” the lead producers, who include Rowling as well as Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, said in a statement. “Acknowledging that there is no road map for producing an open-ended run of a two-part play in NYC, we continue to learn all we can about positioning this remarkable and unique event in this particular market.”

One step the producers have taken is to cut prices, and they have done so effectively enough that the 1,622-seat Lyric Theater has remained fully sold out, week after week. The play is now a relative bargain — a ticket to one of the parts costs less, on average, than all but two shows currently running on Broadway.

“They’re making smart choices by varying prices and maintaining capacity,” said Mike Rafael, a ticketing analyst, who said the important question now is when and whether the “Cursed Child” grosses, which were above $2 million a week through most of last year but have fallen to about $1 million a week this fall, will level off. “I know people are concerned about the declines, but I’m more interested in how they settle.”

Producers redesigned the play’s marketing material to add an image of Harry Potter with a lightning bolt logo that has long been used to promote Potter books and films. They also added Rowling’s name, making it clear that she is behind the stage story.

The Potter imagery, linking the play to other Potter projects, supplants the distinctive child-in-a-nest image that had previously symbolized the play (giant nest sculptures are mounted on the New York theater). There is also new marketing copy that more firmly knits the play to other Potter stories, with language including “Back to Hogwarts” and “Sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.”

The play is stepping up its pursuit of audiences, emailing potential ticket buyers about pricing options, and starting a television campaign that, for the first time, includes footage from the production — a strategic shift from the time of the show’s opening, when the producers encouraged patrons not to give away details by distributing #KeepTheSecrets buttons.

One night in September, the show took over nearly all advertising screens in Times Square. And this week, Scholastic, the company that publishes the Potter novels, is releasing a $39.99 behind-the-scenes gift book about the play, called “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: The Journey.”

There are some hints that enthusiasm for the Potter franchise may be cooling. The second “Fantastic Beasts” film performed less well than the first at the box office, and a third was delayed, although filming is now expected to begin next spring. Universal Studios Hollywood, where The Wizarding World of Harry Potter was added in 2016, has seen its attendance growth slowing. And sales of the script for “Cursed Child” have dropped at retailers in the United States over the last year, according to NPD BookScan.

Two-part plays have long been a tough sell on Broadway. The other two-part play this fall, “The Inheritance,” is doing only moderately in previews (last week it grossed $545,910, which is 44% less than “Cursed Child”). And other examples, a revival of “Angels in America” last year and “Wolf Hall” in 2015, both failed to recoup their investments at the box office.

“Splitting it into two parts maybe wasn’t the best idea for fans,” said Emma Pocock, a senior editor at the Leaky Cauldron, a Potter fan site. She also noted that the presence of multiple productions makes each one less urgent. “Maybe it’s spread out too thin,” she said.

New York is by far the costliest place to produce theater of all the cities in which “Cursed Child” is being staged. Other markets remain encouraged. David Mirvish, owner of the Toronto theater where the play is scheduled to start performances next fall and a co-producer of the Canadian production, said, “I wholeheartedly believe the play will be very successful here.”

'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' Loses Steam on Broadway

NEW YORK — Harry Potter could use a little more magic.

While adjusting to the spotlight that comes with a much-talked-about Broadway debut — he has recently been a guest on “Morning Joe” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” — he has also been using a pseudonym to develop an even more experimental work that is about to begin performances at a small Brooklyn theater, the Bushwick Starr.

The new work, “Black Exhibition,” is described in the script as an attempt “to look at a queer black male psyche through the lens of its literary influences.”

The five figures in the show are all based on real people whose sexual lives form a core part of their public personas. Harris, who danced in high school and acted throughout graduate school, will perform as Gary Fisher, who wrote about his experiences as a black gay man in the posthumously published “Gary in Your Pocket”; the other characters include writers Kathy Acker, Samuel R. Delany and Yukio Mishima, as well as Michael L. Johnson, whose imprisonment for failing to disclose his HIV status to sexual partners prompted a debate over HIV criminalization.

The new work, directed by Machel Ross, is called “Black Exhibition,” because, Harris said, it asks: “What does it mean to be a black body on exhibition?” He is categorizing the new work as a “choreopoem,” after Ntozake Shange’s seminal “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which is now being revived at the Public Theater. Harris said that meeting Shange at a gathering had inspired him to use the dramatic form she pioneered.

Emboldened in part by the surprise album drops of pop artists like Beyoncé, he has chosen to keep his authorship a secret until now. The Bushwick Starr, which is planning to present the hourlong show from Nov. 6 to Nov. 23, has until now been promoting it as having been written by @GaryXXXFisher, a pseudonym created by Harris.

The show is being financially supported in part by Makeready, a film studio with which Harris has been collaborating on other projects.

Harris and the Bushwick Starr’s co-founders, Noel Allain and Sue Kessler, said they had embraced the idea of pseudonymous authorship in the hope that new audiences would have a chance to get tickets before they were snapped up. The space is small — a second-floor walk-up with just 72 seats — and the initial run is just three weeks, although it could be extended.

Harris, 30, agreed to do “Black Exhibition” at the Bushwick Starr long before he knew “Slave Play” would go to Broadway, and he said this venture has become more meaningful now. “The goal of my playwriting work was to be in these kinds of spaces — it was a no-brainer to want to do a show there, but it became even more imperative while my play was uptown, to show younger theatermakers that commercial theater doesn’t necessarily have to be the goal.”

“I was excited to be doing something that didn’t have the pressure of my name attached to it, and didn’t have the pressure of a huge financial obligation,” Harris added. “I could just play in a sandbox with my friends and jam.”

The collaboration with Bushwick Starr, a 12-year-old company with a $1 million annual budget, has been in the works for several years; Allain saw Harris’s work at a festival at the New Ohio Theater and reached out. Once Allain read an early draft of “Slave Play,” he had a sense that Harris might already have outgrown the Bushwick Starr.

“I emailed him right away and said, ‘Are you sure you want to make something at the Starr, because in a couple of years you’re going to be famous,’” Allain recalled. “His answer was very important: He said that no matter what happens, he wanted to be able to show his artistry in different ways, and working at the Starr was an opportunity to showcase his voice in a way he couldn’t do at a larger institution.”

Harris, who has also written another new play, “A Boy’s Company Presents: ‘Tell Me If I’m Hurting You,’” which will be staged next spring at Playwrights Horizons, said he had worked on “Black Exhibition” on Fire Island and in Berlin earlier this year, and Ross, the director, said those settings had helped shape the play’s aesthetic.

“The idea is building a world that feels like an intersection of industrial Berlin and the natural landscape of Fire Island,” she said. “People should come in with as open a mind as they can and prepare for a really visually exciting landscape.”

Secret From 'Slave Play' Creator: Surprise Show in Brooklyn

NEW YORK — Jeremy O. Harris, the provocative playwright behind Broadway’s “Slave Play,” has been keeping a secret.

But her love for the art form goes back much further — to singing around the piano with her mother after dinner; to organizing neighborhood productions in the backyard; to working on four classic musicals a year in high school.

Now deBessonet will have a chance to share that passion with the public, as the new artistic director of Encores!, a longstanding, popular City Center series that stages short-run productions of decades-old musicals, many of which are rarely revived.

“In my childlike heart, musicals are the rhythm,” said deBessonet, 39, who will take over officially with the 2021 season. “When I listen to and experience musicals, I am filled with a giddy joy, and also real awe, that is unlike any other passion in my life.”

DeBessonet has directed a variety of plays and musicals over the years, but she is best known as the founder of Public Works, a much-lauded program of the Public Theater that once a year stages a new musical adaptation of a classic story, which is performed by a handful of Equity actors and more than 100 amateur performers drawn from across the five boroughs of New York. The program has proved influential, spurring similar ventures in multiple cities across the United States and in England.

DeBessonet will succeed Jack Viertel, who is stepping down next year after 20 years at the Encores! helm.

She has been serving alongside him as the series’ resident director since January; she directed “Big River” at Encores! in 2017; “Pump Boys and Dinettes” in 2014 at Encores! Off-Center, a sister program focusing on revivals of off Broadway shows; and next year she is scheduled to direct an Encores! production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

DeBessonet also serves as a resident director at the Public Theater, a role she will retain.

The Encores! series offers three titles per season, for seven performances each, with orchestras of about 30 musicians. (That’s larger, and allows for a lusher sound, than the ensembles at contemporary Broadway shows.) The program’s budget next year is $4.1 million; ticket prices start at $35 (far lower than Broadway’s).

“Encores! is certainly one of our signature programs — it is now in its 27th season; it is the longest program that City Center has produced; it’s a very important and fundamental part of our history; and it’s very popular with audiences, and our board, and donors,” said Arlene Shuler, City Center’s president and chief executive. “We chose Lear because we know she has a real passion for the Encores! mission, and she combines respect for the past and vision for the future.”

DeBessonet said the longevity of Encores! (it has already revived dozens of shows), and the politics of this moment (some historical works have content that is unacceptable to contemporary audiences), posed some challenges.

“Do all works deserve to be seen again?” she asked. “Should we be allowed to correct things that are, thank God, not palatable to an audience now? I’m walking into a very rich set of questions without a preformed answer.”

Shuler pointed to deBessonet’s plans for “Millie” as an indication of her strengths. Although popular, “Millie” has become controversial, particularly in school settings, because of its depictions of Asians and Asian-Americans, which some people view as satirical, and others as racist. DeBessonet has brought in a Chinese-American playwright, Lauren Yee, as a creative consultant, and has cast a Korean-American actress, Ashley Park, in the lead role (which is usually played by a white woman).

“She is looking at the problems in that book, and trying to address it in a way that makes sense for today’s audience,” Shuler said. “We have to look at shows from the past in a new way, and Lear is very sensitive to dealing with the issues facing all of us today.”

NEW YORK — Lear deBessonet, a theater director who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn’t see a professional production of a musical until she was 17, when her school choir, on a trip to New York, got seats to “Rent” and “Les Misérables.”

New Curator of Old Musicals

He is in two festival-prize-winning movies (“Clemency” and “Burning Cane”) and an Amazon television series (“Jack Ryan”). He helped save a radio station, WBOK-AM, in his hometown New Orleans.

And now he is starring as Willy Loman in a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” in London’s West End, where the play begins previews Thursday following a well-received run at the Young Vic.

“This is one of the most memorable years of my career,” said the actor, best known as Bunk in HBO’s “The Wire.” “What I try to do is the trifecta — television, film and theater every year — and this is just the epitome.”

This “Salesman” is noteworthy because the four members of the Loman family are all played by black actors, while the other key roles are played by white performers. The casting gives a new edge to the 1949 play, making the slights and suspicions freshly fraught.

“The thing about Wendell is you can’t help but love him,” said Marianne Elliott, who is directing the production with Miranda Cromwell. “He brings to the part a vulnerability and a massive heart, so even though that character has flaws and makes tremendous mistakes, you feel his pain, and you’re hoping for him all the time.”

These are edited excerpts from an interview with Pierce.

Q: How would you describe Willy Loman?

A: Willy Loman is a man who believes in meritocracy. He believes if you do the things that are necessary, you should achieve certain things in life. And he’s a man who is lost in the denial of what’s really happening in his life, which is that he’s not doing that well.

Q: Tell me about your previous encounters with the character.

A: I read it in high school. I saw it on television with Dustin Hoffman. And I have since gone back to see the Lee J. Cobb. I saw Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman — archive footage. And I’ve seen the movie with Fred March.

Q: Did you ever think you might play the role?

A: No. I was terrified and had a sense of unworthiness. And still in the midst of it every night I feel like I’m at base camp at Mount Everest looking up, knowing that I have to summit by the end of the evening.

Q: Why did you want to take this on?

A: I knew that it would challenge me like no other role. It is the American Hamlet. And now that I’ve done it, I’m going down the list of all the roles that I want to do: Richard III and Walter Lee (“A Raisin in the Sun”). I want to do Astrov (“Uncle Vanya”) again. I’m ready to do my Othello and look forward in the years to come to do a Lear. I’d love to do “Invisible Man” if there was an interpretation of that. I still have fear, but now I have courage.

Q: What was your thinking about having black actors play the Lomans?

A: Arthur Miller never mentions race in the play. It’s really an examination of the human psyche, which is universal.

Q: Some scenes read so differently now.

A: When I’m caught in the hotel, I tell the woman, “Go into the bathroom — there may be a law about this in Massachusetts,” and that line rings out because now you see this black man with a white woman in 1949, knowing that black men have been lynched and killed for less. And in the restaurant, it’s like, “Let me put you in the back, let me put you out of sight — we can’t have Negro patrons in here.” The interpretation is not in competition with the play. It illuminates it even more.

Q: Are there any changes to the script?

A: The only thing is a school — it’s UCLA instead of Virginia, because a black man couldn’t get into Virginia in 1949. And then there is an insult from another salesman when he goes to a store. When Dustin Hoffman did it the word was “shrimp.” When Lee J. Cobb was doing it they made it “walrus.” So I was thinking, as an African American man, what would be the greatest insult? So we say nothing, and you hear the racial epithet. I just dropped a word, and it rang out, because everyone knows what the word is.

Q: What have you learned about yourself from the part?

A: I discovered a great fear: Are my best days behind me?

Q: That’s very Willy.

A: Yes. The lesson you have to learn is redemption. Ultimately in a very awful way, Willy makes a choice that I would not make, and I have to tell myself constantly, “Dude, you cannot accept this choice." But I can have an understanding of why he did it.

Q: Is there any thought of bringing this production to the United States?

A: Ideally I would love to do it on Broadway. But it’s such an American play, I would love to do it at the Kennedy Center, at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco or the Fox in Detroit. To do it in different American cities — this interpretation which I think is historic — it would be a great honor. There are nibbles and, if there aren’t, there’s the chum that I’m throwing out.

Q: The role must be exhausting.

A: People always, at the end of the evening, say, “Wow, you seem so up.” I’m like, “Yeah man, I just climbed Mount Everest.”

Wendell Pierce: 'I Still Have Fear, But Now I Have Courage'

Wendell Pierce is having a very good year.

Now a theater company and a record label with which he long collaborated are planning to release nine albums of his unrecorded music, attempting to cement his distinctive place in the canon.

“Relatively soon after Michael’s passing, we realized we wanted to come together and be able to do something to preserve his music and to make it available to more people,” said Steve Cosson, the artistic director of the Civilians, the theater company. Cosson said he hoped that the cast recordings would encourage other companies to stage shows with Friedman songs.

On Friday, Ghostlight Records is releasing the first three albums from “The Michael Friedman Collection” for digital download and on streaming services. They are recordings of three shows: “The Great Immensity,” about climate change; “This Beautiful City,” about evangelicals, and “The Abominables,” about youth hockey (and a yeti).

The nine albums will be mostly Civilians shows, but will also include some songs that Friedman wrote for cabaret events, and possibly some written for The New Yorker Radio Hour about the last presidential campaign. Friedman also left behind work on several unfinished shows; Cosson said the future of that material depends in part on the living collaborators for those projects. (In February, the off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons is staging one such show, “Unknown Soldier,” which Friedman wrote with Daniel Goldstein.)

Ghostlight has long celebrated Friedman’s work, and has previously recorded his scores for “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” “The Fortress of Solitude,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Pretty Filthy” and “Gone Missing.”

“He was such a vital composer, and there’s so much honesty in his work,” said Kurt Deutsch, a founder and president of Ghostlight Records. “When you look at this incredible body of work, it’s rewarding to know people are going to be able to learn from him and listen to him.”

The albums are new recordings, created in the studio with a mix of original cast members and new performers.

Cosson said the recording project, which has been financed by fundraising from Friedman’s friends and collaborators, has been an emotional experience.

“The recording project itself is celebratory — people who were close to Michael and loved him and the work that he did, doing our best to give them the best expression possible, is a joyful experience,” he said. “But of course that’s mixed with the grief we all have for the loss of Michael, which is just part of reality now.”

Michael Friedman Died in 2017. Now 9 Albums of His Work Are Coming.

Michael Friedman, a theatrical songwriter who died in 2017 at just 41, left behind a chorus of grieving friends and family. He also left a lot of music.

Now, after nearly a quarter century as the artistic director of one of off-Broadway’s most acclaimed nonprofits, Sanford is announcing his departure.

The theater’s next season — its 50th — will be his last as artistic director, and at that point he will have led the organization for half of its history. He will be succeeded by his longtime deputy, the theater’s associate artistic director, Adam Greenfield.

“I started thinking about what else there is in life,” Sanford, who is 65, said in an interview. He said he would not retire but would look for new ways to be active. “I still feel like I’ve got a lot left in the tank.”

Playwrights Horizons, which stages six or seven productions a year, describes itself as a “writer’s theater,” with an emphasis on contemporary American work and relationships with many of the nation’s leading playwrights. The organization has an impressive track record, including six Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, three of which were presented during Sanford’s tenure as artistic director — “The Flick,” “Clybourne Park” and “I Am My Own Wife.”

A midsize organization with an annual budget of about $13 million and a staff of 50, Playwrights Horizons operates primarily in Hell’s Kitchen, where it has two theaters, one with 198 seats and another with 128. The company also runs an undergraduate theater school that is affiliated with New York University.

It is the rare theater that still accepts unsolicited scripts — a practice that rarely leads to productions but allows the organization to develop relationships with artists who seem to have promise. “The message it sends to that sweet and crazy community of people who write plays is profound,” Sanford said.

Playwrights Horizons frequently stages challenging work by early-career artists — its celebrated current show, Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” gives a rich airing to conservative religious viewpoints, while its most recent musical, Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” is described by its protagonist as being about “one lone black gay boy I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord.”

Over the course of his tenure, Sanford has had plenty of successes (in addition to the Pulitzer winners, there were Broadway transfers like “Grey Gardens” and breakout plays like “Circle Mirror Transformation,” by Annie Baker, and “Dance Nation,” by Clare Barron), as well as his share of bad reviews.

Sometimes, the victories and the challenges came with the same show, as with “The Flick,” a slow-paced drama about three employees of a small movie theater, also written by Baker. Sanford thought “The Flick” was “the great American play,” but so many patrons disliked it — 50 people walked out on the first Tuesday night — that he wound up attempting an outreach effort that backfired.

“I sent an email to subscribers, addressing the fact that so many of them hated it, and I felt I was giving a defense of the play, but to some outside eyes it looked like I was being defensive and apologizing,” he said. “The mistake I made was really underestimating the digital world — I learned there is no such thing as a private letter to a subscriber. My naïveté was so absolute that I hadn’t warned Annie ahead of time.”

Time has vindicated Sanford. The play got very strong reviews, won the Pulitzer, was restaged in New York and London and was named by The New York Times as among the best American plays of the last quarter century. “I wouldn’t take away the learning experience,” Sanford said. “I remember interviewing Edward Albee, and he said the advice he gave to writers was ‘make your own mistakes.’”

Sanford also presided over the demolition and rebuilding of the theater’s longtime headquarters on West 42nd Street, a $30 million project that was completed in 2003.

“He leaves an extraordinary legacy,” said Judith Rubin, the longtime chairman of the theater’s board. “His sense of excellence is uncompromising, he’s got extraordinary relationships with writers, and the soul of this place is consonant with Tim’s soul.”

Rubin said the board had opted not to conduct a search for a successor but instead to promote Greenfield, who she said was an obvious and unanimous choice. She praised Greenfield for introducing a number of important new programs and said “his aesthetic and the aesthetic of this theater are in complete sync.”

Greenfield, 44, has been with Playwrights Horizons since 2007, working alongside Sanford; both men are career theater administrators who previously served as the organization’s literary manager, evaluating script for potential production. The two men will jointly run the theater next season — Greenfield will become artistic director in July 2020, and Sanford will assume the title “outgoing artistic director” until June 2021.

“I think we’re in a really strong place, financially and artistically,” Greenfield said. And, he added, “we live in an extraordinary moment for American playwriting.”

Greenfield is married to a playwright, Jordan Harrison, several of whose works (“Marjorie Prime” and “Log Cabin,” for example) have been produced by Playwrights Horizons. Greenfield said his husband’s relationship with the theater predates his own, and “I don’t feel complicated about continuing to program his work.”

The transition takes place at a time of enormous churn at nonprofit theaters across the country, when a generation dominated by white men is being succeeded by a more diverse group of leaders.

“I know we have a lot of growth to do in terms of the diversity and equity on our stage and in our offices, and I know as a cis white gay male, I have an enormous responsibility,” Greenfield said.

Asked about challenges facing the theater, he said, “New York City is a crowded marketplace, and we live in a world that moves faster, so the argument to come spend a good chunk of change to see a play does get harder the more we have more forms of entertainment readily accessible.”

Also, he said, he wanted to focus on “the integrity of producing new, pioneering, exploratory, inquisitive work in a culture that seems to enjoy the shorthand and often pays attention to the loudest voice.”

“I worry about the pressures that are put on nonprofits by the culture of late capitalism,” he said, “to make compromises to the urgency and immediacy and purity of an artistic expression.”

After 35 Years at Playwrights Horizons, He's Ready to Seek New Ones

NEW YORK — Tim Sanford arrived at Playwrights Horizons as an intern in 1984. He’s been there ever since.

The project is the most freighted of the multiple jukebox musicals headed to Broadway because of allegations that Jackson molested children. But the announcement Thursday reflects a confidence by the show’s producers and creative team that ticketbuyers will still be eager to see a show fueled by some of the most popular music in American history.

The show, now called “MJ The Musical,” will begin previews July 6 and open Aug. 13 at the Neil Simon Theater, the producers said. The show was previously called “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.”

The show is being produced by the Michael Jackson Estate and Columbia Live Stage, and features a book by Lynn Nottage, a playwright who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for “Ruined” and “Sweat.” The show is being directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon, a Tony winner for “An American in Paris.”

Nottage and Wheeldon have previously said that the musical would focus on a period of time in the early 1990s when Jackson was preparing for a tour to promote his “Dangerous” album. Asked if the show would address the abuse allegations — which Jackson always denied — Wheeldon said in April that they would endeavor to “lean into the complexities, lean into the darkness, but also recognize the great amount of music and film and choreography that Michael left behind.”

A spokesman for the show said Thursday that no new details about its content were available. A documentary earlier this year, “Leaving Neverland,” called new attention to the allegations, and the musical’s producers then canceled a planned pre-Broadway production in Chicago.

The creative team and a group of performers are now midway through a developmental workshop for the musical in New York. This is the third such workshop the production has held.

Michael Jackson Musical Is to Open on Broadway Next Summer

The biomusical about Michael Jackson will open on Broadway next summer, his estate said Thursday.

“I am really bad with plants,” said the 34-year-old actor, recalling how rapidly the orchids and other flora occasionally sent his way seem to shrivel up and die. “I kill them.”

We were seated under an oak tree that had just tried to bean us with a fast-moving acorn, somewhere inside the New York Botanical Garden. Visiting had been my idea, and I wasn’t quite sure whether it was cheesy or inspired. (Spoiler alert: The musical is about a bloodthirsty plant).

But Groff was game — he had never been — and although the Bronx gardens were not especially menacing (other than that wayward nut) they did provide an opportunity for some reflection on his unlikely career swerve.

He’s performed in two juggernauts — the animated film “Frozen” (he voiced Kristoff, the rugged ice harvester, and will do so again in “Frozen 2” next month) and the stage musical “Hamilton” (he played King George, scoring his second Tony Award nomination with just nine minutes of stage time). And he stars as an FBI agent in the critically lauded Netflix serial-killer drama “Mindhunter.”

So what is he doing in a 270-seat Hell’s Kitchen theater performing a show that can easily be seen at many a summer camp or community theater, and that, the producers say, will absolutely positively definitely not be transferring to Broadway?

The answer, he says, is mostly that it’s fun. He loves the idea (“It made me so giddy and excited”). He loves the music (“I’m just obsessed by it”). And he’s as surprised as you are (“I can’t believe we’re doing this”).

“We’re just laughing because it feels like we’re doing a professional version of the quintessential high school show,” he said. “We’re all going to back to that initial nerdy impulse of what made us fall in love with musical theater.”

The other key factor: This revival, of a show that first opened off-off-Broadway in 1982, is a passion project for director Michael Mayer, who played a formative role in his career. Thirteen years ago, Mayer took a risk by choosing Groff over actors with more education and experience to star in an experimental off-Broadway musical called “Spring Awakening.”

That show transferred to Broadway and won eight Tonys; it brought Groff his first Tony nomination and changed his life. “It was everything I ever dreamed of, come true at 21,” Groff said. “And, like I told Michael, it’s a lifetime of paybacks.”

In May, Mayer asked Groff to join him at the Metropolitan Opera for a performance of his production of “Rigoletto” and during intermission said to him, “I think I found the next project we’re going to work on because I know something about you that other people don’t.”

A week later, Mayer called and asked him to play Seymour, a clumsy and nebbishy orphan fascinated by exotic plants and besotted by his co-worker Audrey.

The show, written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, is now in previews at the Westside Theater, where it is scheduled to run through Jan. 19; the production also stars Tammy Blanchard, as the ill-treated and ill-fated Audrey, and two-time Tony-winner Christian Borle as her sadistic dentist boyfriend.

“Jonathan presents as a beautiful man, competent and terrific and engaged and completely at ease in his own body — the paragon of the golden boy,” Mayer said. “But I know that there’s this other part of him that is very much like Seymour — he’s got insecurities, and he’s got this childlike passion for things that he can get obsessive about, in the way that Seymour is obsessed with the plant and with Audrey.”

Obsessions? Let’s just say that as a child, Groff would type out, from memory, scripts of “I Love Lucy” episodes (he also read books about Lucille Ball, a memoir by Desi Arnaz and a book about their company).

“I am a total nerd, and this role is actually closer to who I am as a person than the other parts that I’ve played on Broadway,” Groff said. “I have a whole side of me that isn’t the projected image,” he added. “I get this — I totally get it — and it feels like a natural fit.”

His physical transformation from hunky to homely has turned out to be surprisingly persuasive, so much so that this production has interpolated a recurring sight gag about the character’s unattractiveness that, by combining absurdity with plausibility, slays the audience (pardon the pun) over and over.

Groff, dressed by costume designer Tom Broecker in ill-fitting khakis and a vintage blue shirt, appears to cave in on himself during the first act of the show, as if he doesn’t even deserve to stand fully upright. He wears black mad scientist glasses, a beige cap and blue Chuck Taylors, and manages to look boxier and younger than he is in real life.

“The only way he’s not a Seymour is because he’s gorgeous,” Blanchard said. “But even that goes away — he just seems to shrink into this dorky thing.”

But is “Little Shop” more than a lark?

“It’s about something larger — it’s Faust,” Groff said. “It’s about greed and how far you’ll go to get what you want.” But, he added, “the reason it ran for five years off-Broadway, and there’s a movie, and every theater in the world has done it, is because it so doesn’t take itself seriously.”

Visiting the botanical garden prompted memories for Groff, who said it reminded him of childhood trips to Longwood Gardens in his home state of Pennsylvania. “The smell!” he exulted.

He grew up in Lancaster County, where his father trains horses. He loved musicals, and dreamed of performing (early fantasy roles: Maria in “The Sound of Music” and Eliza in “My Fair Lady”). As a little boy, he dressed as Mary Poppins and Cinderella and Alice and Dorothy, as well as Peter Pan, before discovering the joys of Robin Hood.

He moved to New York instead of going to college, and after waiting tables and an early Broadway debacle (as an understudy in the short-lived “In My Life”) landed “Spring Awakening.” That show, he said, “was my college experience, in a lot of ways,” broadening his understanding of musical theater and increasing his appetite for risk.

He had known he was gay from an early age and had been living with a boyfriend since he was 19; he came out to his parents shortly after leaving that show, at 23: “I said, ‘I’m gay, but I’m not going to be in a parade or anything.’ ”

By 2014, he was starring in the HBO series “Looking,” about a group of gay friends in San Francisco — and appeared as a grand marshal of New York City’s gay pride march.

“I started to just become way more comfortable,” he said. “When I came out it was sort of like, ‘If I could change it I would, but sorry, this is how I am,’ and then it took those years to feel like this is a part of me that I love and I would never want to change.”

He said coming out has had a generally positive effect on his career — he has been landing roles both gay and straight, and “ultimately the payoff has just been that I’ve been able to be more and more myself.”

And he’s happy. For the last year and a half he’s been dating Corey Baker, a choreographer from New Zealand he met while teaching at a musical theater summer school there. He lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan but also recently purchased a house adjoining his father’s horse farm because he has a fantasy of eventually transforming the property.

“My ultimate dream is to turn it into a kind of artists’ colony for my friends to go make work,” he said.

Groff shuns social media — he said he doesn’t think his life is that interesting — and bikes around the city. He has no interest in clothing. He showed up for our photo shoot with three T-shirts — white, gray and black — proud that he had heeded a publicist’s advice to bring options.

Although he’s never quite sure what’s next career-wise, he likes the work he has.

“Mindhunter” was an unexpected pleasure — “I’m not naturally drawn to true crime,” he said — but he wanted to work with director David Fincher and has enjoyed the immersion in a new world, as well as the time filming in Pittsburgh, which allowed him weekends with his family.

Up next: “Frozen 2.” He won’t say much about what to expect, other than that Kristoff now gets his own song and that the character is “ready to take it to the next step” with Princess Anna.

As we were wrapping up our conversation, I asked Groff about an article I had seen in a Pennsylvania paper, noting that he had been spotted in the audience for a community theater production of “Evita.”

Groff said he loves seeing theater where he grew up and had been further inspired by actor Michael Cerveris, who while filming “Mindhunter” had soaked up shows in Pittsburgh. So yes, he was at “Evita” with his 4-year-old niece, and he also made time to see “Mamma Mia!” at a theater where he had performed.

As we hopped into a golf cart to find our way out of the garden, he wanted to show me one more thing. He pulled out his phone, loaded with pictures of the cramped backstage at “Little Shop,” and swiped to a video in which he was running lines with that niece, who has been learning about the show in preparation for attending opening night.

“She’s apparently been telling the kids at her day care that she eats blood, and she’s obsessed with the plant’s eyes,” he said. “But I think she sort of gets that we’re playing pretend.”

NEW YORK — Jonathan Groff, now starring as a hapless flower shop clerk in an off-Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors,” has a tiny confession to make.

Jonathan Groff Is a Seymour at Heart

But Robert O’Hara had a more pointed agenda in mind when he found himself in a ring of 75 actors and designers and producers one midsummer morning, in a studio lined by a wheelbarrow, a four-poster bed, and refreshments labeled “dildo cornbread” and “nuts cake.”

O’Hara is the director of “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’ raunchy, riveting and risky new work, whose many provocations begin with its double-entendre title. O’Hara, like Harris and many members of the cast and crew, is black. So with just four weeks to go until the first preview, he ignored the naughtily named snacks and invoked his forebears.

“For many years of my life, I’ve had random white people come to me and ask me about where my last name came from, and I would just look them in the face and say, very politely: ‘Slavery’,” O’Hara told the rapt gathering at New 42nd Street Studios, quieting the lingering chitchat. “I just want us all to be mindful that it’s because of what our ancestors endured — and survived, and abolished — that we have the audacity to be in this room.”

Upping the ante, he turned to the show’s producers, most of whom are white, and threw down a challenge. “I want you to be mindful of the responsibility that you have, to put the marquee with the name ‘Slave’ on it in Times Square,” he said. “And I would ask you, with every decision that you make, are you upholding the legacy of that name?”

Broadway is a perilous place: Even amid an overall boom, most shows fail financially. But “Slave Play,” which is costing up to $3.9 million to capitalize, is chancy in new ways.

Arriving 400 years after American slavery began, the play, often funny and pervasively unsettling, examines that lingering wound through the frustrated sex lives, and taboo sexual fantasies, of three contemporary interracial couples.

Set on the grounds of a Virginia plantation, its racially charged sex talk and simulated dominance and submission are potentially so triggering that a pre-Broadway production supplied post-show lobby counselors. An internet-based backlash, seemingly fueled by people who had not seen the play, was threatening enough to require stepped-up security, and online vitriol directed at the Broadway production prompted the show’s social media team to disable Facebook and Instagram comments.

The eight-week off-Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop was hailed by numerous critics — in The New York Times, Jesse Green called it “willfully provocative, gaudily transgressive and altogether staggering,” while Wesley Morris deemed it “the single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time.”

Among those packing into the 199-seat East Village theater to find out what the fuss was about: Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Scarlett Johansson and Stephen Sondheim.

The Broadway production is in previews and is scheduled to run for 17 weeks at the 800-seat John Golden Theater. The producers — a team that includes actor Jake Gyllenhaal, music manager Troy Carter and documentarian Abigail Disney (a great-niece of Walt) — need to harness the enthusiasm and, yes, the edginess as they seek to persuade ticket buyers that they will miss out if they don’t catch “Slave Play.”

“This is going to burn fast and bright and hot,” predicted Greg Nobile, the 27-year-old lead producer. “If you want to be part of the cultural conversation, you must see it.”

Many of the participants still can’t quite believe this play, on Broadway, is happening.

“Absolutely, I’m amazed,” said Joaquina Kalukango, the actress playing Kaneisha, a black woman from the American South married to a white man from Britain. “They really said yes to this?”

Courting Curiosity, Not Controversy

Solange’s “Almeda” streamed over a laptop in a capacious photo studio in Koreatown. There were hair people and makeup people and a tailor at a sewing machine; a stylist and a publicist and ad reps and talent managers and who knows how many assistants, one of whom spent the morning steaming racks of clothing that might never be worn.

It was the day of Kalukango’s portrait shoot, and a lot was at stake.

Online objections to the off-Broadway run had been set off, at least in part, by a photograph in The New York Times, showing Kaneisha, dressed like a slave, twerking for her husband, costumed as an overseer. A hashtag was born — #ShutDownSlavePlay — as well as an online petition, objecting to the play as degrading black women and dishonoring enslaved people.

The criticism, as happens these days, got ugly. Some of it alluded to Harris’ sexuality — he describes himself as queer — and some featured “homophobia, anti-Semitism and threats of violence,” according to Jeremy Blocker, the managing director of New York Theater Workshop. The nonprofit called the police, beefed up security and offered car service home for those feeling unsafe.

Cast members, although not surprised that the play was not to everyone’s liking, were troubled by the hostility. “I hope that people will have an eye toward the complexity of blackness, and that blackness is not monolithic,” said Ato Blankson-Wood, a black actor who portrays one half of a gay couple. “Why can’t we just make space for all these experiences?”

But word-of-mouth was excellent, the production was sold out, and the show has another run. This time, the creative team is determined to control the visuals.

NEW YORK — The first day of rehearsal on Broadway usually goes like this: Circle up. Make introductions. Offer thanks, express optimism, maybe crack a joke. Clear the room of onlookers, and off you go.

Michael Paulson

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