The Metropolitan Opera’s season opener brought Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel to the stage with an ambitious new adaptation exploring art, politics and survival. Photo: Evan Zimmerman
“Noise! Make noise!” Sher hollered at the stage as the cast of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay rehearsed a complex party scene with a huge cast of characters. Unusually for a long tech rehearsal, the energy on stage buzzed between run-throughs. Performers bounced from foot to foot, stretched and practiced stage fighting and falls. They waited for the show’s impressive but temperamental new “irising” system—a curtaining technology that opens and closes around a square “eye”—to figure itself out.
Leaving his lunch uneaten at the director’s stand, Bartlett Sher was constantly in motion. He moved around the stage like a party host, wisecracking, laughing and answering questions. Chatting with Edward Nelson, who plays the opera’s Tracy Bacon, they practiced a balancing move, each showing a different way to hold his body.
Bartlett Sher. Courtesy Bartlett Sher
A native Californian who speaks with a slight uptalk—his voice rising at the ends of sentences like an invitation—Sher’s conversational mode comes across as a desire to connect with whoever he’s talking to. Describing himself as an “interpretive artist,” Sher told Observer that he sees his talent as being “good at marshalling, pulling together many points of view.” His approach to direction is exploratory rather than single-minded. “I’m leading the exploration, I’m guiding us, I’m helping make choices that bring out the best in everybody’s work—rather than thinking of my vision being fulfilled.”
This penchant for weaving together diverse threads seems suited to bringing to the Met’s stage a story as soaringly epic as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon’s novel follows two Jewish cousins—a Czech artist and magician, Joe Kavalier and a Brooklyn-born writer, Sam Clay. Joe escapes Nazi-occupied Prague and arrives in Brooklyn a refugee after being torn away from his beloved younger brother (transformed into a sister, Sarah, in the opera). Together the cousins create The Escapist, a comic book about a superhero who fights fascism through Houdini-esque escape tricks. The book is loosely based on the life of Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America. It covers a wide range of political themes that remain pertinent to our own times, including fascism, homophobia and antisemitism.
The opera, he said, compresses Chabon’s story into the lives of its principal characters and their relationships, all set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust. Incorporated into the work is the theme of art’s place during times of historical turmoil.
Comic book imagery and cinematic set design merge onstage, reflecting the story’s fascination with escape, imagination and transformation. Photo: Evan Zimmerman
“Layered in with essentially Chabon’s own obsession with how much art can help you make sense of or change life,” Sher explained. “Joe Kavalier goes to comic books as a way of handling his pain and maybe transforming his pain. Whether that works or not is a fascinating question. Whether art can actually help you with these things or not becomes a major obsession of the book.”
The place of art in the political and the political in art has been woven throughout Sher’s career as a director. He’s often sought out politically charged material—from directing a dramatization of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book Nickeled and Dimed, about the inability to survive on minimum-wage work in America, to politically sensitive revivals of South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady, to Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I think theatre is a catalyst for change,” Sher said. “I don’t think you make theatre pieces to tell people how to change. We tell stories that express people’s ability to handle ambiguity, deal with problems, see conflicts and make decisions.”
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay approaches politics in a gently coaxing manner. Gene Scheer’s libretto tells a simple story about a handful of relationships in wartime New York and Europe. The epic breadth of Chabon’s novel is conveyed visually. Its density and richness are mirrored in the opera’s textured and complex set design. Layered screens iris in and out, with designs from 59 Studio projected onto them. Towering above the audience are images of midcentury New York in its gloomy noir glory. We see comic book superheroes gleaming in primary colors or animated as elegantly looping works in progress. Haunting the background like a nightmare are greyscale sketches of Nazi death camps, reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
As a director, Sher uses the entire stage—with all its dimensions and angles—in a cinematic approach to theatre. The vast cast of characters appears on stage with fair frequency, in large groups at parties, battles and crowd scenes. A superhero even flies on a wire. But it’s all conveyed with a subdued elegance, never demanding, always inviting. Sher’s contribution in Kavalier and Clay is conversational: the production’s emotional texture is pliable. He doesn’t tell you how to feel or think.
Sher’s ever-shifting, multi-perspectival approach feels ideal for our own overwhelming, anxious and information-dense moment. It dances away from ideological definition. “The themes of a kind of creeping fascism and the struggles against art, against the political mind, against who we’ve become, are really critical right now but also very elusive and very hard to figure out how to express themselves.”
On opening night at the Met, the political charge of our new normal seeped into the opera house. Peter Gelb and Senator Chuck Schumer made speeches on the importance of freedom of expression—the former to cheers, the latter to boos and heckles from frustrated constituents. Even in this historic environment, operating at a political remove now seems impossible.
“I try to believe that great stories come when you need them most,” Sher concluded. “And it feels to me like we’re lucky that Kavalier and Clay is coming around for us at this time.”
Peck’s curatorial approach transforms the stage into a meeting place for genres, generations and creative sensibilities in constant dialogue. Photo: Riker Brothers
In 2022, New York City Ballet’s beloved ballerina Tiler Peck curated a show for New York City Center’s inaugural Artists at the Center program: Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends. The show received critical and audience acclaim in New York City, went on to perform at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London (where the piece Time Spell received an Olivier Award nomination for Best New Dance Production) and then toured Peck’s home state of California. It is now returning to City Center for an encore presentation from October 16 to 19—great news for those of us who missed the popular show the first time around.
The program includes fresh (as in, they first premiered in 2022) works of ballet, contemporary and tap dance from some of the greatest choreographers working today. It opens with the quartet The Barre Project, Blake Works II by modern ballet pioneer William Forsythe, set to music by James Blake, followed by Peck’s sextet Thousandth Orange, set to live music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. After that is the duet Swift Arrow by San Francisco’s king of contemporary ballet, Alonzo King, with music by jazz composer Jason Moran. And closing the program is the City Center commission Time Spell, a collaboration between Peck, tap dance queen Michelle Dorrance, and Emmy-nominated contemporary choreographer Jillian Meyers, with music by Aaron Marcellus and Penelope Wendtlandt. Peck dances in all the works except her own, and the show’s all-star cast also includes fellow NYCB company members India Bradley, Chun Wai Chan, Christopher Grant, Mira Nadon, Quinn Starner, and Ryan Tomash, along with Boston Ballet principal dancer Jeffrey Cirio, dancer and So You Think You Can Dance season 14 winner Lex Ishimoto and tap dancer Byron Tittle.
Observer recently spoke with Peck—always warm, humble and on the move—about her excitement for the show’s encore presentation, her bottomless desire to grow as an artist and her love and admiration for her friends.
How did Turn It Out with Tiler & Friends first come together?
I have curated other shows, but this is the only program I’ve ever created from scratch. None of these pieces existed before I asked the choreographers to make them. So Turn It Out with Tiler feels the most special to me, because it’s kind of like my little child.
I started working on it during the pandemic. I’d always wanted to work with Bill Forsythe, and he had wanted to work with me, but we could never get our schedules together. So I called him and said, “Hi, Bill, I know everything’s, like, shut down, but would you want to work together? I know it’s not ideal.” And he was like, “When can we start?” And I was like, “How about tomorrow?” And so that’s how that piece came about. We just started working together over Zoom. We didn’t know what it would become. After a while, he said, “I think we need to bring some gentlemen in.” And so we did. After we finished The Barre Project, we released it on film so people could see it. But the first time it was ever performed live was at City Center for this show, and the only time we’ve ever done it with the original cast, the way he created it, is during this particular Turn It Out with Tiler show that we tour.
What about the Alonzo King piece?
It was the same thing. I called Alonzo and said, “I really want to work with you. How would you feel about creating something for me?” And he said, “Oh my gosh, I would love to.” And so we made a little bubble in San Francisco. There were just four of us in the room. And he created a pas de deux for Roman and me during that time, which has also only been seen whenever this show is done. My choreography, Thousandth Orange, began at the Vail Dance Festival, but this version we perform is very different. Time Spell was created specifically for this show and has only ever been performed in this show.
How has it been returning to Thousandth Orange, a work you created a few years ago?
It’s nice because I can adjust it for the dancers who are doing it now. It doesn’t have to be a museum piece. That’s one great thing about being a living choreographer—you can still make those changes!
When you first performed the show and toured it, what responses did you get from the audience?
I think Time Spell really transports people. When I’m in the wings listening to Penny and Aaron sing, I feel that, but I wasn’t sure how the audience would react. It’s really hard, I think, to try to mix styles without it looking like “Oh, there’s a tap dancer and there’s a ballet dancer and contemporary dancer and they’re all trying to dance together!” But to me, the seamlessness of how this is blended, you don’t even realize that you’re watching so many different forms of dance in one piece. And so many of the dancers are multitalented. Like Lex is tapping alongside Michelle Dorrance, but then doing a pas de deux with me, because he can do ballet too. A lot of people have told me Time Spell does not leave them. They don’t always understand how to explain it, but they’re so moved by it. And that’s been the case every time we’ve performed it.
How did you go about making that piece?
I wanted to work with Michelle, and Michelle had the idea to bring Jillian Meyers in, too. So the three of us really worked together. They’re so talented. I just helped blend the ballet into it. But everybody was super collaborative. Michelle is just… I don’t know, she’s just like the most talented person I know, and this is, I think, one of her favorite things she’s ever made.
What excites you about returning to this program again?
The nice thing about getting to do something more than once is that you get to dive deeper into each piece and role. And I feel like that’s what’s so beautiful about the show now—it’s really finding its roots, and everybody feels comfortable in it.
These are the most incredible artists to be surrounded by. I think all of us love being in the room together, because we each feel like we grow by getting to work with one another. We all push each other. And we become a really tight family of people. I think that feeling comes across in the show because the works were created during a time when nobody was able to be together. This was the first thing we could do. We were in masks when we first started! And so it really has this feeling of longing, of not being with somebody, and then coming back, and the intersections that happen there. I feel like the more that we all understand the work, the richer it’s become. And because we don’t get to do it often, every time we dance together, it feels fresh.
What’s it like dancing styles so different from what you normally do at NYCB?
Growing up, I wasn’t a classical dancer at all. I took ballet so that my technique would be strong, but I was really a jazz contemporary dancer. So I think that’s why I feel so comfortable in these types of work. At this point in my career, I want to be pushed by choreographers, and not just physically. Alonzo really digs deep into the human side of dancing. He is kind of like a philosopher, and I was interested in growing that way as a dancer. When you’re in the studio with him, you learn so much about yourself and about dance and the world. He has this way of sharing that’s unlike any other choreographer, I think.
And Bill is the most musical person ever, so working with him was like a dream. The way he would explain things like compressing and stretching time, it felt like I was getting a lesson on how to choreograph and dance at the same time every time we worked.
And you’re so musical, too—that’s a great pairing!
You know what’s funny? The one person who makes me feel not musical is Michelle. She can hear notes and beats that my ear doesn’t even go to, and I think I’m musical, so that’s why I’m always so interested in working with her. She’s constantly pushing me to hear and see and explore even further. What I love about this show is that it’s everything. It combines so many types of dance forms into one. I only wear pointe shoes for one of the pieces! It’s more than just a ballet performance. It’s an evening of dance.
Brown’s I AM expands on her signature blend of storytelling, movement and community. Photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt
After a successful world premiere at Jacob’s Pillow last summer, Camille A. Brown & Dancers brought their latest work, I AM, to L.A.’s Music Center for three nights this past weekend. It’s part of their mini-tour with stops at McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey (Sept. 26), followed by dates in Boston (Nov. 14-15) and then Seattle (March 7, 2026).
The new show uses her previous show, ink, as a jumping-off point. “In that one, I was talking about the idea of Black people being superheroes, because we keep rising,” Brown tells Observer. “The idea of perseverance and the celebration of onward movement, regardless of obstacles; I wanted to discuss what it is like to move through the future with joy. I wanted this to be an experience where we’re starting at joy from the top, then where do we go? I have fifty minutes’ worth of where we go. What does it mean to start with joy, and what does that look like with their individual bodies, and as a community, brought together?”
The piece draws its title and inspiration from episode 7 of the HBO series Lovecraft Country, in which the character Hippolyta Freeman (played by Aunjanue Ellis) moves through time and space, visiting different eras and drawing personal insight, joy and strength through her experience.
“I thought that was so powerful and spoke to me, personally, as a Black woman, and what I have to navigate in the world,” says Brown. “I wanted us to feel we have pushed out of these four walls, the black, the space, the universe. The solo, which I created for myself, depicts the story, and my interpretation of Hippolyta’s journey and my journey as an artist. Each section is another form of spirit and joy and love and community. And it’s shown through different ways, through brotherhood, through sisterhood, through funk and R&B, the ballroom, the church, hip-hop, African dance, everywhere we can possibly go.”
Brown won’t be dancing the solo in this iteration of the show. That honor falls to Courtney Ross, an independent contractor with the company since 2019. “While the piece is created on her and debuted by her, the story is human enough to be transferred into what I can bring to the table,” says Ross about taking over the role from Brown. “Within the solo, there is a sense of reclamation, which is something Hippolyta is going through in her journey. So, there are moments where I’m reaching for a higher place. It’s leaning more and more into my joy, and there’s the thing that becomes the strength. Camille went to Ailey, where you’re heavily trained in ballet, modern technique and jazz. We have to bring all of those technical elements into the space.”
Originally from Jamaica, Queens, Brown studied at The Ailey School on a scholarship, while also studying at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts. Her early career was spent at Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company, and she was a guest artist at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before founding Camille A. Brown & Dancers in 2006.
Her work on playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy led to her first Tony nomination for Best Choreography. Her directorial debut, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, garnered two more, for Best Choreography and Best Direction. Her fourth Tony nomination came for Alicia Keys’ jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen, followed by another last year for Gypsy, starring Audra McDonald. At the Met, she worked on Porgy and Bess as well as Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones.
“In the shows that I’ve worked with, everyone has to do everything,” says Brown. “If it’s not a dance focus role, maybe they don’t have as much to carry as a trained dancer in the show. In Hell’s Kitchen, the dancers had to be dancers in the space. With Gypsy, dancers had to sing, dance and act. So, it depends on the requirements of the show.”
Ross confirms that working with Brown requires multi-disciplined training. “We are very well rehearsed. Once you get into the choreography, Camille is very detailed. With the solo, I have a bit more freedom because the solo is about freedom. So, I have agency. I love this work, I AM, my family loves the work and the community loves this work. I’m excited to continue sharing and hearing the response.”
In recent months, Black voices have been targeted by government-backed anti-DEI measures in arts and educational institutions. “If I were to isolate and look at the news, it can be a lot,” Ross says. “It’s an intentional choice to be a Black woman from the African diaspora and say, ‘I’m going to step on stage and tell these very loud and proud stories.’”
By continuing to do what she does, Brown is committed to speaking truth to power. “It’s scary; I don’t want to negate the fear aspect of it, at all. Hopefully, it inspires us all to have conviction,” she says of the crisis. “If we start censoring ourselves and start doing these things to get a grant or a performance, then is it really our art that we’re making, or does it turn into something else? In order for me to continue in this world, I need to focus on my work.”
The piece reflects Brown’s personal journey as an artist, drawing inspiration from Lovecraft Country’s Hippolyta Freeman and the power of reclamation. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima Photography
Hours after Kamala Harris emerged as a presidential contender, Shaina Taub realized that Suffs—her new Tony-winning musical about pioneering suffragists in the early 1900s—was suddenly playing to a different crowd.
“The energy and joy in the audience that got released—it was like a balloon,” Taub tells Observer. “People are so ready to feel some sense of hope, and we celebrate that. There’s a lot of work to do, a lot of organizing and campaigning, but I think there’s a new light under everyone to get it done.”
One of the people to thank for Suffs is the last female Democratic nominee to run for President of the United States, Hilary Rodham Clinton, who, impressed with Taub and the show, came aboard late as a lead producer. You can’t make this stuff up. Taub’s word for this message-laden connection is “surreal.”
The company of Suffs.Joan Marcus
The idea of doing a musical based on the suffragists—from their 1913 march on Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote—did not originate with Taub. Producer Rachel Sussman had dreamed about it since she was 12 and suggested it to Taub over dinner in 2010. She also gave her a copy of Doris Stephens’s 1920 book, Jailed for Freedom, a firsthand account of the movement. Taub read it in one night and signed up immediately, shocked that it was all news to her. To say she was inspired would be an understatement: she wrote the book, lyrics and music for Suffs. The plan was to do a show celebrating the centennial of the 19th amendment, but Covid-19 took care of that.
Suffs tried to world-premiere Off-Broadway on April 6, 2020, and closed quickly for two weeks because of the number of Covid cases among the cast. “I got Covid on what would have been our opening night,” Taub remembers. “We never got to have an opening night at The Public. It was a really low moment of having that ritual taken away from us by the circumstances of the world.”
The show weaved through its initial engagement under the cloud of Covid, nursing some critical body-blows which Taub translated into learning experiences. “The work never stopped,” she noted. “There was no reset. Some people say, ‘Oh, did you go back to the drawing board after The Public?’—but I felt that we never left the drawing board. We—my wonderful collaborator, director Leigh Silverman, and I—knew we weren’t done. We were just excited to keep going.”
Mostly, Taub followed the advice of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “There’s so much you can learn about a musical once it gets in front of an audience. You can do workshops and readings for years, but the audience will tell you real fast. I was so energized to use the intellect from the audience.”
Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland and the company of Suffs.Joan Marcus
Taub tapped into the audience’s intellect not from the wings, but from the stage—in addition to creating the show, she stars as Alice Paul, a key figure in the movement. “Performing in the show helps because you get their data pool,” she says. The audience became her guide when it came to revising the show before it’s Broadway debut. “I know what always works. I know what never works. I know what works sometimes, and I can make the necessary adjustments based on that.”
By the time Suffs got to Broadway and the Music Box Theater last October, Taub had added dialogue scenes to the originally sung-though musical. She is the first woman to ever independently win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score in the same season—and the second woman to write the book, lyrics and music for a show and act a leading role; the last (and only other) person to accomplish this was Micki Grant for 1972’s Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.
It took Taub a decade to create Suffs—and two more years to overhaul it. Depending on how you count it (which is difficult), Broadway is getting 17 new, or relatively new, songs. “Basically, I’m not sure,” she admits of the count. “Some songs the music completely changes. Some songs, I change the lyric. Some songs, I kept the lyric but added a new melody. It’s hard to quantify.”
One new addition gets the show off to a bouncy, ingratiating start—a marked improvement over the Brechtian Off-Broadway opener “Watch Out for the Suffragette,” in which the ensemble of revolutionary women (made up of female and nonbinary actors) sock it to their male detractors and threaten “to scold you for three hours.” That opener played for years in development before Taub realized how off-putting it was for audiences who knew nothing of what they were getting into, so she lightened the lecture-to-come with a sprightly bit of vaudeville, “Let Mother Vote.”
“Those three words were like a campaign slogan for the suffrage movement of that era,” Taub explains. “There were buttons that said ‘Let Mother Vote.’” Taub says she “palmed that” and thought, “Why not have a fun, upbeat ditty that would convey that message?”
The number clarifies what’s to come for the uninitiated much like the way the late addition of “Comedy Tonight” told people what to expect from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Almost all the cast show up for it, including some name-brand performers parading as vintage suffragists: Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, Emily Skinner as Alva Belmont, Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells, Hannah Cruz as Inez Milholland. These characters are old and young, moderate and radical, Black and white—they don’t mix well, but, despite the clashes, their eyes are on the prize.
Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells and the company of Suffs.Joan Marcus
Once these ladies sing their say, Taub makes her entrance—16th in a cast of 17—as the young and impatient Alice Paul, singing the firebrand’s anthem, “Finish the Fight.” In her mind, Taub says she was thinking of her own fight: “I’ve been trying to finish the show all these years.”
The song is reprised at the very end of the show, followed by another late addition number that literally gives the audience its marching orders, a rousing closer called “Keep Marching.”
Will Taub be leaving Suffs to play the anarchist revolutionary, Emma Goldman when City Center’s Encores! stages Ragtime from October 30th to November 10th? “Yes and no,” she answers. “I’ll be out for most of those two weeks, yes. But I’m excited that on election night and on the Wednesday matinee the day after the election, they’re not having Ragtime performances—so I can do Suffs those 24 hours. No matter what happens, it will be quite an intense and emotional place to be.”
Being able to perform in both Ragtime and Suffs is particularly exciting for Taub, since Ragtime is her favorite show. “That’s what I grew up listening to,” she says. “It was such an inspiration for me.” In fact, the Ragtime song “He Wanted to Say”—which has Emma Goldman narrating the thoughts of another character—inspired a song in Suffs, “She and I,” a duet between Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. “I use a similar form where you get to hear Carrie’s inner life, which she can’t express too well,” says Taub. “That’s my homage to ‘He Wanted to Say.’”
There’s a certain casting logic that would turn Taub from Alice Paul into Emma Goldman.
“I love giving to play a fiery activist—especially Emma,” she admits, “I grew up in rural Vermont, where there was no Jewish community per se, but I became so obsessed with Ragtime that it made me look up Emma Goldman. She is the first model of a Jewish activist I ever had as a kid.”
Goldman shows up in several musicals—not just Ragtime but in Assassins and Tintypes. That last one, Taub says with pride, “I actually did at summer camp. Emma’s winding in and out of American-history musicals. I hope eventually that someone writes an Emma Goldman musical, full stop.”
Whatever, it won’t be her, she promises. “I may take a break from historical musicals.”
Evidently so: She spent the summer of ‘22 in Chicago, supplying lyrics to Elton John’s music for The Devil Wears Prada. More work is needed. “When it became clear the schedules were going to overlap, I wanted to make sure that Prada would have someone who would be there to meet in the room and collaborate when I’m bound to the Music Box Theater for God knows how long.”
Will she be leaving Suffs to go to London to work on Prada? The answer to that, she’s happy to say, is an emphatic no. “I actually brought on an additional lyricist, Mark Sonnenblick, who will do additional lyrics and revisions because I can’t be there. I’m in touch with him every day, weighing in from afar, but there’s only so much you can do when you don’t have eyes and ears on it.”
With projects that take years from start to stage, such an arrangement makes sense. “I think we should normalize that kind of collaboration in musical theater,” Taub says. “Given our schedules and our lives, it’s not always realistic to be fully there.”
Meanwhile, crowds keep coming to the Music Box. “Our audiences have blown me away. To look out there at a full house or meet people at the stage door is wonderful. They’re of all ages and genders—but especially mothers and daughters and grandmothers.” Return visits are common, she adds.
“The hunger, I think, that people have for a story like this—a feeling of possibilities in these hard times—I hope we’re lucky enough to get to continue providing that for them as long as we can.”
Director Jessica Stone at the opening night of Water for Elephants at the Imperial Theatre on March 21, 2024 in New York City. Jenny Anderson Photo/Courtesy of Polk & Co
Jessica Stone—who directed last year’s Tony-winning Best Musical, Kimberly Akimbo, and may just have directed this year’s Tony-winning Best Musical, Water for Elephants—first met her husband, actor Christopher Fitzgerald, onstage. This was back in 1999, when there were still babes in arms and rehearsing, appropriately enough, a New York City Center Encores! production of Babes in Arms, the Rodgers and Hart perennial. Specifically, it was while rehearsing a fast-paced, roughhouse rendition of R&H’s “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”
“It was a very physical number,” Stone tells Observer. “The first day we met, we were kicking each other and beating each other up.” But the result was gang-busters. “When you work hard at something and people appreciate it, you feel pretty great.”
Four years later, they returned to the stage of that triumph, Fitzgerald having lured her there, using the ruse that Encores! musical director, Rob Fisher, wanted to see them. When it became clear Fisher was a no-show, Fitzgerald dropped to one knee and popped the question. She said yes. They now have two sons, 17 and 15, but they travel on quite different showbiz planes.
Not long after Babes in Arms, Stone traded in her dancing shoes and for a director’s megaphone. Fitzgerald remains a clown prince of Broadway—he handled three roles in the recent revival of Spamalot—while Stone toils behind the scenes.
Stone sees her switch from dancing to directing as a natural progression. “I always had a desire to collaborate with other kinds of storytellers, to think about the story in a larger way than just the character that I was playing,” she says.
Nevertheless, she tiptoed into this new profession. Whenever she had free time between gigs, she’d sign up to assist friends who were already directors—Joe Mantello, Christopher Ashley, David Warren—and acquaint herself with varied works from Shakespeare to Shaw to Simon.
Paul Alexander Nolan and the cast of Water For Elephants.Matthew Murphy
One of her director-friends, the late Nicholas Martin, started her off on solo-directing in 2010 when he provided her with the mainstage at Williamstown and she filled it with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Just to make it characteristically complicated, she used an all-male ensemble and had everybody double-cast. “I loved the puzzle of it,” she admits. “It’s so silly, and that score is just so elegant. It elevates the entire evening. I just love that show.
“Even then, I didn’t know that I was pivoting away from acting. I thought, ‘Oh, that was kind of a lark,’ but, when serious job offers to direct started coming in, I realized I was more interested in those than in the acting offers. I’d lost my desire for that a while ago, and I felt much happier, more fulfilled and excited. Also, I had much more energy for directing than I had for acting.”
Stone guided Kimberly Akimbo—about a teenage girl suffering from a form of progeria, which causes her to age four-and-a-half times faster than normal—to no less than five Tony wins out of seven nominations. The elaborately staged Water for Elephants—which uses horse and elephant puppets to help tell the story of a run-down, one-ring circus traveling through the Depression —has seven Tony noms itself.
Both shows seem, on paper, difficult if not impossible to musicalize. “I gravitate toward stories that intertwine pain and hope and joy in any given second,” Stone says. “When I was presented with the opportunity to think about Water for Elephants, it was less about ‘Ooooh, this sounds hard—I want to do it’ and more about ‘How’d I do that—and still have the train and a stampede and puppetry? What might it look like?’”
She knows who to thank for getting her somewhat unwieldy epic vision on stage. “I had the luck to work with an incredible producing team—Jennifer Costello and Peter Schneider—who allowed a lot of room for research and development and a lot of time to sit down with Rick Elice and the writers to crack the code,” she insists. Then, there’s that surprisingly tuneful and sprightly score from an aggregate of seven known collectively as PigPen Theatre Co.
Strengthening her stage vision are the idyllic memories of her own circuses from childhood. “ I loved the circus as a kid, and I still love it, as an adult,” she says. “There’s such skill and such fragility in the entire experience, such trust among the company members because they hold each other and carry each other.”
But circus love wasn’t exactly what drew her to the project. “The attraction was the fact that the main character loses everything, and it changes the entire trajectory of his life,” she opines. “He faces again his life, and what he chooses to do with what’s left of it—how he uses that previous chapter of his life to teach himself to think about what he might want to do next.”
This would be Jacob Jankowaki, a veterinarian who loses his parents in a car crash. Transitioning from an Ivy League school to anywhere, he hops a cross-country train shared by the Benzini Brothers Circus, and his life is upended. Grant Gustin, in his Broadway debut, has this lead role. He was recommended by friends to Stone, who “knew he was the guy as soon as we met.”
Young Jacob, too, develops a circus love—specifically for the beautiful horseback-rider (Isabelle McCalla), who unfortunately is married to the ringmaster (Paul Alexander Nolan). I say “young Jacob” because there’s an old Jacob (Gregg Edelman), who muses over the life that he survived.
Grant Gustin, Paul Alexander Nolan, Isabelle McCalla and the company of Water For Elephants.Matthew Murphy
Thus running around loose in Water for Elephants is a circus story, a love story, a triangle and a memory play. That’s a lot for a director to crack her whip over. Stone had help from choreographers Shana Carroll and Jesse Robb, scenic designer Takeshi Kata and costume designer David Israel Reynoso, each of them Tony nominated themselves.
She also had time. Water for Elephants unfurled its tent for the first time last year for a world premiere at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. “I think it’s important to give new musicals a chance to breathe,” Stone contends. “People say, ‘Oh, it takes seven years to make a musical,’ and, in a funny way, it really does. It’s not just the time it takes to write and revise and design. You need room to look at it and then to step away from it. We had so much support at the Alliance. It gave us the opportunity to see it on its feet first and then make changes where we still wanted to that the story. We were able to tinker and make a few changes, actually, upon leaving Atlanta.”
Stone said goodbye to a performing career some time ago and doesn’t miss the acclaim that went with it, but she relishes the kudos she’s getting for directing Water for Elephants. “I love that people really enjoy the show, that they scream at the end of Act I, that they leap to their feet at the end of Act II and tell me it takes their breath away. That’s the thing that moves me. I’m proud of the show we’ve all created. I love the team that I worked with and the company of actors. And I feel really, really proud that this show is getting the kind of praise it’s getting.
“When you get a nomination for Best Musical, it belongs to everybody. You don’t make a musical without everybody. That’s the thing I’m most pleased about, what nobody told me when I was an actor. When you’re a director, you work so closely with every single person on a project. This one has a lot of people attached to it, and there’s not a bad apple in the bunch. It’s an incredible group of storytellers—on stage and off—and Water for Elephants is truly the thing that makes me happy to hang my hat on because it’s a show that belongs to all of us.”
Kecia Lewis as Miss Liza Jane and Maleah Joi Moon as Ali in Hell’s Kitchen. Marc J. Franklin
Alicia Cook, a resident of Manhattan Plaza on West 43rd once upon a time, changed her name to Alicia Keys in part because of the 88s on her piano and the doors they would unlock for her. That was 27 years and 16 Grammys ago, when she was just 16. Her debut album, Songs in A Minor, came out when she was 20 and won her the first five of those Grammys. These days she’s writing for Broadway. Her jukebox musical Hell’s Kitchen — now transplanted at the Shubert Theater four blocks away from the subsidized housing complex she grew up in — is a hometown favorite, winning 13 Tony nominations, one for each year Keys worked on the show. “Greatness can’t be rushed,” she’s said.
The show (with a book by Kristoffer Diaz) recounts a fictional facsimile of Keys’s budding years of creativity in the projects, sprinkling in new songs with her best-known r&b, hip-hop, and pop hits like “If I Ain’t Got You,” “Girl on Fire,” and “Empire State of Mind.” Maleah Joi Moon plays Ali, a 17-year-old girl in freefall, and Shoshana Bean is her single mom, but but a third character emerging from the sidelines proves to be the play’s most memorable: Miss Liza Jane (Kecia Lewis), a no-nonsense teacher who sparks—and deepens—the teen’s musical talent, giving it focus and direction: Voila! a songwriter is born.
Two weeks ago Lewis got the Lucille Lortel Award and Actors’ Equity’s Richard Seff Award. Lastweek the Outer Critics Circle crowned her Outstanding Featured Performer in a Broadway Musical. Yep, she’s up for two more yet-to-be-determined awards: the Drama Desk and the Tony.
Not only does Lewis strike a compelling presence in the show, she also makes her mark musically with a couple of Keys songs, “Perfect Way to Die” and “Authors of Forever.” The creative collaboration that went into making these songs stage-worthy cemented the bond between the singer and the songwriter. “She wants to know what your ideas are, what you’re thinking, how you’re building the character,” Lewis tells Observer of Keys. “And she was kind enough to share with me what she was thinking when she actually wrote those two songs—what was going on in her heart and mind—and then allowing me to bring out my own version of that, my own truth.”
Alicia Keys and Kecia Lewis attend the 77th Annual Tony Awards Meet The Nominees Press Event at Sofitel New York on May 02, 2024 in New York City. Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions
Lewis comes to the role of a teacher and mentor with experience—she’s spent most of her days seesawing between teaching and theater. “Hell’s Kitchen is a perfect match for where I am in my life and my career,” she says. At the Atlantic Theater, she’s taught stage acting. She’s done some teaching at her alma mater, NYU, and conducted a master class at Juilliard. In leaner times, she’s even been known to work survival jobs at elementary schools.
Fortunately, there haven’t been a lot of those. Broadway and Off-Broadway have kept her busy, originating or creating or replacing—roles like Asaka in Once Upon This Island, “Mama” Morton in Chicago, the title role in Mother Courage, et al. The original cast of Ain’t Misbehavin’ revue reconvened for the 1988 revival, and she stood by for Nell Carter and Armelia McQueen.
When The Drowsy Chaperone arrived on Broadway in 2006, Lewis arrived flying a plane as Trix the Aviatrix. “That’s probably in my top five theater experiences,” she figures. “This was a cast of people who, half-kiddingly, considered ourselves the oldest cast on Broadway. The baby of our company was the star of the show, Sutton Foster. She was 30. The rest of us, mostly, were 45 and above, but there was a settled heart and spirit about that, an enjoyment and confidence about what we have been doing so long. That kind of atmosphere, on stage and off, made for an amazingly good time.” The cast hung out together because they enjoyed each other’s company. “On Sundays, Sutton brought in bagels and breakfast things, and we’d meet up before the matinee.”
Hell’s Kitchen’s Miss Liza Jane, her new favorite role, is a composite of several Manhattan Plaza people who help Alicia find her way. Audiences adore this character. Coming and going, Lewis gets her claps and her laughs. Lewis attributes the audience’s warm embrace to fact that almost everyone has had someone in their life like Miss Liza Jane. “A relative, a neighbor, a school administrator, someone who really saw you and believed in you and pushed you to be your best,” she says. “I have been blessed to have quite a few Miss Liza Janes in my life over the years. One in particular that I’m utilizing to create this character: a voice-and-diction teacher of mine in high school—she’s deceased now—Mrs. Koehler. I went to the High School of Performing Arts—the old one on West 46th—and a lot of my classmates would say, ‘Are you doing Mrs. Koehler? Is that Miss Koehler?’”
The film that made that high school famous—Fame—was shot in the summer of ’79, and Lewis didn’t arrive until September of ’79, along with Danny Burstyn, Helen Slater, and Lisa Vidal.
“This is my 40th year in show business!” she gleefully points out. “June 15 will be 40 years to the day when I stepped into the Imperial Theater—age 18—hired by Michael Bennett to begin my journey with Dreamgirls. Now—to have Hell’s Kitchen, to have this kind of role and have it all at this time—is full-circle for me. All this combined in my own life, matched with this character and this group of young people—so many of them making their Broadway debuts—it’s just perfect.”
Some of the plot of Hell’s Kitchen parallels Lewis’ own life, including the problems and worries of a single mom raising an artistically inclined child. Her son, Simon, is almost 21 and “continuing the theater tradition,” his mother beams proudly. “He’s going down the route of stagehand and, right now, is finishing his training at the Roundabout Theater Company’s Internship Program.
“Raising a kid in New York City is a herculean feat. I was lucky enough that I lived in Long Island, so I was a little removed from the city, but the problems still are there—and practically anywhere in this country: the racial undertones of raising Black children or biracial children. We have to train and protect our children with a hyper-vigilance other people don’t know about.”
When Lewis reaches the Shubert Theater every day, her motherhood comes to full bloom, given how many young people are in the cast. “I love that,” she admits. “I think, since I was young, the essence of who I am is a bit of a protector. I’ve always been that. I resisted it when I was young. I wanted to be the ingénue or the pretty girl boys wanted, but I’ve come to embrace and greatly appreciate when young people want to be around me as an older person. I think that’s special.”
The cast calls her Mama. “I didn’t tell them to call me that,” says Lewis. “It’s when they call me Legend that I begin to suspect they’re speaking code for ‘old actress.’”
Candace Bushnell is still showing women a different way to think about themselves. Courtesy Candace Bushnell
More than once, Observer has called Candace Bushnell the ‘real Carrie Bradshaw,’ but by now everyone should know that her Sex and the City alter ego is only a small part of the ‘real Candace Bushnell.’ The fiercely feminist Bushnell is, in no particular order, an international best-selling author, celebrated novelist and successful producer. Her critically acclaimed one-woman stage memoir, “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City” opens at the Café Carlyle tomorrow (April 23) for a limited run after stints at the Daryl Roth Theater and in theaters around the world.
Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column, of course, originated in 1994 at this very publication (then the storied New York Observer broadsheet) before quickly morphing into a book, an HBO hit starring Sarah Jessica Parker, the first of two motion pictures and, eventually, an unstoppable cultural phenomenon.
Bushnell in her one-woman show, “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” Photo by Jeremychanphotography/Getty Images
On a warm day in April, I met Bushnell off Madison Avenue for tea at the Carlyle’s Gallery. So much talent and so many stars have moved through its art deco halls, it seemed like the perfect spot to chat with the glamorous and witty OG Carrie Bradshaw. Bushnell, true to fashion form, was sporting a black blouse with elegant shoulder ruffles, black leather pants with silver zippers, yellow heels and a hot pink handbag. Not only was it thrilling to interview one of my feminist heroes, but as a former sex columnist for the Observer myself, I’d always felt I had big stilettos to fill. (Yes, she still wears Manolos.) And just like that…after actually meeting Bushnell, those shoes felt even bigger.
How did you end up with your iconic column in the New York Observer?
When I first came to New York at 19, I wrote a children’s book. I wrote for anybody and everybody I could write for. This is all part of my show, “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” Then I wrote for women’s magazines, which was the precursor to “Sex and the City.” I was already writing about my Samantha, my Miranda, probably back in the eighties, but I always wanted to write a column. I had a column in Mademoiselle for probably a month or two months, and then the editor left or got fired or something, which was always happening. I started writing for the New York Observer and doing profiles for them, and the profiles were really, really popular. Everybody was talking about them. Then the editor-in-chief asked if I wanted to have my own column, which just put a frame around work that I’d already developed. I’d already developed my voice, and I’d already been writing professionally for 15 years when I got the “Sex and the City” column.
What was it like working with Peter Kaplan, the legendary editor-in-chief of the New York Observer?
It was a very male-oriented, Ivy-League-mentality kind of place. There was a lot of hazing and people were tough—they threw phones. Kaplan didn’t do that, but other people did. Publishing was a slightly violent business. But Peter was brilliant, and he would just say these things that you just realize, “Wow, that’s really it.” In those days, being an editor was a creative job. He felt like it was his job to somehow get the story out of the writer. It was a different mentality.
It wasn’t long before Bushnell’s New York Observer column became a book. Fadil Berisha
How quickly did your column “Sex and the City” take off? You became a star.
It happened right away. Again, I talk about that in the show. I think after I’d written five columns, I sold it to Morgan Entrekin [publisher of Grove Atlantic] as a book. Then the column was really like a serial book, which was obviously what I’d been wanting to write my whole life—a book. People faxed [the columns] to their friends in LA, so from the beginning I had Hollywood calling. ABC wanted it, HBO wanted it, Fine Line, New Line, some other probably movie company that doesn’t exist, and I flew out to LA. It was exciting.
What was it like navigating that?
I didn’t know anything about that business at all. It took me a while to sell it to Darren Star. They say publishing is or used to be a little bit of a gentleman’s business. There’s not that much money to be made. But in TV and entertainment, there’s a lot of money. When there’s a lot of money to be made, people are not, in general, equitable. Nobody gives you a good deal out of the kindness of their heart. The goal is to give as bad a deal as you can get away with, and that’s business. If you’re in it, you understand it, you know how to negotiate it, and you have power. Otherwise, if you’re an outsider, you don’t have that kind of insider access.
And it was sexist.
Back in 1995, women did not have the same kind of power that they have now in Hollywood. It was very different, and there’s a bit of an attitude of—I mean, the whole world was like that, right?
I read that you consulted on the HBO series “Sex and the City” up until Mr. Big got married, and then you felt you no longer related to Carrie. Why is that?
I tell that story in the show, too. At the end of the second season, Carrie and Mr. Big have a bumpy relationship. They break up, they get back together again, and then Mr. Big dumps Carrie and marries somebody else. Somebody he thinks is marriage material—meaning more conventional and less trouble, which is exactly the same thing that happened in my real life. I thought that that was maybe the end of the series, and it fit with my thesis that guys like Big come and go, but your girlfriends are always there for you. But then it’s not over, and they want to make another season, so they have Carrie have an affair with her now-married ex-boyfriend, Mr. Big. And as I say, that’s when a part of me “un” became Carrie Bradshaw because to me it wasn’t feminist. I’m sort of the opposite of that.
Let’s talk about “True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City.” How did the show come about?
I met David Foster and his manager, Mark Johnson, and then we had a meeting. Mark said, “Why don’t you try to do a one-woman show?” I was like, “Why not? What do I have to lose?” I wrote it at the beginning of 2020, and then I started working with [director and choreographer] Lorin Latarro. He found there were Broadway people who were interested, they raised money, and we ended up workshopping it at Bucks County Playhouse. And then we brought it Off-Broadway to the Daryl Roth Theatre, which seems crazy to me. Like what?! Then it closed because of Covid.
Have you always had an interest in acting?
I had some interest in it, but it was kind of brief, and it was a long time ago. When I first started doing [the show], it was more like doing a dressage test than writing a book or an article. It’s performative. It’s choreographed, you say this here and say that there, but then there’s another aspect of being creative within that medium, which is an interesting thing to explore and figure out. There are timing aspects, certain ways that you say certain lines, and it’s very physical. It’s not just me standing up with a microphone. There’s a set. There are little props. There are little tiny skits. I fall off the couch, and it’s fun to do. I actually love doing it.
Sex and the City just came out on Netflix. How do you think it resonates with today’s 20-something audience?
I can only speak from my experience, which is that I have so many young women come up to me as they have been doing for the last twenty-five years saying that Sex and the City saved them, inspired them and changed them, but mostly gave them a different way to look at their lives. And I’ve had women from all over the world say this to me. For a lot of young women, it’s like a rite of passage to watch it when they go to college. These 20-somethings are watching it on Netflix, but there was a whole generation before them of 20-somethings that watched the DVDs with their new friends in college.
Fans tell Bushnell SATC saved them, inspired them and changed them, but mostly gave them a different way to look at their lives. Courtesy Candace Bushnell
I feel like Sex and the City made talking and writing about sex less taboo and more mainstream.
I didn’t write about very much sex at all. There were some things in there like threesomes, but it wasn’t graphic in any way. I always felt like I was writing about power structures between men and women and heterosexual relationships. I thought I was really being much more of a social anthropologist.
On a panel, you said that Sex and the City is feminist because it’s like, “Hey, you know what society? We are single women in our thirties and guess what, we’re getting on with it, we’ve got our friends, we made a different kind of family… there isn’t something wrong with us because we don’t want to follow the narrow prescriptive life of what society tells women they can and should do.”
The women were pretty courageous [back then], I have to say. I knew a lot of single women, and there was a real camaraderie. We had to look out for each other. It was a man’s world, but also New York City was a place where—and here’s why I wrote Lipstick Jungle which I always thought was the next step after Sex and the City—ambitious women make it. There are a lot of really successful women here, and that to me is the most interesting thing. That was what was edgy. Now that there are more successful women, there’s a freedom and you’re allowed to be ambitious. Whereas before you couldn’t. It was like Martha Stewart and Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, but people wrote horrible things about them all the time. If you were a woman and you were successful, you were also going to be punished.
Why do you and SO MANY people today still love talking about Sex and the City?
I don’t talk about it, but a lot of other people want to talk about it, and that’s great. I talk about my new work, the show that I’m doing, feminism, being your own Mr. Big and all the things that drive me as a writer, performer and a creative person in the world to do what I set out to do from the beginning, which was to try to show women a different way to think about themselves and their lives outside of the patriarchy. That’s been my mission since I was a kid. It still is.
I think that we’ve all been sold the fairytale of the knight in shining armor, and that’s problematic.
It’s problematic because being with a man can be physically dangerous for women. There are some really unpleasant truths about heterosexual relationships that we don’t acknowledge. And I think going for the guy who’s going to take care of you or the rich guy—this guy who’s going to be in love with you—can happen if you have the right circumstances, but if you don’t have a lot of the right circumstances, it’s maybe not going to happen. And so instead of spending your time investing in something that ultimately you can’t control because you can’t control how somebody feels about you or what they’re going to do for you, but you can control, hopefully, who you are in the world and, hopefully, the ability to make money and look after yourself. There’s a lot of pride in that.
But then there’s also the pay gap. The system is rigged against women.
If you look numerically at the 1%, only 3.5% of the 1% are women who made their own money. And to be in the 1%, you need to have a net worth of $11 million. Think about how many billions [that is]—think about all of the men who have more than $11 billion. Okay, so 96.5% of the women in the 1% are married to a rich man or inherited the money. That is wrong to me.
The writer and producer considers herself a social anthropologist. Harold Mindel, courtesy Candace Bushnell
You’ve chronicled NYC’s rich and powerful. I get the sense that you have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the rich. I certainly do.
New York is filled with rich people. There’s huge income disparity. I feel like it’s a problem. And it’s certain business practices that have been allowed in the last thirty years. I mean, there have been legal changes to how you can do business, and I think as a journalist you’re supposed to turn a little bit of a questioning eye towards the rich. You’re not really supposed to be one of them.
Like Truman Capote.
Truman Capote, Dominick Dunne, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. These are classic topics for journalists. Of course, now we live in a different time. That was a time when people kind of revered the written word. There was a real status to that. Now there’s a real status to being an influencer. Our value system has changed. We live in an attention economy where it’s really all about getting attention. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw today would be Emily in Paris.
It’s not easy being an artist in the City.
It really isn’t. I mean, that’s sort of the tricky thing about New York. It needs to be a place where if you have a lot of creativity and artistic ability, you can still live here and you don’t need a zillion dollars. When I moved here in the late seventies, it felt really expensive, but somehow you believed you could inch up the ladder and kind of get there. Now it feels like a lot of these places are way out of reach. It’s a big difference if something is $2 million and something is $20 million. So many people came to New York in the late seventies and early eighties—like Cynthia Rowley. She was like, “I just made clothes out of my tiny studio apartment downtown.” She sewed clothes, and then a store said they wanted them. When I first moved here, you had to be creative and interesting, but you didn’t feel like, “Oh, I need to live in the best place” because everybody lived in a crappy place.
Finally, tell me about performing at the iconic Café Carlyle.
So many legendary people have done shows here; it’s incredible. Also, it’s just a very, very New York thing to do. I’ve been on stage and also in the audience, and it’s a super intimate experience—one that you really can’t get anywhere else. It’s just a really special room, and it has the original wallpaper. It has a really, really small stage, and people are right here. You feel like you’re in somebody’s living room. That’s kind of what New York is all about, isn’t it? These one-of-a-kind, one-time experiences.
