Even More Vintage Reviews from the Archive

 

[As I wrote in the introduction to “Yet More Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (24 May 2021), I reviewed plays in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published from 1980 to 1997 in New York City. 

[My beat was mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway, and Native reviews were fairly short since the biweekly usually covered two productions in most columns.  (For the reviews republished below, the companion play isn’t posted here—but it can be found somewhere else on Rick On Theatre.)]

JUNGLEBIRD

by Martha Horstman

Red Moon Ensemble

Nat Horne Theatre

31 December 1990 

[My review of Junglebird was part of “Money, Money, Money” with Smile & Lie, a pair of one-act plays from Alarm Dog Rep: Power Lunch by Alan Ball and Tribes by P. Kevin Strader (posted in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” on 15 March).  The original column appeared in the New York Native on 31 December 1990.]

Martha Horstman’s Junglebird is a slight Cinderella comedy of the ’90s.  Lorni (playwright Horstman) shares Denise’s cramped apartment with her (Jamie Richards) and Denny (Paul Mullins).  She cleans and cooks, and looks after Denise’s bird-like mother.  She loves Denny, a pencil salesman with execrable clothing taste, but he spurns her for Denise, a thrift shop clerk who lords it over both of them. 

Denny and Denise each have impossible pipe dreams.  His is a fool-proof “gotcha” sales technique that will succeed every time, with any product.  She fancies rubbing elbows with Jackie O [who would die in 1994 at 64], changing the apartment’s color-scheme with new junk from the thrift shop.

Lorni, a drudge and a char, cleans other apartments in the building despite the abuse the tenants heap on her.  She endures the ignominy because she seems to know no better, and because she suffers from mild agoraphobia.  All this may change, however, when the lottery ticket Denny has bought for Denise wins the big jackpot. 

The performances, directed by Seth Gordon, are nicely grounded and believable.  Horstman, puffy-faced and shlumpy, mopes about the apartment like a forlorn, oversized puppy.  Mullins’s sharp, whiny voice accentuates his nerdy appearance as he obsesses over his possessions.  Richards’s would-be princess is sharp-tongued and snappish, almost barking out her lines. 

The play promises some off-beat fun in the beginning, but the first act never defines the focus and the action begins to seem attenuated.  In the second act, when the lottery ticket emerges as the main plot element, the action settles even more into a groove.  The characters become as sad and threadbare as Lorni’s clothes, and the promise of wackiness evaporates.  Junglebird feels like a one-act inflated beyond its ability to sustain its flimsy premise.

Bob Phillips’s fragmentary apartment set is haphazardly furnished in ’50s flea-market tastelessness and Jonathan Green’s costumes perfectly suit each character.  Nancy Collings’s lights and Terry Richardson’s sound design (including some weird whistling by “Bursteins”) provide appropriate atmospherics.

[Junglebird was presented at the Nat Horne Theatre (442 W. 42nd Street) on Manhattan’s relatively newly established Theatre Row.  It opened on Friday, 30 November 1990, and ran Thursdays through Sundays through 15 December.  It was first read in Red Moon Ensemble’s New Plays Series in July and August 1987 at the Contemporary Theatre in Tribeca.

[The Red Moon Ensemble , which defined itself as a nonprofit theater company that explores new works, was formed in 1985 by 40 alumni of University Park, Texas’s Southern Methodist University.  (Though a business address is still listed online for Red Moon, I can’t confirm that the Off-Off-Broadway theater is still in operation.]

*  *  *  *

STEEPLECHASE

by Eric Stephen Booth

Booth Enterprises, Inc.

The Center

28 January 1991 

[The column “Talking Heads” included the review below and Lyndon by James Prideaux, posted in “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” 19 April 2021.  They were first published in the New York Native on 28 January 1991.]

Steeplechase, produced in a staged reading as a kind of backers’ audition, is designated in the program as “a 21st century black gay love story.”  Well, it is a love story of sorts, and it is gay, but whatever makes it “twenty-first-century” and “black” is undiscernible.  The cast, of course, is black and Hispanic—Booth Enterprises, Inc. (whose president is author Eric Stephen Booth) is “dedicated to producing . . . gay minority art”—but the play never mentions any minority themes or concerns.

It does mention just about everything else, however.  Steeplechase, the third Booth Enterprises production, all authored by Booth, himself, is kind-hearted and compassionate, dealing as it does with love in the age of AIDS.  It includes all the requisite references: the obligation to practice safe sex, the importance of fidelity, the evils of drug and alcohol abuse, the destructiveness of codependency, the demands of moral responsibility, etc.  If there’s a hot-button, Booth pushes it. 

He also explains it at length in wordy exposition that takes the place of real dramatic action.  Everyone’s background, beliefs, concerns, fears, thoughts, and secrets are spelled out in the dialogue, usually in one- and two-minute speeches.

In fact, between the limitations of the staged reading (which Booth noted in a curtain speech is “close to a full production”) and the overladen dialogue, the actors have nearly nothing left to do but emote.  Instead of acting, they are reduced to holding each other’s hands, stroking each other’s faces and putting their arms around each other’s shoulders. 

Since director Michael Thomas-Newton misses no opportunity for his cast, usually seated side by side, to engage in these shows of affection, Steeplechase becomes a play about hands. 

The story of Steeplechase is simple enough, and, given the amount of exposition, pretty predictable.  Gil (John Pettress) and Louie (Carmelo Ortiz), both recovering alcoholics, are committed, caring lovers.  Gil’s cousin Caesar (Lawrence Joseph), a heavy drinker, declares himself in love with a new man.   Louie’s best friend Teddy (Henry Sanabria), a volunteer at an AIDS clinic, reveals that Louie’s former lover has just tested positive for HIV, but still engages in unprotected sex. 

At a party for Gil, Caesar brings his new lover, who turns out to be Brad (Brocton Pierce), Louie’s ex.  During a fight, Caesar collapses from an alcohol-induced ulcer and is rushed to the hospital where Louie and Teddy urge Brad to acknowledge his condition and convince Caesar to be tested for AIDS, symptoms of which he has begun to show.  Except that no network would air it, it’s a perfect black, gay “Afterschool Special.”

[Steeplechase was produced by Booth Enterprises at The Center (better known as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center), 208 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village.  It ran Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 12-15 January 1991.  Booth produced another showcase of the play in October 1992.

[Eric Stephen Booth-Driver-Robinson (b. 1952) is a native Brooklynite and graduated with a B.A. in Speech & Theater from the City College of New York.  He worked on Wall Street, at the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he’s a licensed massage therapist..

[In 1984, he wrote, directed, and co-produced his first play, The Struggle, at the Puppet Loft in New York City’s Tribeca.  After that, Booth went on to write, direct, and co-produce seven Off-Off-Broadway plays: Metamorphosis, Steeplechase, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Butch Queens, Toy Soldiers, Olodum, and Forbidden Fruit. 

[Booth also had two gay public access TV shows on in the Bronx, Strange Fruits and Fruta Extrana.  In 2005, his first film, Forbidden Fruit was showcased at the Toronto Film Festival.  The Nemesis Horizon Project: Reptilian Logs, Booth’s first book, is the first of four series of titles.]

*  *  *  *

A FIERCE ATTACHMENT

by Vivian Gornick

adapted by Edward M. Cohen

Jewish Repertory Theatre

Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA

1 March 1991 

[This review was part of “Creating the Self—and Other Fictions” with Road to Nirvana by Arthur Kopit (republished in “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” posted on 19 April 2021).]

In A Fierce Attachment, adapted and directed by Edward M. Cohen from Vivian Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, Tovah Feldshuh performs an unusual task: creating two distinct characters simultaneously.  Cohen’s play explores the troubled—and troubling—relationship between Gornick, a liberated, intellectual journalist, and her mother, a working-class Jewish socialist. 

Feldshuh must become both Gornick and Gornick’s image of her mother.  There are other “characters” in A Fierce Attachment, but the daughter and mother are the focus of this one-actor piece, early in which Vivian predicts, “One of us is going to die from this attachment.”

Feldshuh switches facilely between the roles, even recreating conversations, though she is clearly more comfortable as the daughter.  Her Vivian is natural, relaxed, and committed, talking directly with the audience over her desk or from the edge of the set, an open, Conran-style livingroom-kitchen-office designed by Ray Recht. 

At the performance I saw, Feldshuh even responded to the audience’s reactions a few times, even though Cohen told me later she wasn’t supposed to.  As the mother, however, the actress is more forced.  Using a slight old-world Jewish accent that sometimes sounds like an impression of a Billy Cristal character and occasionally stooping like an arthritic crone, the mother now and then becomes a cliché rather than a real person.  It is important to remember, though, that this is the writer’s image of her mother, not necessarily her actual mother.

Altogether, A Fierce Attachment is an engaging performance as Feldshuh’s Vivian fights through the often stifling relationship with her mother to realize that “one has to live one’s life.”  Granted, that’s something of a cliché, too, but, as Cohen pointed out, at base this is a feminist play without the polemics.  What Vivian finally understands is that “I begin and end with myself.”  Platitude though that may be, it is a hard-won revelation to someone who has to discover it for herself.

The production is not without problems.  Brian Nason’s lighting changes inexplicably and abruptly, though there may be some idea of passing time Cohen has not carried over into Feldshuh’s acting, and the actress occasionally walks in and out of shadow as she darts about the set.  More significantly, there is a repetitiousness about the mother-daughter clash that might warrant reducing the hour-and-forty-five-minute two acts to a ninety-minute single act. 

Vivian’s stance toward her mother also seems to shift, particularly when she discusses her with someone else, from antagonism to defense.  This ambivalence, though certainly reasonable, is not investigated in A Fierce Attachment.

[A Fierce Attachment was staged at the Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA, JRT’s sponsor, on East 14th Street; neither the Y nor JRT still exist.  The show ran 20 performances from 16 February to 17 March 1991.  Vivian Gornick’s memoir was first published in 1987, but Edward M. Cohen’s stage adaptation was premièred in this JRT production.

[JRT, a theater “committed to producing theater that details the Jewish experience in America in the English language,” was founded in 1974 by longtime artistic director Ran Avni; it closed its doors in 2004.  The Y, formed in 1960 by the merger of two other community organizations, was moved out of the East Village facility, which was demolished after 1991.]

*  *  *  *

ANGEL AND DRAGON

by Sally Netzel

Village Theatre Company

20 May 1991 

[My review of Angel and Dragon was incorporated in the column ”Skin Deep and Heart Shallow” along with Pageant (book and lyrics by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, music by Albert Evans; posted as “Pageant (1991)” on 4 August 2014).]

Angel and Dragon explores the relationship of two women from 1890 to 1935 by dramatizing an isolated moment in their lives each decade.  The two, painter Maggie Irving (Barbara Bercu) and poet Anna Forbish (Susan Farwell), meet and live out their romance in Paris, but the play is bookended by two scenes in New York ten years after Anna’s suicide.  

Because the play starts in 1945, then zooms back to 1890, it resembles a female version of Tom Stoppard’s recent Artist Descending a Staircase, but it lacks the imaginative twists and turns and linguistic vibrancy even of that lesser Stoppard.  Maggie and Anna are decidedly ordinary women, despite their artistic professions and unorthodox love. 

Actually, the problem lies in that love: I never believed it.  Yes, hedonistic, libertine Anna, the “Dragon” of the title (the metaphor is from some dream drawings Maggie makes), is possessive and controlling.  Yes, sincere, naïve Maggie, the “Angel,” is jealous and abandoned.  But these are just clichés as written by Sally Netzel and acted by Farwell and Bercu.  

The heart of the story ought to be the love of these two women through nearly fifty years, but the play I saw was about character traits, not relationship.  Bercu, when she wasn’t trying to be old, was the most relaxed and convincing human being onstage; Farwell often reminded me of Jane Alexander as Hedda Hopper in the 1985 TV movie Malice in Wonderland, all nasally hauteur and arch sophistication.  

Everyone, including the writer and Gigi Rivkin, the director, tries too hard to evoke period rather than the intimate friendship between two people.  This inclination is manifested in Ismael Hernandez and Jillian Maslow’s costumes, which are too pristine to look like anyone’s real clothes.  This is especially so of Anna’s, which are so flamboyant they call attention to themselves rather than enhance her character.

There is a third person in each of Anna and Maggie’s scenes, which take place in the painter’s studio.  A model—a different one each time, all played by Michelle Berke—is always present, though she has little to do, spending her stage time silently reading, eating, rolling bandages—even sleeping.  I wondered what was the point of having her present at, but not active in the life of two sometime lovers.  I never figured it out (but I kept thinking of Nicol Williamson’s problems with I Hate Hamlet; perhaps Berke should have walked offstage occasionally).

[Sally Netzel’s Angel and Dragon was mounted by the Village Theatre Company at its home theater at 133 W. 22nd Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea Wednesdays through Sundays, from 1 to 26 May 1991.  (It was presented in rotating rep with Frontiers by Meir Z. Ribalow.)  Netzel’s play also ran previously at the TOMI Theatre on the Upper West Side in June 1983.

[Sally Netzel has written over 30 plays, most produced around the country (and published by the Dramatic Publishing Company and the Pioneer Drama Service), including three musicals and 10 plays for children.   She is the co-author of a novel, Midsummer, and author of a book of short stories entitled Rosinante’s Sallies: Animal Fables for Adults and another novel Bohunk Humoresque.

[A member of the Dallas Theater Center in Texas for 15 years as resident playwright, director, actor, and producer of plays for children, Netzel is a recipient of the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award for Playwriting.  She holds a master of arts degree in theater from Trinity University in San Antonio, where she also served as an associate professor of acting. 

[The Village Theatre Company was formed by a troupe of actors in 1987.  (I haven’t been able to confirm if the company’s still producing or, if not, when it closed.)]

'The Misanthrope' – The Musical

 

[I’ve written several times on Rick On Theater about Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company, an experimental theater troupe based in the East Village.  I got to know Leo Shapiro in 1986, when I covered the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place in Baltimore that year.  I was very taken with his company’s work, represented then by The Yellow House (see my post on 9 February 2018), a company-created play about painter Vincent van Gogh.

[My report on the ToN was published in The Drama Review of Spring 1987.  A separate article on The Yellow House appeared in the same issue.

[Six years later, TDR editor Richard Schechner asked me to write a profile of Leo and his company.  I shadowed Leo for several months and “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” was published in TDR in the Winter 1993 issue.

[Combing through Shaliko’s files and interviewing Leo and his colleagues and collaborators, I eventually put together a fairly complete history of his and the company’s work over his lifetime.  Though the original article focused exclusively on the work of The Shaliko Company (1972-93), I expanded that focus and included a record of Leo’s independent work, for a prospective book. 

[One production that fell into that category was an abortive staging of a musical based on Molière’s The Misanthrope for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1977. Below is an account of that ill-fated production.

[Leo died of bladder cancer in Vallecito, New Mexico, on 22 January 1997.  He was 15 days past his 51st birthday.]

New York City’s Shaliko Company’s second production, Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken (1930), introduced the troupe to Joseph Papp (1921-91), who offered the young company the New York Shakespeare Festival as its home—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.  The play, workshopped in March 1974 at Baltimore’s Theatre Project, was in performance at New York University.

Playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), whom Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), Shaliko’s founder and artistic director, had known since his NYU-student days and who had a relationship with Papp and the NYSF, praised Measures to Gail Merrifield (b. ca. 1935), Papp’s wife and the NYSF director of new play development, who saw it and then brought Papp to the Shaliko production.  Measures moved into the NYSF’s Public Theater in October and Shaliko remained in residence there until 1976.

Following Measures, Shaliko presented Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1975) and then Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1976).  (For accounts of the latter two productions, see “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko's Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014, and “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020.)  After Woyzeck, however, the two actors about whom Shapiro cared most, Mary Zakrzewski and Chris McCann (b. 1952), left Shaliko, Zakrzewski to quit the professional theater and McCann to pursue commercial aspirations. 

Shapiro disbanded the company and decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn.  Some years earlier, Shapiro had conceived a musical version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666) with Shaliko but let the project drop. 

The composer, Margaret Pine (b. 1948), one of Shaliko’s original members, had continued to develop the play, and, Shapiro reported, brought it back to the director who convinced Papp to produce it.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro had cast John McMartin as Alceste, John Bottoms as Philante, Helen Gallagher as Arsinoé, and Virginia Vestoff as Célimène but, according to the director, Papp wanted performers who had worked at the Public in the past, including Raul Julia and Patti LuPone or Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. 

“He wanted the Broadway pitch,” Shapiro opined.  “He wanted a Broadway musical hit.  He was hungry for another Chorus Line . . . .”  Papp acquiesced to Shapiro’s casting plans but ultimately the producer objected to the timbre of the production:

Like, Joe was upset because Alceste was too sexy.  He was upset because they were too sexy as a couple—Alceste and Célimène.  He thought that Alceste was too angry.  He thought that Alceste was too much the hero. 

He couldn’t stand that I had a scene in which Alceste and Philinte held hands.  He thought that was just awful and he said, “Are they homosexuals?  Why are they holding hands?  You can’t have that happen.”  And I said, you know, “They’re best friends.  They, as far as I know, are not homosexual.  But if they are, it’s none of your business, Joe.  I mean, that’s not the point I’m making in any case.”  And he said, “Well, you can’t make that point.”  

He said, “The audience won’t understand that.”  I said, “I am teaching the audience that.  That’s why I’m doing it.  I want them to see it.  You know.”  He just couldn’t understand that you can create a convention in that way.  He felt like this means A; it can’t mean B.  This is what it meant to him.  I’ve never forgotten that.  I don’t know what . . . .  He had this lexicon of things, you know.

Shapiro refused to make changes, he said, and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

(A Chorus Line opened at the Public Theater on 15 April 1975.  It moved to Broadway’s Shubert Theatre on 25 July and stayed there for 15 years, closing on 28 April 1990 after 6,137 performances, winning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Musical, and, as of 2005, grossing over $277 million for the Public Theater.  The New York Shakespeare Festival’s share of the profits supported the company’s efforts for years and the play continues to produce income every time it’s revived or the 1985 film is shown.)

Needless to say, the view from the other side is a little different than Shapiro’s own. 

According to the New York Shakespeare Festival, Margaret Pine brought The Misanthrope to Papp in October 1976 after having considered other companies, including André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, and the director Mel Shapiro.  (Stage director Mel Shapiro [b. 1937] is not related to Leonardo Shapiro.  He previously directed—and adapted—the musical version of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona for NYSF in 1971, for which he won an Obie Award, among other productions for the company.) 

According to Joan C. Daly, an attorney for NYSF, Papp maintained that Leonardo Shapiro became part of the project because he had worked with Pine “in developing the concept of such a production, and she brought him along.”  (Daly [b. 1925] was a lawyer with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, attorneys for NYSF.)

From the beginning, apparently, Richard Wilbur, whose verse translation formed the book and lyrics of the musical, expressed reservations about Shapiro’s suitability to direct the production.  As both Jeffrey Horowitz, Shapiro’s prep school schoolmate, and Marilyn Zalkan, Shaliko’s long-time administrator, have remarked, Shapiro had no background in music or musical theater. 

Wilbur’s agent, Gilbert Parker, recommended J Ranelli, another of his clients, to Papp, but the Shakespeare Festival remained initially loyal to Shapiro.  (Parker [1927-2019], late Vice President of Curtis Brown, Ltd., not only represented Wilbur [1921-2017] and Ranelli [1938-2019], but also Bill Gile [1942- 2011], the director who eventually replaced Shapiro on 7 October 1977.)

Wilbur, however, had approved of Margaret Pine as the composer, but did not approve of Shapiro as director and even as early as March 1977, Wilbur held “lingering doubts about Leo Shapiro as director.”  In addition, Wilbur’s contract with NYSF stipulated that his text would remain intact unless he authorized changes.  This provision clearly would make it difficult to accommodate songs and may have ultimately helped sabotage the production. 

Reports of difficulties in the production reached Papp’s office toward the end of the rehearsal period and the producer began to feel that “while there was merit in the concept of presenting ‘The Misanthrope’ with music, Mr. Shapiro could not handle it” and that what Pine and Shapiro had developed “worked badly.” 

By this time, Papp had also become aware that some cast members were “so discouraged” that they wanted to leave but Papp persuaded them to stay “in the hope that with a new stage director and a fresh view point, the project could be saved.”

After Wilbur and Parker saw the second preview of Misanthrope on 5 October, they “urged” Papp to replace Shapiro “to move the production away from the disastrous course it was taking.”  Wilbur also objected to the alterations to his translation and demanded immediate restoration of “unauthorized cuts” in his text. 

At the same time, he insisted that he’d approved Margaret Pine as the composer but hadn’t agreed to any other composer and hadn’t been consulted on the replacement of her songs with anyone else’s.  

Finally, Wilbur demanded that his name be removed from all references to the production. 

According to Horowitz, Shapiro’s long-time friend who’d been in the cast of Shawn’s Youth Hostel at NYSF, there was more to the contretemps, much of it the fault of Shapiro. 

After the director disbanded The Shaliko Company in 1976 and left the Public Theater, Papp was angry at him and Shapiro began gaining a reputation for someone “who had problems.”  Shawn brokered Shapiro’s return later in 1976 to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director. 

Papp’s ultimate rejection of Shawn’s plays for the regular NYSF season had nothing to do with Shapiro’s direction, but then the producer hired Shapiro for Misanthrope and trouble started to appear.  “He wouldn’t listen to Papp,” said Horowitz, founder, in 1979, and artistic director of New York City’s Theatre for a New Audience.  “He was rigorous about his visions.”  Shapiro’s friend went even further, however:

I began to be aware then, starting in the late ’70s—around that time that Papp fired him—that he was having a great deal of trouble putting together his ideas and the community’s understanding of those ideas.

Shapiro’s fellow artistic director had watched, he said, as Shapiro’s acclaim began to deteriorate.  He saw his friend begin in the early 1970s with great respect and strength, both among critics and theater professionals like Papp.  Horowitz called that Shapiro, at the start of his career, “an enfant terrible,” a “brilliant iconoclast.”  Then, Horowitz recounted, “Something happened where he began to get a reputation as someone who had once been very good but was no longer that.”

If Horowitz is correct—and it must be said that he wasn’t present for the Misanthrope rehearsals, nor had he been a member of Shaliko—then this may have been another instance of Shapiro’s inability to function as part of a team or to defer to anyone else’s ideas.  

He would do this again in 1992, with similar consequences, with playwright Karen Malpede over the direction Blue Heaven and the administration of Trinity College over the management of the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, which the Hartford, Connecticut-based college administered and Shapiro conducted in New York City.  (A blog article on Blue Heaven is posted on 11 and 14 May 2020.)

Regardless of the perspective, however, Shapiro recalled the Misanthrope episode bitterly:

I worshiped Joe; he was like my father, you know.  I came there after my father died and I basically identified Joe as my father and I thought I was going to stay there for the rest of my life.  I thought it was home. 

I never got over being fired by Joe.  It never had occurred to me that it was possible.  I never knew you could be fired; I didn’t know about contracts. 

I didn’t know it was his show; I thought it was my show.  I’d never done a show that wasn’t my show.  I mean, I made it up; it was my idea.  It was my idea to do a musical of The Misanthrope.  I mean, what was his about it? 

You know, I didn’t understand what was on paper.  I never looked at anything on paper.  I don’t have contracts; I don’t deal with that world.

(Shapiro met Papp and moved his company into the Public Theater only a few months after the death of his father, from whom he was estranged and with whom he had a strained relationship all through his life, on 15 January 1974.  The timing certainly played a large part in Shapiro’s incipient relationship with the impresario.)

The association with Papp ended acrimoniously, and Shapiro’s departure from the Public Theater left wounds that remained tender.  “I spent, like, two years sulking after that,” said Shapiro.  “I just was beaten.  That’s really like the worst experience of my life, getting fired off that show.”

Shapiro had very conflicted feelings about his relationship with Joseph Papp.  Even years later, he would say, “Joe was a very strong force in my life. . . .  I don’t know that I’d say I admire him a lot.  You know, he was like a father.  To me, he was like a bad father so it’s like a big deal.” 

He noted that there was some of Irving Shapiro in George Bartenieff’s 1992 portrayal of Hermann Kafka, but he also admitted that there were aspects of Papp in it as well.  Shapiro, after all,  saw Kafka: Father and Son as “a Jewish family play, a play about fathers and sons”—a play about child abuse and repression (see my post about this play on 5 and 8 November 2015). 

Part of the root cause of the failure of Shapiro’s freelance directing outing at the Public was his understanding—or lack of understanding—of the standing of an independent director.  Reviewing his motivation to disband Shaliko, Shapiro lamented, “[I] thought I could do bigger work without a company. . . .  I was wrong.  Working freelance didn’t work.  I wasn’t free to address issues I cared about in radical ways; I wasn’t free to rehearse for months at a time or develop original work.”

Aside from losing his company and being unable to develop his own material, Shapiro learned that he was simply no good at working for other people such as producers and artistic directors who had control over his work.  “I have had problems with producers . . .,” he confessed.  “And that’s . . . a character defect . . . .  And I want what I want, and I resent not getting it.”  

This was the basis, of course, of his falling out with Papp, with whom Shapiro had gotten along fine as long as Papp had functioned simply as sugar-daddy.  When he found himself contending with Papp over the substance of a production, Shapiro discovered he couldn’t follow orders.  Being fired by Papp left Shapiro confused:

I think that that experience has a lot to do with the fact that I basically can’t work for anyone else.  I think that I didn’t know what it was like to have somebody have power over your work and be able to say, “You can’t do this.  You have to do it my way.”  Artistically that had never happened to me and it was such a dreadful experience that I really avoided it one way or another ever since.  I mean, I basically don’t work for other people.

Papp and Shapiro never reconciled and Shapiro continued to feel cheated because he had left Misanthrope unfinished, something he said he had never done before.  (This assertion isn’t true.  Shapiro was fired from Yes Yes, No No, his first professional job as a director, before the show opened on New Year’s Eve 1968; it closed after one performance.)

An abortive attempt at a reconciliation did occur in 1984.  In a letter to Papp, Shapiro wrote, “It was nice to talk to you, it helped me set some things at rest.”  (Shapiro wrote on Trinity College letterhead rather than Shaliko Company stationery and provided his Hartford campus and residence phone numbers.  Did the younger director feel that an academic base was more likely to get Papp’s sympathetic attention?) 

Shapiro went on to broach a number of subjects, including several “projects I am interested in” (which included Edward Bond’s Lear, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Ibsen’s Little Eyolf), but Papp rebuffed the overtures.  The letter bears handwritten notes by Gail Merrifield Papp, instructions for a member of the New York Shakespeare Festival staff to respond “for JP.” 

Merrifield described Shapiro as “a director that once worked here, old rift that recently got dealt with” and she instructed the staff member to reply with “the 5 No’s”—referring to the one-word marginal and interlinear annotations she had made by each of Shapiro’s proposals or suggestions—“without being brutal.” 

The tone, at least of Merrifield’s notes, was brusque and dismissive, however.  Even though neither Papp nor his wife themselves had reached out to Shapiro, having delegated that task to a subordinate, when Papp died of prostate cancer on 31 October 1991, losing the chance to make up with the man he had thought of as his father hit Shapiro very hard.  “I really thought that it was my fault that I didn’t make up with him,” he lamented.

The New York Shakespeare Festival went on to produce The Misanthrope at the Public’s Anspacher Theater between 4 October and 27 November 1977 with another director, Bill Gile, credited with the staging. 

An additional composer and orchestrator were brought in to “enhance” the score but the show received disastrous reviews and closed with little fanfare.  (In fact, NYSF delayed opening the production to critics until 22 November, when the run was nearly over.) 

Helen Gallagher (b. 1926), who played Arsinoé, reported at the end of November that changes in everything, including her performance, were being incorporated right up until the press opening.  NYSF files confirm that new music, costumes, and set designs were being incorporated in the production as late as 10 November, and that new orchestrations were still on order at that date. 

Some of the responsibility for the failure might devolve to the new directorial team: Gile’s principle success, for which he won a Tony nomination, was the light and frivolous entertainment, Very Good Eddie (21 December 1975-5 September 1976), and the replacement composer was the flamboyant “glam rock” figure Jobriath (also “Jobriath Boone,” among other stage names; né Bruce Wayne Campbell, 1946-83), who, in an interview, once replied, “I am a true fairy.”  One reporter remarked on the need in this case for “his fairy magic.”

Though there’d been a fair amount of anticipatory press before the production started performances, I could only find four reviews of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Misanthrope.  According to a comment in Richard Eder’s New York Times notice, published on Thursday, 24 November, the Public only invited press to the show on Tuesday, 22 November, and would be closing the production on Sunday, 27 November.

In a review entitled “Miscued Musical ‘Misanthrope,’” Eder observed that all the personnel changes “has resulted is a confusion of purposes and directions, a stageful of misconceived ideas jostling one another for breathing space.”  He quipped that the festival’s belated invitation to reviewers “was for obituaries.”

“Everything is blurred and coarsened,” complained the reviewer of the musicalized version, which he labeled an “absurd trivialization.”  He protested, “The comedy of thought and character has been replaced by a comedy of gesticulation and pratfalls.” 

Of the score, Eder reported, “What the songs don't obscure is blotted out by the noisy, slapstick style of performance,” and dubbed the music “mediocre.”

The Times review-writer even had negative things to say about the physical production, finding that all the energy of the cast, which was all he felt it displayed, “is absorbed by an overlarge and extremely ugly set: fake black marble floors and columns upon which a few pieces of classical French furniture sit as if on consignment.”

(In his negative appraisal of the production, Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News described the set as a “formal, marblelike setting, severe enough for Racine . . . .”  For readers who aren’t up on references to classical French drama, Jean Racine [1639-99], a contemporary of Molière [1622-73], was a Neo-classical dramatist who wrote primarily tragedies.  One of his best-known is Phèdre [1677], on a production of which I reported on ROT on 13 October 2009.)

In the Soho Weekly News, Tish Dace, writing on 1 December, joked that “Thanksgiving week brought a real turkey in the Public Theatre’s . . . Misanthrope.”  (24 November had been Thanksgiving Day in 1977.)  She added, “Molière must have been spinning in his grave at the tacky trumpery.” 

“[T]his production confuses the crass with the comedic,” wrote Dace.  “These aren’t fops and coquettes, these are weirdos.”  The SWN reviewer exempted one cast member, John Bottoms as Philante, when she lambasted the work of the company as “dross.”

“All of this transforms a work of genius into a debased disaster of the most dreary kind,” Dace snapped.  She panned the costumes as “in keeping with the overall gross taste,” concluding, “The totality is vulgarity cultivated as an art.”

I won’t go on to summarize the other notices.  Their headlines tell the tale, I think:

·   “Molière Goes Down the Drain” (Ted Hoffman, Villager)

·   “More misadventure than ‘Misanthrope’” (Douglas Watt, Daily News)

It's noteworthy, I think, that Leonardo Shapiro, The Shaliko Company, and The Misanthrope are all omitted from Papp’s biographies: Stuart W. Little’s Enter Joseph Papp: In Search of a New American Theater (1974) and Joe Papp: An American Life (1994) by Papp and Helen Epstein.

[Past posts on Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company are:

·   “Song in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009

·   “Cheerleaders of the Revolution,” 31 October 2009

·   “Brother, You’re Next,” 26 January 2010

·   “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010

·   “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010

·   “‘As It Is In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011

·   “‘Two Thousand Years of Stony Sleep’” by Leonardo Shapiro, 7 May 2011

·   “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013

·   “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 & 6 March 2014

·   “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or Experimental? (Shaliko’s Ghosts, 1975),” 6 September 2014

·   “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 & 8 November 2015

·   “Faust Clones, Part 1,” 13 January 2016; “Faust Clones, Part 3,” 21 January 2016

·   “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018

·   “Speaking Truth To Power: Shaliko’s Mystery History Bouffe Goof,” 17 August 2018

·   “Leon Gleckman: The Al Capone of Saint Paul,” 29 September 2018

·   “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 & 14 May 2020

·   “Woyzeck (The Shaliko Company, 1976),” 11 & 14 July 2020

[I haven’t included posts on topics to which I was introduced by Leo or those in which he was mentioned in passing.]

Faye Schulman (1919-2021)

 

[In my recent post “Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees” (Rick On Theater, 24 April 2021), one if the articles in the compilation mentioned in passing that “a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery.”  As it happens, the post date for that article (“The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance” by Judy Batalion, published in the New York Times on 21 March 2021) was the day Schulman died in Toronto at 101 years of age. 

[Schulman’s obituary, written by Sam Roberts, appeared in the Times on 2 June (the online version was posted on the Times’ website on 28 May).  Upon doing a little cursory research on the ’Net, I’ve decided to read some additional articles on this Nazi-fighter for a supplemental post.  

[Coincidentally, I’m currently working on a post based on my travel journal for a trip to Israel and Egypt.  I’ve just finished the section covering my visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in the outskirts of Jerusalem.  A feature of the memorial site is the Pillar of Heroism (Buky Schwartz, sculptor; 1970), honoring Jews who fought the Nazis.  Faye Schulman is one of those.]

Faigel Lazebnik was born in Sosnkowicze in eastern Poland (renamed Lenin after 1939, and now located in western Belarus) on 28 November 1919.  She was known as Faye (and became Schulman when she married Morris Schulman, an accountant she knew from before the war, in 1944).  

Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, triggering the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and almost immediately afterwards, on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east.  Schulman’s native country was once again partitioned and remained split between the Nazis and the Soviets until 22 June 1941.

That was the start of Operation Barbarossa, the name of the Axis’s invasion of the Soviet Union.  Germany and its allies planned to get to the USSR through Byelorussia (now called Belarus); to get into Byelorussia, the Wehrmacht had to cross soviet-occupied eastern Poland.  The Red Army accommodated the Germans in their initial gambit by collapsing quickly and the Poles exchanged occupying Russians for occupying Germans.

After the Nazis invaded eastern Poland, Schulman’s Orthodox Jewish family was imprisoned in a ghetto along with the rest of the Jews of Lenin (as the town was now known, named for Lena, the daughter of a local aristocrat, not Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader).  On 14 August 1942, German soldiers killed 1,850 Jews, the last living in the town, including much of Schulman’s family: her parents, her sisters, and her younger brother.  26 Jews were reprieved because their skills might be “useful”: shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, a printer, and a barber.

And one photographer: Faye Schulman.  She was also spared because her photographic skills might come in handy.  Her older brother Moishe had a photography studio in Lenin and Schulman had been his apprentice since she was 10.   Schulman had taken over the studio when she was 16.

Faye Shulman was recruited to take portrait photos of the German officers—and often their new Polish mistresses—and documentational photographs of the Nazis at their activities.  She also processed pictures taken by others, and on one roll, she developed a photograph which showed a mass grave of Jews who’d been executed.  She recognized her own family dead in the trench, and this convinced her, at 22, to join the resistance.  

The young photographer started surreptitiously making copies of the photos she was printing for the Nazis, keeping photographic documentation of their atrocities and war crimes.  The Germans had spared her a firing squad mostly out of their own vanity, but their obsession for record-keeping would help Schulman and others like her win the battle after the war—the battle to remember, to bear witness.

Shulman joined the Moltova Brigade which was composed mostly of Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped German captivity, and worked for them as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944.  She had learned a little about medicine from her brother-in-law who was a doctor, but her real training came from the unit’s medic who’d been a veterinarian in peacetime.  She once had to bite off a fighter’s wounded finger after anesthetizing him with vodka.  

At the same time, Schulman fought beside her resistance comrades in the forests of Eastern Europe.  She even slept with a rifle.  In the earlier post, Schulman is quoted as lamenting: “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle.” 

Along with caring for the wounded, she foraged for food and sabotaged Wehrmacht facilities and harassed Nazi soldiers in the marshes and woods of Byelorussia. 

When her partisan unit raided her hometown, she retrieved her camera and processing equipment.  She began documenting the life of the resistance fighters.  She also took over 100 photographs after getting her photographic equipment back.  Her pictures documented German atrocities and resistance activities. 

Schulman was one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers.  Her goal, she has said, was to show that “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter.  I was a photographer.  I have pictures.  I have proof.”  According to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF), there were 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish men and women who fought against the Nazis and their collaborators as partisans in World War II.

As a member of the Moltova Brigade, Schulman had to keep her Jewish identity secret.  The Russian fighters had little use for her as a woman, but discovering she was a Jew would have led to her expulsion from the group—or worse.  Despite her service as both a nurse and a fighter, the anti-Semitism of her fellow partisans was intense.  At Passover time, when her Orthodox faith forbade her to eat many foods, especially leavened bread, she ate only potatoes without explaining the reason.

In July 1944, when the Soviet army liberated Byelorussia, Schulman left the partisans.  She found that her brother Moishe had also escaped Poland and, with a second brother, Kopel, joined another resistance group.  With them, she met another Jewish fighter, a friend and comrade of Moishe’s whom she’d known at home—Morris Schulman.  They were married in December.

After the war, the Schulmans lived in Pinsk, then a city in Soviet Byelorussia.  (Until 1939, when the USSR annexed the eastern part of Poland, Pinsk had been a Polish city.)  They lived well enough as decorated Soviet and Byelorussian heroes, and Faye Schulman worked for a while as a photographer.  But Faye and Morris said Pinsk reminded them of a “graveyard” and they wanted to emigrate to Palestine, which was still under the British Mandate in 1945.

They left Byelorussia and the Soviet east for a displaced persons camp in U.S.-occupied Germany.  The Landsberg DP Camp was in southwest Bavaria, west of Munich and the Schulmans spent three years here, trying to gain admission to Palestine.  During that time, they worked with an underground organization that smuggled Jews into Palestine.

In 1948, Faye gave birth to her daughter, Susan, and she and Morris decided to emigrate to Canada for the stability and quieter life.  After moving to Toronto, where they spent the rest of their lives, Faye Schulman worked in a dress factory and later hand-tinted photographs and painted.  

Morris was employed as a laborer and then worked in the dress factory as a cutter.  The couple eventually opened a successful hardware store.  Morris Schulman died on 22 March 1992 at 81 and, this past 24 April, Faye Schulman passed away at 101.

In addition to the honors from Byelorussia and the USSR, the two were also decorated by Canada and the United States.  Faye was survived by a brother, a rabbi, and the pair left behind a daughter and a son, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. 

Faye Schulman also left for posterity over a hundred of the photos she took during the war and preserved. 

She also preserved the camera she used back then, the old-fashioned kind with the fold-out bellows.  She treasured it . . . but she never took another picture with it.

[Faye Schulman published a 1995 autobiography titled A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust (Second Story Press) and appeared in a 1999 PBS documentary, Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust, which aired on 24 September 2000 on WNET, Channel 13 in New York City.

[Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photography of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman is a traveling exhibit of Schulman’s wartime photos that’s been displayed in more than 30 cities in the United States, Canada, Israel, Poland, South Africa, and Switzerland.  The exhibit is organized by the JPEF, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, that produces short films and other educational materials on the history and life lessons of the Jewish partisans.]

Drama Book Shop: The Revival

 

In 2017, the famous and beloved—especially among stage folk and fans of the theater—Drama Book Shop celebrated its 100th birthday.  (Some newspaper accounts found during the run-up to the centennial indicated that the theater bookseller may actually have been started in 1916, but that’s an argument for another moment.) 

The celebration might have been short-lived, however.  On 24 October 2018, Allen Hubby (b. 1957), the store’s vice president, announced that an untenable rent hike (from $20,000 a month to $30,000) would force the venerable theater district institution to abandon its location at 250 W. 40th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) and look for other, more affordable premises.  It planned to close the 40th street location on 20 January 2019—after marking DBS’s century on 2 October 2017, which was the birthday of Arthur Seelen (1923-2000), the book store’s owner from 1958 to his death.

Almost immediately, however, actor-playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda stepped up.  On 18 January 2019, the New York Times announced that Miranda, the author of the smash 2015 Broadway hit Hamilton, and his collaborators Thomas Kail, Hamilton’s director; Jeffrey Seller, the show’s lead producer; and James L. Nederlander, the president of the Nederlander Organization, which runs the Richard Rodgers Theatre where Hamilton is playing, would be buying DBS from its previous owner, Rozanne Seelen (b. ca. 1935), Arthur’s business partner and widow.

The deal was a partnership with the city of New York, which promised to help the four new owners find a suitable storefront for DBS.  Apparently it has: the iconic bookseller reopened at 266 W. 39th Street, a little west of 8th Avenue, on Thursday, 10 June.

The Drama Book Shop, the oldest bookstore dedicated to the performing arts in the U.S., was founded in 1923 (unofficially in 1916 or ’17 as an ad hoc bookseller in theater lobbies, operated by the Drama League) by Marjorie Seligman.  Under the Drama League, it occupied space at 29 W. 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the League’s New York City headquarters.

Arthur Seelen (born Seelenfreund in Brooklyn), a former actor who died at age 76, bought the bookstore in 1958; Rozanne Seelen (née Ritch), a former dancer originally from San Antonio, was an employee and then Arthur’s wife.  The couple married in 1980, after Ritch had worked at the store for several years. 

Seligman bought the shop and moved it to a brownstone at 48 W. 52nd Street.  It stayed there until the late 1950s; Seligman retired in 1956 and then sold the shop to Arthur Seelen in 1958.  Seelen moved it to 150 W. 52nd Street—across the street from Joe's Pier 52, a restaurant that was a watering hole for theater people and the celebrity friends of owner Joe Kipness (1911-82), a theatrical producer.

DBS was located on the fourth and fifth floors of the building until 1983, and that’s where it was when I got to New York in the mid-’70s.  There was no display window at street level, no posters or ads.  The entrance led you to a creaky, cramped, and tattered old elevator that took you to the fifth floor where the selling floor was.  Just like the elevator, the shop was unpretty, even a little grimy, no décor or amenities.  No one cared.  If you were addicted to theater, this was your opium den.

Crammed with books on every aspect of theater—the last count was 20,000 titles in stock—with sections devoted to film and television and even radio, the place was crowded with people.  Some were browsing the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, looking for specific titles or just looking for something that fit their need.  Many people were seated on the floor, reading.  

Of course, there were scripts—thousands of them, mostly acting editions from Samuel French and Dramatist Play Service with their pastel-colored covers.  DBS had almost any play or musical libretto you could think of if it had been published.  If they didn’t have one and it was available, they’d get it for you. 

The store also did a big mail-order business—there wasn’t (and isn’t) any other place like the Drama Book Shop anywhere in the country . . . anywhere in the world, so people came to them for play texts and theater books they couldn’t get at home.  There were always dozens of packages of wrapped books on the sales counter, waiting to be mailed to customers far away.

Most of the customers were—are—theater people, theater students, or theater teachers.  (Look around and you might catch a glimpse of a real theater liminary.  In years past, such stars as Marilyn Monroe, José Ferrer, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Midler, Ellen Burstyn, Alan Cumming, John Lithgow, Kevin Kline, and Cher have shopped at DBS.)

Most customers are looking for something specific, but some come to see what’s available that might meet the need for an audition monologue, a classroom scene, or a school play.  I often did all of those things there when I was a student in the ’70s and ’80s, a wannabee actor in the ’80s, and a theater teacher in the ’80s and ’90s.

I was in the Times Square area often for auditions and when there was time between sessions, I used the Drama Book Shop as a place to hang out and look for scripts.  For theater people, DBS was the equivalent of a candy store or a toy store to little kids. 

In 1983, the book shop moved again.  Its new home was 723 7th Avenue between 48th and 49th Street, just north of Times Square.  I shopped here, too.  Not as often as I did at 150 W. 52nd, but I was in grad school at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies at this time (1983-86), and though I didn’t need scripts like I had 10 years earlier, there were other theater books I needed.

Arthur Seelen died in 2000 and in November 2001, DBS moved again.  After a short hiatus, it reopened at 250 W. 40th Street in December 2001.  After Seelen’s death, his widow asked Hubby, her nephew and another former dancer who’d been Seelen’s assistant, to become co-owner.

After DBS moved to its 40th Street location in 2001, Hubby opened a 50-seat black-box theater in the basement.  It was named for Arthur Seelen and Lin-Manuel Miranda developed his 2008 Tony-winning musical In the Heights there.  In 2011, DBS itself received a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theatre.  (Where else but in New York could a book store win a Tony?)

I patronized the West 40th Street store occasionally, too.  My friend Kirk Woodward (whom ROTters will know from his many contributions to this blog) worked in an office on 8th Avenue near Penn Station.  We had lunch together semi-regularly, and afterwards, I sometimes walked to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. 

Since I’d pass right near the Drama Book Shop, I’d sometimes stop in either to browse or to look for a book I wanted.  (By this time, of course, DBS, like most other retailers, had a website and I could look up books for which I was looking and even order them in advance of my visit.)  Regardless, a trip to DBS always meant a surf through the shelves and display tables.

I was devastated when I read two-and-a-half years ago that the Drama Book Shop would be closing.  I hadn’t been going there much—Kirk retired from his job, so we didn’t have lunch together anymore—but I did use the website now and then.  But I still felt as if I were losing an old friend whom I didn’t see much anymore, but would still miss being able to see or call up or e-mail occasionally.  DBS, like the Library for the Performing Arts, had been very important to me at a significant time in my life.

I had a suspicion, though, that someone wouldn’t let such a theater icon disappear.  (Okay, maybe it was more a wish than a suspicion.  You got me!)  And now a knightly foursome has come out of the mist and saved the foundering DBS.  What could be more theatrical?

It's not surprising that these four have done this deed.  Miranda, as I’ve reported, wrote his first hit (just now being released as a movie!) in the store.  He also was one of those play-readers on the floor of the bookstore—some 20 years after I went there regularly.  (I frequented the West 52nd Street shop; he did his reading at the 7th Avenue location.)

Miranda has helped the Drama Book Shop before as well.  In 2016, a pipe burst, flooding the shop and damaging merchandise.  The playwright urged his fans to patronize the store and to entice them, he signed every book with his name on it.  The store sold out in an hour.

Kail directed not only Hamilton, but also In the Heights, so he and Miranda had worked together in the store and the Arthur Seelen Theater.  Furthermore, Kail had a theater company after college, Back House Productions, which was in residence in the Seelen for the first five years of his career.  He considers that experience his professional sipapu.

Seller, the producer, will be managing the store and has already made plans to redesign the DBS website and to expand the bookseller’s in-store programs.  A fifth member of the Hamilton team, David Korins, who designed the show’s sets, has also designed the new store, which has the look and feel of a French café.  The new DBS will also sell pastries and coffee in the hope that the store will once again become a hang-out for artists and theater enthusiasts.

The space is decorated with art spotlighting the theater’s greatest shows, and Korins has created a spectacular centerpiece for the store’s opening.  He’s used 2,500 books to fashion a 140-foot-long, literal book worm weighing 3,500 pounds suspended from the ceiling and snaking around the room.  There are also a pair of replicas of George Washington’s armchair from Hamilton placed at small tables where readers (or coffee drinkers) can sit.

The new DBS is open daily, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; and Sunday, 12 n.-6 p.m.  Capacity is limited to 40 people at a time, and a timed-entry reservation system has been implemented.  Reservations, however, aren’t required, but they are recommended; patrons can also wait in line to enter. 

Be advised that masks are required at all times while inside the store, regardless of vaccination status.  If you forget, DBS has a limited supply available.  To ensure safe shopping, patrons are requested to maintain social distancing.  Hand sanitizer stations are placed throughout the store for shoppers’ convenience, while high-touch surfaces are disinfected regularly and the store receives a deep cleaning each night.

The Drama Book Shop’s website is https://www.dramabookshop.com/ and its e-mail is info@dramabookshop.com; the telephone number is (212) 944-0595.