At The Theater: To Wear A Mask, Or Not To Wear A Mask

 

[Earlier this month, the Broadway League, the national trade association for Broadway theater-owners and -operators, announced that it would drop its requirement that all members of the audiences at their theaters must wear masks inside the buildings in July.  

[I feel the decision is precipitous and premature, but while the policy was still in effect, there were theatergoers who flouted it, putting their own personal interests above the health and safety of other spectators and the artists, crew members, and building staffs who work in the theaters.

[There was a highly publicized incident at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last April that spotlighted the selfishness of one theatergoer and several prominent actors responded.  I’m posting two columns reporting the incident because not only is it topical, but it happens to illustrate my own position on the issue of wearing masks in places like theaters while Covid is still around.  And it is!

[Actors Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman, and Sam Rockwell, who are all quoted in the New York Times report below, say what I feel on the subject.  They also make a strong argument against what they, and I, see as irresponsible behavior of some New Yorkers.]

*  *  *  *
“YOU DON’T WANT TO WEAR A MASK? DO IT FOR HUGH JACKMAN.”
by Ginia Bellafante

[The article below appeared in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on Sunday, 26 June. Ginia Bellafante writes the “Big City” column, a weekly commentary on the politics, culture, and life of New York City.

Beginning in July, Broadway will no longer require audiences to mask up. Actors and theater workers aren’t loving the idea.

Last month, in a much-celebrated moment of public disciplining during a talk back with the cast of “Company” [at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre], a woman in the audience who was told to please put her mask back on refused and then, mocking the directive, waved it in the air and placed it over her eyes. Up onstage, Patti LuPone was not having it and told her to get out. As if incubated in a lab manufacturing legend-resistant organisms — and unlike almost anyone else on the west side of Manhattan — this was a person immune to the ire of Patti LuPone. Yelling back defiantly, she proclaimed, “I pay your salary.” A member of the theater’s Covid safety staff proceeded to escort her out of the building.

In the actress’s view, the woman should have been ejected as soon as it was clear that she was not going to wear a mask. “It shouldn’t have been up to me,” Ms. LuPone said. I called her earlier this week to gauge her feelings on the theater world’s changing Covid protocols. On Tuesday [21 June], the Broadway League, a trade association, announced that owners and operators of all Broadway’s 41 theaters would put a mask-optional policy into effect beginning on July 1, just as the 2022-23 season was kicking off.

In a written statement, the League’s president, Charlotte St. Martin, did not even pretend to ground the decision in statistics. “Millions of people enjoyed the unique magic of Broadway by watching the 75th Tony Award Ceremony recently [12 June],” she began, overlooking the fact that “watching” typically takes place at home.

“Are they afraid that they’re losing audiences?” Ms. LuPone wondered, pointing out that masks were still required of casts and crew backstage. “I don’t know.” Unions, nearly a dozen of which are involved in governing the theater industry, have pushed for strict safety rules since the beginning of the pandemic.

After rising steadily for a decade, Broadway earnings have taken an obvious beating over the past two years. Grosses for the week ending June 19 fell to $29 million from a prepandemic peak late in 2019 of nearly twice that. Covid outbreaks among performers have stymied productions, further complicating things. A few weeks ago, Hugh Jackman, currently starring in “The Music Man” [Winter Garden Theatre], tested positive for Covid for a second time, leaving the role of professor [sic] Harold Hill to Max Clayton.

Even though case rates have fallen recently after a late spring surge, the seven-day average in New York City is still more than 10 times what it was last June. Regardless, Broadway theaters — old, windowless and often poorly ventilated — present particular vulnerabilities to those working in them, especially actors who are communicating intimately with one another onstage, unmasked.

Sam Rockwell, who is starring in “American Buffalo” at Circle in the Square, is one of several actors I spoke with who is unnerved by the change in policy. “We’re doing theater in the round,” he told me. “The other day I had a guy cough four feet in front of me.” He and the rest of the cast and crew test constantly. “We test in order to have the privilege to take the mask off. We earn the privilege to take the mask off and spit saliva on the stage,” he said. “I don’t know if it occurs to the audience that they’re protecting the actors onstage. If someone is mad because they have to wear a mask, they have to know that we are testing everyday [sic].”

It is hard to see who benefits from removal, given that people who go to the theater tend to skew older and have traveled to New York from somewhere else. Moreover, anyone who has held back from seeing shows out of a fear of Covid is unlikely to spend hundreds of dollars to do so now that strictures have loosened. “Just looking at it pragmatically, this is not serving the audience,” Mr. Rockwell said. “It’s about, Do you want to see Hugh Jackman in the show? Do you want to go see that show without Patti? Because let me tell you, if she gets Covid, she’s not in the show for 10 days.” 

Last week, six out of the 11 cast members of the acclaimed Tracy Letts play, “The Minutes” [Studio 54] were out sick. One of them, Blair Brown, now in her 70s, has been especially cautious over the past two years, staying away from restaurants and public transportation. She did not understand how the League would periodically reassess the need for masks — which it has committed to doing — considering that there is no system for tracking transmission in theaters.

While it might be hard for the public to feel sympathetic toward actors, who seem in every way swimming in privilege, most who appear on the New York stage do not make up the ranks of the wealthy and well known. At the same time, according to the League’s own demographic study three years ago, the average annual household income of the Broadway theatergoer is $261,000. If you don’t want to wear a mask for Hugh Jackman, you might want to do it for the actor in the chorus who is making a lot less than that — the one with two lines, who is headed to bed early to teach a barre class at Equinox the next morning.

[Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the “Big City” columnist. She began her career at the Times as a fashion critic,and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.]

*  *  *  *
“PATTI LUPONE SHUTS DOWN ANTI-MASK AUDIENCE MEMBER: ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?’”
by Wilson Chapman

[The following report was posted on the website of Variety, the theater trade paper, on 11 May (https://variety.com/2022/legit/news/patti-lupone-company-anti-mask-covid-1235264323/.)]

Broadway legend Patti LuPone is famous for her long history of calling out theatergoers who fail to follow proper theater etiquette, and that continued Tuesday [10 May] when she exchanged harsh words with an anti-mask attendee during a production of “Company” on Broadway.

The interaction occurred after the show, when LuPone — who stars in the musical as Joanne — appeared with the rest of her cast in a post-show Q&A hosted and filmed by the American Theater Wing. During the Q&A, LuPone called out a patron who wasn’t wearing a mask properly. Currently, the Broadway League’s COVID safety protocols requires all audience members to wear a mask inside theaters through at least May 31.

“Put your mask on over your nose, that is the rule,” LuPone says in a viral Twitter video. “That’s why you are in the theater, that is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, get the fuck out!”

After applause from the rest of the audience, LuPone continued. “I’m serious. Who do you think you are, if you do not respect the people that are sitting around you?”

After a woman in the audience told LuPone “I pay your salary,” LuPone responded by telling her “You pay my salary? Bullshit. Chris Harper pays my salary,” referring to the producer of “Company.” “Who do you think you are? Just put your mask over your nose.”

This isn’t the first time LuPone has had harsh words for theatergoers who have attended her shows. In 2009, while starring in a revival of the classic musical “Gypsy,” she stopped her performance of the closing song “Rose’s Turn” to demand that an audience member taking pictures be thrown out of the theater. In 2015, she made headlines for snatching a phone from the hands of a texting audience member while performing in a Lincoln Center production of “Show Days.”

On Monday, LuPone received a Tony nomination for supporting actress in a musical for her performance in “Company.” The nomination is her eighth over the course of her career. She’s won twice, for her leading role in “Evita” in 1980 and for her performance in “Gypsy.”

[LuPone also won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her performance as Joanne in the current production of Company.  (Both Jackman and Rockwell were nominated for Tonys for their current performances on Broadway.  American Buffalo will close on 10 July and Company on 31 July.)

[The video of LuPone’s mask reprimand is on YouTube at Patti LuPone scolds audience member for not wearing a mask | USA TODAY - YouTube.

[Over the years, I’ve witnessed a few occasions when an actor had to address someone in the audience outside the performance.  I was at a performance of Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes in July 1981 when Elizabeth Taylor, playing Regina Giddens, stopped in mid-speech to admonish someone up in the balcony who was taking flash photos.  Taylor said she wouldn’t continue until the photographer stopped or left the theater.

[In another instance, at a 1976 production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at Circle in the Square uptown with Vanessa Redgrave as Ellida, John Heffernan, as Professor Arnholm at stage right by the railing that separated the audience from the performance area in that peculiarly shaped theater, paused in a line and looked at a couple of women right down front and said to them, “Are you through?”  Clearly they’d been chatting while he was acting!  

[Later that year, when I was doing my MFA thesis performance (in classmate William Mastrosimone’s thesis play, Devil Take the Hindmost), I had one scene right down front in a tavern set.  I was at a table with a camp-follower character I had picked up.  At one point, I heard snoring.  

[It persisted, and I thought it was someone in the front of the house who’d fallen asleep and was being rude and inattentive.  I was just about to say something, remembering Heffernan’s actions . . . when I realized it was my camp follower, who was acting having gotten drunk and passing out at the table next to me!  I’d never noticed her doing that before—I think the actress had embellished the bit without telling me.  I almost embarrassed myself!]

"Unopened": 'The Baker’s Wife'

 

[The failed Broadway première of The Baker’s Wife is the subject of New York Times theater and arts journalist Laura Collins-Hughes’s entry in the “Unopened” series.  Published on 5 November 2020 in the “Arts” section of the Times—and  posted on the paper’s website as “Patti LuPone Was a Constant. The Other Ingredients Never Cooked” on 4 November—the report examines the breakdown of the transfer of the novel and screenplay by Jean Giono for the 1938 French film La femme du boulanger, directed by Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974), to the American musical stage.

[This is the last of the five articles in the Times’ “Unopened” series on failed Broadway attempts.  As I’ve been saying all along, the reports aren’t connected except by the common theme.  Reading all the articles, however, provides an overview of the reasons for and causes of aborted Broadway openings, some of which had every expectation for success.  If you haven’t been reading the whole series, I recommend going back and catching the four preceding articles, posted on 26 February and 1, 4, and 7 March.]

“WHAT COULD GO WRONG? EVERYTHING”
by Laura Collins-Hughes
 

With a marquee creative team, this romantic musical should have been a sure bet. One great song survived the out-of-town turmoil.

The producer David Merrick [1911-2000] was no slouch at offstage drama. With a new musical in rough shape on the road, he devised an audacious caper to fix it.

The place was the Shubert Theater in Boston, the year 1976, the show “The Baker’s Wife” — with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz [b. 1948], a book by Joseph Stein [1912-2010] and a cringe-making trail of reviews that seemed only to be getting worse.

At the start of the five-city, six-month Broadway-bound tour, in May, the Los Angeles Times had kindly deemed the show “not an embarrassment.” By September, The Boston Globe declared acidly that it didn’t “have a prayer.”

To Merrick, the song “Meadowlark” — sung by the title character, played by a not yet famous, 27-year-old Patti LuPone [b. 1949] — was part of the problem. It was more than seven minutes long, and he wanted it out. So after a Wednesday matinee, he ordered the conductor, Robert Billig [b. 1947], to pull all of the sheet music for the song and bring it to the stage.

“I did as I was asked,” Billig recalled by email this week, “and Mr. Merrick put the music in his attaché case and departed for New York.”

The notoriously combative producer left the others to figure out how to make the evening performance work around the hole he had just smashed in it.

“This could all just be myth,” LuPone said by phone the other day, hushing her voice for effect, “but let’s hope it’s true: He was heard in a bar the night before saying, ‘I’ll get that song out of the show if I have to poison the birdseed.’”

“Meadowlark,” which went on to become a cabaret standard, a popular audition number and one of LuPone’s signature solo songs, didn’t stay cut. Billig got on the phone to Schwartz, Schwartz called his agent, threats were made. The orchestra got its music back the next day.

“By that point in the proceedings,” Schwartz said recently by video call, “this is why we couldn’t fix it.” Meaning the show, that is. “Because everything had sort of descended into chaos. Nobody was making really rational decisions.”

In terms of sheer, eye-popping dysfunction, the “Meadowlark” incident — which amuses Schwartz now — is emblematic of the grim slog that was the cross-country out-of-town tryout for “The Baker’s Wife,” whose star, Chaim Topol [Israeli actor, singer, and comedian, b. 1935; aka:  Topol], eventually followed other axed creatives out the door.

Even LuPone, playing Geneviève, was a replacement for the original leading lady, Carole Demas [b. 1940], who was let go in Los Angeles. At that same stop on the tour, Jerome Robbins [choreographer and director, 1918-98] came to see the musical, invited by Merrick and Stein in the hope that he might take over the production. No dice.

“There was like a revolving door of directors,” Schwartz said.

“Every time somebody joined the company,” LuPone said, “we looked at them and went, ‘Oh my God, what did you do that put you in the bowels of hell?’“

“The Baker’s Wife” arrived with great ambitions, expected to join the string of Schwartz hits already on Broadway in the autumn of ’76: “Pippin,” “The Magic Show,” “Godspell.” It still hasn’t played there, and not until 2005 did Schwartz and Stein find its proper shape. But its creation story does have a happy ending, and we will get to that.

First, though, the horror show — which, like all the best horror shows, begins with no inkling of trouble.

In 1972 or ’73, when Schwartz was a 20-something boy wonder, Neil Simon [playwright, 1927-2018] invited him to lunch. Broadway’s reigning king of comedies, Simon suggested they write a musical together. But none of the ideas that he proposed — “Mutiny on the Bounty,” maybe? — appealed to Schwartz.

Then, over dessert, Simon told the story of Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film “La Femme du Boulanger,” in which a village baker’s much younger wife leaves him for a man nearer to her age. By the time Simon got to the ending, Schwartz was in.

And he stayed in after Simon, newly widowed, dropped out of the nascent project and Stein, who wrote the book to “Fiddler on the Roof,” joined it.

Centering their musical on the baker, Aimable, Schwartz and Stein had hoped to cast the “Fiddler” star Zero Mostel [1915-77]. When he turned them down, they took Merrick’s suggestion and went to Topol, who had played Tevye in the 1971 “Fiddler” movie.

“It turned out to be a kind of disastrous choice,” Schwartz said. “Because Topol was never comfortable playing someone who was an older and less attractive man. He had this sense of virility and sexiness.”

“Nothing could be done as long as Topol was there,” LuPone said, recalling one performance when he didn’t like the lyrics and substituted “blah blah blah” instead. “He sabotaged the show.”

A group of his fellow actors wrote to Actors’ Equity, lobbying to have him fired. (Reached by telephone, Topol’s agent declined to make him available for an interview.)

But by the time Paul Sorvino [b. 1939] replaced him, in late October on the tour’s last stop — at the Kennedy Center in Washington, less than a month before the scheduled Broadway start — the actors were so “bloody and beaten” that they only wanted to be left alone by this new leading man who was trying to rally them, LuPone said.

For her, some of the erosion of morale involved “Meadowlark,” which tells the story of Geneviève’s decision to leave her husband. In LuPone’s recollection, it was consistently in the show until Merrick’s stunt in Boston, the tour’s penultimate stop. After that, “it was out, in, out, in, out, in, between Boston and Washington,” she said.

The last time it was pulled from the show, she remembers walking out of a company notes session and telling “the director du jour,” John Berry [1917-99], that he could go straight to hell.

“I left and went into my dressing room, started crying, started smashing stuff,” she said. “And like a flock of sea gulls after the notes session, the company came in and put a Valium in my throat — and then left the room!”

LuPone laughed. At this distance, she cherishes her forged-in-fire “Baker’s Wife” anecdotes, and she is sure about the disheartening disappearance and reappearance of her big song — a number that, at her own concerts, fans demand to hear as much as they demand “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

But Billig, the conductor, said he didn’t remember the song being pulled more than once. Schwartz, whose daughter, Jessica, was born during the tour, was at home for much of its second half. Still, he said the song would not have been out of the show after his agent objected vociferously the first time.

One point of agreement about “The Baker’s Wife” back then is that it never did come into focus, no matter how relentlessly it was reworked. (To those who blame Stein’s book, Schwartz retorts loyally that “if we didn’t solve things, it’s because we didn’t solve them together.”)

Toward the end, as the show kept unraveling, those involved badly wanted out. Eventually Schwartz and Stein — who remained friends until Stein’s death at 98 in 2010 — went to Merrick and asked him not to take it to Broadway.

And when the closing notice went up that November?

“The entire company erupted in tears of joy,” LuPone said.

After they closed, LuPone, Sorvino and other cast members recorded an album of Schwartz’s favorite solos and duets from the show, which attracted a cult following and put “Meadowlark” into the world.

Trevor Nunn [English director, b. 1940] heard songs from the album enough times in auditions to pique his interest. In 1989, he directed a revamped version of “The Baker’s Wife” in London and supplied what was to Schwartz and Stein a crucial insight: that the central character is not the baker but the village — that it’s the story of a community responding to a small domestic crisis that touches them all.

It wasn’t until 2005, though, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, that Schwartz finally saw a version of “” that felt finished to him. The director Gordon Greenberg [b. 1968], who years earlier had fallen for the show through the album, worked with Schwartz and Stein to realign its bones, lending it what Greenberg called a “Gallic shrug.” Alice Ripley [b. 1963] played Geneviève — about 40 in that incarnation, but still with an older husband and a 20-something love.

Before the pandemic struck, Greenberg said, he had an offer to direct “The Baker’s Wife” in London that would have put him in rehearsals there right about now.

But it’s the Paper Mill production that Schwartz comes back to. As his favorite review said, it was the lovely little show that he and Stein had always wanted. It only took 30 years.

“For a long time, of course, it was the child that didn’t survive,” Schwartz said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we never gave up.”

[Before the scheduled Broadway opening on 21 November 1976 at the Martin Beck Theatre, The Baker’s Wife went on a five-city try-out tour.  It opened in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on 11 May 1976 and closed there on 26 June; then it traveled north to San Francisco and played the Curran Theatre from 29 July to 31 July. 

[The Baker’s Wife opened at the Municipal Opera House (the “Muny”) on 16 August and played there until 22 August before moving on to Boston.  It played the Shubert Theatre from 15 September to 2 October, then moved south to Washington, D.C., to open at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Opera House on 4 October.

[The closing notice was posted in Washington and after the final performance there on 13 November, the tour ended and the planned transfer to Broadway was canceled.  The Baker’s Wife has never played in New York City except for a staged concert presentation by the York Theatre Company on 26-28 October 2007.

[The Paper Mill Playhouse (the “State Theater of New Jersey,” Millburn, N.J.) production of The Baker’s Wife, directed by Gordon Greenberg, ran from 13 April to 15 May 2005.  The review I believe Collins-Hughes cites was published in Section NJ (“New Jersey”) of the New York Times of Sunday, 24 April 2005; in the notice, reviewer Naomi Siegel wrote: “And, after 30 years of fine-tuning, Messieurs Stein and Schwartz will have the lovely little musical they always wanted.”]