More Theater Odds & Ends

 

[Here’s another compilation of short pieces from various outlets—this time, two Washington Posts and a New York Times—all about some aspect of theater.  Some of these—most of them, really—I filed away some years ago (these are all from the 2010s), and I’ve enjoyed rediscovering them.  I hope you find them interesting.] 

“THE LEAD HAS A BROKEN ANKLE?

GET THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR!”

by Rebecca Ritzel 

[The following article was originally published in the “Style” section of the Washington Post on 12 February 2014.  It was previously posted on the WaPo website as “Backstage: For Theater J, breaking a leg for real leads to 'Yellow Face' recasting scramble” on 11 February.]

“Call the understudy, I can’t go on tonight,” is the closing theme from the cult television comedy “Slings and Arrows.” The show about backstage drama at a theater company debuted in Canada in 2003, but in the ensuing decade, the refrain has become a bit dated.

[Slings & Arrows was a darkly comic TV Series, aired on Canada’s Movie Central cable channel and The Movie Network streaming service in 2003-06, and in the United States on the Sundance Channel, 2005-07.]

These days, it’s not “call the understudy,” it’s “text the assistant stage manager.” And post-recession, there may well not be an understudy to call.

Jessica Soriano, an assistant stage manager at Theater J, got the dreaded text message [Tuesday,] Feb. 4. The actor sending it was Al Twanmo, one of the leads in the play “Yellow Face.” He was at the hospital, being treated for a broken ankle after falling on black ice. Soriano then e-mailed (still no phone call involved) the production team with the bad news.

[Yellow Face, a 2007 play by David Henry Hwang, played at Theater J in Washington, D.C., from 29 January to 23 February 2014.  It was directed by Natsu Onoda Power; at the time, Ari Roth was the artistic director of the company. (Roth was fired in December by the theater’s parent organization, the Washington DC Jewish Community Center, for protesting the DCJCC’s cancelation of a series of controversial plays about the Middle East (some of which were critical of Israel). See my post on Rick On Theater “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015.]

With little deliberation, Wednesday night’s show was canceled (ticket holders received refunds), but the actors were called to the theater. Director Natsu Onoda Power had an idea to make sure the show would go on sooner rather than later.

First, she re-blocked the entire play, allocating many of Twanmo’s lines to the four other actors in the ensemble who play multiple roles. But replacing Twanmo’s main character was going to be tricky. David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” is a satirical comedy about racial stereotypes. The lead character is Chinese American, as is his father, who Twanmo was playing. The only Asian actor Theater J found who could read for the role on short notice was, in the words of artistic director Ari Roth, “30 years too young.”

Undeterred, Power turned to Roth.

“There was just one person who knew the part, who is not Asian, and who the audience would accept in this role, and that’s Ari,” she said late Thursday night after Roth, a 50-something Jewish playwright, made his professional stage debut playing an elderly Chinese American banker.

Roth maintains that he wasn’t actually acting, “I did this as a reading, everyone else was up there acting,” he protested, adding that he was “doing Al” and did his best to match Twanmo’s cadence.

The part of the father is written in broken English, with lots of stubborn humor, given Twanmo’s character is an immigrant who worked his way up from a laundry worker to the chief executive of Far East National Bank. Before his fall, Twanmo had received praise for his work in “Yellow Face”; Post critic Peter Marks called his performance “beguiling” in his review of the show. Roth will not be nominated for a Helen Hayes Award [the Capital area’s local award for excellence in theater; Helen Hayes (1900-93), the “First Lady of the American Stage,” was a native Washingtonian] for his one-night stint as a substitute, but what he will take away is a bouquet of yellow roses, and some insight into life outside an artistic director’s office.

“I have never spent so much on my personal grooming,” Roth said, “At 5 p.m., I stopped doing my computer work and started preparing for the show.” Those preparations included both streaking his hair with gray and spending some time in front of the mirror trimming nose hairs. He came away not only with more respect for his actors but also for the stage managers and others working behind the scenes at Theater J.

“I have been running this theater for 17½ years,” Roth said, “and I’ve never been backstage watching for an entire show.”

When Roth did come out onstage, it was in a wheelchair, a change Power kept when Twanmo returned to the stage Saturday. In Act II, the script calls for an ensemble member to play the father’s doctor. In Power’s revision, the doctor (played by Mark Hairston) will always wheel Twanmo out. But there’s still a major challenge that they’ll have to deal with until the show closes Feb. 23: a massive set of file cabinets surrounds the stage, and only one entrance is wide enough for the chair.

“The scenery is not wheelchair-accessible,” Power said.

Casting a wider net

Theater J learned its lesson in staging accessible theater the hard way, but several other theaters in the Washington area are deliberately seeking to be more inclusive in their casting, and are succeeding artistically as a result. At Studio Theatre, Nina Raine’s play “Tribes,” about a deaf son in a dysfunctional family, has been extended through March 2. Out in Herndon [Virginia], NextStop Theatre Company is mounting a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” with a deaf actor, Ethan Sinnot [sic; Sinott], starring as the murderous monarch.

Also worth noting: Deaf actor Hector Reynoso is a company member at Synetic [a physical theater company located in Crystal City in Arlington County, Virginia], and next month’s World Stages international theater festival at the Kennedy Center will include Israel’s ­Nalaga’at Theater for deaf and blind actors.

Locally, the two leads in “Tribes” and “Richard III” share an interesting connection: Sinott is chairman of the theater program at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing], and James Caverly, who plays the lead in “Tribes,” is one of his most successful graduates. Yet until he drove out to Herndon recently for a dress rehearsal, Caverly had never seen his former professor act. Caverly loved the concept – and the performance.

“It was brilliant!” Caverly wrote in an e-mail message. “For so long, I’ve thought of Richard III as it was written in the text: a hunchback, hobbled, and writhed villain who’s sole ambition was to destroy those who had more power over him. I never perceived him to be deaf. And it does make sense when you correspond it to a real-life scenario. Most of the royal court chose to seclude him because of his deafness, which eerily echoes with the daily basis of deaf people everywhere. . . . This is a big step for the DC theater scene, and [I’m] proud to be part of something bigger.”

[Rebecca Ritzel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in more than 20 publications in the United States, Canada, and the U.K.  Ritzel regularly contributes arts and entertainment articles to the Washington Post, the Washington, D.C., City Paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer.  Washington’s Theater J, founded in 1990, produces plays “that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy.” 

[I have posted performance reports on three plays by David Henry Hwang (“Golden Child,” 9 December 2013; The “Dance and the Railroad,” 17 March 2013; “Kung Fu,” 8 March 2014) and a performance by the Nalagaat Deaf-Blind Theater Ensemble of Tel Aviv (Not by Bread Alone, 12 February 2013) on ROT.  Earlier, my friend, the late Helen Kaye (1934-2020), who reviewed theater for the Jerusalem Post, sent me her own review of Not by Bread Alone, which I posted in “Dispatches from Israel 1,” 23 January 2013.

[Coincidentally, Ari Roth’s experience filling in at the last minute in a stage role happened to me once, years ago.  I happened to think of it just the other day.  I was in college—May 1967, the second semester of my sophomore year.  I was taking a directing class, the final exam for which was to direct a one-act play.  I had finished my final rehearsal for the presentations the next day and one of my classmates, who’s rehearsal was scheduled to follow mine in the university theater, approached me.

[One of his cast members had been taken ill and wasn’t going to be able to do the show the next evening, and my classmate asked if I’d fill in.  Well, I couldn’t let him down for his final grade, so I agreed to learn the part—it was relatively small, even for a one-act play—but he and his cast would have to help me out.

[I said I could learn the lines and the blocking for the next day after the one rehearsal that night, but the rest of the cast would have to keep to the lines as written, especially the cues, and the blocking as rehearsed—no ad libs or improvisations when I was on stage.  I wouldn’t be able to handle deviations.

[I don’t remember who the director was, or the play, and I don’t know what grade he got on the project—but we made it through and, as far as I could tell, no one knew what we’d had to do.  I do remember being totally keyed up for the whole scene in which I appeared, which was only a few minutes but seemed like at least a half hour to me. 

[I’m sure I collapsed as soon as the curtain came down—and I probably found a drink somewhere as soon as I could get to it.  (In Virginia, where I went to school, you couldn’t buy a drink in a bar or restaurant at that time.  You had to by a bottle in a state package store and keep the booze at home.)]

*  *  *  *

“WITH TRAINED NARRATORS,

BLIND THEATERGOERS FIND A SIGHTLINE”

by Caitlin Gibson 

[Caitlin Gibson’s report ran in the Washington Post on 5 May 2016 (sec. C [“Style”]) and was posted on the paper’s website on 4 May as “'He's picking his nose': How volunteers help the blind 'see' a theater performance.”]

‘Describers’ bring onstage action to life

On the brightly lit theater stage, the first scene of Robert Schenkkan’s Tony award-winning play “All the Way” is in full swing: President Lyndon B. Johnson [1908-73; 36th President of the United States: 1963-69] is pontificating behind a podium. A large desk is wheeled into the spotlight. An agitated secretary darts into view.

[All the Way is a 2012 play by Robert Schenkkan about President Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where it premièred 25 July-3 November 2012. The play was produced in 13 September-12 October 2013, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the production premièred at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre from 6 March 2014 to 29 June 2014 (27 previews and 131 regular performances). It won the 2014 Tony for Best Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play.

[The Arena Stage production of All the Way in Washington, D.C., ran from 1 April to 8 May 2016 on the Fichandler Stage (the arena theater). Jack Willis played LBJ; he was nominated for a 2017 Helen Hayes Award as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Play.]

Steps from the bustling action in the Fichandler Stage at Arena Stage, about 20 audience members are not actually watching the drama unfold. They sit silently, some with their heads bowed, others with their eyes closed. They are all blind or visually impaired; they either can’t see the stage at all, or it appears as little more than a haze of light and shadow.

But these theatergoers aren’t missing the action: Through the headphones clamped over their ears, a woman’s voice is explaining everything happening onstage, in detail, in real time.

The voice belongs to Rita Tehan, a veteran theater describer for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a nonprofit organization that provides audio services to the blind and visually impaired in the Washington region. Tehan sits behind the crowd in a dark, elevated sound booth as the fast-paced plot — depicting the efforts of Johnson and civil rights leaders to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — unspools below.

Tehan speaks crisply into a plastic audio mask linked to a large radio transmitter, explaining what’s happening on the set as vividly and efficiently as possible.

“He waves her away, and pats her on the rear end,” she says when Johnson abruptly dismisses his frazzled secretary.

“LBJ is picking his nose — really deep,” she says during one of the show’s comic moments, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the audience’s laughter. “Hoover is watching.” [That’s J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), the first, and longest serving Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1935-72).]

Tehan points out when Johnson turns from one character to another mid-sentence: “He’s talking to the tailor now,” she quickly interjects. She makes sure that her listeners don’t miss the joke when Johnson, frustrated by his strict diet, swipes a bite of Sen. Richard Russell’s [1897-1971; Democrat of Georgia (1933-71)] dinner. (“LBJ stabs a pork chop on Russell’s plate and pops it in his mouth,” she says. “Russell’s eyes widen.”)

She continues for well over an hour, until the stage lights dim and Act One comes to an end.

“This is intermission,” she says. “It will be about 15 minutes.”

Then she lowers the mask and exhales.

An art in itself

Tehan’s preparation for “All the Way” began weeks before the May 1 matinee, one of more than 50 annual performances with description services provided by the Ear. Describers typically see a performance at least once or twice before they narrate it live, to familiarize themselves with the script and note important visual cues.

The Ear’s roughly two dozen volunteer describers serve more than 250 blind or visually impaired people at seven local theaters every year. They take special requests, too — a couple of years ago, a describer accompanied a blind fan to a Lady Gaga concert at Verizon Center.

“It takes a very special person to be a describer, someone who can think fast on their feet,” says Neely Oplinger, the Ear’s executive director. The people who sign up — and pass a rigorous audition — tend to stick around; many have been volunteering for 10 years or longer.

Tehan joined the organization in 1992, but she had practice long before that: Her father went blind from diabetes when she was a teen, and she used to describe his favorite television shows to him.

“They are so dedicated, and most of them really know theater,” Oplinger says of the group’s volunteers. “But it takes a lot more than knowing theater.”

They also have to know the rules: When describing a performance, you have to slip all the description into the gaps between dialogue. You shouldn’t make judgments; instead of concluding that a character looks “disappointed,” you note simply that he frowns and his shoulders droop. You must capture any movement that’s essential to the plot. And — as with any live performance — if you make a mistake, you have to keep going.

These guidelines were created by Margaret Pfanstiehl, who founded the Metropolitan Washington Ear in 1974 to improve the lives of the blind and visually impaired. Pfanstiehl, a Virginia native, suffered from a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which eventually left her almost entirely blind.

At first, the Ear was a radio reading service — still a core part of its identity. The Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit has nearly 400 volunteers who read newspaper and magazine articles over closed-circuit radio, and the organization offers a dial-in service for listeners to hear recordings of articles from major publications, including The Washington Post, the New York Times and many others. About 5,000 people in the Washington area use the service.

But Pfanstiehl, who died in 2009, was also a devoted opera fan and theatergoer who longed to find a way for blind audience members to enjoy live performances.

“I always wanted a little voice to tell me whether it was a gunshot or a slamming door onstage, if the villain was walking across the stage with a dagger, and whether or not the lovers were facing each other,” she once told Reuters.

In 1981, Arena Stage approached the Ear about making live performances accessible to the blind. Pfanstiehl — then Margaret Rockwell, a divorcee — recruited longtime Metro spokesman and radio pro Cody Pfanstiehl as the first volunteer describer.

They watched dozens of movies together, says Oplinger, and he described the scenes unfolding onscreen. “Together, they devised what they called ‘the art and technique of audio description,’” says Oplinger. “And in the process, they fell in love.”

The couple, who married in 1983, went on to develop a comprehensive training system, teaching hundreds of volunteers to capture live performances for the blind.

Of course, the human mind is not a camera, so the description process is perhaps more like translation — an art in itself: The word choices matter, as do the pacing of the narration, the tone of voice and the clarity of enunciation. A secretary doesn’t just run into view, she gallops. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. doesn’t touch his wife, he gently strokes her arms. The describer has to engage in a sort of verbal dance with the actors, gracefully avoiding overlap or interruption.

And like any art, it’s imperfect. Sometimes details are missed, or a describer talks over a character, or the audio sounds muffled. But even with minor hiccups, the effort makes all the difference to a blind member of the audience, says Freddie Peaco, president of the Ear’s board of directors.

“You can hear the voices, but you don’t know the setting of the stage. The audience gives a great gasp, and you don’t know why they’re gasping,” she says. “With the describer, all of that comes to life, and I can’t tell you how meaningful that is.”

The show goes on

For a describer, Tehan says, “the moment the curtain rises, you’re on your toes” — and so she is as the second act of “All the Way” begins. She stands in the dark booth, her eyes trained on the stage.

“House lights are fading to black,” she says.

After the show, her listeners will praise her performance —“You did a great job, a great job!” one man will gush, grasping her hand — but Tehan won’t be entirely convinced. Even now, halfway through, she’s frustrated by details she couldn’t capture, by how little time she has to speak between the actors’ lines. An artist is never satisfied.

But the show goes on. Tehan cranes forward to follow the actors, her glasses reflecting the glow of the stage lights. She raises the mask to her face. In the seats just beyond the booth windows, all ears are on her.

[Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer focused on families, parenting, and children.  She joined the Washington Post in 2005.] 

*  *  *  *

“INVESTING IN THE THEATER

CAN GET A CHILD’S FOOT IN THE STAGE DOOR”

by Liz Moyer 

[Liz Moyer’s report appeared in the New York Times on 27 May 2017 (sec. B [“Business Day”)].  It was posted on the Times website on 26 May as “To Invest in Your Child’s Theater Dreams, First Invest in the Theater.”]

Dean Roth, the owner and president of a New Jersey company that makes parts for the tool-and-die industry [William T. Hutchinson Co. in Union, New Jersey, a third-generation family business], admits he has utterly failed to talk his teenage daughter out of pursuing a career in musical theater.

Instead of watching helplessly as she bounded down an uncertain career path, he became a Broadway investor to get an inside track: He said his initial $1,000 outlay [equivalent to $1,400 today], in the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” was “tuition for me to find out what the business was like.”

[The Broadway revival of Godspell, conceived by John-Michael Tebelak, who wrote the book based on the Gospel of Matthew, with music and new lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, ran at the Circle in the Square Theatre from 7 November 2011-24 June 2012 (30 previews and 264 regular performances).

[The production was directed by Daniel Goldstein and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, with scenic design by David Korins, costume design by Miranda Hoffman, lighting design by David Weiner, sound design by Andrew Keister, and projection design by Daniel Brodie.]

Since then, he has invested in 22 other shows, with six returning profits so far. And he and his daughter, Kim, now a musical theater student at Syracuse University [see my note following the article], have come to an understanding about where to draw the line between meddling parent and struggling artist.

Like so many parents juggling feelings of pride and concern as their children step into adulthood, Mr. Roth said he wanted his daughter to understand the risks — as well as the rewards — associated with a career in the arts, and the only way he could see doing that was for both of them to get closer to the business.

“I wanted her to go into this with open eyes and know what she was getting into,” Mr. Roth said.

As with practically everything in New York, especially the insular world of Broadway, connections mean everything. Being a child of an investor in a show doesn’t secure a part or even an audition, but it can create opportunities that open doors.

“Getting to know a director and having the opportunity to observe a rehearsal or a script reading to get a deeper understanding of the business, that is a definite advantage,” said Pippin Parker [b. 1969], a playwright and the dean of the drama school at the New School in New York City.

Ken Davenport, a Broadway producer [the current Gypsy with Audra McDonald and the upcoming Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal; he’s produced two Tony-winners] and blogger who raises money for shows and has worked with Mr. Roth [the 2011 Godspell] and other investors, said he has seen more parents invest in shows to encourage a passion they share with one of their children or to bolster the child’s career prospects.

“The parents don’t have the friends or relationships, so they do it the old-fashioned way by writing a check,” he said. “All that check does is get you in the door. It’s up to the kids to prove themselves.”

Of course there’s no substitute for talent, Mr. Parker and others said.

“Investing is a wonderful and glorious activity, but unless you know what you are doing as an investor, the best you can hope for is a glass of Champagne with Bette Midler,” said Peter Cooke, the head of the drama school at [Pittsburgh’s] Carnegie Mellon University, which sends many graduates on to Broadway careers.

The only career path he can see, he said, “is being well trained.”

There are different ways productions raise money, but for many shows, affluent individuals play a key role. Typically, these are people with at least $1 million of investable assets — what the finance industry calls an accredited investor, who is presumably able to swallow the considerable risks associated with this type of investing.

Producers raise the money by putting together pools of investors, who tend to give an average of $25,000 to finance a production in a Broadway theater. Sometimes there are different investing tiers, and those who give more can get perks like having their names printed above the show’s title on posters and Playbills, or getting an invitation to a dress rehearsal.

The investor pools are usually organized as a limited partnership, like a private equity investment fund. Very often these investors are people who know the show’s insiders, including the actors, writers, directors and others bringing it to the stage.

Tim Speiss, a former board chairman of the Abingdon Theatre Company, a Broadway production group, said he once auctioned an item for a production in which the winning bidder could get his or her child a small speaking part in one performance. “There are some very clever ways to raise money,” said Mr. Speiss, who is a wealth adviser at EisnerAmper, an accounting and advisory firm based in New York.

Once a show gets up and running, the investors might get their money back, proportionate to what they put in, plus any profit after the show’s expenses are covered.

Many shows are money losers: Just one in five will end up being profitable, and even fewer are runaway successes. But Mr. Davenport points out that those odds aren’t much different than those of any other alternative investment in which a high-net-worth investor might dabble. As far as privately held start-ups — a favorite of private equity investors — some 50 percent of new companies fail after the first four years, according to labor statistics.

Linda Huber, an executive at a financial services company in New York, began investing in Broadway a few years ago when her daughter, now a high school senior, showed an interest. Her daughter, Claudia Lopez-Balboa, gives her advice on which shows to bankroll. So far she has invested in four, including “On Your Feet,” a musical about the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan [Marquis Theatre, 5 November 2015-20 August 2017], a story that resonated with her daughter’s part-Cuban heritage.

“For art that’s worth making, it’s the responsible thing to support these endeavors — it’s a thing to do together,” Ms. Huber said.

Her daughter is about to graduate from St. Paul’s School, a New Hampshire boarding school, and plans to go to the University of Michigan in the fall to major in finance and minor in arts management.

Ms. Lopez-Balboa said that Broadway had captured her imagination since she saw the show, “Bring It On” [St. James Theatre, 1 August-30 December 2012], as a middle-school student — she recalled skipping all the way home afterward.

“I wanted to produce a show that would make you leap in the air,” she said.

She reached out to Daryl Roth, a 10-time Tony-winning producer (and no relation to Mr. Roth, the tool-and-die executive) to seek out an informational meeting about the business.

Ms. Roth recalled that initial meeting and said she was impressed by Ms. Lopez-Balboa’s energy and interest — enough to hire her as an intern for two summers.

Ms. Roth, the lead producer of the show “Kinky Boots” [Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 4 April 2013-7 April 2019], said she understood where Ms. Lopez-Balboa was coming from because her son Jordan had also dived into the theater world. “I wanted to help Claudia learn and be excited about working in theater,” Ms. Roth said.

For Dean Roth, the industrial company executive from New Jersey, the first $1,000 investment got him and his daughter invited to a cocktail party at Sardi’s, where they mingled with other investors and met the show’s director, Danny Goldstein.

Some of those contacts advised Kim Roth on whether she should pick college or an acting conservatory (she chose college), gave her tips for getting started in the business, and helped answer other novice-level questions.

Ms. Roth, who interned for Ken Davenport one summer, has one year of study left at Syracuse before setting out for what she hopes will be a career as an actress, singer and dancer on Broadway. [She got her BFA in 2018; see below.]

“Living so close to the city just getting to make those networking connections is definitely helpful,” Ms. Roth said. [Westfield, New Jersey, where the Roths lived at this time, is 23 miles from New York City—a 35-minute drive or an 85-minute train ride.] “Knowing someone doesn’t necessarily help, but it doesn’t hurt.”

[Kim Roth (b. 1996), originally from Westfield, Union County, New Jersey, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in musical theater from New York’s Syracuse University in 2018, and is now living in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey.  She’s had additional training at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, on whose stage she’s performed (The Merchant of Venice, 2016).  Acting, singing, and dancing are her passions.  Roth is a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

[Liz Moyer is a journalist with experience reporting and writing about finance, markets, public policy and consumers.  She was most recently a reporter at Barron’s; she was previously an editor at the New York Times and a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.  Moyer has a Master of Science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (1991).

[My friend, and a generous contributor to this blog, was, with his late wife, a small investor in a Broadway musical (Memphis, Shubert Theatre, 19 October 2009-5 August 2012).  It won several awards, including the 2010 Best Musical Tony! Read about his take on being a “Broadway Angel” (by Kirk Woodward, 7 September 2010).]

One-Act Plays Festivals

by Kirk Woodward

[Now comes my friend Kirk Woodward with a new contribution to the blog he urged me to start, lo these 7½ years ago.  This time, returning the broad topic of theater, Kirk’s looking at one-act plays and one-act festivals.  I know you’ll find several truths in his thesis and possibly some thoughts that had never occurred to you before.  As a playwright himself, Kirk has had years of experience writing—and submitting—short plays and in “One-Act Plays Festivals,” he shares some of what he’s learned from that experience as well as that of a long-time theatergoer and sometime theater reviewer.]

There’s a remarkable current theatrical phenomenon that I haven’t seen much published comment about – namely, the one-act play festival or competition.

One-act plays have a long theatrical history, as curtain-raisers, as short stand-alone entertainments, and as major dramatic works in their own right. Moliere (1622-1673) gained his early fame writing one act comedies like “The Flying Doctor” and “The Rehearsal at Versailles” that followed the tragedies he and others wrote. In the late Nineteenth Century, when full-length plays formed part of longer evenings’ entertainment, important writers like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) wrote short plays to precede the main events.

Much of the early growth of American theater in the first half of the Twentieth Century can be found in the one-act plays that Eugene O’Neill, in particular, wrote for the Washington Square Players (1914-1918) and the Provincetown Players (1915-1929), with his “sea plays” generally regarded as among his best, and as outstanding examples of the form. The professional career of Tennessee Williams began when a collection of one-act plays he submitted to a Group Theatre competition was awarded a special cash prize.

So one-act plays are an enduring presence in theater. However, the classic one-acts are old news. The words “World Premiere,” “Original Work,” and “New Plays” are assumed to have strong appeal, and the one-act play festivals and competitions I’m talking about almost all feature new work. At a minimum, they will not feature a play by, say, Eugene O’Neill.

The idea of the one-act play festival or competition got a major push when the Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL) began its National Ten-Minute Play Contest in 1989. This gives me a certain sense of pride because I’m from Louisville, and because I was present at the first organizational meeting of that theater, in 1964.

ATL did not invent the one-act play festival or competition, any more than it invented the one-act play. Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) in New York, for example, began a notable one-act play festival in 1986, three years before ATL, which continues to this day. However, EST accepts submissions up to forty pages long. (Generally speaking, a page of a script is assumed to equal a minute of stage time.)

The genius of ATL was to impose a limit in the length of one act plays to ten minutes. (Their specific requirement is for no more than ten pages of script, not counting the title page and notes.) I have not been able to determine whether the ten-minute limit was ATL’s invention – I’d guess it was not – but they also popularized it by publishing a series of collections of the one-act plays they’ve produced. These collections have wide popularity in the theater community.

With a ten minute play limit, a full evening of one-acts can contain eleven or twelve plays without much difficulty. (ATL has experimented with even shorter time lengths of submissions in recent years, including plays to be performed as phone conversations, and plays printed on T-shirts.)

In any case, the one-act play festival phenomenon has now reached astounding proportions. A Google search for “one-act play collections” reports about 9,730,000 results. About!

                                                                                                             

One of the first listings on a recent search was titled “One Act Plays For Every Stage – Read 2,100 One Act Plays Free.” That’s a lot of one-act plays on just one website. My brain can’t hold the idea of 2,100 one-act plays existing, much less the idea of reading all of them. I don’t know if I could read 2,100 of anything. And that was among the first search item that turned up.

A web search for “one-act play competitions” turns up a couple of million fewer hits. Among the notable long-lasting festivals in Manhattan are those of the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, the Strawberry One-Act Festival, and, as noted, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s series.

In a way the term “one-act play” is something of a misnomer. It might equally well be applied to full-length plays (one or one-and-a-half to two hours long or longer) performed without an intermission, like 2016’s The Humans. Shakespeare’s plays appear to have been originally performed this way, with no breaks in the action at all. (The first division of his plays into acts was by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) in his edition of the plays published in 1709. He created the scene divisions in the plays too.)

I admit that I have no name to substitute for the kind of play I’m talking about here. “Short one-act play” is about as close as I can come, and it is implied in this article. Very often these plays are original – that is, they’ve never been produced before. Producers love to announce premieres. Clearly this policy wastes good plays – why shouldn’t they be produced more than once? But the label “new work” has some drawing power.

There are many reasons that short one-act play festivals and competitions are currently popular, reasons that apply to producers, to actors, potentially to audiences, and definitely to playwrights as well. There are downsides too, which I will mention.

For producers, one-act play festivals and competitions offer a conceivably enticing financial prospect. If a producer puts on a program of, say, seven one-act plays, each with an average cast of three, and if each of those people, plus the writer, brings in six family members, there is already a practically guaranteed audience of 168 people, and the producer hasn’t even printed a flier yet. (I have been in more than one production of a full length play that didn’t bring in that many people over an entire run.)

Of course success still may not be guaranteed, even in a theater with a small seating capacity. But there is another possible strategic move. Call your night (or nights, or weeks, or festivals) of one-act plays a competition, offer a cash prize of a reasonable amount, and make it clear that winning the competition will depend on audience voting.

Writers in particular will pack the house with “safe” voters. More audience! If you have a smallish sized theater, you may even sell out. Meanwhile your production costs are likely to be low, since multiple set changes between plays require that items like furniture be kept to a minimum.

So presenting a festival or competition of one-act plays is a sensible financial strategy, even if the words “An Evening of One-Acts” on the marquee is by itself no guarantee of success. (It may be, of course. The one-act play competition at Actors Theatre of Louisville, for example, is extremely popular on its own. However, that theater has worked hard to build a reputation as a quality production house.)

For actors, the advantage is a significant increase in the number of available roles. True, a big role in a one-act play probably won’t be the size of a big role in a full length play. On the other hand, it could be a meatier role. In any case, it’s work. Often one-act plays are rehearsed on independent schedules, one for each play, with the whole group brought together only at the last minute. This too is an advantage for actors, who need to schedule their time efficiently.

The advantage of one-act play festivals and competitions to audiences is more problematic. As I said, the festivals at Actors Theatre of Louisville are popular, but the quality of work at that theater is high, which is not the case of the material at every one-act play festival, even in Manhattan. The odds are against any new play’s succeeding; the odds of a dozen of them succeeding at once are low.

Of course, the risks involved in one-act plays are also smaller. Some, actually, are no more than skits, which I’d define as actors in short depictions of situations that require only surface characterization. Good skits aren’t easier to write than anything else, but at least they are compact, often funny, and quickly understood.

Generally, however, I doubt that much of the general play-going public is thinking right now, “I wish I could find a good evening of one-act plays.” I was once in a rock band where, after a particularly successful string of numbers, the lead singer announced, “Now we’re going to do some original material.” The crowd fell ominously silent and he had to add that he was joking. I’m not sure that the term “one-act play festival” doesn’t have something of the same effect.

However, as noted above, many of us will go to a play for the purpose of supporting a friend or relative who’s in it or wrote it, and an evening of one-act plays offers an opportunity to include a lot of those.

One-act play festivals and competitions are also attractive to playwrights. This is in fact an element in the popularity of one-act plays for both producers and playwrights. Producers need plays to present, and playwrights write them. Producers love one-act plays because all they have to do is ask for them, and the plays come pouring in, because the playwright has a chance of getting a play produced.

What a wonder this is for a playwright, who lives a life of continual rejection. Of course there’s no guarantee a particular one-act play will be accepted for production. I have written, for example, a ten-minute play on a Christmas subject that I think is both offbeat and funny, and that has never gotten the slightest glimmer of interest from any festival of holiday plays (a sub-genre of the one-act play festival).

But the odds of having a play accepted by a one-act play festival or competition are at least greatly increased, because not only might one performance present between half a dozen and a dozen plays, but the festival might include dozens more presented on different nights, perhaps in a different order for each performance.

Also, because the producing organization actually wants to receive submissions of plays, instead of dreading to receive them (as is often the case), a playwright can have reasonable confidence that her play will really be read by somebody. (People who have not submitted plays to theaters and agents can’t begin to imagine how often plays are lost, ignored, or cursorily read.)

And it simply takes less time to write a short one-act play – say, a play ten minutes long – than it does to write a full-length play. If I have a good idea, I can write a good one-act play overnight. The demand for “original work” can easily be met.

But what if I don’t have a good idea? Shorter is not necessarily easier. In fact, shorter is much more difficult. If it weren’t, there’d be – I was going to say hundreds, but considering the Google search, I should probably say millions – of good or great one-act plays around. There aren’t.

The sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one,” has been attributed to many people. Whoever said it, its point is correct. It’s easy to be verbose and extraordinarily hard to be succinct.

The solution, for many one-act plays I’ve seen, is to choose a subject with impact, use that as the subject of the one-act, and rely for success on the seriousness of the issue raised – say, because I’ve seen so many of these plays, cancer. Cancer is real, it’s terrible, it’s disastrous, it’s horrible. No question.

So write a play about someone with cancer. They die – tears. Or they live – cheers! Or they struggle – drama!

What can possibly be wrong with that? I have two answers, one more or less practical and one aesthetic. The practical objection is that what you’re doing in such a play is emotional manipulation. You’re taking a subject you know will succeed in stirring an audience’s feelings, and putting it up there in the knowledge that it’s precertified as intense, stirring drama.

Emotional manipulation is difficult to avoid, but we ought to try. It’s just too easy. Shakespeare figured that out a long time ago, and he does very little emotional manipulation. He has Hamlet say:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

I understand that cancer, or any other strenuous or catastrophic event, may not be “nothing” to the writer – it may in fact be real and personal. But as artists we have responsibilities to our art, and one of them, I submit, is to cheat as little as possible, and to approach subjects creatively and imaginatively, rather than using them for their predetermined value in tears and fears.

Far too often, one-act plays take a huge problem, throw it at us knowing we already have feelings about it, and leave it at that. Easy to do – one-act plays aren’t very long. Suppose a play competition’s subject is “Dogs.” Then have a play where a child’s dog is run over. Why not? It happens in life, doesn’t it? It’s terrible, isn’t it? But it’s also emotional manipulation.

And as I said, there’s also an aesthetic reason why such an approach is dubious. Aristotle in the Poetics says that tragedy – and I think this can be applied to other forms of drama as well – works when it is an “imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”

Although there’s plenty of argument about exactly what he means, I think it’s clear that he feels a play’s size should be proportional to its subject.

Few of us today would want to turn Aristotle’s observations (assuming they are his – some suspect the Poetics is lecture notes) into rules, as happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But the man has a point. A one-act play needs a one-act action – an action that fits the size of the play. A study of the best one-act plays points this out.

In a series of postings elsewhere on this blog, I describe several excellent examples of the genre by George Bernard Shaw, for example “The Glimpse of Reality” and “The Six of Calais.” [See the author’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September.] In both these plays Shaw does everything required by the size of his story – not less, and not more.

Contrast Shaw’s examples with a number of the one-act plays I’ve seen recently, whose subjects have included, among others, old age and dementia; cancer – there it is again;  severe mental illness; suicide; having to put animals to sleep; and my very least (but frequent) favorite, the Deceased Wife Play. Sometimes two or more of these are combined in one ten-minute episode. I suggest a firm rule: No more than one death per one-act play!

Such works make one-act plays on subjects like dating rituals seem like masterpieces. Perhaps that’s why there are so many one-act plays about dating rituals.

A friend remarked to me that many of these plays – both the tragic and the “relationship” one-acts – are “window” plays:  you look at them and you see a bit of life, as though you saw it through a window, not much changed from the way it happens in the world. My two responses are that looking through a window is not the purpose of art, and that if those things are what the window reveals, I don’t want to live in that neighborhood.

In saying all this I am also grateful for the many delightful one-act plays I’ve seen. They exist and I salute the people who write them. As a favorite example I cite “Words, Words, Words” by David Ives (1987). A riff on the idea that a million monkeys on a million typewriters will eventually write the plays of Shakespeare, it shows three monkeys (named Milton, Swift, and Kafka) banging away on the keys, comparing and criticizing their work, briefly coming close to an actual Shakespeare line, and illustrating in a charming way the difficulties of writing and the frustrations of creative work. It’s a play with both immediate and long-range implications, snugly embodied in the short play form. May its tribe increase.

Unquestionably, no one has the right to tell an artist what to create. Playwrights must write the plays that come to them. But I would love to be able to look at a sign that reads “AN EVENING OF ONE-ACT PLAYS” with anticipation rather than dread. Could evenings of one-act plays be more like festivals, and less like autopsies? May I suggest that as a goal?

[Over the time I’ve been posting play reports on ROT, I’ve included a number of one-act play evenings.  Some are not really very short plays, the way Kirk means, and several fit into the negative characterizations Kirk describes.

·   Horton Foote’s nine-play trilogy, The Orphans’ Home Cycle (reported on 25 and 28 February 2010), is an assemblage of one-act plays all telling the fictionalized story of Foote’s father’s life. 

·   Five By Tenn was a bill of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, first staged as the opening show of “Tennessee Williams Explored” (April-July 2004), the season-long celebration by Washington’s Kennedy Center of the great playwright; I posted my review of the evening, “Uninhabitable Country: Five By Tenn,” on 5 March 2011.        

·   Happy Hour, a world première staged by the Atlantic Theater Company, is a collection of three one-acts by Ethan Coen; I reported on the trilogy of bleak glimpses at human behavior with an ironic title on 29 December 2011. 

·   Early Plays, an adaptation of three one-acts from the Glencairn Plays by Eugene O’Neill, was presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse by the Wooster Group and the New York City Players.  My report was posted on 14 March 2013.

·   3 Kinds of Exile, a collection of three one-acts by John Guare connected by a common theme, was presented by the Atlantic Theater Company in June 2013.  I posted my report on 27 June 2013.

·   Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy is comprised of three connected one-acts, International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, which premièred separately.  I saw the joint production at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2013 and posted my report on 5 October.

·   Lee Blessing’s Flag Day is a pair of one-acts, Black Sheep and Perilous Night, also originally presented individually, that I saw at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Sheperdstown, West Virginia, in 2004; I posted my report, “Contemporary American Theatre Festival (2004),” on 8 July 2014.

·   Summer Shorts is an annual two-part festival of one-act plays, often including work by well-known authors, presented in July and August by 59E59 Theatres.  I saw one evening of the festival in 2015 and published “Summer Shorts 2015, Series A,” on 12 August.

·   Desire is another collection of one-acts by Tennessee Williams, but these six plays are all adaptations of short stories, scripted by different playwrights.  It was a production of the Acting Company, which has made something of an industry of assembling this sort of evening (Chekhov stories, Shakespeare sonnets), in 2015 and my report appeared on 29 September.

·   Last May, I caught a presentation of three Samuel Beckett one-acts, Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby, performed in a bravura production by Irish actress Lisa Dwan called “Beckett Trilogy.”  I posted my report on this experience on 1 May 2016.

·   In June, the Signature Theatre Company presented an evening of one-acts drawn from past seasons devoted to three playwrights: Edward Albee’s The Sandbox, María Irene Fornés’s Drowning, and Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro.  I posted a report called “Signature Plays” on 3 June 2016.

·   My most recent one-act evening was Horton Foote’s The Roads to Home, produced by Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.  The three connected one-acts, A Nightingale, The Dearest of Friends, Spring Dance, is running though 27 November and my report was posted on 22 October. 

[Some of these playlets were composed to be performed together, so they’re not necessarily the kind of bill of one-acts that Kirk is writing about, but the list does give some idea of the popularity of the short play on today’s theater.]

“Anatomy of a Broadway Flop”

by Michael Paulson

[The following article was published in section C (“The Arts”) of the New York Times of 23 June 2016.  “Anatomy of a Broadway Flop” is presented as a sort of theatrical post mortem of four big Broadway musicals that failed this season.  I know little about three of the shows in the article aside from the Times reviews, but I think that Michael Paulson, the acting theatrical ME, was probably gentler than I suspect the shows deserve.  If I didn’t know better, I’d come away from the article thinking, ‘Gee, they made a couple of little mistakes.  That’s hardly worthy of a death sentence.’  But I can attest at least in the case of Bright Star, the only one of the four plays covered here that I saw, that the creators and producers didn’t do much right from my perspective (see my report on 11 April—I didn’t pussyfoot!).  Bright Star almost certainly wouldn’t have even made it to a Broadway stage (or, probably, even the Kennedy Center) if the name Steve Martin hadn’t been attached.  (I doubt Edie Brickell carries that much weight.)  Bright Star shouldn’t have been in the lofty position it finagled for itself and couldn’t sustain its unearned prominence.  (It’s sort of the theater counterpart of the Peter Principle: the show rose to its level of artistic incompetence and failed.  I’m sorry for the artists who’ve lost their jobs—but theater, especially commercial theater, isn’t a jobs program.)

[American Psycho, with a book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik, began previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre under the direction of Rupert Goold on 24 March 2016, opened on 21 April, and closed  on 5 June.  The review-survey website Show-Score gave American Psycho an average rating of 62 based on notices that were 49% positive and 30% negative with 21% mixed.  American Psycho won Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Sound Design, Outstanding Lighting Design, and Outstanding Projection Design, plus five additional Drama Desk nominations and two Tony Award nominations (Best Scenic Design and Best Lighting Design).  The musical also received eight Outer Critics Circle Award nominations of which it won two (lighting and projection design) and two Drama League Award nominations.

[Bright Star has a book by Steve Martin, music by Martin and Edie Brickell, and lyrics by Brickell and began previews under the direction of Walter Bobbie at the Cort Theatre on 25 February and opened on 24 March; the show closed on 26 June.  Show-Score reported that Bright Star received 66% positive reviews, 18% negative, and 16% mixed, accumulating a score of 67.  Bright Star won one Theatre World award for Carmen Cusack’s performance and one Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music; the musical was nominated for six additional Drama Desks and five Tonys (Best Musical, Best Book, Best Original Score, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, and Best Orchestrations).  It also won two Outer Critics Circle Awards (Outstanding New Broadway Musical and Outstanding New Score) from seven nominations, and one Drama League Award (Cusack) from two nominations; it also received two Fred and Adele Astaire Award nominations.        

[Disaster! began previews at the Nederlander Theatre on 9 February, opened on 8 March, and closed on 8 May.  Directed by Jack Plotnick, Disaster! has a book by Plotnick and Seth Rudetsky based on a concept created by Seth Rudetsky and Drew Geraci using popular songs of the 1970s.  Show-Score gave Disaster! an average score of 65, with 67% of its reviews positive, 26% negative, and 7% mixed.  The jukebox musical was nominated for one Tony for Jennifer Simard’s featured performance and one Drama Desk Award for the featured performance of Baylee Littrell.

[Tuck Everlasting, with a book by Claudia Shear and Tim Federle, music by Chris Miller, and lyrics by Nathan Tysen, started previews under Casey Nicholaw’s direction at the Broadhurst Theatre on 31 March, opening on 26 April and closing on 29 May.  Show-Score’s rating of 63 was based on an average of 45% positive notices, 24% negative, and 31% mixed.  Tuck received one Tony nomination, for the costume designs of Gregg Barnes, and won a Theatre World award for the performance of actress Sarah Charles Lewis.  There were also three nominations for Outer Critics Circle Awards, two Drama League Award nominations, and two Fred and Adele Astaire Award nods.]

Roger Bart in “Disaster!” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

The woeful wordplay writes itself. “American Psycho” met a gruesome end. “Tuck Everlasting” was not immortal. “Bright Star” ran out of fuel. And “Disaster!” proved to be — well, you can finish that one yourself.

Broadway is a brutal business, in which real success is enjoyed by a handful of shows, while a vast majority crash and burn. And this season was especially tough, because one show, “Hamilton,” gobbled up much of the attention, enthusiasm and awards that motivate potential ticket buyers.

For musicals that opened this spring, it was an especially unforgiving season. Broadway is increasingly saturated with long-running hits, and four musicals that opened last fall — “School of Rock,” “On Your Feet!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Color Purple” — reached the new year still running strong.

“People don’t have to go to their ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll like it’ show when there are so many ‘You’re going to love it’ shows to see,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five of the 40 Broadway houses.

Ultimately, shows fail because not enough people buy tickets to see them. Maybe the title wasn’t as popular as the producers thought, the performers not as appealing, the stories not as dramatic, the songs not as memorable. And, in an era of high running costs, many producers can no longer afford to wait to let an audience build.

Four shows flopped this spring at a total loss to their investors. Here, based on interviews with a variety of Broadway figures, is an autopsy report of sorts for “American Psycho,” “Disaster!” and “Tuck Everlasting,” all of which closed in recent weeks, and “Bright Star,” which wraps up on Sunday.

Benjamin Walker in “American Psycho” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘American Psycho’

The run 27 previews, then 54 performances after opening April 21 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.

The story A hunky and status-obsessed investment banker who is (or at least appears to be) a sex-crazed serial killer in New York City in 1989.

Cost to produce $9.8 million

Onstage The title character, Patrick Bateman, was played by Benjamin Walker (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”); the cast also featured a reunion of the “Next to Normal” co-stars Jennifer Damiano and Alice Ripley.

Offstage An A-list creative team: music by the singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik (“Spring Awakening”), set design by Es Devlin and direction by Rupert Goold (“King Charles III”). The lead producer was Jeffrey Richards.

What were they thinking? The title is well known and has an established fan base through the polarizing 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis and the cult film adaptation in 2000. The musical seemed sexy and fearless, with a critique of the go-go ’80s that might resonate in this era of intense discussion about income inequality; an initial production, at the Almeida Theater in London from 2013-14, received some encouraging reviews. The show was scheduled then to go to Second Stage, an Off Broadway nonprofit, for further development, but the rights holder was so confident of the prospects that it forced the cancellation of that production and moved straight to Broadway.

Critical response Divided, but several of the most influential critics hated it. The show was nominated for two Tony Awards, for scenic and lighting design, and won neither.

Why it failed It was always going to be a risk. The blood-drenched material (at one performance, a misfiring blood pack splattered an audience member) was unsuitable for families and unappealing to tourists, who make up a large constituency of Broadway ticket buyers. But the show proved divisive even for adventurous theatergoers. Some raved about its bold look and daring content, but others suggested it underplayed the satire; many found the explicit and misogynistic violence offensive. Also noteworthy: British-developed shows satirizing the United States (see “Enron”) have recently tanked on Broadway.

Carmen Cusack in “Bright Star” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Bright Star’

The run 30 previews, then 109 performances after opening March 24 at the Cort Theater.

The story Inspired by a news account of a baby found in a valise, the musical, set in North Carolina in the 1920s and the 1940s, tracks the intertwining stories of a young soldier and the editor of a Southern literary magazine.

Cost to produce $10.5 million

Onstage Instead of going with a well-known star, the show’s creative team chose Carmen Cusack, who had been with the project from the start; she got great reviews and was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut performance as the editor, Alice Murphy.

Offstage The comedian and musician Steve Martin and the singer-songwriter Edie Brickell collaborated on the score. The show was directed by Walter Bobbie (a Tony winner for “Chicago”), and the lead producer was Joey Parnes, who had shepherded “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder” into an unlikely hit.

What were they thinking? The producers and creators were encouraged with what they saw at two pre-Broadway productions, a premiere at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2014, then a run in 2015 at the Kennedy Center in Washington; they believed that the cultural cachet of Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell would attract audiences and that a combination of buzz and awards would broaden the appeal.

Critical response Mixed. Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised the show as “gentle-spirited, not gaudy,” but Terry Teachout described it in The Wall Street Journal as “a really bad bluegrass-pop musical.” The show was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for best new musical, but won none.

Why it failed Although some were charmed, few were wowed, making it hard to build word of mouth. As an original musical, not adapted from a film or novel, and with a complex plot, it was hard to explain to ticket buyers. Some found the show’s denouement laughably predictable. The musical was nostalgic; it was often described as quiet, or small, which has worked for some recent musicals (“Once,” “Fun Home”), though not this year. As “Bright Star” struggled at the box office, Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell, among others, lent the production more money to keep it running, and on about a dozen occasions Mr. Martin joined the band onstage for an instrumental entr’acte, but it was not enough to save the show.

A scene from “Disaster!” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Disaster!’                              

The run 32 previews, then 72 performances after opening March 8 at the Nederlander Theater.

The story A spoof of 1970s disaster films (particularly “The Poseidon Adventure”), the show depicted the misadventures of the passengers and crew members on an ill-fated floating casino in New York City in 1979.

Cost to produce $6.5 million

Onstage Seth Rudetsky, a Broadway booster and a co-writer of the musical, starred as a disaster expert and enlisted several stage notables to ham it up alongside him, including Roger Bart (“The Producers”), Kerry Butler (“Xanadu”), Adam Pascal (“Rent”) and Faith Prince (“Guys and Dolls”).

Offstage The musical featured jukebox classics from the disco era and was directed by Jack Plotnick, who wrote the show with Mr. Rudetsky. The lead producer was Robert Ahrens.

What were they thinking? This show was an effort at counterprogramming — it had two successful Off Broadway runs, in 2012 and 2013-14, and the producers hoped that the enthusiasm for a campy night out could be replicated on Broadway.

Critical response Mr. Isherwood, writing in The Times, praised the show as a “delirious goof,” but other key critics were less impressed; in New York magazine, Jesse Green called it “a tiny entertainment that should probably have been left in a basement rec room.” Jennifer Simard’s uproarious performance as a nun with a gambling problem received the only Tony nomination; she did not hit the jackpot.

Why it failed The musical struck many as an extended, one-gag skit, without enough star power, spectacle or drama to justify Broadway prices (or a two-act running time), and it sank.

Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Sarah Charles Lewis in the musical 

“Tuck Everlasting.” (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

‘Tuck Everlasting’

The run 28 previews, then 39 performances after opening April 26 at the Broadhurst Theater.

The story A young girl who meets an immortal family in the woods of rural New Hampshire and must decide whether to drink from the water that would allow her to live forever.

Cost to produce $11 million

Onstage The Broadway veterans Terrence Mann (“Pippin”), Carolee Carmello (“Parade”), Michael Park (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”) and Andrew Keenan-Bolger (“Newsies”), along with an 11-year-old newcomer, Sarah Charles Lewis.

Offstage A beloved children’s book, published in 1975 by Natalie Babbitt, was the key ingredient. Add in the hitmaker Casey Nicholaw as director and choreographer, changing pace from his go-for-the-guffaw spectacles — “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Something Rotten!” The musical’s initial book was by Claudia Shear, and then the producers added Tim Federle to help revise it for Broadway; Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen did the score. The lead producer was Beth Williams.

What were they thinking? An initial production in Atlanta was well-received; Mr. Nicholaw has a track record of commercial success; and family-friendly musicals often do well on Broadway.

Critical response Tepid, with a few exceptions. The show was nominated for one Tony, for costume design; it did not win.

Why it failed Without big stars, it had low advance sales, and some argued that its leafy logo was unhelpful. The story is a bit of a fairy tale — often hard to execute. Adults perceived it as a show for children, and family shows without the Disney imprimatur are hard to sell. “Tuck” was sweet and lovely, but those are not the adjectives a musical needed this season to be heard above the din.