In this episode of “Sages of the Sun,” we sit down with frequent contributor Elysa Gardner to talk about theater in New York. Ms. Gardner is a longtime theater and music critic who has written for the New York Times, the Village Voice, Town & Country, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, and other publications. She is a board member of the Drama Desk and has twice served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, most recently as chairwoman.

Caroline Vik:  Thank you so much for joining us.

Elysa Gardner:  Thank you for having me.

Vik:  I am admittedly a bit of a theater novice so I am especially excited for this conversation because I think I’ll learn a lot.

Gardner:  Oh good, there’s a lot going on right now.

Vik:  Why don’t you tell us?  What are you seeing?  What should I be seeing?

Gardner:  April is kind of like December for the movies because it’s right before the cutoff.  The end of this month is the cutoff for the Tony Award eligibility.  Then right after that it’s a bunch of other awards like Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, New York Critics’ Circle, Obie Awards.  These are, in some cases, awards that include or even focus on off-Broadway or even off-off-Broadway.  There is, particularly on Broadway and everywhere really, just tons and tons of stuff opening up.  I have to say, I’ve been doing a lot of gushing as a critic, on your site certainly.  I just saw “Hangmen,” Martin McDonagh’s latest play.  He’s a great Irish-Anglo playwright who just writes these incredibly dark, thrilling comedies.  This one was like a lot of shows that were on Broadway this season, delayed by Covid.  That was another thing, where we have show’s opening the season that should have opened two years ago.

Vik:  That’s a lot of backlog.

Gardner:  Yeah, there’s a great revival of “American Buffalo,” that I just reviewed, with Lawrence Fishburne, Darren Criss, and Sam Rockwell.  I’m going to refer to my notes because there is just so much going on and I want to make sure I don’t miss anything.  “The Minutes” by Tracy Letts, one of my favorite actors and playwrights.  He’s never been on Broadway as an actor and a playwright.  He’s had great shows on Broadway like “August: Osage County,” which won a Pulitzer.  He won a Tony for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” several years back.  But this is his first play where he appears with an absolutely stellar cast.  It’s a great, very topical play.  I saw a really fabulous production in Brooklyn at BAM of “Cyrano de Bergerac.”  It was completely different.  It’s a rewritten text.  It’s an adapted text so the playwright has sort of used hip-hop poetry, which sounds like it could be contrived, but it really works because it puts the emphasis on the lyricism of the words and the beauty and the power of the words.  As my 14-year-old daughter observed, this is a production where Cyrano is hotter than Christian.  She said “Oh wow.  Is it normally like this?  Why would people believe that Cyrano is ugly?”  The whole idea is everything’s about words so James McAvoy, the star that plays Cyrano, doesn’t wear any prosthetics.  He doesn’t wear that big old nose.  So yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on.  What am I forgetting that’s opened recently?  Well I’m seeing “Funny Girl” this weekend, which is the first revival of that show astonishingly.  I think the other was a kind of aborted revival about 10 years ago.  Bartlett Sher, a wonderful director was going to bring it to Broadway, but it just didn’t work out and now Beanie Feldstein, who’s kind of the “it girl” of the moment, is going to be stepping into Barbra Streisand’s shoes which are very, very good shoes to fill.

Vik:  Has she done a lot of theater before? 

Gardner:  She has.  I saw her in “Hello, Dolly.”  She was wonderful.  It was more of a comedic role, a supporting comedic role.  But she has done theater and she can sing.  I mean, I’ve heard her.  Can anyone sing like Barbra Streisand?  I don’t know.  I think if people compare her those will inevitably be unfair comparisons.  She’s got a strong, I don’t want to say nasal, but the right soprano belt which is what you need for that role.  I am curious to see her in it. 

Vik:  What makes her the latest “it girl?”

Gardner:  Your guess is as good as mine.  I think partly her association with people.  She’s certainly hot from playing Monica Lewinsky in that miniseries, which I’m completely spacing on the name right now, but yes she’s just been gradually increasing in visibility and I think this could be a real breakout role for her.  Although it seems like she’s already a superstar with the kind of press she’s getting.

Vik:  So for some of the ones that you like the most, why do you love them?  What makes them great in your view?

Gardner:  I think there have been a lot of productions where they’ve tried to do new things with classics and there’s interesting original works.  One thing I’ve lamented in recent seasons was the lack of original scores on Broadway.  As we get more jukebox musicals and kind of like musicals chronicling catalogs, for example “Girl from the North Country,” which had a delayed opening this season, was a wonderful show.  It’s not really a jukebox musical.  It’s sort of a pairing of an original script by Conor McPherson, who’s a terrific playwright, with Bob Dylan’s music so it’s actually a very inventive musical, but it’s not an original score.  So this season we are having a couple of musicals, a few musicals actually, with original scores.  There’s “Six” which traces the wives of Henry VIII.  I think it’s hilarious and fun, but I don’t know if it’s a great musical.  It seemed to me like a skit. 

Vik:  As a child I read so many stories about Henry VIII and all the wives.  It’s a very interesting topic.  Would you recommend it?

Gardner:  I would.  I enjoyed it more the second time I saw it believe it or not.  I think that’s because I saw it before the shutdown and it was one of those shows that was about to open.  Literally I think it was their opening night, March 12, that the shutdown was imposed.  It really was kind of lousy for them, but this production is a lot of fun.  It’s really funny and there’s a lot of energy on stage.  There’s a really talented and diverse cast.  That’s something else that’s very prominent this season, a focus on diversity as there has been in the arts, generally I think.  Last season there was a play called “Slave Play,” which got a lot of acclaim.  It was transferred off-Broadway by Jeremy O. Harris.  It won 12 Tony nominations which I believe is a record for an original play.  It did not get a single one. 

Vik:  What’s that about in your view?  

Gardner:  I don’t know.  I mean, certainly we’ve been at a time of reckoning, you know, not just in the arts, just in the world over the past two years.  I think that was disappointing to a lot of people.  On the other hand the play that did win, “The Inheritance,” was the first play by a Latino playwright to ever win the Tony award and his focus was on gay men and different generations of gay men dealing with the AIDS crisis.  The fact that we were at a particular point of reckoning last year where the idea was that BIPOC artists and black artists in particular needed more recognition on Broadway.  I think there’s been a real focus on that.  Certainly not just with the artists we see on stage, but the playwrights, the directors, the designers.  One production that I’ve seen recently that just blew me away, just breathtaking, is Lileana Blain-Cruz’s new revival of “The Skin of our Teeth” by Thornton Wilder, which is just about to open at Lincoln Center Theater.  That’s a play that’s just kind of all over the place.  The fourth wall is down.  It’s not realistic at all.  It traces this family through the Ice Age and war.  There are dinosaurs on stage.  She just did such an imaginative, really vivid, reinterpretation of this play in which the central family is a black family.  It totally works because it reminds you that this is a story of all of humanity, right?  It reminds you that we have to depict all of humanity in order to reflect all of humanity.  It’s such a wonderful production.  There’s original material added to Thornton Wilder’s text by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.  He’s a rising playwright and there are a number of rising playwrights that are represented this season.  We had Antointte Nwandu with “Pass Over,” which was off-Broadway, “Thoughts of a Colored Man” by Keenan Scott II.  “Clyde” was a great play by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Lynn Nottage.  This was a really funny comedy that opened several months back.  It may be a contender.  I think the Best Play category is going to be very competitive this season.

Vik:  Who’s nominated?

Gardner:  We don’t know yet.  The cut off date I think is april 28th so the nominations will be announced a few days after that and then you’ll have the Drama Desk nominations and other nominations which will in some cases, focus off Broadway and off-off Broadway, and in some cases, will encompass Broadway.

Vik:  Who do you think will be nominated?

Gardner:  I think all the plays that I mentioned will have really good chances.  Of course you can only do four or five to a category, sometimes six.  I’m not entirely sure.  It’ll be a tight race.  With actors it’s always really tight.  There have been many wonderful actors and stars.  Every year stars come to Broadway and this year we’ve had a bunch from theater favorites like Patti LuPone and the revival of “Company,” which is another great revival.

Vik:  It seems like a lot of revivals.  Is it more common to do a play revival than maybe a remake of a movie, or is it similar?

Gardner:  It’s certainly more common to do a revival of a play or musical.

Vik:  What’s that about?

Gardner:  It’s familiar material that people love.  Look at how well “The Music Man” is doing.  I’m sure that a lot of that has to do with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster starring in it, but it’s also just a classic American musical, maybe the classic American musical.  I love many musicals as much or even more than “The Music Man,” but that is the American musical.  It’s just a wonderful work.  There was even a little bit of a twist in that production because they cast Sutton Foster as Marian the Librarian, typically a role played by a lyric soprano like Barbara Cook who has played it.  She was the one who originated the role, and Sutton Foster is more of a mezzo and more of a belter.  They did slightly redo things vocally with the role to really emphasize the feistiness in Marian’s character.  Some people liked that, some people didn’t.  But that’s just another example of how there’s been a desire to see things new even though you’re reviving and you want to bring in people that know the material, you’re giving them a new twist on it.

Seth Lipsky:  As you become more familiar to our readers, they’re going to want to know more about you and I’m just astonished at your fluency on your beat.  I’m just wondering how you came to this beat.  Tell us a little bit about your progression into the theater world.

Gardner:  Well, I was a major musical theater geek in high school and college.  I did musicals.  I was a singer who moved which means I couldn’t dance.  I eventually took lessons and I learned how to dance a little bit.  My mother was a professional singer and so I was weaned on original Broadway cast albums so that’s like the first thing I listened to.

Lipsky:  Did you grow up in New York?

Gardner:  I grew up in Rockland County and there was a great musical theater program where I went to school.  There was a summer program and they would bring in pros to work with the kids and so it was my first love.  Then as a teenager I also went to pop music.  In fact, I wrote about pop music for almost ten years before I started writing about theater.  I was originally an assistant music editor at Entertainment Weekly when it was just starting out.  From there I started freelancing for Rolling Stone and LA Times.  It just so happened that at USA Today, around 2000, they had an opening.  They wanted somebody to cover pop music and theater.  It was like rediscovering an old love.  Musical theater was really my first love, but my emphasis in college had been Drama.  I was an English major with an emphasis on Drama so it wasn’t just about “West Side Story.”

Lipsky:  How many times a week do you go to the theater?   

Gardner:  This time of the year a lot, you know, four or five.  Not always that much but I try to go as often as I can.  It’s fun.  It’s always a discovery even if the play or the musical doesn’t work entirely.  I should say if the production doesn’t work entirely because that’s an entirely different thing.  Sometimes the play or the musical doesn’t work also, but there’s just so many talented people everywhere, particularly in this city.   

Lipsky:  How do you think Broadway will survive the pandemic?  I mean, there were fears that it might be permanently hurt, yet it’s blooming now.

Gardner:  I think the Broadway League has done things right in terms of the pandemic.  They were very careful.  As was off-Broadway.  The mask mandate, in fact, was just extended through May 31st and I think probably the fact that some very high-profile stars have contracted Covid recently.  Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker are co-starring in a revival of a play by Neil Simon, but Neil Simon used a premise that Noël Coward has used previously.  I believe, and this may be an apocryphal story, but I believe that Noël Coward made some kind of joke about “oh that’s an interesting premise.  I wonder where he got it from?”  The play I’m referring to is “Plaza Suite.”  Anyway, I’m off on a tangent here.  What I was saying was that Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, who of course are married and are co-starring in the play, both got Covid.  Daniel Craig, who is starring as MacBeth, contracted Covid.  There’s definitely caution still.  I think it’s good that we’re being careful.

Vik:  Going back to you a little bit more.  My curiosity is piqued.  What do you think it is about the theater that you love so much?  What resonated with you?

Gardner:  Where do I start?  I have to be honest.  It was the music.  It was the scores.  It was Rodgers and Hammerstein, Sondheim, Lerner and Loewe, Frank Loesser, and all those geniuses who lent so much to American culture in the 20th century and still do.  You know, you have a great musical like “Hamilton” that comes along and there have been others.  I’m really looking forward to seeing “A Strange Loop.”  I don’t know if I’d put it in the same category as “Hamilton.”  It’s different, but I love the form.  I love the idea of emotion being so heightened that you have to sing and dance.  I love the community.  I love the communal nature of theater and that you’re surrounded by people and everyone’s experiencing this together.  I think, obviously, that suffered because that was something you couldn’t have during the pandemic.  I think artists were extremely brave and prolific and imaginative.  They did whatever they could and they were diligent.  They tried to do stuff using the format we’re using right now and similar formats, but…

Vik:  What kinds of things did they do?

Gardner:  For example, the Public Theater.  Richard Nelson, one of my favorite playwrights, had done a series of family plays.  He did two or three of them that were done on Zoom where the family members were meeting on Zoom because they couldn’t meet during the pandemic.  There were audio plays.  There were all kinds of things where people used technology, but it doesn’t capture the live experience.

Vik:  Interesting.  

Gardner:  You can probably go to the Public’s website.  I’m sure they’re archived.  

Vik:  Fascinating.  So you say there’s been a major push for diversity in the theater world.  Has it been pretty smooth?  Have there been flare-ups or major controversies?  How do you think they’re doing?  How’s it going?  Where does the tension lie?

Gardner:  The one concern I hear among people I talk to is whether it’s performative or not.  Whether this is kind of like a Flash and the Pan thing where we’re going to have a ton of productions by black playwrights with multi-racial casts and then next season will be completely different, but I think people are relatively optimistic.  As I mentioned before, there has been a genuine reckoning in the country.  I think that’s opening things up.  Years and years ago when I was at USA Today writing about theater and music, I wrote a story about how there was also a color line behind the scenes among designers.  It’s not that we don’t want to use artists of color consciously.  Sometimes it’s just about connections and associations people have, or people you know.  It’s about making things more open to everyone and I think that now that people are very conscious about that, that’s definitely going to be something that everyone bears in mind.

Vik:  So what is your all-time favorite play?

Gardner:  I couldn’t answer that.  I couldn’t.  I’m sorry.  I can’t.

Vik:  Is there one that came to your head first?

Gardner:  Because of my roots I go back to musicals.  If somebody put a gun to my head, like literally, I could pick three.  I’ve thought of this question before and I don’t think any of them were written after 1980.  It would be “Carousel” by Rodgers and Hammerstein, in no particular order by the way, “Sweeny Todd” by Stephen Sondheim, and “West Side Story” of course.

Vik:  Why those three?

Gardener:  Because they are meaningful and profound.  The scores are just, you know, I feel like I’m speaking from my music critic perch here a little bit, but maybe because I came from a place where I was grounded in music because my mom was a singer.  It’s funny because I just finished a book about “Pippin,” which is another one of my favorite musicals.  Of course that’s a Bob Fosse musical, or rather a Stephen Schwartz musical, but it was choreographed and directed by Bob Fosse.  There’s a whole other wealth of musicals that are more grounded in dance like “West Side Story.”  Well, they’re all grounded in song and dance to an extent.  You can think about the great choreographers like Jerome Robbins, Fosse, Michael Bennett, and so many others, but for me, I think of the composers and the lyricists first.  That’s why those are the ones that come to mind. 

Vik:  Music first and foremost.

Gardner:  When it comes to musicals of course.  With plays it’s different.  It’s funny.  I think I like musical playwrights.  I like playwrights whose dialogue is musical.  I think of somebody like August Wilson, one of my favorite 20th century playwrights, or David Mamet.  There’s a sense of jazz and blues.  Pinter, also.  His pauses are very rhythmic so I guess in a way I do approach theater from a music lover’s standpoint.  That’s the first thing that drove me to it.

Vik:  Do you still keep a close eye on pop music or that feels like it’s in the past?

Gardner:  I do to the extent that I have a 14-year-old daughter.  I don’t want to feel like I’m becoming an old fogey, but I do.  There’s still singer-songwriters who come along who interest me, but so much pop music over the few decades has increasingly been about production.  I think some of the producers are very interesting to listen to, or rather, to listen to their work.  In terms of song craft, I don’t find myself as hugely intrigued by what’s in the top 40.  I would need to spend more time looking outside the Top 40.  I’ve been a little more focused on theater and on cabaret for that matter.  I write about cabaret as well.  That’s a lot of showtunes and a lot of standards but also contemporary tunes.  Some of the more interesting cabaret artists have songs that are in the Top 40 so that’s how I keep my ear to the ground a little bit.

Vik:  What are you listening to right now?

Gardner:  I’m so ensconced in theater right now that I’m thinking about live music that I’ve seen lately.  There’s a guy named Michael Garin who I’ve written about who’s just fantastic.  He does these mash-ups of classical, country, pop, showtunes, and jazz.  He plays live at the Roxy and West Bank Cafe, but that’s more cabaret.  There’s Joe Iconis who’s a musical theater songwriter, composer, lyricist.  I just got a new album by him that I’m really looking forward to listening to, but again, I’m definitely in my theater mode right now.  Not a lot of Olivia Rodrigo for me.

Vik:  Fascinating.  I feel like I’ve learned so much and I’m ready to go buy some tickets and see some of the things that you recommended.  Thank you for taking so much time to talk to us.

Gardner:  Thank you for having me.  This was fun.  We’ll do it again.

Sages of the Sun is a weekly podcast produced by The New York Sun. The Sun is committed to upholding the finest journalistic traditions and staying true to our motto, “It Shines For All.”

Seth Lipsky is a seasoned veteran of the news business, and among the most revered American editors. He previously spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal, launched the Jewish Daily Forward, and first revived the Sun back in 2002.

Caroline Vik has more than a decade of experience in policy-making, with years spent on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the Department of Defense, and on the National Security Council.