The Stage Is the Only Room That Still Has a Dress Code

There is a kind of person who decides what they think about a show before the house lights go down, and there is the kind of person who waits. We have always belonged to the second group, which is why we are suspicious of ourselves at the Marquis Theatre, where Stranger Things: The First Shadow has been playing to full houses and we arrived, if we are honest, ready to disapprove.

We did not disapprove. This is the uncomfortable part. A play built from a Netflix property, engineered in London by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, Olivier-decorated, nominated for five Tonys, carrying the obligations of a franchise on its back — it had every reason to be the thing we fear most, which is spectacle wearing the costume of theater. And the special effects are extraordinary, and they are not the point. The point is a teenager named Henry Creel — played with uncomfortable precision by Victor de Paula Rocha — in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1959, and the slow and genuinely dreadful recognition of what he is becoming. The machinery exists to serve that recognition rather than to replace it. That is the whole test of adaptation on a stage, and most productions assembled from intellectual property fail it because they confuse scale with stakes. This one knows the difference. You can dislike the premise and still owe the execution your attention. We went expecting to be sold something. We came out having been told a story. Those are not the same evening, and if you still have your doubts, October is the correct month to resolve them, because the material was built for the dark.

Which brings us to spring, and to the question of what we return to when the novelty subsides.

In March, Lincoln Center Theater opens The Sound of Music at the Vivian Beaumont, with Jasmine Amy Rogers — last seen earning a Tony nomination as Betty Boop — as Maria. We will say the quiet thing plainly: The Sound of Music is the show cultured people are trained to condescend to, and the condescension is a tell. It reveals more about the critic than the score. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a musical about a woman choosing conviction over comfort inside a country about to lose both, and we have let the hills and the apron turn it into something we smile at from a distance. The Beaumont will not permit the distance. It is a thrust stage with a thousand seats arranged so that no one is far from the actor, which is exactly the wrong room for sentimentality and exactly the right room for sincerity performed without irony. Casting Rogers signals the ambition: not a museum revival, but a reading that trusts the material to be serious. Whether it lands we cannot yet know. But a canonical score meeting a canonical house is an occasion, and we intend to treat it as one.

A few blocks south, at the Majestic, the arithmetic is harder.

Purple Rain begins previews in March, directed by Saheem Ali, carrying more than twenty songs from a catalog we are not neutral about. Let us be precise about the register here, because reverence and skepticism are not opposites and the honest position holds both. Prince is not a property to be adapted. Prince is a question the stage has no obvious right to answer. The film is a flawed and electric artifact, and the music is sacred in the specific way that music becomes sacred when it was the private soundtrack to someone's actual life. So the problem Purple Rain must solve is not fidelity to a plot. It is whether a Broadway company can hold that voltage without grounding it — whether the thing that made a man in Minneapolis unrepeatable survives being repeated eight times a week. We do not know. We are not sure anyone does. But we would rather watch a production attempt something genuinely difficult and fall short than watch a safe production succeed at nothing, and the attempt itself is worth the ticket.

And then there is the one we are actually clearing the calendar for.

In April, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theater premieres Born in the Dirt, a new play by Kimberly Belflower, directed by Danya Taymor. If those names mean nothing to you yet, correct that now. Belflower wrote John Proctor Is the Villain, the Georgia-high-school play that took The Crucible and turned it on the men who have always been safe inside it; it earned seven Tony nominations and the uncommon distinction of being discussed by people who do not usually discuss new plays. Taymor directed that production and won the Tony for Best Direction of a Play, and before it she made The Outsiders into something muscular and strange on a Broadway stage. The two of them reuniting at the Newhouse — a small, deliberate room where the audience sits close enough to be implicated — is the sentence in this entire season that made us put down what we were doing. This is not spectacle, and it is not a beloved score, and it is not a question of whether a catalog survives translation. It is a new American play by a writer with something to say and a director who knows how to make a room hold still. This is the reason we go. The rest is pleasure, and some of it will be real pleasure. This is the appointment.

So: four rooms, one season, and a scale that runs from a franchise proving it can be theater to a theater that needs no proving at all. Go to the one that frightens you a little. Then go to the Newhouse in April, and sit near the front, where you can be caught.