For four decades, Ken Fallin has been looking at famous faces and seeing what the rest of us miss.

Joan Crawford

A few strokes of ink become a raised eyebrow. A slightly exaggerated jaw becomes an entire personality. A familiar silhouette suddenly tells you everything you need to know about the person inhabiting it. That is the peculiar magic of caricature when it is done brilliantly: exaggeration somehow produces something closer to truth.

Alfred Hitchcock’s website

This fall, Fallin celebrates that remarkable career on two fronts. On Wednesday, October 7, from 5 to 7 p.m., New World Stages will host the opening reception for an exhibition of his work, offering audiences an opportunity to see the drawings beyond the pages and screens where so many first encountered them.

Gregory Peck

At the same time, Fallin is assembling a self-published book featuring selected drawings from his 40 years as an illustrator and caricaturist—and for those who think they know his work primarily through Broadway, the collection may contain a few surprises.

Ethel Merman in London

Because Ken Fallin’s world has always been considerably larger than the theatre district.

Karl Lagerfeld

The proposed book reaches through an astonishing range of subjects and assignments: actors and filmmakers, politicians and journalists, fashion royalty including Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, architect Jean Nouvel, and hundreds of figures drawn during Fallin’s long association with The Wall Street Journal. Taken together, the images become something more interesting than a conventional career retrospective. They are a visual record of the people who shaped several decades of American culture.

Fallin’s first major break came in 1983 when he began creating the posters and advertising artwork for Gerard Alessandrini’s deliciously wicked Forbidden Broadway. It proved an ideal marriage of artist and subject. Fallin’s ability to lovingly skewer a famous face mirrored exactly what Forbidden Broadway was doing musically to Broadway itself.

Andy Warhol

Those drawings eventually traveled far beyond Manhattan, with Fallin’s Forbidden Broadway artwork appearing as productions reached London, Tokyo and Sydney. His visual language became inseparable from the show: you could recognize Forbidden Broadway before reading its title.

Bassets

By 1987, The Boston Herald had commissioned Fallin to create a weekly celebrity caricature for its Sunday arts and entertainment section. But another chapter of his career would eventually introduce his work to an enormous national readership.

Jean Nouvel

For The Wall Street Journal, Fallin has illustrated roughly 500 notable figures, ranging from presidents to movie stars, cultural figures and newsmakers. His subjects have included Barack Obama and Paul Newman, as well as journalist Tim Russert, whom Fallin drew for Peggy Noonan’s memorial following Russert’s death.

Bernard-Henri Levy

That work reveals something particularly interesting about Fallin’s gift. Caricature can easily become cruelty. Fallin rarely needs cruelty. His drawings can certainly be wicked—and anyone who has followed his theatrical work knows that his pen possesses teeth—but underneath the exaggeration is observation.

Warren Buffett

He isn’t merely drawing what someone looks like. He is drawing what makes us recognize them.

Cole Porter

Sometimes it is posture. Sometimes hair. Sometimes the architecture of a face. Sometimes it is simply attitude. Fallin understands that likeness has surprisingly little to do with photographic accuracy. Capture the right three things about somebody and suddenly there they are.

DOVER Quartet

That ability made him equally valuable outside editorial illustration. His commercial clients have included American Express, HBO, Showtime, CNBC and Walt Disney Productions, while assignments have taken his distinctive line into national advertising campaigns and commissioned work far removed from Broadway.

Patti LuPone

LuPone Carnegie Hall

Then there are the subjects themselves.

Gloria Vanderbilt

Sunset Blvd. Gloria Swamson

Fashion designers. Architects. Movie stars. Presidents. Broadway legends. Journalists. Cultural eccentrics. Fallin has spent forty years quietly assembling an extraordinary paper cocktail party populated by people who, in many cases, would never otherwise have occupied the same room.

John Williams

The forthcoming book promises finally to invite us into that room.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg

What makes the project especially appealing is the possibility of seeing work that even longtime admirers may never have encountered. Editorial illustration is ephemeral by nature. A drawing appears beside an article, advertisement or review and then disappears into an archive. Decades later, an artist can discover that he has created an enormous visual history almost accidentally. Fallin has.

Lani Bell

While the mediums surrounding illustration have transformed dramatically during those forty years—from newspapers and print advertising to digital publishing and social media—the fundamental appeal of his work hasn’t changed. A Ken Fallin drawing remains unmistakably a Ken Fallin drawing.

Robert Glasper

That may be the greatest achievement of all. In an age increasingly dominated by photographic perfection, filters, digital manipulation and now artificial intelligence capable of manufacturing faces that never existed, there is something wonderfully human about the visible intelligence of a hand-drawn line. You can see the decision. You can see the joke. You can almost see the instant when Fallin looked at his subject and thought, Ah. That’s it.

Steve Jobs

The October exhibition at New World Stages brings that line back where so much of Fallin’s story began: the theatre.

Yves Saint Laurent

The book promises something larger.

Vivek Ramaswamy

It reminds us that Ken Fallin hasn’t simply been drawing Broadway for forty years. He has been drawing his time. And what a cast he has had.

Ken Fallin

Welcome to Manhattan.You have just driven through the Lincoln Tunnel. You have already paid the Port Authority toll for the privilege of crossing the Hudson River. You emerge in Midtown, travel the short distance necessary to get to the Manhattan Plaza parking garage on West 42nd Street, put the car away and go about your business.

Congratulations. New York may have already charged you for congestion pricing as well. It sounds almost like a mistake. It isn’t necessarily one.

Under the MTA’s Congestion Relief Zone rules, passenger vehicles entering Manhattan’s local streets and avenues at or below 60th Street are subject to the congestion toll. The West Side Highway and FDR Drive are excluded roadways, but only as long as drivers remain on them. Once a vehicle leaves an excluded roadway and enters the local street grid inside the zone, the toll applies.

Therein lies one of the stranger realities of congestion pricing for drivers emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel. There is no magical highway corridor carrying you directly from the tunnel into the Manhattan Plaza garage. The Lincoln Tunnel feeds vehicles into Midtown’s street network. So even if your destination is only blocks away—even if the entire purpose of your trip after emerging from the tunnel is simply to put the car into a garage—you have entered the Congestion Relief Zone.

The current peak congestion toll for a passenger vehicle with E-ZPass is $9. The MTA does provide qualifying drivers entering through the Lincoln Tunnel a crossing credit during peak periods, which reduces the additional congestion charge rather than eliminating it. Overnight, the passenger-vehicle congestion toll drops to $2.25.

Technically, the MTA can therefore say the system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. But West 42nd Street presents another, considerably more troubling question.

In October 2025, CBS New York reported complaints from Manhattan residents who said they were being charged congestion tolls when leaving their own parking garage on West 42nd Street. These weren’t drivers entering Manhattan from New Jersey. They already lived inside the Congestion Relief Zone. According to residents interviewed by CBS, cameras near the garage were sometimes treating vehicles pulling out as though they were entering the zone. CBS presented one resident’s disputed charges to the MTA; the agency acknowledged one of the cited charges was incorrect, and the resident received a refund.

Now we have reached the genuinely interesting question. How can you “enter” a congestion zone when you were already inside it? The MTA itself says that merely traveling within the Congestion Relief Zone does not incur a congestion toll. Its FAQ gives the example of beginning a trip on Chambers Street and crossing West Street into Battery Park City: because the trip began within the zone and remained there, there is no toll.

A car parked overnight in a West 42nd Street garage is already inside the zone. Its driver is already inside the zone. The garage is already inside the zone. Pulling out of the garage cannot logically constitute entering something in which both car and driver already exist.

That distinction matters because congestion pricing isn’t collected by someone sitting in a booth who can look at the situation and say, “Obviously this person is leaving a garage.” It depends upon cameras, license-plate recognition and E-ZPass technology interpreting vehicle movements.

Machines are wonderfully literal creatures. They don’t know that you live upstairs. They don’t know that you parked there yesterday. They don’t know that you’ve traveled twenty feet rather than twenty miles. They know what the system tells them your vehicle has done.

That makes the Manhattan Plaza situation a fascinating case study in what happens when a large public policy collides with the peculiar geography of New York City.

The Congestion Relief Zone was created to discourage unnecessary vehicle trips into Manhattan’s most congested streets while raising money for public transportation. Supporters can point to evidence that it has reduced vehicle entries: six months after implementation, officials reported roughly 67,000 fewer vehicles entering the zone per day compared with the previous year.

Fine, a successful policy can still produce absurd results at its edges. West 42nd Street appears to be one of those edges. A New Jersey driver can pay to enter through the Lincoln Tunnel, emerge into Manhattan and almost immediately park—yet still legitimately trigger congestion pricing because those few blocks count as entering the local street grid.

Meanwhile, a Manhattan resident can begin the day with a car already parked inside the Congestion Relief Zone, pull out of a garage and, according to documented complaints, sometimes find a congestion charge waiting.

One driver has barely gone anywhere. The other hasn’t entered anything. Yet the meter may be running.

There is also a larger issue here about transparency. When automated systems determine when money is taken from millions of people, the burden shouldn’t fall entirely upon drivers to discover incorrect charges buried inside an E-ZPass statement and then fight to have them reversed.

If a camera can mistakenly interpret leaving a garage as entering a toll zone, how readily can the person receiving the bill determine exactly where and why the charge occurred? More importantly, how many people actually check?

Nine dollars is simultaneously enough money to matter and little enough money that many people won’t spend an afternoon fighting over it. Multiply that psychology across hundreds of thousands of transactions and accuracy becomes more than a technological issue. It becomes a question of public trust.

Congestion pricing can be debated endlessly. Some New Yorkers consider it transformative. Others consider it another tax imposed upon drivers. Both arguments have occupied enough newspaper columns to pave Seventh Avenue.

This particular question doesn’t require choosing a political side. If the government is going to charge someone for entering a zone, it should be able to establish that the person actually entered it.

If you’re coming out of the Lincoln Tunnel simply trying to put your car into a garage a few blocks away, perhaps New York could at least allow you enough time to say hello before presenting the next bill.

Apparently in Midtown these days, you don’t actually have to get anywhere. You just have to arrive.

Broadway is rarely accused of being inexpensive, which makes September one of the better times of the year to rediscover the Theatre District.

NYC Broadway Week returns September 8 through September 20, 2026, offering 2-for-1 tickets to 25 Broadway productions, from long-running blockbusters including Wicked, The Lion King and Chicago to some of the season’s newest arrivals.

The participating shows are & Juliet, Aladdin, The Book of Mormon, Buena Vista Social Club, Chicago, The Great Gatsby, Hadestown, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Just in Time, The Lion King, The Lost Boys, Maybe Happy Ending, MJ The Musical, Oh, Mary!, Operation Mincemeat, The Outsiders, Paranormal Activity, The Rocky Horror Show, Schmigadoon!, School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play, SIX: The Musical, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Titaníque, Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) and Wicked.

That’s an unusually broad menu, which creates another problem: What should you actually see?

T2C has some thoughts.

Buena Vista Social Club

This is the choice for anyone who wants to remember what live music can do inside a Broadway theatre. The Tony-winning musical turns the story behind the legendary Cuban album into something visceral, rhythmic and gloriously alive. The musicians aren’t accompaniment—they are the pulse of the evening—and when the music takes over, the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre practically changes temperature. If you have been waiting to see this one, a 2-for-1 offer removes the excuse.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Even people who couldn’t tell a Horcrux from a Hogwarts house can appreciate the sheer theatrical wizardry happening at the Lyric. Cursed Child remains one of Broadway’s great technical achievements because its illusions don’t feel like technology showing off; they feel like actual magic happening several feet in front of you. Broadway Week is particularly useful for the expensive spectacle shows, and this is precisely the kind of production where getting two seats for the price of one feels like you’ve performed a little magic yourself.

Just in Time

Jeremy Jordan playing Bobby Darin in a theatre transformed into a nightclub was already an irresistible proposition, and Jordan’s extraordinary ability to erase the boundary between performer and audience makes Just in Time considerably more than another jukebox musical. Circle in the Square becomes part concert, part nightclub and part biography. Go for Jordan, certainly, but stay for the terrific music and the intimacy of watching a star seemingly make an enormous Broadway theatre disappear.

The Lost Boys

One of Broadway’s newest offerings makes Broadway Week an excellent opportunity to find out how the beloved 1987 vampire film translates to the stage. With its mixture of teenage rebellion, rock music, danger, sexuality and supernatural mythology, The Lost Boys arrives with built-in nostalgia but has to create a theatrical identity of its own. For audiences who would rather use the discount to discover something new than revisit an established hit, this is one of the obvious choices.

Maybe Happy Ending

If you still haven’t seen Maybe Happy Ending, this is the one I would tell you not to miss. What sounds on paper like a peculiar little musical about obsolete robots becomes something exquisitely human—a meditation on love, loneliness, memory and what it means to know that something beautiful cannot last forever. It won the Tony for Best Musical for a reason. In a Broadway landscape increasingly dependent upon recognizable intellectual property and enormous spectacle, Maybe Happy Ending accomplishes something much harder: it makes you care deeply about two small beings sitting quietly in a room.

MJ The Musical

An oldie but a goodie. You may arrive for Michael Jackson’s catalogue, but the reason MJ continues to work is that it understands those songs require extraordinary performers to recreate the electricity surrounding them. The dancing is sensational, the production values are enormous, and the sheer number of songs embedded in the evening makes it one of Broadway’s most unabashed crowd-pleasers. If you want your Broadway Week ticket to deliver spectacle, choreography and a catalogue you already know by heart, MJ remains a strong bet.

Operation Mincemeat

Five actors, dozens of characters, one preposterous but true World War II operation—and one of the cleverest musicals to cross the Atlantic in years. Operation Mincemeat proves that imagination remains Broadway’s best special effect. It is fast, funny, deeply eccentric and then, when you least expect it, surprisingly moving. The show asks its actors to change characters at breathtaking speed while the audience races to keep up. Don’t worry. You will.

The Outsiders

There is a reason The Outsiders became a phenomenon. S.E. Hinton’s familiar story has been given a physical theatrical language that makes it feel immediate again, particularly in its extraordinary staging and choreography. The now-famous rumble sequence remains one of the most thrilling pieces of stagecraft on Broadway: bodies, rain, light, movement and violence collide until choreography becomes storytelling. This is theatre doing something a movie simply cannot reproduce.

Paranormal Activity

For people who like their Broadway with considerably more screaming, Paranormal Activity offers one of the season’s most intriguing propositions: can the stripped-down terror of the film franchise actually work in a Broadway theatre? Horror is notoriously difficult onstage because an audience can look wherever it wants—there is no camera controlling what we see. That makes the theatrical mechanics of frightening several hundred people simultaneously half the fun. Since I’m seeing this one Sunday, T2C will shortly have considerably more to say about whether it succeeds.

Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)

Sometimes charm is enough—provided you have the talent to pull it off. Two Strangers takes a wonderfully simple premise, two people thrown together while carrying a wedding cake across New York, and turns it into an intimate musical about connection, expectation and the strange things that happen when another human being unexpectedly enters your life. Against Broadway’s increasingly enormous productions, its relative smallness is part of its appeal. This is the choice for anyone who wants wit, romance and heart rather than another multimillion-dollar machine.

Broadway Week has always been marketed as an opportunity to save money, but the better way to use it is as permission to take a chance. See the show whose regular ticket price has made you hesitate. Take somebody who doesn’t normally go to Broadway. Try the strange little musical you’ve heard people arguing about. Or finally see the Tony winner everybody else seems to have gotten to before you.

Because two-for-one Broadway tickets don’t make Broadway cheap.

But in New York City, half-price magic is about as close as we’re likely to get.

By Sunday, Broadway had been living beside the Hudson for three days. The experiment had worked. What began Friday as an ambitious idea—take Broadway out of its traditional theaters, move some of its greatest artists two hours north of Times Square and create something resembling a theatrical music festival—reached its finale on Sunday, August 16, at Hutton Brickyards Riverfront Hotel + Venue in Kingston.

Audra McDonald. Photo by Austin Ruffer

If you are going to close a Broadway festival, having Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell around certainly doesn’t hurt.

The Festival Apprentices. Photo by Austin Ruffer

The final day of The Festival, produced by Joshua Saltman and David B. Schwartz, spread performances across the Broadway Direct Stage, New 42 Stage and surrounding grounds, bringing together Broadway royalty, composers, younger performers and some pairings audiences aren’t likely to encounter during an ordinary night in the theatre.

The Festival Apprentices. Photo by Austin Ruffer

After Friday’s introduction and Saturday’s emotional 30th anniversary reunion of the original Broadway cast of RENT, Sunday felt less like another day of programming and more like the culmination of what The Festival had been trying to create all weekend. Broadway had come to play.

Audra McDonald. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

There are Broadway stars, and then there is Audra McDonald. With six Tony Awards and a career that has moved effortlessly between musical theatre, drama, opera, television and concert stages, McDonald doesn’t need much introduction. Her presence alone gave the final day a sense of occasion.

Alongside her was Brian Stokes Mitchell, another performer whose voice is practically woven into modern Broadway history. Mitchell has spent decades making leading-man charisma look deceptively easy, from Ragtime and Kiss Me, Kateto Man of La Mancha and beyond.

Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Denée Benton, representing another generation of Broadway artists, joined them among Sunday’s marquee performers. Benton possesses that wonderful combination of classical musical-theatre intelligence and contemporary immediacy that has made her work in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 and Into the Woods so memorable.

Denée Benton. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

One of The Festival’s smartest choices throughout the weekend was refusing to segregate Broadway by generation. Legends weren’t treated as museum pieces, and younger performers weren’t relegated to an opening act. Everyone inhabited the same landscape. That is how an art form remains alive.

Tom Kitt. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Sunday also put the people who actually create Broadway’s musical language center stage. Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tom Kitt hosted “Tom Kitt & Friends,”

Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal. Photo by Austin Ruffer

joined by performers including Anthony Rapp and Solea Pfeiffer.

Tom Kitt and Solea Pfeiffer. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Kitt’s catalogue alone could sustain an afternoon. From Next to Normal to If/Then, Almost Famous and his extensive work as an arranger and orchestrator, his music has become part of the sound of contemporary Broadway.

Denée Benton, Lauren Patten, Andrew Barth Feldman. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

There is also something particularly revealing about hearing a composer at the piano with singers who understand his musical language. Strip away scenery, costumes, automation and millions of dollars of Broadway infrastructure, and what remains is the thing from which every musical begins: Someone writes a song. Someone else sings it. An audience listens. For all The Festival’s scale, that fundamental simplicity repeatedly became one of the weekend’s greatest pleasures.

The looser format also allowed Sunday to indulge in something Broadway rarely gets enough opportunity to do: mix people up.

Patti Murin. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Patti Murin and Colin Donnell. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Colin Donnell and Patti Murin. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Real-life couple Patti Murin and Colin Donnell took on “Here I Go Again,” bringing a little rock-and-roll swagger to the Hudson.

Andrew Barth Feldman. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Andrew Barth Feldman. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Andrew Barth Feldman. Photo by Austin Ruffer

while Andrew Barth Feldman and Tyler Joseph Ellis offered another pairing of distinctive young Broadway personalities.

Lauren Patten. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Lauren Patten and Jenn Colella. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Lauren Patten. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Then there were Jenn Colella and Lauren Patten, two performers with the kind of individual stage presence that makes putting them together almost mischievous.

That is part of the appeal of a festival format. Broadway productions are enormously controlled machines. Casting is specific. Repertoire is fixed. Characters dictate who sings with whom. A festival can simply ask: Wouldn’t it be fun if these people got onstage together? Quite often, the answer is yes.

Photo by Austin Ruffer

The day’s major collaborative event, The Big Show: Sunday in the Park, provided an appropriately theatrical title for the closing celebration. There was something almost too perfect about it. Broadway was literally spending Sunday outside, surrounded not by the concrete canyons of Midtown but by river, sky and the vast industrial beauty of Hutton Brickyards. After three days of concerts, conversations, unexpected combinations, campfires and late-night revelry, the final Big Show gathered the weekend’s energy back onto the main stage. By then, The Festival had begun to feel less like an event testing an idea and more like a community that had temporarily built itself a home. That may be its greatest accomplishment.

By the time the final note had been sung, 2,875 people from 48 of the 50 states had made their way to Kingston for the inaugural weekend. That number deserves some perspective. This wasn’t Times Square, where millions of potential ticket buyers pass through the neighborhood. Audiences had to decide to come. They had to travel to Kingston and devote a weekend to an event that had never existed before. They came from virtually the entire country.

Across three days, The Festival presented more than 30 programs featuring 165 onstage performers, including 30 musicians, 14 ensemble members and 13 apprentices. Those statistics are impressive, but the more interesting achievement may be what happened between the numbers. The Festival created an environment where a Broadway legend could be followed by an emerging performer, where composers could play their own work, where RENT could reunite 30 years later, where performers could gather around campfires after the formal programming ended, and where audiences could experience Broadway without the invisible wall separating the people onstage from the people sitting in the house. That is considerably harder to manufacture than a concert.

Broadway has a new summer tradition Joshua Saltman and David B. Schwartz didn’t wait long to answer the obvious question. The Festival will return in 2027.

Additional details will come later, but announcing another year before the inaugural weekend had even faded into memory was perhaps the clearest indication that Broadway’s great weekend in the country wasn’t intended to be a one-off experiment.

Over three days, The Festival demonstrated something Broadway occasionally forgets about itself. The theatre isn’t a collection of buildings between 41st and 54th Streets. It isn’t a Tony Award, a marquee or a $200 orchestra seat. It is composers and actors, dancers and musicians, technicians and apprentices—and audiences who will apparently travel from 48 states simply to be around the thing they love.

Friday asked whether Broadway could become a destination festival. Saturday gave it a history and a heartbeat. Sunday, with Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tom Kitt and a small army of Broadway talent filling the banks of the Hudson with music, the answer became rather obvious.

See you in 2027.

If Friday was Broadway’s arrival in the country, Saturday was the moment it unpacked its bags and decided to stay awhile.

Photo by Austin Ruffer

Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Photo by Austin Ruffer

Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Day Two of The Festival, held Saturday, August 15 at Kingston’s Hutton Brickyards Riverfront Hotel + Venue, took the ambitious premise introduced on opening day—a destination festival devoted entirely to musical theatre—and turned up the volume. The Broadway Direct Stage filled with Tony winners and Broadway favorites, composers stepped out from behind their scores, unlikely musical moments appeared, and after dark the Hudson River became part nightclub, part theatrical summer camp.

But the emotional heart of Saturday belonged to a musical that changed Broadway 30 years ago.

Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Wilson Jermaine Heredia. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Fredi Walker-Brown. Photo by Austin Ruffer

No Day But Today: RENT at 30

Daphne Rubin-Vega. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Daphne Rubin-Vega and Kristen Lee Kelly. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Anthony Rapp. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Anthony Rapp, Fredi Walker-Brown, Gwen Stewart. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Three decades after RENT exploded onto Broadway and changed the sound, look and audience of the American musical, members of its original Broadway company reunited at The Festival. Anthony Rapp, Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Taye Diggs came together again, transforming what could easily have become a nostalgia exercise into something considerably more moving.

Anthony Rapp and Taye Diggs. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Because RENT is no longer simply a Broadway musical.

Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Taye Diggs. Photo by Austin Ruffer

For an entire generation, Jonathan Larson’s work became a marker of time. It arrived speaking about AIDS, art, poverty, friendship, sexuality, chosen family and the terrifying uncertainty of whether tomorrow would arrive at all. Its young artists were trying to create lives in a city that increasingly seemed determined to price them out of existence. Thirty years later, some of those ideas feel less like period details than unfinished conversations.

RENT 30th Reunion. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Daphne Rubin-Vega. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Fredi Walker-Brown. Photo by Austin Ruffer

RENT 30th Reunion. Photo by Austin Ruffer

And there they were again…. Rapp,Pascal, Rubin-Vega, Diggs. Older, certainly. So was the audience that first loved them.

RENT 30th Reunion. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Fredi Walker-Brown and Lauren Patten. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Fredi Walker-Brown and Lauren Patten. Photo by Austin Ruffer

But RENT has always contained that strange contradiction: a musical obsessed with mortality that somehow refuses to age. Hearing its music sung by the people who helped introduce it to the world created one of those rare theatrical collisions between memory and the present. The people onstage had lived 30 more years. So had many of the people watching them.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes suddenly seemed like a very small unit of measurement.

Kelli O’Hara

Kelli O’Hara Raps. Because Apparently Anything Can Happen Upstate.

Kelli O’Hara Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Kelli O’Hara and daughter, Charlotte Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Saturday wasn’t entirely interested in reverence. One of The Festival’s strengths is its ability to remove Broadway performers from the carefully constructed environments in which audiences normally encounter them. Here there are no characters to disappear behind and no fourth wall demanding obedience. The artists can play. And Kelli O’Hara rapping certainly qualifies.

Kelli O’Hara Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

One of Broadway’s most exquisite singers—an artist associated with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Adam Guettel and some of the most beautifully controlled vocal performances of her generation—allowed herself to venture considerably outside the territory in which Broadway audiences usually encounter her. That sense of mischief is exactly what an event like The Festival should encourage. We already know what these performers can do eight times a week. The fun is discovering what they do when somebody hands them a microphone beside the Hudson and lets them loose.

Jason Robert Brown Photo by Michaelah Reynold

Norbert Leo Butz. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Norbert Leo Butz. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Norbert Leo Butz. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Norbert Leo Butz Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Norbert Leo Butz offered a different kind of pleasure, returning to Big Fish, while Jason Robert Brown sat at the piano and performed selections from his own formidable catalogue. Brown remains one of contemporary musical theatre’s most distinctive composer-lyricists, and there is something particularly satisfying about hearing theatre songs stripped back to the person who first imagined them.

Jenn Colella. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Jenn Colella. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Jenn Colella. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Jenn Colella. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Jenn Colella. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Dasia Thomas, Jenn Colella and others to perform songs from Brown’s past and present shows.

Kelli O’Hara, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Renee Elise Goldsberry Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Renee Elise Goldsberry Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Renee Elise Goldsberry Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Renee Elise Goldsberry & Kelli O’Hara

Kelli O’Hara, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

Lena Hall, Norbert Leo Butz, Renee Elise Goldsberry

The Saturday Big Show, featuring Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kelli O’Hara, Norbert Leo Butz, Jenn Collela,

Lena Hall. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Lena Hall. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Lena Hall. Photo by Austin Ruffer

and Lena Hall.

Solea Pfeiffer. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Solea Pfeiffer. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Solea Pfeiffer. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine, and Tyler Joseph Ellis. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Krystina Alabado and Isabelle McCalla. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

A Preview of New Musicals, hosted by NY1’s Frank DiLella, highlighting seven new musicals in development: Autopilot, Bludline, Huzzah, Love Somebody, Regency Girls, Someday Soon, and Star Machine. The talented Solea Pfeiffer, Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine, Krystina Alabado, Isabelle McCalla and Tyler Joseph Ellis joined.

Some Broadway performances become permanently attached to the actor who introduced them, regardless of how many talented performers inherit the role. Angelica Schuyler’s breathtaking rewind through desire, sacrifice and split-second decision-making is one of those moments, and Goldsberry remains inseparable from it. Bringing “Satisfied” out of the Richard Rodgers Theatre and onto an open-air stage gave Saturday another jolt of Broadway history suddenly living in the present.

That mixture became the defining character of Day Two. This wasn’t merely a collection of performers singing their biggest numbers. The Festival was beginning to demonstrate the value of placing artists from different corners and generations of Broadway beside one another and seeing what happens when the usual theatrical architecture disappears.

When Broadway Goes to Camp

Lauren Patten. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Fredi Walker-Brown and Lauren Patten. Photo by Austin Ruffer

Jenn Colella, Lauren Patten, and Norbert Leo Butz. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

Then the sun went down. This may ultimately be where The Festival separates itself most successfully from the endless parade of Broadway concerts, conventions and benefit evenings already filling the theatrical calendar. The programming didn’t simply end after the marquee performances. Instead, Broadway nightlife followed Broadway upstate. A cozy campfire set featuring performances from Kelli O’Hara, Jenn Colella, Lauren Patten, Norbert Leo Butz, and more.

Krystina Alabado and Isabelle McCalla. Photo by Michaelah Reynolds

A pop-up edition of Club Cumming, the East Village playground created by Alan Cumming and a gathering place for performers, musicians and assorted creatures of the night, brought some downtown Manhattan energy to Kingston. The elegant Hudson Valley retreat suddenly acquired a little glitter around the edges.

Elsewhere, Broadway performers gathered around campfires for acoustic music along the river.

Amber Ardolino. Photo by Austin Ruffer

That image may actually capture the entire weekend better than the “Coachella for Broadway” label that has followed The Festival since it was announced. Coachella suggests scale, spectacle and celebrity. The Festival certainly had all three. But Broadway is fundamentally a community of storytellers, musicians and performers, and some of the weekend’s most appealing moments came when the machinery disappeared.

Seth Rudetsky and Tommy Bracco. Photo by Austin Ruffer

A singer, a song, a fire, the Hudson and people listening. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that, particularly for an industry increasingly obsessed with grosses, celebrity casting, social-media engagement and whether a production can survive another week. Remove the commercial machinery for a moment and you’re left with the reason people entered this profession in the first place. They wanted to tell stories.

Photo by Michaelah Reynolds (

Hovering over Saturday was RENT, the musical that once told Broadway audiences that community could become family and that the meaningful measurement of a life wasn’t money, possessions or even time. It was love. Thirty years later, on the banks of the Hudson, the people who first delivered that message found themselves together again. Perhaps that is why the reunion belonged here.

The Festival was attempting to build something Broadway desperately needs and rarely has enough time to create: community without a curtain call waiting at the end of it. Saturday proved there may indeed be an audience for that. And there was still one day left.

Next: Day Three — Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and the finale of Broadway’s first weekend on the Hudson.