On Making Assumptions About People & Plays

Being a few thoughts about the career of Bill Rauch, 'Cats' and the new-play ecosystem in the American theater

Ask me five years ago what Bill Rauch might eventually win a Tony Award for, and I’d eagerly have shared ideas. None of them would have been the wildly unlikely — and wildly successful — revival/rethink of Cats that got its start at Lower Manhattan’s Perelman Performing Arts Center, where Rauch has been artistic director since 2018.

It’s not that Rauch hasn’t been in Tonys contention before. His 2014 production of Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way took home a pair of the spin-top trophies, in fact, for star Bryan Cranston and for best new play.

It’s just that I might’ve expected the honor to come for something huge and ambitious like the Schenkkan play — something civic-minded, serious, and scaled to meet the big-think track record Rauch has built for himself.

I met and was hugely impressed with him a bit over two decades ago, at one of Sasha Anawalt’s legendary NEA-backed arts-journalism fellowships in Los Angeles. At the time Rauch was already a budding superstar, working at major regionals around the country but still known mostly as cofounder of the Cornerstone Theater Company — a super-creative roving institution (later settled in L.A.) that created all kinds of opportunities for theater rooted in communities, involving people who don’t often get to participate. (Good background articles here.)

His move to Oregon to run the much bigger Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland came not long after he shared his theatermaking philosophy at that NEA fellowship. And his 12-year tenure at OSF was marked by major commissions or co-commissions like Schenkkan’s All the Way and its sequel The Great Society, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, and Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated Indecent. (That last landed the directing Tony for Rebecca Taichman, who’s made a splash here in D.C. as well, not least with a gorgeous Twelfth Night at the Shakespeare Theatre Company.) OSF’s reach and resources are almost unparalleled; with help from one of his Cornerstone posse, Alison Carey, Rauch commissioned 37 new works (a deliberate number, as any Shakespeare nerd will recognize) during his tenure.

Thirty-seven. That’s three a year, even if you stretch it out across Rauch’s dozen years running the Festival. (Like Arena Stage’s similarly visioned Power Plays initiative, launched by then-artistic director Molly Smith eight years later, OSF’s American Revolutions project formally spanned a decade.) That may not sound insane now, given how the American theater has evolved in that same time, but when Rauch and the OSF launched the project it was pretty damn ambitious. Of the other global heavy-hitters, only the Royal Shakespeare Company has operated on such a scale for such a stretch.

And Rauch hasn’t rested on his proverbial laurels. Even before Cats: The Jellicle Ball blew up and earned him and co-director Zhailon Levingston¹ their shiny new Tony trophies, he and his crew at the brand-new Perelman Center had announced a 25-show, 5-year commissioning project “exploring the nature, friction, and diverse perspectives of modern democracy” across theater, concerts, dance, mixed-media, and opera. The first two shows have already premiered — one of them in Santiago, Chile, where its instigating company is based. That detail alone tells you something about the scale of Bill Rauch’s ambitions. (Would that we had someone with like gifts to take over at our own national landmark of a PAC, which certainly needs a kick in the ass fresh leadership.)

Now that the Tony Awards have pointed out the obvious, it occurs to me that actually, Jellicle Ball fits pretty neatly into Bill Rauch’s history of queering canonical stories and opening doors and taking risks with classics. (Yes, Cats is both canon and a classic, and one with a T.S. Eliot pedigree to boot. Snobs will just have to deal.) The adaptation is in fact radically civic-minded. The lessons it teaches are in fact deadly serious. They’re just bundled up in a hugely entertaining package marked indelibly with the stamps of black and queer struggle — and black and queer² joy.

One of the commissions fresh from the Perelman pipeline is Giulia, the Poison Queen of Palermo, a new musical from Sugarland frontwoman Jennifer Nettles about a 17th-century Italian witch/feminist activist who may or may not have helped as many as 600 women to poison their dickweed husbands. (I am so very onboard.) It’s opening this month at PAC-NYC, directed by the always intriguing Mary Zimmerman, another towering force in the American theater. (And another notable veteran of both the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Arena Stage.) You’ll find a snippet or three in the PAC NYC YouTube channel.

---

A Scandal That Can’t Be Papered Over

I’ve mentioned, I think, that I’ll be leading a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe next August. (That’s August 2027, y’all. Still plenty of time to get interested. Ping me if you are.)

One of the resources I rely on for news about Fringe and about theater in the U.K. more broadly is Fergus Morgan, who’s a writer for The Stage and the author of The Crush Bar, a truly indispensable theater ’stack. Please enjoy his take on the latest unbelieeeeeevable scandal to engulf the festival.

Pro tip: Do not sign up for the Edinburgh Fringe Society media list unless you are genuinely interested in the hundreds and hundreds of email pitches you will receive about shows aiming to conquer the world by staggering in the footsteps of Dudley Moore³ and our favorite Fleabag herself. My inbox is awash, I tell you. And there’s some hilarious shit. I’ll share some of the juicy ones in the coming months.

---

Three Things

• This is a badass story. They found china! Chandeliers! Stemware! I remember reading recently, in an update on the Malaysia Airlines mystery, that more than half of the world’s oceans remain largely unmapped and unexplored. Which is f*cking cool, yeah? Imagine the things we don’t know about what’s down there.

• The apples-to-oranges metaphor in this argument amused me greatly. Let it be a caution to you. People are wise to those claims about your home city being the X-busiest theater town in the country, is what I’m saying.

• With a handful of Tony-winning theaters anchoring the D.C. scene — Arena, Signature, STC, and Woolly Mammoth; did I miss any? — it’s worth a repeat shoutout to this year’s regional-Tony winner, which I highlighted back in April but didn’t really know all that much about. Full disclosure: I’m not always hugely impressed by the regional Tony choice, governed by the recommendations of the American Theatre Critics Association, of which I am not a member. But now that I look deeper, this joint looks genuinely special. (And I’m told at least a handful of D.C. theater types have worked there.) Bonus recommendation, if I haven’t pointed it out here before: The new outdoor Shakespeare palace in the Hudson River Valley is calling my naaaaaaame. Road trip!

1. Levingston has a hell of a story of his own, though so far it’s much shorter. Definitely a talent to watch. I should try and land an interview for the podcast, right?

2. I’m told that Andrew Sullivan has recently and at some length expressed disdain for this term, so you can count on seeing rather more of it here in the foreseeable future.

3. Yup, the star of Arthur and 10 got his first major press in Edinburgh, as part of Alan Bennett’s landmark Beyond the Fringe. Which interestingly enough, and contrary to most assumptions, was not produced at the Fringe. It was part of the main Edinburgh Festival, an older institution that was in 1960 being legit threatened by the meteoric rise* of the Fringe and commissioned Beyond the Fringe as a countermeasure, kicking off an absolute golden age of British satire. As memorialized in HBO’s The Crown, it was a huge hit for which the London Establishment was not even slightly prepared.

*Why do we say “meteoric rise,” anyway? Hardly apt, considering the damned things’ inevitably downward trajectory.