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In May of 2020, Lear deBessonet was supposed to begin her tenure as the artistic director of City Center’s beloved Encores! series, which offers concert stagings of musicals from Broadway’s past. The pandemic changed everyone’s plans, and when Encores! returned two years later with The Tap Dance Kid (1983) and The Life (1997), some perceived a bit of a wobble in its stride. Since then, however, deBessonet has presided over many successes: two Encores! shows that she directed herself, Into the Woods and Once Upon a Mattress, wound up transferring to Broadway, and others (like Jelly’s Last Jam and Titanic) earned rave reviews from critics and audiences alike. But this will be her last season at the Encores! helm; next year, she will take over as the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater.
DeBessonet has come a long way from Baton Rouge, Louisiana—her name is pronounced the French way (de-bess-o-NAY)—and her Lincoln Center appointment is the culmination of a steady rise through the New York theater world. In 2013, deBessonet created the Public Theater’s Public Works program, which partners with organizations around the city to mount enormous productions that redefine community theater; she has also directed memorable revivals of Good Person of Szechwan, Venus and, for Shakespeare in the Park, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She has an expansive view of what theater can do, and her final Encores! lineup for 2025 is typically eclectic: Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1948 concept musical Love Life is sandwiched between two shows of more recent vintage, Urinetown (2001) and The Wild Party (2000).
First, though, deBessonet is directing City Center’s two-week gala run of Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Terrence McNally’s 1998 epic Ragtime, which opens tonight with a stacked cast of musical-theater pros including Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Nichelle Lewis, Colin Donnell, Ben Levi Ross and Shaina Taub. We chatted with her at City Center last week, on one of her breaks from rehearsing the show. Her manner is thoughtful and even-keeled, but there’s a special glint in her eye when she discusses her passion for bringing theater to the people: a twinkle of radical welcome.
Thank you for making time in what I know must be a very busy week.
Busy does not even begin to capture it—the heart intensity of every scene, and this company of actors who are bringing it with their all at every moment. And of course, I’m there to be with them and go where they’re going. So it is tremendously emotionally intense as well as logistically intense, which is why I’m drinking this orange juice.
As well you should! You don't wanna get scurvy and have to drop out! Ragtime has so much breadth—there are so many different characters who all have arcs. But because of that, it holds a lot of interest for good actors.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's exquisite. And then to have 10 days of rehearsal with it.
Just 10 days? That’s wild.
It’s 10 days before we go into our quick hot minute of tech. Yeah. And on a sort of nerdy directing level, part of what’s intense is that a lot of old musicals were structured with a chorus and principals, so you could have two rehearsal rooms running: One room is doing dance sections with chorus, and the other is doing work with principals. But this show has so many moments that are essentially all 33 people very actively engaged. Even though we’re doing a concert staging—we’re not doing full choreography for all numbers or anything like that—it means a very heightened level of intensity. At least for me, there’s not five minutes where I’m sitting on the side resting and watching somebody else work.
In some ways this show lends itself well to a concert presentation—the opening number is so narrational, and there’s a lot of direct storytelling in the show.
Absolutely. I was quite excited, as I often am with Encores! shows that had original productions with ginormous scenic design—huge scenic transformations, basically with every number—to see they will be when that's entirely cut. [Our designer] David Rockwell has made a very elegant, poetic envelope, but it does not change with locations—and there’s certainly no moving scenery or automation. So this is completely about the music and the orchestra on stage with these once-in-a-generation talents directly in relationship to the audience. And I think that is so thrilling on this material.
I'm curious about how you think about the trajectory of your tenure. I feel like there's been an evolution in the way that you've approached some of these pieces. Is that true?
There is of course constant learning and growth, but I feel like we are in a flourishing and a realization of some of the intentions that I had for it from the very beginning. One thing that was important to me, because of the populist founding of City Center as a building—and which I am very passionate about—was generating a spirit of welcome and a deep invitation. The Encores! audience contains both people that have been there from the very first Encores! show—deeply faithful subscribers who know every note and could talk you through what has changed across different orchestrations—and people that have never been to an Encores! show before. And widening our embrace has been very important to me. I love to think about every show as a possible first-ever experience at the theater for someone because, to me, that changes your perspective on it. It means a certain warmth of invitation and also a clarity of storytelling that we always want to be there. We want people to not have to have had 12 years of reading Cliff Notes on this stuff to be able to enjoy it.
That feels like a dagger to my heart. [Laughs.] I have a thousand cast albums on CD.
You are my dream audience! [Laughs.] But I want a person sitting next to you to be seeing it for the first time. And I believed that there was an opportunity to move the calendar forward in terms of the shows we presented. Encores! has mostly programmed shows from up to around 1969. When the series started, that meant shows that had happened approximately 30 years earlier—but now 30 more years have gone by. So I think we should be presenting work that is more recent. That is part of the natural evolution of the series and it also engages a younger audience to have a fuller participation in it. And another part of my constant learning is really focusing on what I think are the superpowers of this series. This a place for transcendent musical-theater actors. There is an Olympic-athlete aspect of this—to be able to do these performances in this amount of time, it’s like an Olympic skill set for these people. And to be able to cast people in roles that are perfect for them. That's another thing that I'm always chasing: to put an actor in the role that is either their dream role, or that they didn’t even know existed, but is now their dream role. And then to strip away the other things and let the material just literally sing. So that’s what I wanted to have happen with it. I don't know what additional things you might notice from the outside.
It's hard to evaluate the larger arc at any given moment, because of course a lot of these things are planned far in advance. By the time we see what's been planned, you may already have changed some of your approach, but you're still doing the things that were planned before.
I think an artistic director's work really has to be understood in the context of multiple years of programming, because as you said, many things take a long time in the works. And every single show we do at Encores!, we have to get the rights to; there is always an estate, and every estate has its own particularities in negotiating to get those rights. One of the most hidden parts of this work is trying to get the rights for things; that is an enormous factor. So there are shows we are doing this year that I’ve wanted to do for [a long time]—I've wanted to do Ragtime since before I was even at Encores! Even in that first year, I think some people perceived Into the Woods as a shift, but it happened four months into my first season. It was always planned to be part of that first year.
I think the reason it felt like a shift is because Into the Woods was a more or less traditional revival, whereas the two shows before it were less so. Many Encores! productions have involved retooling of the scripts, but it felt like the changes made to The Tap Dance Kid and especially The Life were much more comprehensive—not just compressing the story or refreshing some lines, but taking a new stab at rewriting the show entirely.
Hmm. From very early on, Encores! has had contemporary playwrights work on the books of the shows. Some shows need much more attention than others, and all that work is always done in concert within an estate. I've not had any two situations that have been exactly the same. The work that Amy Sherman Palladino did on Once Upon a Mattress was not the same as—I mean, we did not do any work on Into the Woods, and we're not changing the script or the score of Ragtime at all. Ragtime is a gala performance, so it's technically not one of the three Encores! shows of the season. But I'm proud of all of the shows that have happened here. One piece of learning for me with time has been that, because of the compressed time, it feels like the space where the director has the biggest chance for a sort of auteur vision, if they want to have it, is actually essentially in casting choices. Because the process itself is so quick—I think this is one of the things that we learned along the way—that we don't have time for development. Many shows have not only a four-to-six-week rehearsal process, but have other steps like workshops and readings, and we don't do any of that. Not that we don't also look at the books—because even with Once Upon a Mattress, we did look at the book.
Especially in old comedies, where the jokes have to be sharpened.
Yes. Which is a lot of what [the playwright] David Ives was doing in those early Encores! shows—making sure that if something was supposed to be a joke the audience understood that it was a joke.
I've been very impressed with your tenure at Encores!, but those shows at the beginning did feel a little shakier to me. What you're saying makes sense, though. It's hard enough to put together a production in a week and a half with a whole new cast. There aren’t even any previews. So there’s no time to test new material and see if it works and rewrite it on the fly; you’re basically stuck with whatever your first draft was for the new script, which is not how musical development usually works.
Yeah. And also, I will never be able to separate my experience of being the artistic director of Encores! from stepping into that job during the pandemic—all of the social upheaval, and the crises on multiple fronts. When we were coming back and performing those first shows, everybody was in a mask and being tested every day, and there was an enormous amount of pressure on live performance, and on society in general. People were literally figuring out how to gather again. And we had actually programmed those shows in the first season before the pandemic. Into the Woods was the only one that was responsive to the pandemic; The Life and The Tap Dance Kid were projects we were already working on.
I think they struck people as a reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests and the George Floyd murder two years before.
Right. Which is interesting, because the choice to program them preceded all of that. Which I think is interesting just to know. And again, that’s why I would always urge—underline this!—I would always urge people to let an artistic director do at least a whole first season or two before trying to make a blanket statement about what that person might have as an agenda or how they're approaching things. Because it is larger. I mean, I love and believe in those artists. And I also feel like there was, and still is, an important conversation [to be had] for a series that does works from the past. We know how few musicals by writers of color were able to be on Broadway in the Thirties, Forties, Fifties—up until basically the present time, right? And that’s part of what was important to me about the bravery of what those artists were doing. Both of those shows had been written by exclusively white authors, basically about people of color. So it was and is important to me to create a space where black artists could artistically lead those projects.
Let’s talk about Ragtime. This is a show that is very important to a lot of musical-theater fans. I saw the original production, and there was a lot about it I loved. But I was a big fan of the E.L. Doctorow novel, and I remember bristling at what I perceived as a sentimentalization of the material. It felt like there was a big shift in emphasis toward the Coalhouse story over the stories of Mother and especially Tateh.
I'll be eager to hear how you feel about this production, but I hope and think you'll find the Tateh and Mother storylines to be quite present and gripping. Overall, I think our production has an emotional rawness to it. We are literally stripping a lot away—the big set and everything. You know, I looked at some of the original advertisements when I was preparing for this, and I almost fell off my chair at some of the ads that ran in the New York Times. They were like, “Love! Patriotism!”
They were really trying to sell it as classic Americana.
Yeah. This show is an epic, but it's an epic tragedy. I can't imagine an exclamation-point type of feeling about it; to me, it feels so emotionally complicated. The thing we talk about every day in rehearsal is that this show is, for me, the piece of musical theater that most closely holds the promise and the wound of America, right up next to each other. And that wound is aching, gaping, bleeding right now. There are many people for whom it has always been an open wound. But now more people have become aware of that.
And that wound is race?
Yes, but it's not just race. First of all, it's gender, too, for sure. But also I think it's about the American dream. The promise of America. And I think the promise—which is represented theatrically and is quite glorious—is the idea that people from all over the world are coming to this place with the hope of being able to build a life for themselves in freedom and fairness, and that there will be a peaceful coexistence of all these people from all over the world living together. Which genuinely is a miracle: I find it miraculous every single day living in New York City, walking down the street. Wow. Where else does this happen? That aspect of America is, if we take even one step back, I think genuinely astonishing and glorious.
In fairness, that’s also New York, not necessarily all of America.
And Ragtime is largely set in New York. Ragtime is set in a place to celebrate that. So that's the promise. And then, as we all know, heartbreak happens because of broken expectations. Our hearts are broken because of love.
And for many people, the promise of America is a broken promise.
Right. For many different reasons. I don't think there's a single character in the show for whom there isn't some wound to their ideals—what they think this country should be that it isn't. The promise is not lived up to in so many different ways. That's what I mean by the wound. [You hear it in] some of the lyrics in “Wheels of a Dream,” what Coalhouse and Sarah hope for their son—which mirror the lyrics that Tateh has in “Success,” what he says America is going to be like. And then we see both of those characters crushed. Tateh emerges from those ashes into a place of thriving, while Coalhouse’s story ends in his death. But both of these characters are in the particular pain that they're in because of how much they invested in hope. Others did not—Coalhouse, I imagine, was probably unique in his community being like, “I can buy this car. I’m going to. I believe that I will be treated fairly.” And then, “I'm gonna go and report this at the police station, and it will be taken seriously.” The elevation of his hope is in direct proportion to his downfall.
One of the great things about Encores! is that you get to see people do parts they could not otherwise play and show facets of themselves they can rarely show in their tracks on Broadway. For example, Nicholas Christopher was a revelation this year in Jelly’s Last Jam. And like in Into the Woods and Once Upon a Mattress, there are many principal roles in this show, so lots of actors are eager to be in them. The casting in Ragtime seems very fancy indeed.
Yes! [Laughs] They're so fabulous. And that is part of my secret sauce: Taking all these actors that I love so much and just imagining what it would be like to have all of them in a room together. So I’m drawn to that kind of show. I think actors in this company feel like, “I can't believe that we get to play together.” They just aren't in this situation normally. Many of our greatest musical theater actors are occupied with film and television, but the shortness of the process allows us to see people that maybe haven't gotten to see in a musical for a while.
It was the only place Patti LuPone did musicals for 25 years!
Totally. Yeah. When Into the Woods moved to Broadway, Heather Headley and Denée Benton and Neil Patrick Harris had TV shows, so none of those people were able to make the move. But we were able to find other glorious people! With that richness, a community is naturally created. And that’s another dream I had for Encores! that feels like it's coming to perfect fulfillment for me in this show. An actor's life has many things about it that can be soul-crushing, even for a very successful actor: the pressure of doing a commercial production that sits on your shoulders every day, the box office pressure and all the other pressures that come along with that. With Encores!, I feel like I get to invite people to come and remember why they wanted to do this originally—to just be with this material and be with each other and play. It's not a commercial production. You're not carrying that weight. Also, we have no time. So the only way this is happening is for every single person in this room to choose to lay down their stress and their anxiety and their self-consciousness and basically, like, hold hands and leap. And we are all gonna be terrified and it's gonna be glorious, and we're gonna have each other's backs. And it's remarkable how theater people are able to do that.
They have so many skills that they mostly don't get to use. I am always stunned at what the ensembles in these shows can pull together in so little time.
You will not believe the ensemble in Ragtime. Like every single one of these people is delivering at such a high level.
In a weird way, is the lack of time helpful? I know that in my own writing, I sometimes end up worrying things to death if I have too long to work on them.
There's something about, in a sense, good pressure, the good adrenaline. And also, I think that self-doubt cripples us in rehearsal processes often. You spend the first couple of weeks discovering, with actors making all these beautiful choices, and then often you lose almost the whole third week of rehearsal to self-doubt, when suddenly everybody is like, “I actually am not sure that that initial choice I made was right. Maybe it's a terrible choice!” And everybody has to go through this kind of dark night of the soul. But at Encores! we just end before that happens. [Laughs.] This whole process is really just about the leap, and people that have the unbelievable divine gifts to be able to do that.
Speaking of leaps, you’re about to take a big one when you take over at Lincoln Center Theater. We’re in the midst of a sea change wherein many of the biggest companies in town are changing leadership, often after long periods under the same leaders. In many cases there’s a big generational shift. I know it's very early in the game—and, as we were talking about earlier, any new artistic directorship is going to be transitional to some degree—but what are some of your initial impulses about what you want to accomplish at Lincoln Center?
For me, Lincoln Center with all the lights on is a palace for the people. It really is an artistic palace, and it is meant to be along the lines of the Rockefeller founding mission: not for the privileged few but for the many. I'm very committed to continuing the legacy of having new plays and new musicals, but also revivals and classics: being able to do all those different kinds of works underneath one umbrella with this big mandate of making it a place that is of service. Lincoln Center is a place where people can come and experience how exquisite the theatrical art form is—to say, Here's what the theater does, here's what's unique about the theater beside these other art forms. I’m honored and thrilled to live into that mission.
Lincoln Center is thought of, in certain circles, as a little bit snobby. How might that populist philosophy manifest itself in terms of your programming?
Of course, it will manifest itself in programming, but it's much deeper than programming. Before I was even doing Public Works, I had years of experiments that ended up arriving at the beta version of Public Works, so I've been working with and invested in these ideas for 20 years. What does it mean to have a theater in New York that can actually say, “This is for all New Yorkers”? There's a high bar; it's a high calling. But I totally believe it's possible, because the theatrical art form is an engine of empathy: It's literally imagining what it feels like to be another person, to be a person that's not you. My approach—and I hope my body of work speaks for itself—is not something grafted on in the last couple of years because in 2020 theaters had a crisis and realized something wasn't working. This has been my commitment. This is what I’ve believed in since I was like a little girl in Louisiana that wanted to run a theater company. And my ideas about it were shaped by things like Mardi Gras and church and football games—all these intergenerational and hugely diverse things. Those are foundational influences for me. But I love the legacy of what Lincoln Center has done, and I would never step into a job where I didn't have actual deep passionate love for what the theater was already doing. I think sometimes an artistic director comes in that doesn't care for what the theater has been before them, and that is the opposite of my situation. I love Lincoln Center and have had many of my greatest experiences as an audience member there. So I see this as a natural extension into the future.
Ragtime plays at New York City Center through November 10. You can buy tickets here. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
