30 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
rooms. There was an infectious this-is-
gonna-be-great vibe, as if a bunch of
kids were setting up a back-yard spook-
house. The attention to detail was im-
pressive. A young woman with a paint-
brush, Alyssa Najafi, daubed a chain-link
fence with a gunky greenish-brown sub-
stance. “I’m grossing the fence up, be-
cause in an apocalypse no one is clean-
ing things,” she said, brightly. She showed
a colleague how to weather a stop sign
with a jackknife. Backstage, her husband,
Sohail Najafi, who owns a company that
does lighting and production design,
opened a tool case. Inside was a tangle
of wiring and circuitry—it resembled
a nuclear-bomb detonator from a spy
movie—that controlled the Experience’s
sound and light cues, as well as “gags”
like the hissing oxygen tanks, which were
real. Sohail Najafi emphasized that an
experiential-marketing experience can’t
rely on the “twenty-five-foot rule of the-
atre,” a reference to an audience’s distance
from the stage and a designer’s atten-
dant license for fakery. “People are going
to interact with this on a very intimate
level,” he said, mentioning the various
knobs, dials, and valves with which guests
would have to grapple.
This raised an interesting question
that no one was too eager to address.
On background, it was explained that
the Experience’s many surfaces would
be wiped down with disinfectant after
every group of three guests had gone
through. Purell would be available. But
the word “coronavirus” was one more
sound that the “A Quiet Place Part II”
Survival Experience was hoping would
be hushed. There are scares, and then
there are scares.
—Bruce Handy
1
THEBOARDS
THEPRINCESSWORKOUT
S
o you’re going to be a princess. Feli-
cidades! Now get to work. You have
a public to win over, and stuffy new in-
laws to impress. There are practical mat-
ters, too. After Kate Middleton’s engage-
ment to Prince William, she got busy
choosing a wedding gown and presid-
Jeanna de Waal
liams and her husband do three times a
week. Originally called Yoga for Danc-
ers, it was created by Juliu Horvath, a
Romanian-born dancer who had rup-
tured his Achilles tendon while perform-
ing with the Houston Ballet. He moved
to the Virgin Islands and developed his
method, living in a mountain hut. Then
he opened a practice in Chelsea, at a stu-
dio called White Cloud, “which sounds
very culty, but it’s not,” an instructor
named Abbe Ouziel said. She and de
Waal were at a bustling Upper West Side
branch, upstairs from a ramen place. Gy-
rotonic, Ouziel explained, has special-
ized techniques for golfers, equestrians,
and pregnant women. De Waal’s was her
first customized princess workout.
Ouziel led her to a contraption called
the Cobra, part of the Gyrotonic Ex-
pansion System. De Waal, who wore
black workout gear that matched her nail
polish, straddled the seat. She arched her
back and spread her arms in a breast-
stroke motion, clutching stirrup handles.
“Take in a nice big inhale, and on the
exhale unwind your spine,” Ouizel said.
“Woo!” de Waal said, feeling dizzy.
“So much oxygen to the brain!”
Next, she lay on her back, her feet fas-
tened to a pulley system, and stretched
out her legs with frog kicks, scissor for-
mations, and figure eights. “I feel like I’m
the producers’ racehorse,” she said. “ ‘She’s
massaged and moisturized and she’s ready
for the race!’” Ouziel rolled out a royal-
looking paisley yoga mat, and de Waal
put on a pair of platform heels and prac-
ticed her stance. “Make sure your shoul-
ders are over your hips,” Ouziel advised,
as de Waal yanked on the pulleys. Fi-
nally, Ouziel placed a weighted disk on
de Waal’s head. “When I take the weight
off, you want to keep that sensation of
reaching up through the crown of your
head,” Ouziel said.
Afterward, de Waal headed to the
Longacre Theatre. She was born in Ba-
varia, to a South African father and a
British mother, and moved to Solihull,
a town near Birmingham, England, when
she was six. Princess Diana died three
years later. “I have a memory of being
woken up and my grandma being very
upset, and it being on the telly all day,”
she recalled. At the theatre, she went up
to her dressing room and practiced her
princess gait in a pair of tan costume
heels, trying to look placid. Diana, too,
ing over official functions, such as the
naming of a lifeboat in North Wales.
Meghan Markle had to sort out her im-
migration forms and convert to the An-
glican Church. “The biggest adjustment
is not being able to do what you like
when you like,” Dickie Arbiter, a former
press secretary to Queen Elizabeth II,
said recently. “You can’t suddenly decide,
Oh, I’m going to go out to the shops.”
The actress Jeanna de Waal is in her
princess-preparation phase, as the star
of the new Broadway musical “Diana.”
De Waal, who is thirty-one, has been
working on the role for two years. She
spent hours listening to Princess Diana’s
interviews on YouTube, to master her
posh speech, and read Andrew Morton’s
biography “probably ten times,” she said.
But the biggest challenge was physical.
“I tend to have bad posture,” de Waal,
who began her career in the Queen mu-
sical “We Will Rock You,” said. (The di-
rector Des McAnuff once told her, “Your
posture’s holding you back, dear.”) The
real Diana attended the Institut Alpin
Videmanette, a finishing school in Swit-
zerland. She was five-ten, and de Waal
is five-four, so the production designed
her special shoes with hidden platforms—
which make maintaining her royal bear-
ing even more of a challenge. “When
you’re trying to portray a painful moment
at home, or nursing a baby, you don’t
want people to be, like, ‘She looks like
she’s in stripper heels,’” de Waal said.
Last summer, one of the show’s pro-
ducers, Beth Williams, told her about
Gyrotonic, an exercise program that Wil-
