Eliana Willis

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    in Theater

    Blue Man Group’s 34-Year New York Run Comes to an End

    After 17,800 shows and 82,150 gallons of paint, Blue Man Group is hanging up its bald caps at the Astor Place Theater for good on Sunday. It arrived there in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, cellphones were rare and the World Wide Web was two years away. (The group’s first profile in The New York Times existed only on paper.) In the generation since, the trio of hairless, earless, silent, blue-and-black clad performers, who spit paint and sculpt marshmallows, gobble Twinkies and drum in primary colors, unexpectedly became a culture-infiltrating sensation.They achieved this — along with shows in more than a dozen cities across the globe, multiple concert tours, three studio albums, a Grammy nomination, many TV appearances, a book and one indelible sitcom story line — without changing much about their approach. Throughout one of the longest runs in Off Broadway history, they remained proudly on the silly side of performance art. Even without a narrative, they also connected viscerally with audiences, earning a legion of megafans. “We love the idea of a show that is sublime and ridiculous,” said Chris Wink, one of the founding performers.Blue Man Group, which has been owned by Cirque du Soleil since 2017, is not disappearing: long-running shows remain open in Boston, Las Vegas and Berlin, and a return gig is planned for Orlando, Fla. But closing the New York production, where it all began — along with another decades-old production in Chicago — is the end of a chapter. (In a statement, a spokeswoman said Cirque du Soleil was proud of Blue Man Group’s track record, and that it made the “difficult decision” to shutter after “we re-evaluated our current standings.” After declaring bankruptcy in 2020, Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based live entertainment behemoth, is controlled by private equity firms.)Paint gets everywhere, often by design and to the delight of fans.The splatter has built up on lighting equipment over the years.Emerging from the East Village arts scene, the original Blue Man Group served as a monument to possibility: D.I.Y. creativity — or unfettered lunacy — could still flourish in New York. That for 34 years it occupied the same bit of desirable real estate, near the downtown mecca of Astor Place, and across from the landmark Public Theater, gave it a stately foundation — even if its 281-seat subterranean space was, almost by design, a little dank. Photos of the bald and the blue loomed outside, part of the urban architecture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Review: In ‘Common Side Effects,’ It’s Fungus vs. Them

    A weird, deadpan animated thriller finds a new timeliness in ancient medicine.From “The Last of Us” to athlete’s foot commercials, fungus does not have the best of reputations on television. But what if it could save us all?“Common Side Effects,” a wryly funny animated conspiracy thriller beginning Sunday on Adult Swim, suggests that not everybody would be pleased.Marshall Cuso (Dave King), an eccentric environmentalist and self-employed scientist, discovers a rare mushroom on an expedition to Peru. The fungus, a ghostly specimen called the Blue Angel, can cure almost any illness and heal seemingly fatal injuries — including the ones Marshall sustains when he is attacked by gunmen immediately after making his discovery.Back in the States, pursued by the Drug Enforcement Administration and other, more mysterious figures, Marshall runs into Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), his former school lab partner who is now unhappily working for a pharmaceutical giant. Together, they make a pact to bring the magic mushroom to the people and protect it from the forces who would like to erase all traces of its existence.Who are those forces? Them. And who’s them? “Big Pharma, the insurance companies, the government,” Marshall explains. “All the people who make tons of money just from keeping us sick.”A figure like Marshall — nerdy, neckbearded, with a prominent belly hanging from his Hawaiian shirt and one big theory that explains it all — would usually be portrayed on TV as, at best, a well-meaning kook, a side character who exists for laughs and exposition. Even in the conspiracy-riddled world of “The X-Files,” he would be more of a Lone Gunman than a Fox Mulder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Forget the Punchline. It’s the Setup to These Jokes That’s Tricky.

    Ronny Chieng, Gary Gulman and other comics are experimenting with long buildups that can be audacious … when they work.A joke can be broken down into two sections: The setup, which isn’t necessarily funny, and the punchline, which better be.Facing a crowd that’s looking to laugh, comics tend to want to get to the payoff as quickly as possible. But there is a rich tradition of jokes that move in the opposite direction, where part of what’s funny is that the setup keeps going and going, long past what you expect.The most famous example might be the Aristocrats, the rare joke that inspired its own documentary. An old bit, it begins with a setup about family members trying to get an agent to book their act and its humor tends to be fundamentally dirty and gratuitous. But in the last year, some of the most ambitious new hours have used the long setup to develop more rarefied kinds of jokes, formally inventive, experimental and very funny.Witness the magnificently unusual joke midway through Ronny Chieng’s recent special, “Love to Hate It” (Netflix), which begins with him trying to find common ground with the MAGA movement, saying its supporters have a point that the country has problems. Slowing his aggressive rat-a-tat delivery, he lists evidence of decline — bad health-care outcomes, wealth inequality — and just when you expect a punchline to lighten the mood, he gets even more serious.Ronny Chieng kills with the long form in “Love to Hate It.”NetflixAdopting the tone of a politician, he says that we did not fulfill the implicit promise that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could make it. At this point, the comedy seems to have ground to a halt. It’s also when Chieng’s pace shifts, from slow and deliberate to pointedly sped up as he rapidly unspools a grand unified theory. The tempo of his hard-to-follow chatter, which covers tax and trade policy, among other economic minutiae, indicates a departure from logical argument and a venture into the ridiculous. It recalls how everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Benny Hill has used fast forward to create comedy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    Idina Menzel Played Elphaba and Elsa. Now She’s Back on Broadway.

    Menzel, a fan favorite since “Rent,” is back on Broadway in “Redwood,” and this time she’s climbing conifers.Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryNo matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.Menzel had her breakout role in “Rent,” top left, and then won a Tony in “Wicked,” top right. Her other stage roles have included the Off Broadway play “Skintight,” bottom right, and the Broadway musical “If/Then,” bottom left.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof’

    In a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, a woman rehearses how she would escape her building if Israeli forces were to strike.There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israel Defense Forces attacked it.“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Kara Young, a Tony-Winning Actress, Spends Her Sundays

    Kara Young spends a rare day off brunching with her family in Harlem and popping into beauty supply stores along 125th Street.Many actors have to leave their support systems behind when they set out to follow their Broadway dreams.But Kara Young, a Tony Award-winning actress who grew up on the west side of Harlem — and lives just three blocks from where she was born — has been able to share her success with the community that raised her.Ms. Young, whose parents immigrated from Belize, attended elementary school and high school in Spanish Harlem, the neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan known for its Puerto Rican culture. “It’s a super beautiful community,” she said.“But at the same time,” she added, “I recognize that I’ve been privileged to be able to stay in the community I grew up in. Gentrification is real.”It was at the 92nd Street Y, she said, that she first became hooked on theater. Her older brother, Klay, was taking a mime class as part of an after-school program — and a 5-year-old Ms. Young knew she wanted in.Soon she was performing with the other students around Manhattan, and “that set off my imagination,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    Jimmy Fallon Makes His Broadway Debut in “All In”

    The “Tonight Show” host is performing in the new comedy “All In,” which features a starry cast. “It’s a dream,” he said.Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night. “It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”Fallon, backstage with one of his co-stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda.Graham Dickie/The New York Times“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

    The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More