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    Sutton Foster to Star in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ on Broadway

    The revival, which had an earlier run at New York City Center, is scheduled to open in August and close in November, followed by a run in Los Angeles.Sutton Foster, a classic Broadway triple threat beloved for her comedic skills and her big belt, will star this summer and fall in a Broadway revival of “Once Upon a Mattress.”The production had a brief and exuberantly received run earlier this year as part of the Encores! program at New York City Center, where the critic Elisabeth Vincentelli, writing for The New York Times, said Foster “makes a banquet of the material” and added that “Foster’s glee in taking possession of the stage creates an all-encompassing manic energy that both the audience and her scene partners feed off.”The musical, first staged in 1959, is loosely based on “The Princess and the Pea” fairy tale; Foster plays Princess Winnifred, a graceless minor royal who is a possible bride for a local prince. The role is a fun one for comedically gifted actresses — it was first played on Broadway by Carol Burnett, and then, in a 1996 revival, by Sarah Jessica Parker.The show features music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Marshall Barer. The original book was by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Barer; the current revival is a new adaptation by Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”).The revival is being directed by Lear deBessonet, who is the artistic director of the Encores! program. It is to begin previews July 31 and to open Aug. 12 at the Hudson Theater. The run is scheduled to end Nov. 30, and then to transfer to Los Angeles, where Foster will star in a four-week run, beginning Dec. 10, at Center Theater Group’s Ahmanson Theater.Foster, a two-time Tony Award winner, for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and a revival of “Anything Goes,” just wrapped up a three-month run in a revival of “Sweeney Todd” that she began five days after ending her two-week City Center run in “Mattress.”The “Mattress” revival is being produced by Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Creative Partners Productions (C. Graham Berwind III and Eleni Gianulis-Vermeer). More

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    ‘Young Sheldon’ Is One of TV’s Most Popular Shows. So Why Did It Just End?

    The “Big Bang Theory” spinoff aired its last episodes Thursday night, but the franchise will continue on CBS this fall.This article includes spoilers for the “Young Sheldon” series finale.In last week’s episode of the CBS sitcom “Young Sheldon,” a laid-back, beer-drinking Texas high school football coach named George Cooper (Lance Barber) says goodbye to his family and goes to work. He never comes home: George dies of a heart attack later that day. The tragedy sets up the series’ last two episodes, which premiered Thursday night on CBS: They are about what happens when someone so steady, so reliable and so unassuming is just … gone.A spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory,” the long-running CBS hit, “Young Sheldon” has been steady, reliable and unassuming over its seven seasons. This warm family sitcom, which fills in the back story of the “Big Bang Theory” breakout character Sheldon Cooper — played by Jim Parsons in the original and Iain Armitage in the prequel — has quietly been one of TV’s most-watched shows since it debuted in 2017.And now it, too, is gone. The series finale takes Sheldon from the small town of Medford, Texas, where he attended high school at 9 and college at 11 as his family tried to understand and accommodate his genius, to the California Institute of Technology, where “The Big Bang Theory” is set. The episode included appearances by Parsons and Mayim Bialik, whose character, Amy, marries Sheldon in the original show.The franchise will continue this fall with another spinoff: “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” It will follow Sheldon’s good ol’ boy older brother George Jr. (Montana Jordan) and his wife, Mandy (Emily Osment), as they raise their baby daughter.“Young Sheldon” was a smash from the start, and while its network TV audience has shrunk (just like most every other show’s), its episodes elsewhere have drawn newer, younger viewers. Reruns air on the cable network TBS almost daily. Netflix licensed the show late last year, and it has since appeared regularly on that service’s self-reported Top 10 most-streamed TV series.Yet despite its pervasiveness in TikTok memes, “Young Sheldon” has never been much of a cultural phenomenon. Television critics rarely write about it, and the Emmys have ignored it entirely — it has yet to get a single nomination. “The Big Bang Theory,” one of TV’s most-watched shows for much of its 12-season run, which ended in 2019, had a mixed critical reputation. But it did get press coverage, and was a legitimate Emmy contender, earning four nominations for best comedy series and picking up four wins for Parsons.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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    Does a Smash Hit Like ‘Lion King’ Deserve a $3 Million Tax Break?

    Broadway is still recovering from the pandemic. A state tax-credit program has helped, but watchdogs say it aids some shows that don’t need a boost.There is no greater success story on Broadway than “The Lion King.” It is reliably among the top-grossing stage shows in New York, where it has brought in nearly $2 billion over its 26-year run; its global total is five times that amount.The musical’s producer is the theatrical division of the Walt Disney Company, an entertainment industry behemoth that earned $89 billion in revenue during its last fiscal year.And yet, the show was one of roughly four dozen productions that have received millions of dollars in assistance from New York State under a program designed to help a pandemic-hobbled theater industry in New York City.Over the three years since the program was established, New York State has bestowed over $100 million on commercial Broadway productions.“The Lion King,” along with other juggernauts like “Aladdin,” “The Book of Mormon” and “Wicked,” each got the maximum $3 million subsidy.The program was initiated by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as theaters were nervously preparing to reopen after being shut for a year and a half. It was later tripled to $300 million by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is now considering whether to seek an extension when it expires next year.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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    Seth Meyers Slams Republicans Supporting Trump at His Trial

    Meyers joked that “sitting front row at the Trump trial must be like the MAGA version of sitting courtside at a Knicks game.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Character StudiesOn Thursday, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert were the latest Republican lawmakers to show up in support of former President Donald Trump at his criminal trial in New York.Seth Meyers joked that “sitting front row at the Trump trial must be like the MAGA version of sitting courtside at a Knicks game.”“Well, I get it. It’s good publicity for Boebert and good practice for Gaetz.” — SETH MEYERS“You see, Trump is under a gag order and can’t attack people involved in the case the way he wants to, so his workaround is to summon his army of puppets to do his bidding. The problem is character witnesses should be people of high character, not people of whom you would say ‘He’s a real character.’” — SETH MEYERS“If you’re on trial for a criminal charge where character is central to the case, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert aren’t exactly the role models you want with you in the room. That’s like if O.J.’s buddy at his trial were Charles Manson, Hannibal Lecter.” — SETH MEYERS“Got to say I’m surprised to see Lauren Boebert there. Not surprised she showed up, just surprised she hasn’t been kicked out yet. I mean, if you’re going to get handsy during a performance of ‘Beetlejuice: The Musical,’ I can’t imagine how turned on you’d get for a hush-money-to-a-porn-star trial.” — SETH MEYERS“Seriously, this is how grimy and pathetic the Republican Party has become. The only thing sadder than having to sit in a dreary New York City courtroom for your porn-star-hush-money trial is sitting in a dreary New York City courtroom for someone else’s porn-star hush money.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Ventriloquist Edition)“That’s right, Lauren Boebert was in the audience, so whoever sat next to her may end up with their own hush-money trial.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“They’re saying by next week Trump will run out of supporters and just show up with a ventriloquist dummy.” — JIMMY FALLON“Seriously, there are more Republican members of Congress at Trump’s criminal trial than there at the Capitol. Just going to throw this out there: Might be a good day to storm it.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingNorah Jones performed the song “Paradise” from her new album, “Visions,” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutJenny Holzer’s “For The Guggenheim,” 2008/2024, a nighttime light projection on the facade of the Guggenheim Museum, features spare, heartbreaking poetry by Wislawa Szymborska and other poets Holzer admires.Jenny Holzer/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Erik Sumption/ Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New YorkThe artist Jenny Holzer’s new career-spanning show at the Guggenheim, ”Light Line,” includes a new LED sign that scrolls up all six levels of the museum’s ramp. More

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    Samm-Art Williams, Playwright, Producer and Actor, Dies at 78

    He challenged racial barriers in Hollywood, was a producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and earned a Tony nomination for “Home,” a paean to his Southern roots.Samm-Art Williams, who made his mark in several fields — as an executive producer of the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as an actor on both stage and screen and as a Tony-nominated playwright for “Home,” died on Monday in Burgaw, N.C. He was 78.His death was confirmed by his cousin Carol Brown. She did not cite a cause.An imposing 6-foot-8 (a lefty, he once served as a sparring partner to Muhammad Ali), Mr. Williams appeared in films including Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and the Coen brothers’ neo-noir, “Blood Simple” (1984). He had a memorable turn as Jim in the 1986 adaptation of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” part of PBS’s “American Playhouse” series.Mr. Williams as Jim with Patrick Day in the 1986 television version of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”Everett CollectionCommitted to expanding the Black presence in Hollywood, he was both a writer and an executive producer on “Fresh Prince,” the hit 1990s NBC comedy starring Will Smith as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who moves in with his aunt and uncle in the moneyed hills of Los Angeles.He also served as a writer and a producer on the television shows “Martin” and “Frank’s Place.” He was nominated for two Emmy Awards — for his work as a writer on “Motown Returns to the Apollo” in 1985 and a producer of “Frank’s Place” in 1988.Raised in Burgaw, a former railroad town north of Wilmington, N.C., he moved to New York in 1973 to pursue a career in acting. It was his wistfulness for his small Southern hometown that inspired “Home,” a production of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company that opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in Manhattan six years later before moving to Broadway.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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    ‘Past Lies’ on Hulu Is a Swirly Spanish Mystery

    The drama is the latest mystery about a group of now-grown women haunted by their teenage pasts.Elena Anaya, left, and Itziar Atienza star in the Spanish drama “Past Lies.”HuluGather ’round, old friends, for it is time to recall the big, terrible event of that night long ago — that night when we swore a solemn oath to bury this secret, and yet now, somehow, perhaps 20 full years later, the horror of it still affects us all! Why must every group have a prodigal troublemaker whose return dredges up these old memories? Can we not leave the past in the past? Maybe our recollections differ — we can confront this in flashback, or maybe just in the pounding rain. The first person who cries and says “But she was our friend!” loses.“Past Lies,” a six-part Spanish drama (in Spanish, with subtitles, under its original title, “Las Sambras Largas,” or dubbed) on Hulu, is the latest swirly mystery about a group of now-grown women haunted by their teenage pasts. “Lies,” though, is more frank than much of its brethren, more streamlined and grounded.Rita (Elena Anaya) is a well-known film director who reluctantly returns to her hometown, Alicante, Spain, to settle her mother’s estate. Despite initial dodges and awkwardness, she winds up folded back into her high school clique, starting with a brittle dinner party. The different kinds of hugs Rita exchanges with each of these former friends is one of the juiciest, most detailed scenes I’ve seen in ages — decades of longing and disappointment depicted in the twist of one shoulder blade.The reunion becomes even more strained when the police identify the remains of Mati, a classmate who vanished during a senior trip to Mallorca. Mati’s younger sister, Paula (Irene Escolar), is one of the investigators, though it’s hard to imagine how she finds time for police work when she is so busy scowling and chewing gum. Paula is convinced these women know more than they’re telling her, and she’ll comb through home videos the girls shot as teens to prove it.Part of what makes “Past Lies” intriguing, beyond its appealing chicness and gorgeous setting, is that the central mystery is not one agreed-upon lie. The women each have different suspicions, different secrets they wanted to keep back in the day or maintain now. The show is a saga not about simmering teenage blood lust or the freaky, warped horrors of girldom, but rather about the natural contours of regrets, the bittersweetness of regarding one’s youthful passions. More

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    Why Are Nuns Either Saintly, Seductive or Sadistic?

    In uncertain times, religious sisters are often invoked as vessels for collective doubt.From Chaucer’s supercilious Madame Eglantine in “The Canterbury Tales,” with her spoiled lap dogs and secular French airs, to Ryan Murphy’s ruthless Sister Jude in 2012’s “American Horror Story: Asylum,” a woman who wears a red negligee under her habit and is not above indulging in some communion wine, fictional portrayals of nuns have long captured and confounded the imagination. How could it be otherwise? The sisters’ vows of chastity and poverty and the air of secrecy that shrouds their cloistered lives are all intriguingly antithetical to modern Western values of sex, money and fame. Many of us have also encountered nuns in our actual lives — I spent much of fourth grade facing a corner of the classroom at the punitive behest of Sister Rosalia — and are left with what I’d call a primal fascination. But if the aesthetic interest in nuns is an enduring one, it’s also true that every few years, like fashion trends or viral flus, nuns have a particularly concentrated cultural moment. We’re living in one now.Perhaps the starkest, knottiest contemporary depiction of nuns is the playwright John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable.” First staged on Broadway in 2005, it recently wrapped another run there, directed by Scott Ellis. (Three of the cast members have been nominated for Tony Awards.) The play tells the story of the iron-fisted Sister Aloysius (Amy Ryan in Ellis’s revival), the principal of a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, who, based on the hunch of a guileless novice, Sister James (Zoe Kazan), accuses Father Flynn, the parish priest (Liev Schreiber), of making advances toward the school’s only Black student (whose mother was played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine). It’s a detective drama with no resolution, a morality tale with an insoluble ambiguity at its heart. Ellis says he was drawn to stage the play because its titular emotion feels more crucial than ever in our increasingly polarized world. “Given everything that we are in society right now, the black and white of it all, the red and the blue,” he says, “doubt is the most important place to live.”Liev Schreiber as Father Flynn (left) and Amy Ryan as Sister Aloysius in the recent Broadway production of “Doubt: A Parable” by John Patrick Shanley.Joan Marcus/Polk & Co., via Associated PressRebecca Sullivan, the author of the 2005 book “Visual Habits: Nuns, Feminism and American Postwar Popular Culture,” says that “in times of deep doubt,” we tend to see cultural representations of nuns crop up. She notes that the cascade of nunsploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s — a campy, provocative, mostly European cinematic subgenre in which nuns are sexualized, tortured or possessed — occurred at a time of great social upheaval. Second-wave feminism was afoot, secularism was on the rise and the Second Vatican Council, held between 1962 and ’65, had ushered in numerous church reforms: Nuns, for example, were encouraged to get out of the convent and serve the community and were no longer required to wear habits. The liminal status of sisters — they were independent women who also exhibited a “subversive subservience,” as Sullivan puts it, to a patriarchal institution — made them rich and complex symbols, ciphers for exploring the era’s feelings about women at large.We’re in another profound moment of disruption, particularly when it comes to women’s rights and roles: Roe v. Wade has been overturned; tradwifery is a trend. And thus we’ve seen a new spate of arty nunsploitation films, with “Immaculate” (2024), starring Sydney Sweeney, being the latest. (Others include Paul Verhoeven’s 2021 erotic lesbian nun satire, “Benedetta,” and Rose Glass’s taut 2019 psychosexual horror, “Saint Maud.”) Directed by Michael Mohan, “Immaculate” follows a devout Midwestern novice, Sister Cecilia, who arrives at a gloomy convent in the remote Italian countryside and mysteriously becomes pregnant, leaving church elders to conclude that she’s carrying the savior. In a turn reminiscent of “Rosemary’s Baby,” the sinister Father Tedeschi more or less imprisons Cecilia in the dark, labyrinthine building. For all its gory, sexy-nun fun, the film raises all-too-familiar questions about female bodily autonomy in oppressive male institutions. But this nun, a feminist heroine for the 21st century, is the agent of her own destiny: Unlike so many sisters in the first wave of nunsploitation films, she frees herself.Cate Blanchett and Aswan Reid in the 2023 film “The New Boy.”via Cannes Film FestivalWe 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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    ‘Terraces’ Review: A Stunning Tragedy Revisits the Paris Terror Attacks

    The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.Outdoor cafe terraces are part and parcel of the Parisian way of life — ready meeting points for socializing and people-watching, across ages and social classes. Yet the word for them in French also means to floor, or bring down, someone.On Nov. 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, bringing horror to cafes and entertainment venues in a string of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a prominent French author and playwright, has channeled the collective trauma of that night into a stunning play, “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.If you were in the city that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from relatives and friends as news alerts pinged, the prospect of a show summoning those memories may be cause for trepidation. And “Terraces” does bring it all back — the gut punch, the nausea. Yet Gaudé and the director, Denis Marleau, manage just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to haunt rather than reopen wounds.It isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays have focused on the stories of survivors.With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé works on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: The text weaves together not just the experience of victims, but the voices of people whose lives changed in other ways that night. Passers-by, spouses, parents, emergency medical workers, special forces and a janitor all make appearances, with stories that overlap and build up to a collective remembrance of the attack.Extensive research evidently went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t fit neatly into the genre of documentary theater. Its characters are composite creations rather than real people: Many introduce themselves under several names and stress that theirs are collective stories. While some characters pop up time and again over the course of the play, they often occupy a liminal space between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other shootings or speaking from beyond the grave.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