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    ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Is Now a Play in London’s West End

    Much has changed for L.G.B.T.Q. people since Annie Proulx’s short story was published in 1997. But a new theatrical version is a reminder that homophobia is far from over.In 2016, when the theater director Jonathan Butterell was considering a proposal to adapt Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story “Brokeback Mountain” for the stage, he wondered how to translate the prose’s vast landscape and insular emotions into a play.Last month, in a central London rehearsal studio, Butterell and Ashley Robinson, who wrote the play, tried to answer that question. To help the cast connect with Proulx’s story of a cowboy and a ranch hand falling in love against the wide-stretching landscapes of 1960s Wyoming, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls during rehearsals.“The vastness has been there from the very beginning,” Butterell said in a recent interview. When it came to evoking the story’s emotional landscape, the director had stuck one sepia-toned photograph, of a lone cowboy in a snow-covered Wyoming, behind a pillar. The image “speaks to the bit of us that feels alone in the world,” Butterell said. “Maybe he’s at peace with this, maybe it’s the source of his agony.”Butterell’s “Brokeback Mountain” opened in previews May 10 at @sohoplace in London’s West End. It’s the first time the story has been adapted for theater — an opera by Charles Wuorinen premiered in Madrid in 2014 — and each version now follows in the footsteps of Proulx’s text and the film that popularized it: Ang Lee’s 2005 Academy Award-winning adaptation, which is often cited as one of the best L.G.B.T.Q. films of all time.Faist, left, and Hedges at @sohoplace. During rehearsals, black-and-white photographs of American plains and mountain ranges were tacked to the walls.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesButterell said he was aware of his audience having expectations based on the film. “They’re inevitable,” he said, “but I don’t mind that.”This theatrical version also has some Hollywood clout. Its lead characters, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, are played by the BAFTA-nominated actor Mike Faist and the Oscar-nominated actor Lucas Hedges.In late 2016, Robinson first wrote a treatment for what he called a “memory play” based on the short story, after speaking with the composer Dan Gillespie Sells and Butterell. Robinson’s script stated that the Wyoming setting should not be conveyed “in a purely literal sense,” and his story is set in 2013, with an older version of del Mar reflecting on the years he spent with Twist between 1963 and 1983.Proulx approved of Robinson’s vision. She has “high hopes for the play,” she said in a recent email interview. “When I read Ashley’s script several years ago, I thought he had done a fine job.”In Proulx’s story, del Mar and Twist’s interior worlds are conveyed by an omniscient narrator. In the stage adaptation, music does much of that work.“These two men can’t sing,” Gillespie Sells said, because “they don’t have an emotional dialogue.” Instead, a character called The Balladeer — played by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader — sings with an onstage country and western band. “She takes us through time,” Butterell said. “Sometimes it’s from night to day. Sometimes it’s 10 years.”“Brokeback Mountain” will be the first time its two lead actors have appeared onstage in five years. Faist, who plays Twist, originated the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway, and has had more recent success in film, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 remake of “West Side Story.”Hedges “hadn’t acted in a while” when he was sent the script, he said, having been focusing on writing instead. The “Brokeback” offer and playing del Mar changed that. “There wasn’t an angle I didn’t love about this,” he said.“As terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” Faist, left, said of the production.Shona LouiseAs the project entered its final week of rehearsals, both actors were grappling with the process in different ways. Hedges said he was experiencing “tragic and triumphant ups and downs” about his own work. “I have a day where I think I’ve figured it all out, and then a day when it all disappears,” he said. The “collective experience” of theater was daunting compared to working in film, he said, adding that onstage, “I can’t use tricks to make it through.”Faist concurred: “It’s a challenge, and it’s terrifying,” mainly because of the expectations of having to match the source material and 2005 film, he said. “But as terrifying and frustrating as it is, I really am having the time of my life,” he added.Butterell said that Faist and Hedges were “as men, as actors, very different creatures.” Faist, he said, had “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Hedges “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Neither Hedges, Faist nor Butterell had revisited Lee’s film since they were approached for the project. “The truth of the matter is, no matter what, he’s not Heath Ledger and I’m not Jake Gyllenhaal,” Faist said of the film’s two lead stars, who both earned Oscar nominations for their performances. He and Hedges, Faist added, would both bring their “own weird things” to the roles.The production has forced Faist to confront his “traumas,” he said. “We can take those traumas, turn them around,” he added, and, he hopes, make the audience “think deeply about their own lives.”Following the success of the “Brokeback Mountain” film, Proulx said fans of her text sent her fan fiction that rewrote the ending of her short story, claiming the original was too sad. She told the The Paris Review that those fans had “misunderstood” the story and stated that it was, most importantly, about “homophobia.”Jonathan Butterell, the play’s director, said his two lead actors had different strengths: Faist, left, has “a sense of life and vivacity,” while Lucas, right, “has this deeply complex interior landscape that’s very much of Ennis.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThis is the first adaptation of “Brokeback” to be released since the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all 50 U.S. states. Robinson — who lives in Brooklyn but was raised in the tiny town of Lockhart, S.C. — said he wrote it to remind audiences that gay trauma still exists.“These stories aren’t necessarily being told anymore because of a trend to put onstage what we want the world to be,” he said, referring to the theater community. “That’s a wonderful thing to do, but we shouldn’t cancel out all of the opportunities to talk about what’s going on underneath it.”Butterell added that the fight against homophobia was “not over” in Britain either, citing a recent spike in the number of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. people.“This is a tragedy,” Butterell said of the play. “Of course love exists — I don’t want it to be solemn — but the tragedy of this piece is that fear wins.” More

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    Jacklyn Zeman, Nurse Bobbie on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 70

    , She played the same role on the popular soap opera for nearly half a century and was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards.Jacklyn Zeman, an Emmy-nominated actress who for nearly a half-century played the role of Bobbie Spencer, a nurse on the long-running soap opera “General Hospital,” died on Tuesday in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at Los Robles Regional Medical Center, came after a “short battle” with cancer, according to her family.In announcing Ms. Zeman’s death on Wednesday, the show’s executive producer, Frank Valentini, wrote on Twitter, “Just like her character, the legendary Bobbie Spencer, she was a bright light and true professional that brought so much positive energy with her to work.”As Barbara Jean (Bobbie) Spencer, Ms. Zeman was among the longest-lasting cast members on the series, which since 1963 has centered around the lives of characters who work in the hospital and in the wealthy business community in the fictional New York town of Port Charles. Ms. Zeman first appeared on the show in 1977 and was featured in nearly 900 episodes.Bobbie was a student nurse who had moved on from her past life as a prostitute who gave up a baby for adoption in Florida; vied for the affections of a law student named Scotty Baldwin; and was the younger sister of Luke Spencer, played by Anthony Geary.She portrayed her character as a loving but tough nurse who had emerged from a difficult past. In one scene, she defends her hard-knocks upbringing to Mr. Baldwin, saying she never had anything handed to her.“I wanted Bobbie to be bouncy and have a positive aura and energy,” she said in an interview last year with TV Insider. “I wanted her to have intelligence, humor and a love of people. Bobbie came from a dysfunctional background but she wanted to have kids and be a mother.”“I wanted the character to be perky and to come in like a hurricane,” she said.Ms. Zeman was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on the show and received a fifth nomination in 2021 for her acting on the television series “The Bay.”Jacklyn Lee Zeman was born on March 6, 1953, in Englewood, N.J., and grew up in Bergenfield. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Richard Zeman, an engineer with IBM, and Rita (Duhart) Zeman Rohlman, who worked for Scholastic Magazine.She began training in ballet at the age of 5, said Cassidy Zee Macleod, one of Ms. Zeman’s two daughters. When she was 15, she moved to New York City to pursue dancing and attended New York University briefly, Ms. Macleod said. She was cast as Lana McLain in 1976 on “One Life to Live” before her move to “General Hospital” in 1977.In addition to Ms. Macleod and Lacey Rose Gorden, another daughter whom she had with her third husband, Glenn Gorden (they divorced in 2007), Ms. Zeman is survived by two sisters, Lauren Fischetti and Carol Kolb, and two grandchildren. In April, “General Hospital” celebrated 60 years on the air. Ms. Macleod said that one of her mother’s last appearances was on the show’s nurses’ ball in April.Ms. Macleod said that her mother, who lived in Calabasas, Calif., adored the “strong-willed” role of Bobbie and that she and her sister recognized how deeply their mother’s role had affected people when some of the nurses caring for her described how Bobbie had inspired them.“We recognized how many lives she touched,” said Ms. Macleod. “They said they became nurses because of her.” More

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    Review: At ‘Tartuffe’ in the Park, Hypocrisy Is No Picnic

    The 17th-century play, staged by the theater company Molière in the Park, skewers those who preach morality yet practice anything but.I like to think that Molière, the great French playwright who died in 1673, would have really enjoyed the flagrant hypocrisy of our current political moment. Each month seems to bring new duplicities and new scandals, lies big and small — the résumés embroidered like Rococo tapestries, the lawmakers endorsing conspiracy theories to boost their careers. A devotee of prevarication and double-dealing, Molière would have made the most, in three acts, of stories like these. In some ways and in multiple plays, he already has. More than 350 years dead, he can seem effortlessly, wickedly contemporary.But a current production of “Tartuffe,” presented by the theater company Molière in the Park, drawing from the playwright’s original version, takes a different approach. A cause célèbre in 1664 when it was written, the play was quickly banned by an archbishop with a limited sense of humor. It skewers not only those who preach morality while practicing alternatives, but also the toadies and dupes who keep people like that in power. Sounds pertinent, doesn’t it? This slick, streamlined production, however, staged outdoors in Prospect Park by the director Lucie Tiberghien, is so busy stomping around its small stage that it never reaches out into the present.The English-language premiere, which credits Maya Slater as its translator, has simplified the original, reducing the number of characters and mostly dispensing with the third act. When “Tartuffe or The Hypocrite” begins, Tartuffe (Matthew Rauch, oilier than a perfect New York slice), a priestly figure, is already installed in the home of Orgon (Yonatan Gebeyehu), a wealthy man. Orgon’s wife, Elmire (Michelle Veintimilla), and his son and brother-in-law all see through Tartuffe, but Orgon and his mother refuse to believe ill of him. Eventually, Tartuffe propositions Elmire. But even this doesn’t sway Orgon. He would rather disinherit his own family than believe his own wife.Molière in the Park first staged “Tartuffe” nearly three years ago, with a different cast and using a different translation. That was a pioneering work of Zoom theater, presented back when most of us were still figuring out how to use the mute button. (A live version, with a somewhat changed cast, followed a year later.) In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the streamed show “full of delight for our undelightful time” and praised the production’s allusions to the Trump White House and Black Lives Matter. So how strange that this production, despite its modern dress, resists contemporary allusion entirely, reducing “Tartuffe” to a pedestrian domestic farce.Under Tiberghien’s direction, the play begins in high energy and high dudgeon, with most of the characters racing around the stage — a square set atop another square — and speaking couplets speedily, long before the audience has any understanding of what’s what and who’s who. That stage is plopped into the middle of a circular plaza at the park’s LeFrak Center, which serves as an ice-skating rink in the winter and a splash pad in the summer. The play, which is relentlessly interior, seems disconnected from this environment.And at the matinee I saw, it failed to connect with its audience — or at least the several dozen middle school students in attendance, who napped, whispered, fidgeted and surreptitiously checked phones. Teenagers are, like Molière, keen to discover and condemn adult duplicity. But barring a slow-motion sequence at the play’s end, they found little to divert or engage them. As both teenagers and headline readers know, we are in a moment of pervasive political and religious insincerity. Someone should tell this “Tartuffe.”Tartuffe or The HypocriteThrough May 27 at the Prospect Park LeFrak Center, Brooklyn; moliereinthepark.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    ‘Bad Cinderella’ to Close on Broadway, Ending Lloyd Webber’s Streak

    When it concludes on June 4, an unbroken string of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows since 1979 will come to an end. His latest opened only in March.“Bad Cinderella,” a revisionist riff on the classic fairy tale, will close on June 4, bringing to an end, at least for the time being, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 43-year-long streak of shows on Broadway.The latest musical, which opened March 23, was not the pinnacle of that career — it was greeted on Broadway by hostile reviews, garnered zero Tony nominations and struggled at the box office. Last week it played to houses that were only 54 percent full and grossed just $326,303, which made it the lowest-grossing musical on Broadway.It had fared slightly better in London, and not just because “bad” was not part of the title there — critics had looked on it more favorably when it opened in the West End after multiple pandemic-related delays, but it had only a modest run and a closing clouded by the way the cast was informed and some of the words Lloyd Webber used to describe the turn of events.The musical is, like most Cinderella stories, about a shabbily treated young woman whose fortunes change when she meets a prince. The twists, in this production, are that the protagonist is rebellious, Prince Charming is gay, and beauty standards are oppressive.In addition to music by Lloyd Webber, who is best known as the wildly successful composer of hit musicals like “Cats,” “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” the musical features a book created by Emerald Fennell (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman”) and then adapted by the playwright Alexis Scheer (“Our Dear Dead Drug Lord”), and lyrics by David Zippel (who won a Tony years ago for writing the lyrics for “City of Angels”). “Bad Cinderella” is directed by Laurence Connor, who previously enjoyed more success directing Lloyd Webber’s 2015 musical, “School of Rock.”“Bad Cinderella” was capitalized for up to $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. The musical’s lead producer is Christine Schwarzman, a lawyer; together she and her husband, the Blackstone billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, are major players in New York financial and philanthropic circles. Christine Schwarzman has become increasingly active as a producer on Broadway through her production company, No Guarantees; she is also a lead producer of “Fat Ham,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama and is nominated for the best play Tony Award.At the time of its closing, “Bad Cinderella” will have played 33 preview performances and 85 regular performances. More

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    ‘Daddy’ Review: Deeper Into the Internet’s Darkest Corners

    In Marion Siéfert’s much-anticipated new show, the French director explores the dynamics of online grooming.The French stage director Marion Siéfert has her finger on the pulse of our digital lives. In “2 or 3 Things I Know About You,” she playfully tackled oversharing on Facebook, before turning to the perils of online streaming in “_jeanne_dark_” — a show that fell foul of Instagram’s moderation policies when it was relayed live on the platform.With “Daddy,” a sharp, no-holds-barred new production at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, in Paris, Siéfert has ventured even further into the internet’s dark corners. In it, a 13-year-old is groomed online by an older man and gets lost in a virtual reality game that exploits teenage girls for profit.It also marks a new stage in Siéfert’s career. “Daddy” is her first big-budget production for a major playhouse, and one of the Paris season’s most anticipated premieres. So Siéfert is swinging much bigger, on every level: larger cast, more atmospheric sets and a somewhat indulgent running time of three and a half hours. Yet her biting originality remains intact.Reality is no match for screen entertainment in “Daddy.” The central character, Mara, is a quiet teenager from southern France. A subtly written scene, early on, introduces her family: Her parents, a nurse and a security guard, are too exhausted by their poorly paid jobs to devote much attention to their daughters. It’s no surprise that whenever she can, Mara escapes to the brighter landscape of online gaming.In an unnamed video game, she joins Julien, a smooth-talking 27-year-old who is her frequent online partner in crime. The easy intimacy they have built is showcased through a spectacular video sequence: On a screen the size of the Odéon’s stage, we see a 3-D game designed by the video artist Antoine Briot in which Mara and Julien’s avatars who shoot at enemies with assault rifles before hopping on fluorescent skateboards.Throughout, we hear Mara and Julien banter over their headsets. “You’re the most badass girl in this game,” Julien says.The groundwork is laid for the abusive dynamic that ensues. When they first meet outside the game, on a video call, Mara confides in Julien that she dreams of being an actress. He compliments her, and tells her about “Daddy” — a new game that allows players, Julien says, to become avatars sponsored by sugar daddies, and showcase their talents to a “fan base.”Peres, right, has appeared in several French television shows and movies; Houel is a newcomer to professional acting.Mathieu BareyreSiéfert has a knack for assembling captivatingly unconventional actors, and just as “_jeanne_dark_” was tailor-made for Helena de Laurens, a shape-shifter unafraid to lean into grotesque physicality, “Daddy” owes much to its two central performers. As Mara, the 15-year-old Lila Houel, who came to the production with limited stage experience, is coarsely candid in these early scenes, with turns of phrase that emphasize the character’s working-class background. Opposite her, Louis Peres, best known as a screen actor, is a startling tech-generation descendant of Christian Bale in “American Psycho”: clean-cut, in control, smoothly scary.Siéfert’s smartest move is to leave video and special effects behind once the two enter the game world of “Daddy.” The virtual space becomes a sinister, near-empty stage dotted with what look like snow mounds, where Mara encounters other preyed-upon young women.The rules of “Daddy” aren’t wholly clear. Men invest so teenage girls can perform routines that earn them points with fans. Houel, for instance, interprets a scene from the movie “Interview with the Vampire”; the sparkling Jennifer Gold, who plays the game’s reigning star Jessica, delivers cabaret-style numbers, including Marilyn Monroe’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from the 1960 film “Let’s Make Love.”The points and the fans are never shown — Siéfert keeps things deliberately vague. The focus is on the dynamics of child abuse, and the erosion of Mara’s individuality and willpower by Julien. While some scenes of verbal and physical violence are troubling enough to make you fear for Houel’s mental health, she rises to the occasion with astonishing sang-froid, quietly haunted then seething in the second act.Siéfert co-wrote “Daddy” with Matthieu Bareyre, and some of the points they make don’t need so much time to come across: Cuts would be welcome. Yet “Daddy” speaks to the zeitgeist and the lives of teenagers today with a mix of ease and critical distance that few stage directors can match.And even at 11:30 p.m., one final scene had the audience sitting up and leaning forward. After a bloody narrative twist, the back wall of the stage slid away to reveal the street outside, and a performer staggered out of the game into the Odéon’s leafy neighborhood — while a few passers-by stopped, puzzled, to peek at the action onstage. In Siéfert’s theater, the real and the virtual keep colliding in invigorating ways.DaddyThrough May 26 at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris; theatre-odeon.eu. More

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    Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

    A centenary exhibition in Paris honors the French actress who invented the concept of the global star.In the 19th and early 20th century, everyone worshiped at the altar of Sarah Bernhardt. She was a stage actress at a time when the theater was the equivalent of a stadium, a global celebrity who ushered in the very concept.Born in Paris in 1844, Bernhardt was a sickly child whose mother preferred to ignore her. As an adult, she insisted on standing out. She captivated theatergoers with her hypnotic voice (Victor Hugo ‌‌called it “golden”) and her bombastic performance style. ‌No role, no métier, was too ambitious: She was a writer, painter, sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, too. The ‌‌newspapers amplified the legend of the “Divine Sarah,” as did the sundry artists and writers who counted her as their muse.The fanaticism surrounding her was comparable to that inspired by the Beatles or Taylor Swift; her devotees made shrines and gathered below her hotel window; reporters tracked her movements like proto-paparazzi.A 1910 self-portrait by Sarah Bernhardt. As well as an actor and painter, Bernhardt was a sculptor, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist.RMN-Grand Palais, via Art ResourceBernhardt may have been an object of extraordinary fascination, but nothing about her was passive. She played for the camera, generating her public image on her own terms with dynamism and feverish originality. Bernhardt created herself relentlessly — filling her memoirs with tall tales about her origins, living her life on a scale that matched the epics in which she starred — as an act of resistance. Only she would define her, and even now, 100 years after her death in 1923, she dares us to try and pin her down.This roguish quality of Bernhardt’s is what drew me to a 1910 self-portrait that can be seen in the exhibition, “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star,” running through Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais in Paris. It’s an oil painting of the actress as a clown, smiling slyly. Bernhardt went on to play another clown in Jean Richepin’s 1883 play “Pierrot the Murderer” — a famous photograph of the actress in her Pierrot get-up is on display in the exhibition — but the self-portrait struck me as a statement of purpose.In the 19th century, the clown was something like a poet, walking the line between reality and fiction and imagining an alternative to the status quo. It’s no wonder that Bernhardt saw herself in such a figure. On and offstage, her showmanship placed her in opposition to the everywoman bound by the strictures of France’s Third Republic.A installation view of “Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the Star.” In the foreground is the costume Bernhardt wore in Victorien Sardou’s play “Théodora,” in 1884.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeBernhardt dazzled because she was free. “She did whatever she wanted and didn’t care what others thought,” said Annick Lemoine, the director of the Petit Palais and one of the co-curators of the Bernhardt exhibition. “She loved men and women. She traveled the world. She had a son out of wedlock and raised him the way she wanted to. She had no fear.”At 18, Bernhardt joined the prestigious company of the Comédie Française theater, in Paris, but she wouldn’t stay long. A spat broke out between a veteran actress and the feisty newcomer, which led to Bernhardt’s dismissal — yet another upheaval in the young woman’s already tumultuous life. Her father was out of the picture and her mother, a Parisian courtesan, had shuttled her daughter around France — to a boarding school, a countryside nursery, a nunnery.Bernhardt, it seems, became accustomed to the hustle, and not long after she was kicked out of the Comédie Française she broke out in an 1868 revival of “Kean” by Alexandre Dumas. From ingénue to full-fledged luminary, she tackled gutsy parts like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Hamlet — characters she inhabited, like a wild spirit, rather than merely played. She took her greatest hits on the road and performed for audiences around Europe and the United States.Known for her over-the-top death scenes, Bernhardt had a flair for melodrama, and in her private life, too, she was eccentric with a taste for the macabre. One of her many hats was adorned with a taxidermized bat and she had a photograph taken of herself in a coffin playing dead.A photo portrait of Bernhardt by Otto Wegener around 1899 or 1900, with her bat hat.BnFThose are among the more than 100 objects from private collections and public institutions around the world on display at the Petit Palais, along with artworks by and about Bernhardt, her stage costumes, personal belongings, advertising campaigns, photographs, clips from silent films and phonograph recordings of her voice. (Naturally, she was among the first to exploit the era’s new technologies for self-promotion.)Bernhardt’s greatest roles resembled the personas of David Bowie. She didn’t bring, say, the Empress Théodora or the doomed singer Floria Tosca to life so much as she absorbed them into her own. Passing through a room in the exhibition dedicated to her theater characters is like encountering the bat-cave where she stores the suits and props for her alter egos. In the latter half of her career, bored by the tragic female roles that were her claim to fame, she played teenagers and men — and some teenage boys — as a woman well into her middle age.“Bernhardt was someone who demanded the right to be extraordinary,” said the American playwright Theresa Rebeck in a video interview. Rebeck’s play “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” which premiered on Broadway in 2018, looks at the backstage drama surrounding the actress’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s drama. When Hamlet, a neurotic depressive in most productions, was given the Bernhardt treatment in 1899, the character paradoxically appeared steelier and more overtly masculine than usual, irking traditionalist critics and teasing queer ideas about the fluid nature of identity. “People think that I completely reimagined the history of that staging for the play,” added Rebeck, “but I really didn’t change that much.”Rebeck said she was inspired to write about Bernhardt after visiting the Alphonse Mucha Museum in Prague, home to the towering posters of the actress that have become synonymous with the curvilinear designs of Art Nouveau. In 1894, Bernhardt ‌had ‌commissioned illustrations from a studio to promote ‌her latest play, “Gismonda,” but the first round of mock-ups was not up to snuff. She demanded new versions, stat, which gave the unknown Mucha, one of the company’s minor employees, his big break.Posters depicting Bernhardt by Jean-Michel Liébaux, André-Georges Dréville and François Flameng on display at the Petit Palais.Petit Palais; Photo by Gautier DeblondeMucha went on to design several more posters for Bernhardt’s shows; these lofty works, which depict her like a pagan icon, are also on show at the Petit Palais. Dozens of other artists rendered her likeness: she’s angelic against a golden backdrop in a painting by Jules Masson; a coy mistress in a full-body-length portrait by Georges Clairin. She’s a topless geisha in one sketch, a cartoonish chimera in another.A pioneering self-brander, Bernhardt would have certainly intuited the power of social media. But unlike the influencers of today, many seemingly hellbent on conjuring an illusion of authenticity, she refused to be anything but larger-than-life. That’s why, like Keanu Reeves or Nicolas Cage, she always played a heightened version of herself. The tension between her irrepressible individuality and dramatic skill produced something rare: stardom.Sarah Bernhardt: And the Woman Created the StarThrough Aug. 27 at the Petit Palais, in Paris; petitpalias.fr. More

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    ‘The Habit of Art’ Review: Theater of the Creative Drive

    A play within a play about W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten structures this sex-spiked comedy for the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan.The poet W.H. Auden is expecting a rent boy, not a journalist. So when he opens the door to his home in Oxford, England, to let the much younger man in, it takes a while to clear up the confusion. Once the visitor has explained that he is not there to take off his pants, he commences an interview.“Are you writing?” he asks the poet.“Am I dead?” Auden ripostes. “I work. I have the habit of art.”Such a smooth, substantial-sounding phrase — a bulwark against others’ intrusive questions and Auden’s own self-doubt. Still, he is telling the truth.In Alan Bennett’s delectably smart, gently moving, sex-spiked comedy “The Habit of Art,” the year is 1972 and Auden is nearing the end of his life. Suspecting that God has rescinded his genius, he keeps writing anyway.“I have to work, or else who am I?” he says.All this, by the way, is part of the play within the play in the excellent production that the Brits Off Broadway festival has brought to 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. “The Habit of Art” is partially about an imagined meeting between Auden and his old friend, the composer Benjamin Britten. But Bennett frames it with a band of theater people finding their way through a script that tells this story — or, as he wrote in his diary in 2009, the year “The Habit of Art” made its premiere: “a group of differently fractured people coming together to present something whole.”Directed by Philip Franks for the Original Theater Company, “The Habit of Art” takes place in a dingy rehearsal hall (the set is by Adrian Linford) where a company is rehearsing a new play. The absent director has left in charge the savvy, ego-soothing stage manager (a wonderfully brisk Veronica Roberts), while the playwright (Robert Mountford) fends for himself, trying to shield his script from tinkerers who would make cuts or additions.The actor Fitz (Matthew Kelly) is a terrible snob, his dignity affronted by playing Auden — a role that requires him to be stained, stinky, squalid: a great man in unglamorous decline. Henry (Stephen Boxer), as the self-contained Britten, at least gets to look civilized.In the play within the play, the composer pays Auden a visit, seeking his help, though they haven’t seen each other in decades. Britten is writing “Death in Venice” — an opera about an older man obsessed with a beautiful boy, a theme that echoes in “The Habit of Art” — and it’s not going well.“I came because I feel so lonely,” Britten says.“Of course it’s lonely,” Auden reassures him. “It’s new. What do you expect?”That’s the voice of long experience speaking — Auden in his twilight, yes, and also Bennett, who this week turned 89. The playwright knows too that, in his chosen medium, a creator’s isolation eventually gives way to collaboration: maybe maddening, bickersome and chaotic, but at least not solitary.Such is the nature of theater. Such are the habits of that particular art.The Habit of ArtThrough May 28 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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    in Television

    British Spies, Japanese Teens and a German Cop’s Wild Ride

    Recent international series of note include “A Spy Among Friends” on MGM+ and “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.It has been a quiet season for international television on American screens — nothing has grabbed attention on a “Squid Game” or “Downton Abbey” scale. But barely a day goes by, in the streaming age, without an interesting series washing up from some foreign shore. Here are four recent shows worth tracking down, from an elegant British thriller to a Chinese dramedy about a demon god and an immortal warrior who meet cute on the mortal plane.‘A Spy Among Friends’Alexander Cary, a writer and executive producer on “Homeland,” wrote this six-episode spy thriller as a leisurely, literate, three- or four-dimensional game of chess. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, it tells the story of Kim Philby (and the other high-level Soviet spies known as the Cambridge Five) by focusing on a set of intertwined sparring matches: Philby’s with his friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott, sent to Beirut to bring the disgraced Philby home; Elliott’s with a (fictional) agent, Lily Thomas, assigned to interrogate him when he returns to London alone; and Elliott and Thomas’s with the MI6 hierarchy once he brings her around to his side.Made for the British streaming service ITVX and available here on MGM+ and Prime Video, “A Spy Among Friends” is smart, complicated (at times overly so) and saturated in a particular Cold War blend of tragic romanticism and kitchen-sink class politics. What makes it stand out, though, is its casting. Anna Maxwell Martin and Guy Pearce are excellent as Thomas and Philby, and Damian Lewis is outstanding as Elliott, the colorless spy’s spy whose skills and motives are in question until the end. Tightly controlled yet somehow relaxed, Lewis gives a performance in which the coldblooded manipulator and the sentimentally loyal bro coexist at every moment.Malick Bauer is an East German policeman tossed around by history in “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.Stephan Burchadt/Disney‘Sam: A Saxon’As triumph-of-the-spirit stories go, “Sam: A Saxon” is notably low on triumph. Sam Meffire, the subject of this German biographical mini-series from Hulu, grew up in Dresden, both acutely aware of how his skin color set him apart and fiercely loyal to his East German homeland; shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, he became the country’s first policeman of African descent. His life since then — he’s only 52 — has been a carnival ride that no screenwriter would be likely to dream up: first a poster boy in a national ad campaign designed to humanize the police, and then a fugitive fleeing to Africa to avoid arrest for armed robbery.Jörg Winger, a creator and the showrunner of “Sam,” was also a creator of “Deutschland 83” and its sequels, and the shows share a knack for embedding engaging characters in real-world events in a way that feels both credible and suspenseful. In this dramatized telling, Meffire, played by the imposing actor Malick Bauer, is a true believer who finds himself continually and perversely acted upon by history. He is tossed about by the fall of Communism, and by the ravages of capitalism, racist nationalism and crime that the collapse unleashes. “Sam: A Saxon” stands firm against streaming-video bloat: Its seven episodes barely contain the story it sets out to tell.“Skip and Loafer” presents an expressionistic depiction of the life of a high-school girl.Misaki Takamatsu,KODANSHA/”Skip and Loafer” Production Committee‘Skip and Loafer’This sweet, lightly sentimental slice-of-life anime, halfway through its 12-episode season on Crunchyroll (and available for purchase on Prime Video), is an example of something that Japanese animation provides more consistently than American live-action TV: a comic, even expressionistic depiction of high-school life that still feels unforced and natural. Mitsumi, the star student of her small seaside town, moves to Tokyo to attend an elite prep school. Ferociously single-minded, very impressed with herself and determined to take her new school by storm, she’s also a quick-to-embarrass country bumpkin, a classic setup for teenage comedy.An early scene of Mitsumi’s childhood friends chasing after her departing train is a ruse, a poke at the conventions of this sort of story in traditional anime and Studio Ghibli-style films. And the bending of perspectives continues: While Mitsumi runs a gantlet of welcoming ceremonies, classroom presentations and karaoke parties in Tokyo, we and everyone around her — new friends, old friends and family — can see the anxieties and mortifications that she thinks she is hiding. The show (whose cryptic title, taken from the manga on which the anime is based, probably alludes to Mitsumi and her slacker crush, Sousuke) is a lighthearted essay on loneliness and the life-or-death nature of every decision a 15-year-old makes.In “Till the End of the Moon,” Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu play characters who are entangled across time and space.Rakuten Viki‘Till the End of the Moon’While a demon god is in the process of destroying the world, the resolute mystical warrior Li Susu (Bai Lu) is sent back in time 500 years to find the demon while he is still in mortal form and kill him. Arriving in the kingdom of Sheng, she discovers that she is in the body of a headstrong, very poorly behaved princess who is married to — do I have to spell it out?“Till the End of the Moon,” which is 35 episodes into its 40-episode run on Rakuten Viki, was a major hit in China, where it wrapped up this week; its premiere reportedly drew the highest numbers in three years for a xianxia (immortal heroes) drama. It’s an excellent example of the Chinese streaming-video industry’s capacity for making slickly disposable, highly enjoyable entertainment that combines elements of costume drama and special-effects-laden fantasy action with a healthy portion of romantic comedy. The humor will largely translate for a Western viewer, and Luo Yunxi (“My Sunshine,” “Ashes of Love”), who plays both the annihilating god and the possibly sympathetic human prince, is a hypnotic camera subject. More