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    in Theater

    How Sutton Foster Juggled ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    There’s busy, and then there’s bonkers.Sutton Foster, one of musical theater’s most celebrated performers, had already committed to starring in a City Center production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” on top of developing concert shows for Carnegie Hall and Café Carlyle, when she was approached last fall about stepping into the lead female role in the Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”She hesitated.“Sweeney” wanted new stars in January, the same month as the “Mattress” production. She would have to simultaneously master two scores and two stagings while building the bespoke concert shows and learning to speak with a Cockney accent. And even if, as it turned out, “Sweeney” was willing to wait until her “Mattress” run ended, she’d still have to do double duty — rehearsing “Sweeney” during the day while performing “Mattress” at night.She said yes.On Feb. 9, she took her first bows as Mrs. Lovett, the shamelessly resourceful pie shop owner in “Sweeney Todd,” alongside Aaron Tveit, also in his first night, as the bloodthirsty barber (the show’s title character). It was just five days after she took her final bows as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, a coarse but determined marriage candidate in “Once Upon a Mattress,” and the applause was thunderous.Foster with Aaron Tveit, who is also new to “Sweeney Todd,” during rehearsals in early February at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo how did she do it?Plenty of people hold down two jobs at once. There are repertory companies in which actors perform in a rotating selection of shows. There are Broadway stars who spend offstage hours filming television shows. And 40 years ago, Cynthia Nixon, while still a teenager, spent three months performing in two Broadway plays at the same time (dashing from one theater to another and back again).But still, learning the starring roles in two vocally and physically demanding musicals at virtually the same time is a feat. And, inevitably, Foster faced hurdles. Among them: Halfway through “Mattress” rehearsals, she came down with Covid (for a third time).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

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Dolly Parton’s Pet Gala’ and ‘Crime Nation’

    The country singer hosts a special that involves a dog runway. The CW airs a new anthology series about true crime.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 19 – 25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE PROPOSAL (2009) 5:30 p.m. on FX. Though this movie starring Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock is marketed as a romantic comedy, it really could be a horror movie. Imagine your mean boss has proposed that you commit a crime for her — the penalties of which are a potential fine of $250,00 and five years in prison. Scary, right? The rom-com follows the book editor Margaret Tate (Bullock), who convinces her assistant Andrew (Reynolds) to marry her so that she can get a fiancé visa and avoid being deported to Canada. While Bullock’s character lacks a certain friendly, polite Canadian charm, Reynolds (like me, a real-life Canadian) is oozing with it as the accommodating assistant whose family lives in Alaska.TuesdayCRIME NATION 8 p.m. on The CW. This new anthology series is the first original true crime series from the CW. Each two-hour episode focuses on a crime that was widely covered on social and traditional media, including the death of Gabby Petito, and the Gilgo Beach and Delphi murders; armchair experts, podcast hosts and true crime followers discuss the cases.THE GOOD DOCTOR 10 p.m. on ABC. This is the seventh and final season of the medical show starring Freddie Highmore as Dr. Shaun Murphy, a brilliant surgeon who has autism. Because Dr. Murphy just became a father, it is likely that this last season will focus on his new role as a dad as well as his sometimes complicated relationship with his patients and hospital colleagues.WednesdayDOLLY PARTON’S PET GALA 9 p.m. on CBS. Dolly Parton hosts a two-hour special devoted to dogs featuring performances by country singers like Lainey Wilson, Carly Pearce and Chris Janson, as well as KC of KC and the Sunshine Band — all singing classic Dolly songs. In a preview, the country legend explains that she loves dogs and wanted to show all the things they can do, from fun to more serious work. Puppies are set to walk a runway while modeling the latest styles in doggy-fashion and accompanying special guests include Kristen Bell, Neil Patrick Harris, Jessica Simpson and more.ThursdayLindsay Hubbard and Carl Radke on “Summer House.”Bravo/Eugene GologurskyWe 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

    ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 6 Recap: Stories Are Stories

    The season ended with a finale that provided plenty of answers while clinging to a bit of mystery.Season 4, Episode 6: Part 6One of the tricky parts of a ghost story like “True Detective: Night Country” is the banal, inevitable business of having to explain events that were once teasingly inexplicable. It is more haunting, for example, to imagine a supernatural force turning terrified scientists into an Arctic “corpsicle” than to learn that they were commandeered by a vigilante band of Indigenous women taking justice into their own hands.This is the risk the creator Issa López has courted all season, as the show’s procedural elements have been intermingled with obscure symbols, hidden traumas and outright ghostly hallucinations. In order to solve the practical mysteries facing Danvers and Navarro, it would have to come crashing back to earth.Yet the achievement of this flawed but compelling finale is that López succeeds in having her cake and eating it, too. The important whodunit questions about the deaths of Annie K. and the scientists have concrete answers, but she’s unwilling to sell out the spiritual and psychological unrest that’s unique to this locale.From the beginning, the strongest element of “Night Country” has been its evocation of Ennis, Alaska, as this northernmost outpost of humanity, a border town to oblivion. There have been several moments, including a few in the finale, where a character is one step away from disappearing into nothingness, like Werner Herzog’s deranged penguin in “Encounters at the End of the World.”The big revelations start hitting before the opening credits here, as Danvers and Navarro bust into the ice cave system in the middle of a storm that looks formidable even by Ennis standards. Yet López is still unwilling to part with the uncanniness that’s been such an important piece of the intrigue: As they make their way through the caves, Navarro peels off through a narrow crevasse, certain that she “hears” Annie leading her to where they need to go. That’s more than a detective’s instincts at work; that’s a sixth sense. And López validates the moment when the two discover the secret lab where Annie was murdered.The connection between Annie’s case and the dead scientists had been something Danvers and Navarro had worked hard to connect, from the romantic relationship between Annie and Raymond Clark to the shady financial arrangement between the mine and the lab, which needed help in finessing its pollution numbers. When they find the underground facility and capture Raymond, their suspicions are confirmed, though the details are a little surprising.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

    For Donald Trump, the Recriminations Will Be Televised

    The former president’s trials aren’t being aired. That isn’t stopping him from turning them into a political reality show.The civil-fraud case against Donald J. Trump’s businesses in New York, in which he was ordered to pay a penalty of $355 million, was not televised. Neither was his civil trial for the defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Nor — barring an unlikely change in federal court policy — will be his looming federal election-interference trial.But outside the courtroom, the show goes on.In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads.To TV producers, because Mr. Trump is a former president, a candidate and high-profile defendant, his on-camera tirades are news. But there is also a kind of transaction at work. TV news craves conflict and active visuals. There are only so many times you can show a motorcade, or reporters cooling their heels in the street. Mr. Trump’s appearances give them sound, fury and B-roll.At the same time, Mr. Trump gets the kind of unfiltered access to the airwaves that networks were, once upon a brief time, wary of giving a candidate notorious for fabrications and conspiracy theories.On the day a judge set a trial date for his Manhattan criminal case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, cable news networks took him live as he called the case a Biden-campaign plot to steal the election: “This is their way of cheating this time. Last time, they had a different way.”On Friday evening, after the civil-fraud ruling, he spoke to the cameras at his home and private club Mar-a-Lago, claiming that the case (brought by the New York attorney general) “all comes out of Biden,” accusing the judge of corruption, citing his election poll numbers and lamenting that “the migrants come in and they take over New York.”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

    ‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before

    A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange.A scene from the play.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times“The Shawshank Redemption” — the story of a man wrongfully convicted of murder who defies prison officials’ tyranny and eventually pulls off a daring escape — has been a target for Chinese censors before. Mentions of it were briefly censored online in 2012, after a prominent Chinese dissident escaped house arrest and fled to the American Embassy. In general, the Chinese authorities have shown little tolerance for calls, artistic or otherwise, for freedom and resistance to injustice.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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    Review: Sarah Snook Is a Darkly Funny Dorian Gray

    In a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Snook plays all the characters — with the help of screens.A large, rectangular screen hangs from the top of the stage at the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, rather appropriately, in portrait mode.Beneath it, the Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small team of black-clad camera operators who broadcast her every move onto the screen in real time as she simultaneously narrates and performs the title role of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”Later, several more screens descend, playing prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than twenty-five other roles. Over the course of the next two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are no other actors involved.Wilde’s 1890 novel, in which a handsome rake makes a Faustian bargain with the cosmos by trading his soul for eternal youth (and comes to regret it), lends itself to stage adaptation: It is dialogue-heavy, punctuated by witty, morally intelligent exposition; its allegory of human hubris is timeless.This adaptation, by the Sydney Theater Company, directed by Kip Williams and running through May 11, is a formally ambitious but playful multimedia production. The single-actor format and clever use of camerawork give visual expression to the novel’s themes of overweening egotism and existential dread.The play’s aesthetic palate is a blend of period and contemporary. There’s something tongue-in-cheek about much of the dated garb.Marc BrennerWe 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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    Tobias Menzies on ‘The Crown’ and His Role in ‘The Hunt’

    The British actor excels at playing reserve, and what roils beneath, on “The Crown.” And now he brings that stoicism to “The Hunt,” onstage in Brooklyn.On a morning in early February, the actor Tobias Menzies walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the relative anonymity he prefers. Menzies wasn’t hiding. He wore no sunglasses, no cap, just Blundstones, jeans, a shearling coat. He didn’t duck when people came his way. But the past few years, including multi-season stints on “The Crown” and “Outlander,” have brought him a new visibility, which still makes him uneasy.“I’m not that confident about my life or what it is to be able to put it out in the public,” he said, shoulders hunched against the breeze. “I’m just bumbling along as best I can.”Menzies, 49, had come to Brooklyn, to rehearse “The Hunt,” a theatrical adaptation of the Thomas Vinterberg movie that begin performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Friday. Back in 2019, Menzies had originated the stage role of Lucas, a preschool teacher falsely accused of exposing himself to a child, in a London production. A member of a local hunting club, Lucas now finds himself targeted by the community that once embraced him.In the years since “The Hunt” premiered, Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” and a fan base for his dual roles of Frank Randall and his sadistic ancestor Black Jack Randall on the Starz series “Outlander.” He also played somewhat against type as an anxious therapist in Nicole Holofcener’s acerbic comedy “You Hurt My Feelings.”Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” opposite Olivia Colman.Sophie Mutevelian/NetflixFive years ago, the role made perfect sense for Menzies, who specializes in wounded masculinity. The play, adapted by David Farr, is caustic and cerebral, and it reunited him with a frequent collaborator, the director Rupert Goold. And Lucas is a type that Menzies has often gravitated toward, a man unable, whether by upbringing, temperament or circumstance, to show his feelings. Lucas benefits from both Menzies’ natural reserve and his ability to show what roils beneath that stoicism, a game of emotive hide-and-seek.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