Eliana Willis

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    ‘Trophy Boys’ Review: The Nerds’ Case Against Feminism

    In an Off Broadway play, young men on a high school debate team prepare to argue an uncomfortable case.Has feminism failed women?That’s the uh-oh question facing the Imperium School’s senior debate team when asked to argue the affirmative in the finals of their league competition. But asserting that proposition against the girls from St. Gratia feels deeply uncomfortable to the four teenage boys who make up the team. Worse, it feels like a sure way to lose.And losers are not what Imperium’s debaters, no matter how nerdy, are expected to be. How will they get into Yale or Harvard — or “maybe … like … N.Y.U.?” — if they’re caught defending the patriarchy? How will Owen, their best speaker, run for president one day, as he intends to, with video of him vivisecting feminism in the ether forever?That’s the setup for Emmanuelle Mattana’s “Trophy Boys,” whose title suggests that what’s at stake is more than a contest. Regardless of their protestations of love for their mothers and sisters, the team members are mostly concerned with preserving their privilege as preppies and men. Their feminism is the kind that crumbles the moment it asks something of them beyond lip service.“Trophy Boys,” which opened Wednesday at MCC Theater, addresses their bad faith in many ways but not, alas, in the most important one: a convincing narrative. Mattana begins with satire so broad it’s indistinguishable from burlesque, as the Imperium team arrives at St. Gratia for their power hour of prep time. How stoked they are by the posters of feminist thought leaders — Oprah, Malala, Yoko — plastering the walls! (The classroom set is by Matt Saunders.) “I am at my most inspired when surrounded by inspiring women,” Owen says.Owen is portrayed by the playwright, who has made the casting of female, queer, trans and nonbinary actors “nonnegotiable.” Not that Danya Taymor’s production asks us to read their gray flannel, blue blazer, repp tie drag as real. (The costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) Especially when they roughhouse, leaping on desks and licking their notebooks, the cast overplays the characters’ youthfulness, making them seem less like a delivery system for gender commentary than a cartoon version of “Newsies.”But if those choices take some of the sting out of the boys’ masculine cluelessness and bro-y vulgarity, they also amp up the ambient camp. Jared (Louisa Jacobson) is a sendup of WASP obliviousness, disowning his advantages while pulling a gold watch and Tesla keys from his backpack. Scott (Esco Jouléy) is clearly in love with him, even as he overcompensates with casually sexist remarks. And David (Terry Hu) is an arrogant incel whose most salient contribution to feminism is calling his father a cuck.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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    Broadway Musical ‘Boop’ Set to Close Amid Weak Ticket Sales

    ‘Boop! The Musical’ imagines the cartoon character leaving 1920s filmdom for 2020s New York City. Ticket sales were weak.“Boop! The Musical,” based on the iconic flapper from early animated shorts, announced on Wednesday that it would close July 13 after failing to find sufficient audience to defray its running costs on Broadway.The show is the fourth new musical to post a closing notice in the 17 days since the Tony Awards, following “Smash,” “Real Women Have Curves” and “Dead Outlaw.”“Boop!” had a disappointing Tonys season — it was not nominated for best musical, and its request to perform on the awards show was rebuffed. It was nominated for best lead actress (Jasmine Amy Rogers), best choreography (Jerry Mitchell) and best costume design (Gregg Barnes) but won no awards.The show’s weekly grosses, consistently too low, ticked upward last week, but remain well below its running costs. During the week that ended June 22, “Boop!” grossed $602,017, and 19 percent of the seats went unsold.The musical began previews March 11 and opened on April 5 at the Broadhurst Theater. At the time of its closing, it will have played 25 previews and 112 regular performances.Set primarily in New York City, the musical imagines that Betty Boop, an actress in films of the 1920s, time travels to present-day Manhattan seeking a greater sense of her self; in the city she finds friendship, love and clarity.The musical, led by the veteran producer Bill Haber, had been in development for more than a quarter century, with shifting creative teams, and had a pre-Broadway production in Chicago in 2023. The version that finally made it to Broadway has a book by Bob Martin, music by David Foster, and lyrics by Susan Birkenhead; it is directed as well as choreographed by Mitchell.Reviews were mostly positive. But in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green was unenthusiastic, praising Rogers’s performance and other elements of the show, but questioning its rationale, saying that “a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for” is “disappointing,” and that “one feels at all times the heavy hooves of a marketing imperative.”“Boop!” was capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show’s development — has not been recouped. More

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    Global Arts Festival Taking Shape Inside Gowanus Power Station

    The first Powerhouse: International will feature works from South Africa’s William Kentridge, Brazil’s Carolina Bianchi — and 10,000, $30 tickets.A new arts festival, featuring performance art from Brazil, an interactive installation from New Zealand, and a party presented by a Beyoncé dance captain, will be staged this fall inside a onetime power station along Brooklyn’s industrial Gowanus Canal.The three-month series, called Powerhouse: International and scheduled to run Sept. 25 to Dec. 13, is being curated by David Binder, a longtime performing arts producer and former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will take place at Powerhouse Arts, a hulking structure that since 2023 has housed fabrication studios for artists from a variety of disciplines.The festival will be the building’s first series of performing arts events, and will feature acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who is presenting his multidisciplinary opera-theater work “Sibyl”; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece “Larsen C” is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who will perform her “Cadela Força Trilogy,” a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.“We’re in this moment when there are so many barriers — cultural, physical, ideological — and this festival aims to break down those barriers,” Binder said in an interview. “What really interests me is the convergence of artists from different countries and different disciplines.”To keep the events accessible, the festival is making at least 10,000 tickets — just over half of the expected total — available for $30 each. At most configurations, the venue will have about 800 seats.Binder said he was motivated in part by a change in the types of work being presented in New York City in recent years. “There’s obviously a lot less international work in the city, a lot less art, a lot less new plays, a lot less music and dance,” he said. “I’m hoping we’re adding to the conversation.”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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    Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” Returns After 25 Years

    Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” premiered to rave reviews shortly after the playwright killed herself. A quarter-century later, the original cast is reviving the production.When the British playwright Sarah Kane died by suicide in 1999, at age 28, she left behind the manuscript for an unperformed work. “Just remember, writing it killed me,” Kane wrote in an accompanying note, according to Mel Kenyon, the playwright’s long-term agent.Just over a year later, when the Royal Court Theater in London premiered the piece — a one-act play called “4:48 Psychosis” that puts the audience inside the mind of somebody having a breakdown — it received rave reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf said it was “arguably Kane’s best play” and compared it to the work of Samuel Beckett.Yet despite the praise, a question hung over the production: Was it possible to honestly critique a play about depression so soon after Kane’s tragic death? The headline on an article by the Guardian theater critic Michael Billington suggested a challenge: “How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?”Now, 25 years later, theatergoers are getting a chance to look at the original production of “4:48 Psychosis” afresh, and see if passing time brings a change in perspective. The show’s cast and creative team is reviving the production at the Royal Court, where it runs through July 5, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it will run from July 10-27.This time around, critical reception has been mixed. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, praised the production and said the play “still feels raw,” but Clive Davis, in The Times of London, argued that “‘4:48 Psychosis’ isn’t a play at all, rather the random agonized reflections of a mind that has passed beyond breaking point.”A performance of “4:48 Psychosis” in 2004.Dan MerloWe 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 Did ‘Hercules’ Get So Lame?

    A Disney musical based on the 1997 animated movie feels as though its creators wanted to get to the finish line and move on.How could a show about such an outsize hero as Hercules be so lame? That’s the question hovering over a Disney-backed musical that arrived at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, in London on Tuesday, just nine months after the playhouse waved goodbye to “Frozen,” another screen-to-stage cull from the Disney catalog.First seen in New York’s Central Park in 2019, “Hercules” has undergone significant changes in personnel on its way to the West End, including a German-language premiere in Hamburg. But all the tweaking hasn’t made a satisfying whole out of material that ought to feel a lot mightier than it does. Indeed, the production is so short — the second act is barely 40 minutes — that it begins to feel like its creators just wanted to get to the finish line and move on.Based on a 1997 animated film (midlevel Disney in my view), “Hercules” casts its strongman central character (Luke Brady) as a puppyish young man trying to find his way in the world: as god, or mortal, or a hybrid of the two. To quote one of the better-known songs from Alan Menken and David Zippel’s score, Hercules needs to go from “zero to hero in no time flat.” That itself may help explain the rushed feel of the director Casey Nicholaw’s production.Standing in the way of young Herc, as he is known, is his evil uncle Hades, who lords it over the underworld and casts a resentful eye on his brother Zeus’s perch on Mt. Olympus. The role of venomous Hades has been given to Stephen Carlile, whose previous stage credits include the sneering Scar in “The Lion King,” a villain cut from comparable cloth.Hades’ two minions, Pain and Panic in the movie, here go by the rather more neutral names Bob and Charles. An inevitable love interest arrives in the cougarish form of Meg (Mae Ann Jorolan, a holdover from the Hamburg production), who has been enslaved by Hades but is quickly drawn to Hercules’s string vest (He is 10 percent toga and the rest muscle, we’re told, and the show features a largely bare-chested male chorus; for a family musical, “Hercules” doesn’t stint on suggestive eroticism.)While Hades whines and moans — “I’ve lost everything but weight,” is how Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s jokey book puts it — Hercules takes advice from the wisecracking trainer Phil (Trevor Dion Nicholas), who advises the young man to “go the distance.” That happens to be the title of the show’s best-known song, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1998 and gets several reprises here without ever raising the roof.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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    Gailard Sartain, Character Actor and ‘Hee Haw’ Regular, Dies at 81

    Though best known for comedy, he also played serious roles, including a sinister sheriff in “Mississippi Burning.” The director Alan Rudolph cast him in nine films.Gailard Sartain, a character actor who moved easily between comedy, as a cast member on the variety series “Hee Haw”; music, as the Big Bopper singing “Chantilly Lace” in “The Buddy Holly Story”; and drama, as a racist sheriff in “Mississippi Burning,” died on Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 81.His wife, Mary Jo (Regier) Sartain, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Sartain spent 20 years on “Hee Haw,” the country equivalent of “Laugh-In,” hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, which combined cornpone sketches with music. The characters he played included a bumbling store employee, a chef at a truck stop and Officer Bull Moose. At the same time, he also developed a movie career that began with “Nashville” (1975), Robert Altman’s improvisational drama set against the background of the country music industry.In that film, Mr. Sartain played a man at an airport lunch counter talking to Keenan Wynn. “I just said, ‘Ask Keenan what he’s doing in Nashville,’ and he did,” Alan Rudolph, the assistant director of the film, said in an interview. But Mr. Rudolph saw something special in Mr. Sartain and went on to cast him in nine films he directed over the next two decades, including “Roadie” (1980) and “Endangered Species” (1982).“I only wish I could have fit him into another nine,” he said. “Gailard had a certain silly magic about him. Most of my films are serious and comedic at the same time. In ‘Roadie,’ he was opposite Meat Loaf, as beer truck drivers, and that was about 700 pounds in the front of a beer truck. That should be funny.”One of Mr. Sartain’s most notable roles was in “Mississippi Burning” (1988), Alan Parker’s film about the F.B.I.’s investigation into the murders in 1964 of the civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were buried in an earthen dam. Mr. Sartain played Ray Stuckey, a county sheriff whose deputy was among the Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the men.Mr. Sartain played a racist Southern sheriff in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.” “Nobody likes to be typecast as a barefooted hillbilly,” he said, “so when I had the opportunity to do other roles, I happily did it.”Orion PicturesWe 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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    Why the Salary for Dakota Johnson’s Character in ‘Materialists’ Is Such a Game-Changer

    By making the number explicit, Celine Song’s new film reflects modern dating realities in a way rom-coms rarely have before.Almost everyone who sees “Materialists,” the writer-director Celine Song’s new spin on the old romantic comedy formula, seems to want to talk about one number: $80,000. That’s how much Lucy (Dakota Johnson) says she makes in her job as a matchmaker. She brings it up to goad Harry (Pedro Pascal) into revealing his own salary, but he will only say that he makes “more” — which, as a finance guy working in private equity and owner of a $12 million bachelor pad, he certainly does.The viewer conversations are over whether Lucy’s salary is realistic for her lifestyle: she wears relatively nice clothing, and lives alone in what appears to be a peaceful and brightly lit apartment, though we don’t see much of the interior. The film’s production designer revealed in an interview that her home is a teeny-tiny studio on the edge of the affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, with a rent that Lucy probably shouldn’t be paying relative to her salary. Yet this matches her character’s single-minded aspiration: to be surrounded by wealth.We could debate whether the rest of her lifestyle, like her clothing, is realistic on her salary; I tend to think it could be, but in a Carrie Bradshaw, leveraged-to-the-hilt way. After all, we live in a world where direct-to-consumer brands sell decent silk slip dresses, and everyone’s thrifting or renting outfits — not to mention that anything looks good on Dakota Johnson.Knowing the character’s salary, viewers have debated her lifestyle choices.Atsushi Nishijima/A24But the fact we’re even debating that specific number is remarkable, and hints at what makes “Materialists” feel so very 2025. At my screening, the salary detail provoked a collective gasp that briefly sucked the air out of the room. It wasn’t even the amount, really: It was the fact that someone had said a number at all.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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    5,000 Sondheim Sketches and More Head to Library of Congress

    The musical theater titan left behind material from beloved shows like “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George.”The Library of Congress has acquired Stephen Sondheim’s vast collection of manuscripts, drafts and ephemera, the library announced on Wednesday. The material could be a valuable resource for academics and artists alike.Sondheim, who died at 91 in 2021, left the library more than 5,000 items from his long career as a musical theater composer and lyricist, including sketches, scrapbooks and more from shows like “Sweeney Todd,” “Sunday in the Park With George” and even “Here We Are,” the musical he was writing at the time of his death.“There’s no question he was brilliant, a genius,” said Mark Horowitz, a senior music specialist in the library’s music division. “But here, you’re really seeing the perspiration behind it all. The amount he put behind each song is staggering.”In 1993, Sondheim visited the Library of Congress and saw the manuscript of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” He was moved to tears and, Horowitz said, made the decision to leave the library his own archive, and later persuaded his collaborators Arthur Laurents and Harold Prince to do the same. (Sondheim previously donated a collection of manuscripts to the Wisconsin Historical Society in the 1960s; copies of those are available in Washington.)Unlike memorabilia sold last year in a blockbuster Sondheim auction at Doyle, the items at the Library of Congress are limited to those with research value. But they are treasures nevertheless: a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the song “Send in the Clowns”; opening-night telegrams from the likes of Prince and Leonard Bernstein; and a notebook of ideas going back to his early days as a student at Williams College.Horowitz was struck, he said, by how much more lyric and musical sketches there are over time. There are three boxes worth of drafts for “Company” (1970), for example, but nine for “Sunday in the Park With George” (1984).“I’ve never seen a composer who has so many music sketches, trying out different melodic lines, different harmonies, rhythms, chord progressions,” Horowitz said. “Even with classical collections, I’ve never seen this.”The song “A Little Priest,” from “Sweeney,” has 40 pages of lyric sketches. In that comic Act I finale, Todd and Mrs. Lovett trade punny hypotheticals of what type of people could be baked into meat pies, a little more than 30 in all. Those were just a sampling of a much longer list.“He does lists in the margins: rhymes, synonyms, emotions of things,” Horowitz said of Sondheim. Sketches like that will be helpful for researchers looking to add to the existing wealth of academic work on Sondheim’s life and career, but Horowitz has other hopes for the collection’s future, too.“One of my fantasies is that young songwriters will come for inspiration for how to write a song,” he said. “You can really see how one approaches songwriting at this kind of level.” More