Eliana Willis

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    Why Do Broadway Actors Love to Work Summers at The Muny in St. Louis?

    As summer sets in and New Yorkers escape to greener, milder, beachier pastures, Broadway performers are flocking elsewhere: the great, landlocked outdoors of St. Louis, where summers are known for … bugs. Humidity. Unpredictable storms. Oppressive heat.What draws them there is the Muny, a century-old outdoor musical theater nestled in Forest Park that seats nearly 11,000 a night through a rapid-fire lineup of seven shows in 10 weeks. The experience, according to the actors who return year after year, is worth the elements.The Muny will open its season with “Bring It On,” a musical about the world of competitive cheerleading. The cast of 39 includes Equity actors and University of Kentucky cheerleaders.Preparations for the Muny’s 107th season, which begins June 16 with “Bring It On,” are in full swing. A whirlwind week of rehearsals began on Monday, as has been the Muny’s fast and furious way for decades. Only this summer, the process is unfolding with an extra notch in the company’s belt: this year’s regional theater Tony Award.The honor is certainly a nod to the cast and crew members who put up Broadway-caliber shows in an impossible span of time, seven times in a row. But it’s also a recognition of the significant role the Muny plays in St. Louis — a place where generations of families have spent their summer nights, an institution as synonymous with the city as the Gateway Arch or the Cardinals.“Everyone has worked so hard, really worked hard, because we believed in what this could be for our community and our audience,” said Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer.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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    Five Actors on the Muny: ‘Unlike Any Place I’d Ever Been on Earth’

    The St. Louis theater, this year’s regional Tony Award winner, has drawn Broadway actors to its stage for a century.Cary Grant and Gene Kelly have been there. So have Carol Burnett, Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman and Debbie Reynolds. Not to mention Jennifer Holliday, and Ben Vereen, and Joel Grey, and Bernadette Peters.The Muny has lured plenty of stars to St. Louis, some who grace the theater’s massive stage in Forest Park as established talents, others who begin long careers there. But perhaps more notably, after spending the summer sweating through breakneck rehearsals, those stars decide to come back.As the Muny accepts its regional theater Tony Award on Sunday, I asked several Broadway actors, including some of this year’s Tony nominees, about what drew them, often more than once, to St. Louis. Their interviews have been edited and condensed.Danny BursteinBurstein, a Tony nominee this year for his role in “Gypsy,” has been in 11 shows at the Muny, starting the summer he was 19.The Muny’s executive producer Ed Greenberg was actually my teacher at Queens College. Ed took me under his wing and became a great mentor and a dear, dear friend. And when I was 19 he said, “Why don’t you come out for the summer?” It was my first Equity contract.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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    An ‘S.N.L.’ Secret Weapon Retires After 50 Years

    Stephen DeMaria has overseen the building of “Saturday Night Live” scenery since the show began. At 87, he finally hung up his hammer.The Stiegelbauer workshop, where Stephen DeMaria coordinated the construction of sets for “Saturday Night Live,” is in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, miles from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Geographically, and in the minds of “S.N.L.” fans, DeMaria’s name was always far removed from the prestige and glamour of the show that has defined American comedy since 1975. But while most viewers have never heard of him, he has spent 50 years setting the scenes for the show’s most memorable moments.And now he is done. DeMaria, known as “Demo” in the shop, retired after the 50th season finale, May 17. The day before, the white-haired, 87-year-old carpenter was leaning over his drafting table, inspecting blueprints and fiddling with the No. 2 pencil usually found behind his ear. For DeMaria and his crew, the show had already begun.Stiegelbauer Associates Inc. is a cross between a shop class and a late-night museum: A Rainbow Room marquee hangs above a workbench; a leftover airplane set sits plastic-wrapped; photos of past sets installed in the show’s Studio 8H are framed on every wall.During show weeks, sets are assembled all over the shop by an eclectic crew of craftspeople, many of whom have worked on “S.N.L.” for decades. As the foreman, DeMaria coordinates the teams assigned to build the sets designed at 30 Rock. Then he oversees the construction, moseying through the shop and kicking up sawdust with his cane as he checks in at the workstations.The cane was the result of an injury he suffered at an end-of-season celebration last year: After a night of tearing up the dance floor, he fell off a curb and broke his hip.“The best time of my life is the ‘S.N.L.’ parties,” he said. “I’ll be on the dance floor when I get there, and I won’t leave until 5 in the morning.” His favorite, he said, was the 2012 end-of-season party, after an episode hosted by Mick Jagger. “He was dancing all over the studio, so I got involved,” DeMaria recalled. “I was dancing with Mick Jagger!”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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    Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

    George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More

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    What to Expect at the 2025 Tony Awards: ‘Hamilton,’ Robots and More

    This year’s annual celebration of the best on Broadway is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo.Singing robots. Undead frenemies. A dead bank robber, and a dying cave explorer. A fumbling group of spies, and a bumbling group of pirates. Also: “Hamilton.”Welcome to the 2025 Tony Awards, which take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast on CBS.The show is Broadway’s biggest night, because it introduces the latest plays and musicals to a television audience of several million, any of whom might turn into a theater lover, a ticket buyer, or even an artist (so many Broadway performers and producers have stories about watching the Tony Awards as children).Here’s what to expect:The HostThis year’s ceremony is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a 38-year-old British actress who won a Tony Award in 2016 for her breakout performance starring in a revival of “The Color Purple.”In the years since, she has focused on movies, television and music — she stars as Elphaba in the pair of “Wicked” films (the second one comes out Nov. 21), and she played Harriet Tubman in the film “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha.”After the Tony Awards, she’ll be returning to the stage. In August she’s playing Jesus in a one-weekend run of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and then early next year she’ll star in a one-woman version of “Dracula” in London’s West End.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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    Sunny Jacobs, a Celebrity After Freed From Death Row, Dies at 77

    Her story, fashioned into an Off Broadway play and television movies, was later questioned by an investigator in a 2021 book.Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.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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    Documentary Series Goes Inside Trump’s Bubble

    Advance episodes of “Art of the Surge” offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at the adulatory environment in which Mr. Trump has moved since regaining power.A few weeks after winning the election, President-elect Donald J. Trump found himself face-to-face with Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a rising star in the Democratic Party, as the two men made their way through the bowels of Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., to watch the annual Army-Navy game.The governor greeted him effusively.“Mr. President, welcome back to Maryland, sir, welcome back to Maryland!” Mr. Moore said. “Great to see you, great to see you, great to have you back here.”“You’re a good-looking guy,” Mr. Trump observed.“We are very, very anxious to be able to work closely with you,” the governor added. Then he mentioned the ongoing efforts to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge outside Baltimore, which had collapsed that March.This chummy encounter was captured on camera for a documentary series called “Art of the Surge,” now streaming on Fox Nation, which provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at the adulatory environment in which Mr. Trump has moved since regaining power. The series gives a sense of how much he is enveloped by people eager to stroke his ego and get in his good graces — including some unexpected figures, according to advance episodes viewed by The New York Times.A still image from video footage of Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland greeting President-elect Donald J. Trump at the Army-Navy football game in December 2024.Art of the SurgeAt one point, inside the V.I.P. box at the football game, Brian Grazer, a top Hollywood producer, gets his photo taken with the president-elect and confides to those in the room that he cast his ballot for the Republican.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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    ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Keeps Pushing Back TV’s Fourth Wall

    Reality TV had long advised casts to pretend the cameras (and producers) weren’t there. But for the Mormon influencers of MomTok, the business of being on camera is central to the plot.The women of MomTok, the 20- and 30-something Mormon influencers who make up the cast of Hulu’s “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” built their livelihood on upsetting codes of conduct.The series’s first season was birthed in the wake of a “soft swinging” scandal involving some of its couples. A few of the cast members drink alcohol. Some abstain in keeping with the Church’s doctrine, but interpret its teachings on ketamine use more loosely.In the show’s second season, which finished airing this month, the group routinely flouted what, in eras past, had been a cardinal rule of reality TV: Don’t break the fourth wall.“It’s not a shock that I was a fan favorite,” Demi Engemann pointedly told her MomTok peers in Episode 6. The group had just learned she tried to persuade producers to kick off her co-star Jessi Ngatikaura to secure a higher contract for this season. “I feel like I’m an asset, I should fight for more.”That prompted Taylor Frankie Paul, the unofficial founder of MomTok, to push back about her own negotiations over the very show on which they were appearing.“I’m the that one that’s actually struggling because I’m open to the [expletive] world,” she said. “If anyone deserves to be paid more it’s me and I’ve never even asked for that.”

    @secretlivesonhulu The girls are fightinggg 🫣 #TheSecretLivesOfMormonWives ♬ original sound – secretlivesonhulu 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