Eliana Willis

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    Dozens of Festival Plays Worth Traveling to This Summer

    Across the country, you’ll find Shakespeare in amphitheaters, exciting new works on intimate stages and many regional repertories in bucolic settings.In and Around New YorkJust off Manhattan, a full-to-bursting open-air season is already underway at Little Island (through Sept. 28), a park in the Hudson River that looks from afar as if it was built atop a giant’s stash of stiletto heels. Highlights include Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg’s “The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter’s City” (through June 15); Sarah Gancher’s bluegrass re-envisioning of “Eugene Onegin,” directed by Rachel Chavkin (July 30-31); and “The Tune Up,” a music-filled evening of new work by Suzan-Lori Parks (July 30-Aug. 3).And at the newly renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Shakespeare in the Park makes a glittery return with Saheem Ali’s production of “Twelfth Night” (Aug. 7-Sept. 14), starring Lupita Nyong’o as Viola, Sandra Oh as Olivia, Peter Dinklage as Malvolio, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Maria and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek.Amid the hive of theater development that is Poughkeepsie in summertime, New York Stage and Film’s dozen public performances at Marist College (July 11-Aug. 3) include new works by Donja R. Love, Carly Mensch, Hansol Jung, Kirsten Greenidge and John Patrick Shanley, while a reading of Drew Gasparini and Alex Brightman’s musical “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is part of the Powerhouse Theater season (June 20-July 27) at nearby Vassar College. In Garrison, under the tent at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, “The Comedy of Errors” (June 6-Aug. 2) plays in rep with Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” (June 8-Aug. 3), followed by Dave Malloy’s chamber musical “Octet” (Aug. 11-Sept. 7).The Pennsylvania ShakespeareFestival, about an hour north of Philadelphia, takes an expansive approach to the Bard. You can see “Hamlet” (July 9-Aug. 3) and its Tom Stoppard spinoff, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (July 17-Aug. 2). Iambic pentameter not your jam? You can also catch the musical “The Producers” (June 11-29) or the Lorraine Hansberry play “A Raisin in the Sun” (June 25-July 13). Now that’s range.Shakespeare & Company’s outdoor stage is in bucolic Lenox, Mass.Nile Scott StudiosNortheastWestern Massachusetts is a travel destination for the Berkshires’ hilly beauty and for the summer seasons of its established theaters, including Barrington Stage Company (June 3-Oct. 12), in downtown Pittsfield; Shakespeare & Company (June 19-Oct. 12), in bucolic Lenox; and Berkshire Theater Group (through Oct. 26), in both Pittsfield and Stockbridge.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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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3 Premiere Recap: Outlook Good

    The new season opener found most of the women prioritizing their men’s needs over their own. That didn’t seem likely to last.My jaw is bruised from hitting the floor when Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) tells her gal pals that her boyfriend, Aidan (John Corbett), asked for “no communication” while he deals with family issues — and that she is just fine with giving it to him. No communication. For five full years. And this is supposed to be love?Let’s review how we got here. At the end of Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the on-again lovers Carrie and Aidan found themselves at an impasse when Aidan’s son, Wyatt, hit hard times. Wyatt needed paternal supervision — so much so, apparently, that Aidan felt compelled to devote himself to it entirely back home in Virginia. The Gramercy palace Carrie had just purchased for the two of them became a reluctant bachelorette pad, and their love was relegated to a long-distance situationship.At that point, we knew Carrie and Aidan were going to hold onto their love connection but weren’t going to visit each other — as implausible as that seemed alone. What was less apparent until the first few moments of Season 3 was that they weren’t going to speak, period. No texting, no FaceTime, not even the occasional Instagram like. The only hellos they’re exchanging are blank postcards, which they’re each sending back and forth between Virginia and New York, and for Carrie, this is apparently enough. Right.This no-contact-but-stay-together setup was never realistic — even if we suspended every possible disbelief. It is even more absurd that Carrie plays along.It doesn’t take long for Aidan to break his own rule, though. All he needed were three beers and a good, old-fashioned “ache.” He buzz-dials Carrie out of nowhere and lures her into one-sided, rather frantic phone sex. (Carrie may have been more enthusiastic if not for the beady eyes of her kitty-cat, Shoe, who was watching from the edge of the bed. But between that, Aidan’s intoxicated grunts, and a disruptive horn-blare, she just couldn’t quite get there.)Not long after, Carrie calls up Aidan for Round 2, but the time is no good for Aidan. He is back on Wyatt patrol, lying in bed beside his sleeping son. Carrie hangs up in shame.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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    ‘Malditos’ Is a Brooding, Operatic French Drama

    Set amid a traveler community in southern France, the Max series is a fresh and surprising story about family, superstition and a legacy of violence.The French drama “Malditos” (in French, with subtitles, or dubbed), on Max, is set within a traveler community whose members are about to be displaced from the dilapidated carnival fairgrounds where they live and work. The show hits brutal, operatic highs, with its deadly scheming playing out against the dramatic landscape of Camargue, in southern France. Give us blinding fraternal strife, and give it to us on a sun-bleached salt flat.Sara (Céline Sallette), who instead of a crown and a scepter has a scowl and a cigarette, is determined to keep the clan together. But everyone around her has different ideas about how to scrounge up enough money — and enough mutual will — to do so.Especially her sons. The brash, excitable son, Tony (Darren Muselet), wants to get into the lucrative drug market — or maybe he wants to run away with his girlfriend, who is from a rival clan. The brooding, bitter son, Jo (Pablo Cobo), who was forced to abandon his career ambitions, has his own vision for leadership, one he honed during years of estrangement from his mother and brother. Sara, Tony and Jo all think they are keeping the same secret, but they aren’t quite.The show wears its Shakespearean power-jockeying as comfortably as its track jackets. “You’re a real prince,” a vulnerable man stutters at Jo, begging for his life. Every bright idea just illuminates the path toward a more severe catastrophe, and pretty soon, the bodies are piling up. Some are even being exhumed.Violence abounds, both in harebrained shoot-em-ups and in the startling volatility of a bull. One person might be leveled by a mob-led beat-down or by the punishing rains of an unrelenting storm. Another might be swallowed up by oppressive gender roles or spit out by expensive real estate regulations.A few of the twists and turns here can feel a little predictable, and all that glowering starts losing its impact after a while. But the show has plenty of fresh ideas and true surprises in its specifics and realism, in its characters’ rites and traditions. “Malditos” teases out how religion, superstition and harshly enforced cultural customs are both the fabric and the rend. There’s a bright beauty to a tough-guy dad tenderly officiating a poetic marriage ritual, and also a cold horror at the bride’s numb concessions and deep despair.Four episodes are available now, and the remaining three arrive on Fridays. More

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    ‘Dept. Q’ Review: Netflix’s Nordic-British-American Noir

    Matthew Goode plays a traumatized Edinburgh detective in a complicated cold-case series that’s less than the sum of its influences.“Dept. Q,” this week’s new cop show on Netflix, is a study in internationalism. Largely written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, it is based on a novel by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen and set and filmed in Scotland with a British cast led by Matthew Goode.That might stand out given the current trans-Atlantic vibe, but of course the show, which premieres Thursday, has been in the works for years. And if anyone is going to remain committed to peaceful relationships across multiple markets, it will be Netflix.The ambitious, nine-episode season also reflects the history of Frank, a talented writer and director who has had his highs (“Out of Sight,” “The Queen’s Gambit”) and his lows (“Monsieur Spade”). He likes to roam among genres, with a home base in literary American crime (“Out of Sight,” “Hoke,” “A Walk Among the Tombstones”) but forays into the western (“Godless”), science fiction (“Minority Report”), period melodrama (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and others.For “Dept. Q,” in which Goode plays a damaged Edinburgh detective tasked with assembling a new cold-case unit, Frank (who developed the show with the British writer Chandni Lakhani) gets to play mix-and-match in one place. The influence of Nordic noir on the traditional British mystery has been established for several decades now, but Frank adds some American flavor to the cocktail.The buddy-cop pairing of Goode’s Carl Morck and Alexej Manvelov’s Akram Salim, a Syrian immigrant with an unsettling knack for extracting confessions, is probably more richly drawn than it would be otherwise; the interplay of Goode and Manvelov is one of the show’s main pleasures. And as is usually the case in Frank’s productions, “Dept. Q” has an overall flow and fluency — a style that is, if not always seductive, consistently engaging.(A 2013 Danish film based on the same source, “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” is dour by comparison, though some might find its 96-minute running time preferable to the seven and a half hours of the series.)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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    Mike White, ‘White Lotus’ Creator, Will Return to Cast of ‘Survivor’

    Mike White, a noted reality-television aficionado, first competed on the show in 2018.Mike White, the acclaimed screenwriter, creator of the hit HBO series “The White Lotus” and reality competition show veteran, will be returning to “Survivor” for its 50th season.The “Survivor” host Jeff Probst announced White’s return on “CBS Mornings” on Wednesday.“In between writing and directing seasons of ‘White Lotus,’ Mike White is back,” Probst said.White first appeared on “Survivor” in 2018, during the show’s 37th season, and lasted on the island for 39 days, finishing in second place. Although “The White Lotus” wouldn’t premiere until three years later (White has said the show, an acerbic anthology series set at an exotic hotel chain, was partly inspired by his observations while on “Survivor”), he was already a well-regarded filmmaker, having written the film “School of Rock” and created the HBO series “Enlightened.”Conceived of and filmed during the Covid pandemic, “The White Lotus” became a breakout hit for HBO and catapulted White to a new level of fame. He won Emmy Awards for both writing and directing in the limited series or anthology categories for the show’s first season. The finale of the third season — which aired this spring and starred Parker Posey, Carrie Coon and Walton Goggins — was watched by more than six million viewers.Before “Survivor,” White competed on “The Amazing Race” with his father in 2009 and again in 2011. In a 2021 interview with The New Yorker, he attributed his love of reality television to its ability to distill real human behavior and conflict.“For me, as a writer of drama, I aspire to do what reality television already does,” he said. “To create characters that are surprising and dimensional and do weird” stuff and “capture your attention.”The landmark 50th season of “Survivor,” which is scheduled to air in 2026, will feature several returning cast members, including a Season 1 contestant, Jenna Lewis-Dougherty, and the five-time competitors Cirie Fields and Ozzy Lusth. Filming is scheduled to take place this summer. More

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    Willem Dafoe Returns to His Stage Roots at the Venice Theater Biennale

    Willem Dafoe is returning to his roots. While his distinctive, chiseled features are instantly recognizable from over 150 movie roles, Dafoe, 69, actually got his start in experimental theater. In 1980, he co-founded the New York City-based company the Wooster Group, and performed with it for more than 20 years.Now, he is taking on the role of a curator. Last year, Dafoe was announced as the artistic director of the 2025 and 2026 editions of the Venice Theater Biennale, one of several festivals that began life as offshoots of the Art Biennale. (The theater event is actually an annual fixture.)And there will be familiar faces around Dafoe at this year’s edition, which opens Saturday and runs through June 16. Dafoe is paying tribute to some avant-garde theater companies that shaped him and were prominent 50 years ago at the 1975 edition of the festival, with productions from Denmark’s Odin Teatret and Thomas Richards, formerly of Workcenter Grotowski. The Wooster Group’s longtime director (and Dafoe’s ex-life partner), Elizabeth LeCompte, will receive the event’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.Under the tagline “Theater Is Body. Body Is Poetry,” the Theater Biennale will also welcome a mix of European directors whom Dafoe described in a recent video interview as “modern maestros” — including Romeo Castellucci, and Milo Rau — as well as emerging artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this appointment come about? Did Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Venice Biennales, reach out personally?Yes. I knew him a little bit: He was a very good friend of a dear friend of mine. I knew he wanted to talk to me, and it was the simplest of phone calls. I was very happy to accept.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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    Lea Michele Returns to Broadway in ‘Chess’

    The “Glee” star will join Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher next fall in a Broadway revival of an Abba-adjacent Cold War musical.The 1980s musical “Chess,” about a love triangle set in the geopolitically charged world of top-level chess tournaments at the height of the Cold War, will be revived on Broadway for the first time this fall, with Lea Michele playing one of the three starring roles.Michele was last on Broadway in 2023 in “Funny Girl,” whose fortunes she revived after stepping in as a replacement when the initial lead wasn’t working out. Best known for portraying an ambitious musical theater actress on the television series “Glee,” Michele will star in “Chess” alongside Aaron Tveit (a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”) and Nicholas Christopher (a “Hamilton” alumnus who recently thrilled critics in an Encores! production of “Jelly’s Last Jam”).The show is the brainchild and passion project of Tim Rice, the Tony-winning lyricist of “Evita” and “Aida.” Rice collaborated with Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba on the music and lyrics.The revival was announced Wednesday, but the announcement did not include specific dates or the exact theater — only that it would be staged in the fall at a theater operated by the Shubert Organization. The lead producers will be Tom Hulce, Robert Ahrens and the Shubert Organization.“Chess,” set primarily in Bangkok and Budapest, tells a fictional story about two grandmasters, one American (Tveit) and one Soviet (Christopher), facing off at a chess tournament, joined by a woman (Michele) whom both of them, at various points, love.The musical, first staged in London in 1986 and then heavily revised for a Broadway production in 1988, has an ardent fan base, but the Broadway production was a flop, and the show has been reworked for subsequent stagings around the world.This fall’s production features another new book, by the screenwriter Danny Strong. The show will be directed by Michael Mayer, who directed Michele both in her breakout Broadway role, in “Spring Awakening,” and in “Funny Girl.”Mayer and Strong, working with Rice, have been rethinking “Chess” for some time — they collaborated on a 2018 concert presentation of the musical at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. More

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    ‘The Counterfeit Opera’ Comes Together Like a Madcap Caper

    “The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter City,” which opens the summer season at Little Island on Friday, wears its influences on its sleeve.It draws not only from John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” which is often credited as birthing the modern musical in 1728, but also that show’s 1928 adaptation, “The Threepenny Opera,” by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. Indeed, many of the characters’ names — including the scoundrel Macheath and his paramours Polly and Lucy — are the same in all three works.But “The Counterfeit Opera” is also a “fake opera,” according to Kate Tarker, who wrote the book and lyrics. The story is still rooted in underworld figures. Now, though, they are a gang of modern-day burglars who use their plundered loot from places including the Metropolitan Opera, to put on a show.“These thieves are calling it an opera,” the show’s director, Dustin Wills, said with a laugh. “They probably don’t go to the opera very often.”“The Counterfeit Opera” has had a fast and furious gestation; Wills said it has been like “‘Project Runway’ for directing.” It started late last fall, when Zack Winokur, Little Island’s producing artistic director, approached Wills and the composer-arranger Dan Schlosberg, the music director of Heartbeat Opera.The “Counterfeit Opera” creative team, from left, Dustin Wills, Tarker and Schlosberg.Bess Adler for The New York TimesWe 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