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    Who Should Be a Tony Awards Nominee in 2025?

    Our chief theater critic makes his picks.Clockwise from top left: “Oh, Mary!”; “Maybe Happy Ending”; “Yellow Face”; and “Gypsy.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; top right: Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThough the official Tony Awards nominations aren’t scheduled to be announced until Thursday, I give you my unofficial ones right now. If it were up to me, these would be the nominees.They include some, marked with an asterisk, that because they were seen Off Broadway or were otherwise ineligible, the real Tonys won’t include. Call it theatrical license that I do so anyway. Also bucking the rule book is my Best Ensemble category, which I argue for every year even though choosing among the Broadway riches is all but impossible.Best Play“Cult of Love”“English”“The Hills of California”“John Proctor Is the Villain”“Oh, Mary!”Best Musical“Dead Outlaw”“Death Becomes Her”“Maybe Happy Ending”“Smash”“Swept Away”Best Play RevivalAndrew Scott in “Vanya.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Eureka Day”“Our Town”“Vanya”*“Yellow Face”Best Musical RevivalCats: The Jellicle Ball*“Floyd Collins”“Gypsy”“Once Upon a Mattress”Best Actor in a PlayCole Escola, “Oh, Mary!”Jake Gyllenhaal, “Othello”Louis McCartney, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”Jim Parsons, “Our Town”Andrew Scott, “Vanya”*Best Actress in a PlayLaura Donnelly in “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLaura Donnelly, “The Hills of California”Susannah Flood, “Liberation”*Deirdre O’Connell, “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.”*Lily Rabe, “Ghosts”*Sarah Snook, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”Best Actor in a MusicalDarren Criss, “Maybe Happy Ending”John Gallagher Jr., “Swept Away”Jonathan Groff, “Just in Time”Joshua Henry, “Ragtime”*Jeremy Jordan, “Floyd Collins”Best Actress in a MusicalJasmine Amy Rogers, center, in “Boop! The Musical.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMegan Hilty, “Death Becomes Her”Audra McDonald, “Gypsy”Jasmine Amy Rogers, “Boop! The Musical”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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    Reality TV Wades Into Cross-Generational Dating Pools

    Bravo’s “Love Hotel” and ABC’s “Bachelor in Paradise” are widening the age range of prospective love matches.Age-gap relationships are nothing new when it comes to depictions of older men in TV and film plots. But a wave of recent releases, including “Babygirl,” “The Idea of You,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” and “Lonely Planet,” have zeroed in on romantic and sexual relationships between women in midlife and younger men.Two new reality dating spinoffs are now catching up. Bravo’s “Love Hotel,” which premiered Sunday, features three over-50 “Real Housewives” — Luann de Lesseps, 59, Gizelle Bryant, 54, and Shannon Beador, 61 — looking for love among eligible bachelors whose ages range from their 30s to their 60s at a luxury resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. (Ashley Darby, 36, rounds out the group of bachelorettes.)In the first episode Bryant asks Wale Alesh, 38, if he wants children. When he responds that he does, the cameras cut to Bryant in an interview filmed after. “Gizelle doesn’t have a uterus, so that means we aren’t compatible,” she says, speaking in the third person.Meeting Jay Bramble, 46, Bryant explained: “My three daughters are in college. I have the house to myself, so I just walk around naked.” He responded, “You’re living the dream.”Bryant, who is divorced and who dated the “Winter House” cast member Jason Cameron, 38, on a past season of “The Real Housewives of Potomac,” said it’s important that audiences see mature women living vital love lives. “Hey, ain’t nobody dead because they have, like, jumped over 39,” she said in an interview.Bryant added that the program gives the women a chance to show “we can spend whatever days we have left in a happy place with somebody that, you know, you really want to rock out with.”

    @bravotv Be cool, the wait for #BravosLoveHotel is over. #CountessLuann ♬ Luanns Right Back from Bravos Love Hotel – Bravo 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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    Late Night Pokes Fun at Trump’s Dismal Poll Numbers

    Seth Meyers called Donald Trump “the most unpopular president since Kevin Spacey.” Even measles is polling better, according to Jimmy Fallon.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Down BadPresident Trump will mark 100 days in office this week, but most of the country won’t be celebrating, to judge from his falling poll numbers.On Monday, Seth Meyers said Trump was “killing it — and by ‘it,’ I mean his approval ratings.”“Donald Trump is the most unpopular president since Kevin Spacey.” — SETH MEYERS“After almost 100 days in office, Trump is as popular as Kanye at a bat mitzvah.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Time really flies when you’re in the fetal position, doesn’t it? — BILL MAHER“In the ABC poll, more than 70 percent of Americans say the economy today is either ‘not so good’ or ‘poor.’ The other 30 percent are either in a coma or in his cabinet or both.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yep, Trump’s approval rating is down to 39 percent. Even measles is polling at 40 percent.” — JIMMY FALLON“In a post on Truth Social yesterday, President Trump urged House Republicans to skip a celebration of his first 100 days in office to vote on his tax bill. Oh, I hate to break it to you, buddy — there wasn’t going to be a celebration.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Cedric the Entertainer Edition)“For whatever reason, even though the Vatican dress code specifically recommended a dark suit for the service, Trump showed up in his bluest blue suit, something from the Cedric the Entertainer funeral collection.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump wore his blue suit, and Melania wore her wedding dress.” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump thought it was a funeral for his holiness, Papa Smurf.” — JIMMY FALLON“Meanwhile, Trump wore a black suit for a week after Hooters went out of business.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Oh, Mary!” star Cole Escola showed Stephen Colbert how to play a straight guy on Monday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightJulia Louis-Dreyfus will appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“This is where I belong, these are my people,” Sister Monica Clare said. “I never thought I would find that.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesSister Monica Clare presents a compelling argument for convents in her popular TikTok content and a new memoir. More

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    Bill Belichick’s Girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, Shuts Down Question About Their Relationship

    The legendary football coach has never shared much with the news media, but on Sunday it was Jordon Hudson who shut down a line of questioning.When Bill Belichick, one of the country’s most famous football coaches, appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the weekend to promote his new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football,” he touched on a number of topics, including his apparent disdain for inspirational halftime speeches.Football, Mr. Belichick said in his interview with Tony Dokoupil of CBS, is really about strategy: What is his opponent doing? How does his team need to adjust?“Identifying a problem,” he went on, “figuring a solution and then executing that plan to make it work.”Jordon Hudson, Mr. Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend, tried to do exactly that at one point in the interview, when Mr. Dokoupil asked Mr. Belichick, 73, how they had met.“We’re not talking about this,” Ms. Hudson interjected off camera from the producer’s table.“No?” Mr. Dokoupil asked her.“No,” Ms. Hudson said.A spokesman for Mr. Belichick and the University of North Carolina’s football team declined to comment on the interview, but Mr. Belichick’s relationship with Ms. Hudson — and, of course, their nearly 49-year age difference — has been a source of intrigue since the couple went public last year.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 ‘Krapp’s Last Tape,’ Gary Oldman Hits Rewind

    The star actor returns to the theater where he started almost a half-century ago, with Samuel Beckett’s bleak one-man play.For Gary Oldman, it is a homecoming of sorts. The English actor got his first professional gig at the Theater Royal in York, a small city 210 miles north of London, playing the titular feline in a 1979 pantomime production of “Dick Whittington and His Wonderful Cat.” He went on, of course, to establish himself as a screen star, achieving global fame through acclaimed performances in movies such as “J.F.K.,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”Now, almost half a century after his York debut, Oldman — who lives in Palm Springs — has returned to the Theater Royal to direct himself in a revival of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-man play, “Krapp’s Last Tape.” The run, through May 17, is almost sold out, and the playhouse has gone to town on merch, with signed posters and T-shirts on sale in the lobby.The story of this production is like an inversion of the play’s: Oldman, 67, fondly revisiting a haunt of his youth in the twilight of an illustrious career, plays Krapp, an unsuccessful writer who, on his 69th birthday, looks back at his past self and sees only abject failure.Krapp emerges onstage, coughing and doddering, into a dusty study and sits down at a desk to rehearse an annual ritual: recording a monologue on a chunky, reel-to-reel tape recorder. First, though, he retrieves an old spool of tape, recorded 30 years earlier, shortly after a romantic breakup, and plays it back, pausing now and then to reflect and ruminate.The tape suggests a life waylaid by misdirected amorous energies and a penchant for drink. When Krapp finally passes comment, it is to condemn, matter-of-factly, “the stupid bastard I took myself for 30 years ago.”The recorded voice has more lines than the flesh-and-blood Krapp; for the actor playing him onstage, the challenge is to achieve the right quality of stillness and silence, and to render the subtle shifts as he listens to the recording.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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    Where Can I Find a Cheap Broadway Ticket?

    If you are determined to see a celebrity in a popular show on a busy night, you may be out of luck, but with flexibility and persistence, you can cut some costs.Illustration by Melanie LambrickDo you have a question for our culture writers and editors? Ask us here.How in the world do people score cheap Broadway tickets? The TKTS booths do not seem cheaper; one time I did rush at the box office and it was the same price as full price. Other than lottery, what do people know that I don’t know?First, a reality check: Yes, it’s true that many seats at this season’s “Othello,” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, are priced at $921. But it’s also true that that show is an outlier — the average ticket price on Broadway this season has been $129, and about one-quarter of the 40 shows now running on Broadway have an average ticket price below $100.That said, ticket prices are indeed higher than they once were, and a subject of concern for the industry, widely acknowledged and little addressed.I can’t tell you that I know of some secret strategy for getting a steal, but with a combination of flexibility, persistence and luck, you can reduce your cost.Start at the sourceYour first stop should be the official website for the show you want to see. Click on the button that says “tickets,” and that will take you to the show’s official ticketing provider. Buying that way should help you reduce fees and avoid both scalpers and scams. The fee savings can be considerable; last I looked, the same prime seat at a Saturday matinee for “The Great Gatsby” was priced at $248 via the show’s website, but $313 at broadway.com, a site that says it caters to premium ticket buyers.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’s Debacles Live On at Joe Allen’s ‘Flop Wall’

    The posters in the theater-district restaurant document the shows that went wrong.Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We’ll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla’s right to operate five dealerships in New York.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesThere’s a place where Broadway flops live on: a wall at the restaurant Joe Allen in the theater district that is lined with posters of duds and disasters. “Everyone remembers the hits,” Joe Allen’s website says, “but we revel in the flops.” My colleague Sarah Bahr, who revels in both, writes about what it takes to make the flop wall:Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the 2000 drama “Dinner With Friends,” has a spot on the wall.But it’s not that play that earned him that place.It’s a show almost no one has heard of, a comedy called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” that starred Faith Prince. It opened on Broadway on Dec. 8, 1994, and ran for just 12 performances.A poster for that production is one of the more than 50 posters for little-known Broadway shows featured on what is known as the “flop wall,” the brick wall opposite the bar at Joe Allen. Among them are “Doctor Zhivago,” which ran for 23 performances a decade ago, and “Moose Murders,” which closed the same night it opened in 1983.“Sometimes having a life in the theater is electrifying, and sometimes it is electrocuting,” Margulies said after a rehearsal for his latest play, “Lunar Eclipse,” which is set to begin performances Off Broadway next month.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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    My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

    What is it about Chekhov’s melancholy inaction hero that makes him, and the play he stars in, so meaningful at all ages?Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.In the one-man show “Vanya,” Andrew Scott plays the title character as a man stuck in arrested development.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.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