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    in Theater

    3 Ambitious Song Cycles, but Only One Connects Mind and Heart

    Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a work of wonder, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird” are less effective.Days and months, but also mere minutes, acquire outsize, perhaps even life-altering significance, in three song cycles currently playing intimate venues in Manhattan.Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There,” at the Minetta Lane Theater through Oct. 5, takes place over just a few minutes, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird,” upstairs at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 13, cover periods that feel like distinct parentheses in his life.Under its goofy exterior, Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart. This 75-minute Audible production, directed by David Cromer, unfurls over the time it takes for Todd (Almond) to walk down the stairs from his apartment to the street, where Guy, who has just rung his buzzer, awaits. The two met at a brunch the day before and ended up walking around together, until an abrupt parting. Now this possible love interest has unexpectedly turned up, bearing coffee.An accomplished composer and music director (he collaborated with Laura Benanti on her recent Audible show, “Nobody Cares”), Almond has created something that feels like an interior monologue with the jumbled, digressive quality of a fever dream: Time and space unfold following their own surreal logic and Todd experiences jump cuts from one location to another as the mayhem escalates. “This is exactly what happens when you let someone talk you into brunch,” he says while trying to escape a vampire’s fangs.An undercurrent of anxiety runs through the show — Todd has a fear of falling from something (like his building’s rooftop when sleepwalking) or for someone (like a certain nice man with whom he just clicks) — but it fuels a self-deprecating, antic energy that keeps the story from lapsing into neurotic solipsism.Flanked by Erin Hill on harp and vocals and Luke McCrosson on bass, Almond, whose acting credits include “Girl From the North Country,” brings to life a gallery of eccentric characters, but does quite well on his own, enlivening his serviceable vocals with a vividly comic presence. Letting people in is tough, but Todd eventually answers that bell and opens up.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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    Musical Comedy ‘Operation Mincemeat’ to Open on Broadway Next Spring

    The show is about a real World War II episode in which British intelligence planted disinformation on a dead body to fool the Germans.“Operation Mincemeat,” an improbably successful British musical comedy, already has a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality to it: It’s about a World War II military ruse in which British intelligence planted fake information on a dead body to (successfully) mislead the Germans.Now the producers of “Operation Mincemeat” are hoping for another hard-to-believe turn of events: Finding success on Broadway at a time when many other shows have big stars or big brands.The oddball show began its life in a tiny London theater and then this year won the Olivier Award — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — for best new musical. On Tuesday, the show’s producers announced that the musical’s first production outside Britain will open on Broadway next spring, with previews beginning on Feb. 15 and an opening slated for March 20 at the John Golden Theater.A lead producer, Jon Thoday, said in an interview that he was concerned about opening in a climate dominated by celebrities, but also inspired by the success of plays like “Stereophonic” and “Oh, Mary!” that demonstrate it is still possible for unknown shows with little-known casts to break through.“It’s daunting, because you come here and you look at one show after another with a giant Hollywood star in it, and we’re doing a show with people who had never written a musical before,” said Thoday, whose company, Avalon, is producing the show. “We’re going to see whether it works here or not. We’re hoping it will, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”“Operation Mincemeat” is set in 1943 and based on a true story that is seemingly so crazy it has repeatedly been adapted and written about. The musical was written and composed by a comedy group called SpitLip — David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts — which bills itself as “makers of big, dumb musicals.” Their show, directed by Robert Hastie, had several small productions around London before arriving on the West End in early 2023.Powered by heart and humor, the show has had strong word-of-mouth — it has a passionate group of fans and repeat attenders who are affectionately known as mincefluencers — and has become profitable in the West End, where it continues to run. Thoday said he hopes that the original cast will come to New York, but that that depends on whether they are able to get visas.Thoday said he expected that the show would be capitalized for about $11.5 million.“Operation Mincemeat” is not the only show to announce Broadway plans this week. On Monday, the producers of a musical adaptation of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” said their show would come to Broadway at an unspecified point next year. More

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    in Television

    Late Night Slams Trump’s Plan to Adapt ‘The Purge’

    “Good news: He stopped talking about Hannibal Lecter,” Jimmy Fallon said. “Bad news: He suggested we do ‘The Purge’ instead.”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.Taking a Page from ‘The Purge’ PlaybookDuring a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, former President Donald Trump suggested that Americans have “one really violent day” to curtail crime.Late-night hosts likened Mr. Trump’s plans to the popular horror movie franchise, “The Purge.”“Yeah, Trump wants ‘The Purge,’ while his staff wishes he would re-enact ‘A Quiet Place,’” Jimmy Fallon said on Monday.“Good news: He stopped talking about Hannibal Lecter. Bad news: He suggested we do ‘The Purge’ instead.” — JIMMY FALLON“Did he just suggest ‘The Purge’ for stealing from CVS? [imitating Trump] ‘If that doesn’t work, I have other ideas, OK? We put all the shoplifters on a bus with Keanu Reeves. If it goes slower than 50 miles an hour, blammo!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He suggested that the way to end crime would be to have one really violent day, one rough hour that would solve everything, like ‘The Purge’ and so much more. If anyone in your life had, like, a weekend like this, you’d be concerned. Like if your dad had a series of similar outbursts, you’d call your siblings to figure out what to do.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (V.P. Debate Prep Edition)“Tomorrow night in New York, the first and only debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, this will be the first vice-presidential debate since 2008 in which the candidates will stand instead of sit. I guess they were worried JD Vance might get distracted by a sexy office chair.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Honestly, I’m not even going to watch it, and I’m going to tell you why — because I already know who I’m voting for, vice-president-wise.” — JON STEWART“Actually, today Trump asked Vance if he needed any debate advice, and Vance was like, ‘Absolutely. Do you have Kamala’s number?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Voters were more likely to describe Walz as honest, trustworthy and caring, where they were more likely to describe Vance as nervous, unsettling and damp. But I disagree. You know, when I see JD Vance, I see a man who is grounded, who is rational and so humanlike, you could barely tell he isn’t one.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed his new book, “The Message,” with Jon Stewart on Monday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe musician-turned-movie star Lady Gaga will promote “Joker: Folie à Deux” on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutBillie Eilish onstage at the Videotron Center on Sunday night. Her new tour supports her most recent album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”Julia Spicer for The New York TimesA master class in intimacy and crowd engagement, Billie Eilish’s new Hit Me Hard and Soft tour debuted in Canada on Sunday. More

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    in Theater

    Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

    The “Oppenheimer” star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.Sara Krulwich/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

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    Based on a True Story, or a True Story? In ‘Baby Reindeer’ Lawsuit, Words Matter.

    A defamation suit against Netflix boils down to how the company presented its story about Martha Scott, a fictionalization of what the show’s creator has described as a real-life stalking incident.The woman who claims to have inspired the character Martha Scott in the Netflix series “Baby Reindeer” can proceed with a defamation lawsuit against the streaming giant, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled last week.The woman, Fiona Harvey, says that she has experienced panic attacks and faced abuse, and that she has developed a fear of going outside, since the show was released in April. Online sleuths quickly identified her as the real-life inspiration behind the character and inundated her with threatening and harassing messages, according to the lawsuit.The seven-episode limited series, which won six Emmy Awards this month, follows a struggling comedian, Donny Dunn (played by the show’s creator, Richard Gadd) as he is stalked and harassed by Martha Scott, a patron he meets while working at a bar in London. The show follows Donny as his life spirals out of control, and ends with Martha, played by Jessica Gunning, being convicted of stalking.Mr. Gadd has said the story, which he first developed as a play and then the Netflix series, was based on his own real-life experience with a stalker.Ms. Harvey’s lawsuit cites a statement that appears at the opening of the show: “This is a true story.”The case could boil down to an intricate issue of semantics related to that line, according to Judge R. Gary Klausner of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, who on Friday denied Netflix’s attempt to dismiss the suit.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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    Gavin Creel, Tony-Winning Musical Theater Actor, Dies at 48

    He won the award playing a Yonkers feed store clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” and was also nominated for roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Hair.”Gavin Creel, a sly and charming musical theater actor who won a Tony Award as a wide-eyed adventure seeker in “Hello, Dolly!” and an Olivier Award as a preening missionary in “The Book of Mormon,” died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 48.His death was confirmed by his partner, Alex Temple Ward, via a publicist, Matt Polk. The cause was metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, which Mr. Creel learned he had in July.Mr. Creel was a well-liked member of the New York theater community whose death comes as a shock, given his age. He had been performing on Broadway for two decades, mostly in starring roles, and just last winter his physical and vocal agility, as well as his charisma and curiosity, were on display in a memoiristic show he wrote and performed Off Broadway called “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” about learning to love the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Mr. Creel during his Broadway debut in 2002 when he played Jimmy Smith in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” opposite Sutton Foster as Millie Dillmount.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA superior singer with a sunny tenor, Mr. Creel made his Broadway debut and received his first Tony nomination in 2002 as the suave salesman Jimmy Smith in the original production of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” starring opposite Sutton Foster, who played the title character, a spunky social climber named Millie Dillmount.He went on to find success in a string of Broadway revivals, playing the straight son of a gay couple in “La Cage aux Folles” (which opened in 2004); the leader of a tribe of hippies in “Hair” (2009); a womanizing clerk in “She Loves Me” (2016); a callow clerk in “Hello, Dolly!” (2017); and both a prince and a wolf in “Into the Woods” (2022).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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    Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country

    The Off Broadway plays “Fatherland” and “Blood of the Lamb” explore the grief, anger and fear of no longer recognizing the country you love.When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.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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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Real Housewives’ and the Vice-Presidential Debate

    The Bravo franchise will air two different premieres. And on Tuesday is the first debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Sept. 30-Oct. 6. Details and times are subject to change.MondayALL AMERICAN: HOMECOMING 8 p.m. on The CW. This college-focused series is wrapping up its third season. The show follows a group of athletes as they juggle training, socializing and interpersonal relationships. This finale will hopefully tie up lose ends because the show, now canceled, won’t be coming back for a fourth season.TuesdayVICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 9 p.m. on various networks. For anyone counting, or bracing themselves, the election is under 40 days away. This will be the first debate between Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota. So far, the rules are pretty similar to those implemented at the presidential debate last month, but the candidates will likely be standing, a departure from the past couple of V.P. debates.REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW YORK CITY 9 p.m. on Bravo. The New York City gals are back on small screens, this time with the addition of the fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff and the art curator Racquel Chevremont. Lots of fights, glamour shots and not-so-subtle sharing are on the docket.WednesdayChad Michael Murray and Morgan Kohan in “Sullivan’s Crossing.”Chris Reardon/Freemantle, via CWSULLIVAN’S CROSSING 8 p.m. on the CW. It is officially fall a.k.a. “Gilmore Girls” rewatch season. But if you have already memorized all seven seasons of that show, then this series, coming back for its second season, is a great way to have Scott Patterson (Luke Danes in “Gilmore”) back on your screen. Patterson plays the father to Morgan Kohan’s Maggie Sullivan, who moves back home to get her life back together. Chad Michael Murray (“One Tree Hill”) is also there because what’s small-town charm without a mysterious and emotionally distant hunk?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