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    In a Musical About Penicillin, Superbugs Take Center Stage

    “The Mold That Changed the World” focuses on the physician who discovered penicillin. And it offers a message: Don’t take antibiotics unless you really need them.WASHINGTON — Robin Hiley’s eyes rolled when he recounted the night in 2016 that a friend, an infectious disease doctor, asked him what seemed like a crazy question: “Wouldn’t it be a great thing to have a musical about antibiotics?”Hiley, a composer and songwriter who is the artistic director of the Charades Theater Company in Edinburgh, was skeptical. Though the troupe calls itself “theatre with a social conscience,” antibiotics — or more precisely the threat of antimicrobial resistance, which can lead to death when common germs evade treatment — seemed a bridge too far.But the friend, Dr. Meghan Perry, was persistent, passionate about what she conceded was “this wacky idea.” And so it is that “The Mold That Changed the World,” a musical about Alexander Fleming, the Scottish physician and microbiologist who received a Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin, is playing this week (through Sunday) in Washington.The show traces the life of Fleming, from his days as a young private in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps who later became a medical doctor, through two world wars and his famous discovery. It also offers a glimpse into a dark future — one predicted by Fleming himself — where antibiotics no longer work because deadly “superbugs” have learned to evade them.It also has a neat twist: a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast. They include people like Mario Sengco, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency who also sings in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.Emily Bull, as Rose, comforts a wounded soldier played by Scott Armstrong in “The Mold That Changed the World.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times“How often can a musical deliver a lifesaving message to society?” he asked.The danger Fleming foresaw is, in fact, already here. Experts estimate that antimicrobial resistance leads to 1.2 million deaths around the world each year.And the problem — known by its initials, A.M.R. — is getting worse, because the drugs were overused during the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The show opens on Nov. 1 in Atlanta, home of the C.D.C.; Dr. Walensky will participate in a panel discussion before the performance.)At a discussion before Thursday night’s performance at the Atlas Performing Arts Center here in the nation’s capital, Dr. Rick Bright, former director of the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, made the story personal: After a cut he sustained while gardening led to an antibiotic-resistant infection, he spent a week in the hospital, and almost lost a thumb. It took seven antibiotics to cure him. Another panelist, the writer Diane Shader Smith, lost her 25-year-old daughter, who had cystic fibrosis, to a superbug infection.In Edinburgh, that is precisely what Dr. Perry was worried about when she pitched her idea to Hiley, who said he gravitates “toward historical stories that have a social impact.” He began reading about Fleming, he said, and “saw this potential of a story and started to begin to understand the global impact of A.M.R. And the seed was sown, so to speak.”The musical features a chorus of real-life health care professionals and scientists, who play soldiers, lab technicians, reporters — singing and dancing with the rest of the cast.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThey received funding from the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which in turn led to backing from a powerful figure: Dame Sally Davies, who was then Britain’s chief medical officer. She was so concerned about antimicrobial resistance, she said, that it is now on Britain’s “risk register,” along with pandemics and bioterrorism, as a security threat.The show has had sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and has also played in London and Glasgow — with mold spelled “mould.” It opens with Fleming, played by Jeremy Rose, at the end of his life, encountering an otherworldly, barefoot Mother Earth figure named Rose, played by Emily Bull.Rose, the Mother Earth character, hovers over the story as a kind of narrator, bringing Fleming back and forward in time. Two ethereal-looking circus performers, dressed in flowing psychedelic colors, appear throughout the musical, spinning on an acrobat’s wheel. Hiley envisioned them as the “Gram twins,” representing two different types of bacteria: Gram-positive and Gram-negative. (Penicillin treats Gram-positive infections.)The audience sees the young Army private bidding farewell to the London Scottish Regiment, where he has served for 14 years. (“Private 6392, this mess hall honors you!” the cast sings.) Soon it is 1914, and Fleming is in Bologne, France, tending to soldiers — some from his old unit — facing death from exposure to poison and shrapnel wounds that turn into deadly infections.He cries at the uselessness of it all: “These men came to war prepared to die to protect their homeland, their families, their friends — not to be poisoned by gas, gangrene, harmless cuts; infected by horse manure on the fields on which they fought!”Fleming, later seen in his bacteriology lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, is a rumpled, earnest figure. He was apparently not the neatest of scientists, and the show riffs on other scientists who frown on his untidy habits. (“It’s clean and tidy we adore,” the chorus, dressed in lab coats, sings. “So sterilize those beakers! Disinfect that glass pipette!”) But that very untidiness led to his world-changing discovery.In 1928, while experimenting with common staphylococcal bacteria, Fleming spotted a ring of mold in a petri dish he had left by an open window while he was off on vacation. He was astonished to see that the mold had killed the germs. But that is not the end of the story.More than a decade passed before his discovery could actually be put to use. It took a couple of polished Oxford University scientists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to purify the mold called penicillium notatum so that it could be tested on mice, and then people, and manufactured in mass quantities. They shared the Nobel with Fleming.A panel discussion at the Atlas Performing Arts Center included, from left: the composer and songwriter Robin Hiley; Sarah Despres of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Bethany Brookshire, a science writer in Washington; Dr. Rick Bright; and the writer Diane Shader Smith.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesOne of the biggest challenges in modern medicine is that drug companies don’t want to invest in developing new antibiotics; it is not that lucrative, and if germs keep evolving to evade new drugs, the market potential is limited. In bringing the show to Washington, Dame Sally said, she hopes to persuade Congress to pass a bill, the PASTEUR Act, that would offer incentives for companies to innovate. (The name, a play on the famous scientist Louis Pasteur, stands for Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions To End Up surging Resistance.)“We have a market failure,” Dame Sally said.Looking ahead, Dr. Walensky said, “addressing antimicrobial resistance is going to be the next chapter because it was the thing everybody was worried about before the pandemic.”As “The Mold That Changed The World” winds down, Fleming finds himself in the future, aghast at what humankind has wrought. With so many people taking antibiotics unnecessarily, and farmers using them to prevent and treat disease in livestock and increase productivity, modern medicine is no more equipped to handle bacterial infections than the young Fleming was on the battlefield.The message, Dr. Perry said, is clear: “Don’t take an antibiotic unless you really need it.” She harked back to when she and Hiley were brainstorming at the cafe in Edinburgh, and to the message she had written in block letters atop their storyboard: “Antibiotics are precious.” More

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    ‘Life of Pi’ Will Come to Broadway

    Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel will begin preview performances on March 9.The theatrical adaptation of “Life of Pi,” about the tales of a teenage boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger, is coming to New York this spring.Following an energetic run in London, where “Life of Pi” won five Olivier Awards, including best new play, the show will come to Broadway’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theater with preview performances starting March 9 and an opening night slated for March 30. Casting has not yet been announced.The show, written by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster, is an adaptation of Yann Martel’s acclaimed 2001 novel, which won the Man Booker Prize and inspired a 2012 film. It uses intricate puppetry to bring the story’s animal characters to life, with the seven performers who play the tiger collectively awarded best actor in a supporting role at the Olivier Awards.In The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf wrote that the appeal of the production in London’s West End “lies not so much in blunt pronouncements as in the visual wonder of a bare stage yielding to richly imagined life.”In a statement, Chakrabarti called the show “a story of survival which all of us can fundamentally relate to after the effects of the pandemic.” She added that “to be able to tell this story the way I imagined it, to create the world using my references and viewpoint, has been an extraordinary gift.”Before coming to Broadway, “Life of Pi” will make its North American premiere at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The White Lotus’ and Lots of Spooky Movies

    The HBO series begins its second season. And we rounded up some scary movies to get you prepped for Halloween.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Oct. 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE SURREAL LIFE 9 p.m. on VH1. In a world where we have an abundance of reality shows that throw a handful of strangers together (see: “Big Brother,” “The Real World”), why not add one more? This one isn’t exactly new (the last season that aired was in 2006). This time, eight celebrities, including Frankie Muniz, Stormy Daniels and Dennis Rodman, move into a house together and moments of chaos certainly ensue.TuesdayMAKING BLACK AMERICA: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This four-part series, hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is wrapping up this week. Gates Jr. speaks to politicians and scholars about organizations and social networks that have been created by Black people, for Black people. The final episode discusses the media phenomenon of Black Twitter as a safe space for debate and celebration.WednesdayA still from “A Tree Of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting.”Courtesy of HBOA TREE OF LIFE: THE PITTSBURGH SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING 9 p.m. on HBO. On Oct. 27, 2018 a man armed with an assault riffle and several handguns killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, making it one of the deadliest attacks against the Jewish community in the U.S. This feature documentary tells the stories of victims, survivors and family members as the community works toward healing.VICE NEWS TONIGHT INVESTIGATES: WHEN MURDER ISN’T MURDER 11 p.m. on Vice. In 2015, LaKeith Smith was 15 years old, he and three of his friends burglarized a house in Alabama. When the police showed up, they shot and killed his friend A’Donte Washington, but because of a law in Alabama, Smith is now serving 30 years in prison for Washington’s murder. The accomplice liability law means that someone not involved in a murder can nevertheless be charged for it, if that person is committing a felony, like robbery, at the same time. This one-hour special tells the story through previously unreleased police interrogation tapes and body-camera footage while also spotlighting the movement to free Smith from prison.ThursdaySIESTA KEY 8 p.m. on MTV. The residents of “Siesta Key” are moving down to Miami this season. Most of the original cast is returning, including Juliette Porter, the de facto narrator and star, but Kelsey Owens and Garrett Miller said they were unceremoniously cut from the show. Though some familiar faces will be missing, we can be sure to expect gorgeous overhead shots of southern Florida, plenty of altercations and some romance sprinkled in.CRIBS 9 p.m. on MTV. Going on 22 years, this iconic reality show, where we get to have a sneak peak of celebrity homes, is back. This season we’ll be welcomed into the houses of Matt James of “The Bachelor” fame, the model Olivia Culpo and current “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Jessie James Decker.FridayHeather O’Rourke in “Poltergeist.”MGMPOLTERGEIST (1982) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film, directed by Tobe Hooper and written in part by Steven Spielberg, teaches us that friendly ghosts communicating through your television isn’t always as fun as it seems. For the Freelings family, the spirits quickly turn scary and menacing, and when their 5-year-old daughter (Heather O’Rourke) goes missing, a parapsychologist and exorcist are brought in to help. “‘Poltergeist’ is like a thoroughly enjoyable nightmare, one that you know that you can always wake up from, and one in which, at the end, no one has permanently been damaged,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times.SaturdayHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 7:20 p.m. on Freeform. In this animated movie, the titular hotel acts as a safe haven for all sorts of monsters. But things go awry when Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) throws a 118th birthday party for his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and a human (Andy Samberg) crashes the party and falls for Mavis. It’s that classic star-crossed, human-monster love story.Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia in “The Addams Family.”AP Photo/Paramount PicturesTHE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991) 7:30 p.m. on Paramount. Based on a cartoon and a 1964 TV show of the same name, this version stars Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez Addams. When a man claiming to be Fester (Christopher Lloyd), Gomez’s long lost brother, shows up, the family is thrilled — until suspicions arise that he isn’t who is he says and he aims to steal the family’s fortune. The film is a “funny revival that goes well beyond the limits of its original sources, thanks to ingenious casting, droll production design, spirited direction and dazzling camera tricks,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times.SundaySILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) 8 p.m. on BBC. If you’ve watched Netflix’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” you’ll find chilling similarities in Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter. In this film, Jodie Foster plays a student at the F.B.I.’s training academy who interviews Lecter as he is serving life in prison. Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The Times that “the gruesome details are vivid without being exploited.”THE WHITE LOTUS 9 p.m. on HBO. After a successful first season (and several Emmy wins), the anthology show is back with a whole new group of vacationers jetting off to another White Lotus resort in Sicily. The new cast includes Aubrey Plaza, Theo James and Tom Hollander with one familiar face: Jennifer Coolidge is reprising her Emmy Award-winning role as the daffy heiress Tanya McQuoid. More

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    Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

    Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

    BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” More

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    ‘Back to the Future’ Musical to Open on Broadway Next Summer

    The show, now in London, has a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts. Performances will begin on June 30.Filmdom’s most famous DeLorean is getting ready to park itself on Broadway.A musical adaptation of the hit 1985 film “Back to the Future” is planning to open on Broadway next summer, its producers announced Friday. (Look at your calendar: Friday is Oct. 21, which is when devoted fans celebrate “Back to the Future Day.”)The musical, with a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts, has already had a life in Britain.It had an ill-timed opening at the Manchester Opera House on March 11, 2020; that production closed a few days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show then transferred to London last fall, where it has had much better luck: It won this year’s Olivier Award for best new musical, and it is still running at the Adelphi Theater.The beloved science-fiction film, about a teenager who travels back in time in a DeLorean and disrupts the lives of his future parents, spawned sequels and a variety of spinoff ventures, and also contributed to the fame of its star, Michael J. Fox.“Back to the Future: The Musical” features a book by Bob Gale, the screenwriter who co-wrote and co-produced all three films, and songs by Alan Silvestri, who composed the film’s score, as well as Glen Ballard, a record producer and songwriter. The musical also includes pop songs featured in the film, including “The Power of Love.”The director is John Rando, who in 2002 won a Tony Award for “Urinetown.”Two members of the London cast have signed on to reprise their roles on Broadway: Roger Bart as the inventor Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly, the protagonist’s father. Casting for the main role, of the teenager Marty McFly, has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances June 30 and to open Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, which is now home to a starry revival of “The Music Man” that is planning to close Jan. 1.The musical, with Colin Ingram as its lead producer, is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Gale, who has been working on projects related to “Back to the Future” for more than four decades and is the de facto guardian of the franchise, said he is delighted to finally be working on Broadway, more than 15 years after Leslie Zemeckis, the wife of the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, saw “The Producers” and suggested “Back to the Future” could also be musicalized. “Broadway is the gold standard — musical theater was really invented there — and I’m delighted that we are finally going to get our shot on the Great White Way,” Gale said.Gale said the creative team has been making tweaks to the script and the set as it prepares for a Broadway run, incorporating lessons from the productions in England. They are small changes, he said, “but little things add up.”“One thing people appreciate about the movie: the more they watch, the more details they see,” he said. More

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    ‘The Gold Room’ Review: Gay Sexuality on Shuffle Mode

    Two men circling each other for a hookup talk through fantasies and everyday doubts in this play by Jacob Perkins.Showing up to a stranger’s house for sex may seem provocative to some, but it’s become a mundane interaction among gay men who use apps like Grindr. Still, such encounters are loaded with profound questions that are often dispensed with in a blink. What does it mean to separate sex from intimacy? How does shame interfere with vulnerability?The two men circling each other in “The Gold Room,” now playing at Here, perform an abstract excavation of gay sexuality, its present-day mores and psychological undercurrents (spoiler alert, daddy issues ahead). But the playwright Jacob Perkins does not throw stones (the set by Emona Stoykova is appropriately glass-walled), indicting the broader cultural forces that influence and constrict gay men, a familiar mode for artists who’ve traversed similar territory. “The Gold Room” rather turns inward, to fantasies and everyday doubts that many who share the playwright’s experience will recognize.A chlamydia scare is not the icebreaker one would think to use with a hookup, but Robert Stanton’s character, an unnamed early career playwright, is recalling how it hurt to pee while his prospect, played by Scott Parkinson, grabs beers in the next room. Did he forget to mention that it was only a dream? The next moment, they’re engaging in aggressive verbal role play, then agreeing to another round. Stanton continues to probe his character’s psyche (he recounts a second elaborate dream, about his father cross-dressing) as Parkinson takes on a series of shifting roles — a reluctant producer encouraging the writer to tone down the eroticism of his work, a proctologist assuring him he did nothing to deserve hemorrhoids, an experienced lover instructing him to use “an ocean’s worth” of lube.One scene moves into the next with the ease and illogic of a subconscious on shuffle mode, with lighting by greer x, and occasional gusts of haze, marking the subtle shifts. Presented by i am a slow tide, and directed by the artistic director Gus Heagerty, the production has an elegant polish that suggests a more assured purpose than “The Gold Room” conveys over its hourlong running time. “I don’t know if it’s a work,” Stanton’s writer admits of the record he’s been keeping of his dreams, adding that they might not mean anything. The expression of insecurity seems to belong as much to Perkins as to his onstage surrogate.There is a therapy-couch feel to the play’s unprocessed reflections, and a lack of perspective that results from such sustained navel gazing. Perkins writes in the script that the two men may be cast with actors of any race, so long as they are both the same, suggesting a kind of mirroring. That note seems blind to the context of privilege, though, at a time when its acknowledgment has become essential to many conversations about difference. When talk turns to feeling unsafe, and to the monsters that always seem to be lying in wait outside the door, it’s tough not to consider that other facets of identity tend to offer some protection.The Gold RoomThrough Nov. 5 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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    in Theater

    ‘He Must Have Superpowers’: Asi Wind and His Sublime Card Tricks

    With a new one-man show, deploying a single deck of cards, the performer’s 20-year run as magic’s best-kept secret may be nearing its end.“Every now and then, this fails,” said Asi Wind, pausing for a suspense-maximizing moment during his new one-man magic show, “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle.” “This could fail. If it does, remember all the fun we had before.”There is little chance anyone took this whimsical disclaimer seriously. By the time it was offered, Wind, a 43-year-old Israeli-born New Yorker with the effervescent wit of a good dinner party host and the cunning of a master jewel thief, had already pulled off so many seemingly impossible feats that only a sucker would have bet against him. If he’d told us that we were all about to start floating around the room, half of the audience would have reached for a Dramamine and braced for lift off.Detailing what happens during this giddily mystifying 70-minute production — which opened last month and runs at the Gym at Judson, next to Washington Square Park in Manhattan, until Jan. 1 — would spoil more than a few surprises and much of the fun. Suffice to say, the entire show revolves around a single deck of playing cards, and the cards behave in ways that defy reason and, occasionally, the laws of physics.But Wind’s niftiest trick, honed over more than 20 years and thousands of private events, is his ability to eliminate any sense that he and his audience are locked in a contest. He does it with a combination of charm and humility that peers say is just one reason he ranks among the great magicians of our time.“When he was in his late 20s, I was describing him as one of the finest close-up performers in the country, and I think he’s been at the top of the magic world ever since,” said Jamy Ian Swiss, author of six magic books and co-producer of the long-running show Monday Night Magic at the Players Theater in Greenwich Village. “Very often a performer has a big personality onstage or he’s got great technical chops or he’s just inventive. And you can get by on any one of these qualities. Asi has all three. He’s the complete package.”For “Asi Wind’s Inner Circle,” audience members are asked to write their first and last names on blank playing cards, which are then spread on a round table where Wind conjures his mischief.Joan MarcusMany magicians imply that they are performing miracles and dare onlookers to divine their methods. Wind turns that approach on its head. He tells spectators that he can’t do magic and then makes any other explanation seem inconceivable.And he does it with ease and self-deprecating humor — “C’mon,” he said at one point, faux-pleading for a big reaction, “in Israel that’s a miracle!” — that will disarm even the most ardent Card Trick Columbos, those spectators too busy trying to bust the performer to enjoy the performance.Though a star among insiders, Wind has remained a relative unknown to the public. He had an Off Broadway show in 2013 called “Concert of the Mind,” and there was his wickedly bamboozling appearance on the competition television show “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in 2019, which has been viewed on YouTube nearly 14 million times. That video and a few other clips are about the only glimpses available of the man at work. He’s maintained a surprisingly low profile, earning his living at corporate shows and consulting with David Blaine, a producer of “Inner Circle” who calls Wind “my favorite magician.”“Fame is not his goal,” Blaine said in a phone interview. “What interests him most is answering the question, ‘How can I make magic a great experience for my audience?’ That’s what he’s chasing.”Wind’s status as magic’s best-kept secret may end with “Inner Circle,” which is built around a simple, ingenious premise. Before the action begins, ushers ask audience members to write their first and last names on blank-face playing cards that all have identical backs. The cards are then spread on a round table where Wind will sit and conjure his mischief.So every trick is performed with a deck missing any of the standard suits, faces or numbers, and that changes every night. A card might start off as “Zach Alexander” then transform, in Zach’s hands, into “Rachel Silver.” Rachel may then open a sealed envelope she’s been guarding, only to find “Zach Alexander” inside.“A playing card has information on it, but to most people, the six of hearts, for example, means nothing,” Wind said one recent afternoon. “But if a spectator puts his name on that card, suddenly it is significant. It’s not a card. It’s a person.”Wind was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, a place that has a cameo in the show — a spectator is dispatched here to ask a stranger for a random number — and a key role in his origin story. In 2001, he flew to the United States, intending a quick visit with his brother, but fell hard for New York City and tore up his return ticket. With no job prospects, let alone a work visa, he took a regular deck of cards to this park and performed for tips for anyone who could be convinced to stand still for a few minutes.“It was hard, and I failed,” he recalled, with a smile. “But it taught me a valuable lesson — that magic is about connecting to people. It’s about them.”Wind was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, a go-to outfit that he augments for performances with a dark sports jacket, a look that says TED Talk more than “I do magic.” During a two-hour interview, he was animated, funny and candid about his struggles, which include a somewhat debilitating streak of perfectionism that he described as a curse.“It’s never being satisfied, never being super happy with something,” he said. “It really takes a toll on me, emotionally.”Wind in Washington Square Park, where he used to perform for tips.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesHe pronounced himself “60 to 70 percent” pleased with the show during this talk in late September, and said he’d never stop refining it. For years, he’s kept vampiric hours in his Upper East Side apartment, spending all night practicing sleights and polishing routines. “Inner Circle” includes effects that Wind has been fine-tuning for decades. There’s no hint of methods in the show, let alone the daredevilish risks he takes through the evening, because he’s spent thousands of hours rendering his techniques invisible.When he’s in the mood for more visible handiwork, he paints watercolors. Many are portraits of his magic heroes, several of which are projected onto the round table at the end of “Inner Circle” during a monologue about those who have influenced him.“Harry Houdini,” he said, introducing the first image. “He understood that it’s not enough to fool people with magic. You have to make them care.”Wind began his life as Asi Betesh in Holon, a city near Tel Aviv. An uncle showed him the first tricks he ever saw, and the owner of a magic shop later scrambled his brains with a card trick that he can still describe in detail.He left Israel after developing a comedy-magic act inspired by Steve Martin and lived with his brother in Brooklyn while working the lowest rungs on the entertainment ladder — twisting balloon animals for tips at a Toys “R” Us in the Bronx or performing at kids’ parties dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants, in a costume that once gave him scabies.“Oh my God, was that hard to get rid of,” he said. “I had to take so many showers and take every sheet, every fabric in my apartment to the laundromat.”He started landing gigs at parties and, eventually, a spot at Monday Night Magic, which first let him perform during intermissions and seven years later, in 2008, as a headliner. As his reputation grew, Penn and Teller tried to coax him on to “Fool Us” and succeeded only after agreeing to let Wind perform without having to dupe the hosts.“For all his talk about not wanting to compete,” said Penn, a bit grumpily, “he did a trick backstage that had one purpose — to fool me. So shut up, Asi.”Today, and for the run of “Inner Circle,” Wind has a theater of his own, a bespoke and painstakingly fabricated 106-seater that is based on a venue for magicians in Munich. Judging from audience reactions, the design yields an intimacy that makes the effects astonishing from every vantage point.“I was sitting there thinking that all the people he was calling on were shills — and then he called my name,” Wendy Rogers, a public-school teacher from Brooklyn, said after the show. “He must have superpowers or something because what he does isn’t possible on earth. And yet he does it.” More