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    Ian McKellen Is in ‘Good Spirits’ After Falling Off the Stage During a Play

    The English actor was injured during a performance of “Player Kings,” and the show was abruptly canceled. He is expected to perform again on Wednesday.The actor Ian McKellen was hospitalized but expected to recover quickly after falling off the stage during a performance of “Player Kings” at a theater in the West End in London on Monday night, the producers of the play said.After a scan, doctors at Britain’s National Health Service said that McKellen would “make a speedy and full recovery, and Ian is in good spirits,” according to a statement by the producers.In a statement provided by his publicist on Tuesday, McKellen thanked the N.H.S. professionals who treated him. “To them, of course, I am hugely indebted. They have assured me that my recovery will be complete and speedy and I am looking forward to returning to work,” he said.McKellen, 85, who has been nominated for two Academy Awards and has won a Tony, a Golden Globe and multiple Olivier Awards, is starring in the play, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s two “Henry IV” plays, directed by Robert Icke. McKellen plays John Falstaff, a fictional character who appears in three Shakespeare plays. The fall took place during a battle scene, according to Aleks Phillips, a BBC journalist who was in the audience on Monday night and described what he saw in an article. “It happened so quickly that at first it appeared to be part of the performance,” Phillips wrote. “But the actor cried out and staff rushed to help.”After the fall, the performance was canceled and the audience left the theater. Tuesday night’s show was also canceled, the producers said, but McKellen was expected to return to the stage for a matinee performance on Wednesday. McKellen has often returned to the stage for Shakespeare plays throughout his six-decade career, including in recent years as King Lear and as an octogenarian Hamlet. He is also a fixture of the silver screen, including his roles as Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies, as well as Magneto in the “X-Men” series.“Player Kings” is in its final week and runs at the Noël Coward Theater through Sunday. More

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    Meet The Sisters Who Turned “Merrily We Roll Along” Into a Tony Winner

    Maria and Sonia Friedman discussed their long history with “Merrily We Roll Along,” after a bittersweet Tony Awards.The Friedman sisters have been making art together since they were little girls. Their London childhood was chaotic — they were often left to their own devices — but the family’s four children found solace in storytelling.Now Sonia, 59, is one of the most successful theater producers in the English-speaking world. Maria, 64, is a celebrated actress and singer. Their sister is a scientist, and their brother, who died last year, was a violinist.Sonia and Maria have occasionally worked together over the years, but rarely with as much emotional investment as on the current Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” which Maria is directing and Sonia is producing. The revival has been transformative for the show, which, despite much-loved songs by Stephen Sondheim, was a famous flop when it first ran in 1981, and is now one of the hottest tickets in town.On Sunday night the Friedman sisters’ production won a Tony Award for best musical revival, as well as acting prizes for two of its stars, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, and another for its orchestrations. It did not, however, win for Maria’s direction, which made their evening bittersweet.“My heart went into 2,000 pieces,” said Sonia Friedman, who has a shelf full of Tony Awards, but just wanted recognition for her sister. She said she had to step out of the theater to collect herself. “The little sister in me was in agony for an older sister who’s only ever held me and supported me.”“Winning the Tony was fantastic, for Steve and for the legacy,” Maria Friedman said, but added that losing out on the best director award “was painful.”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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    Huey Lewis Musical to Close on Broadway as New Shows Struggle

    “The Heart of Rock and Roll” is the first new Broadway musical to announce a closing plan following Sunday’s Tony Awards.“The Heart of Rock and Roll,” a new jukebox musical powered by the songs of Huey Lewis and the News, will close on Broadway on Sunday.The show is the second to announce plans to close in the wake of this year’s Tony nominations, joining “Lempicka” on the list of productions that could not find an audience during this jam-packed spring. “The Heart of Rock and Roll” opened on April 22 to better-than-expected reviews, but picked up zero Tony nominations. The show will have played 24 previews and 72 performances.During a very crowded period on Broadway, the show was unable to break through: It grossed $272,051 in the week ending June 9, which is not nearly enough to cover the running costs of a full-size Broadway musical.“The Heart of Rock and Roll” is a freewheeling romantic comedy about a young man (played by Corey Cott) working at a Milwaukee cardboard factory but feeling the tug of his old band and developing a crush on the boss’s daughter (McKenzie Kurtz). The show, directed by Gordon Greenberg, features a witty book by Jonathan A. Abrams and even wittier choreography by Lorin Latarro; there was a pre-Broadway production at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2018.The musical, playing at the James Earl Jones Theater, features multiple Huey Lewis and the News hits, including “The Power of Love” and “Do You Believe in Love” as well as the title song. Huey Lewis, now 73, remains a nostalgic favorite for fans of 1980s culture, and he threw himself into promoting the show.The lead producers are Hunter Arnold, Tyler Mitchell and Kayla Greenspan; it was capitalized for up to $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission, and that money has not been recouped.The closing comes at a challenging time for Broadway, where production costs have risen and attendance has fallen since the coronavirus pandemic. There are now 32 shows running on Broadway, and many of them are losing money each week. More

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    How to Make Thrilling Theater About Climate Change Negotiations

    A new play from the writers of “The Jungle” dramatizes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a landmark climate agreement preceded by years of arguments over its wording.When the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson were looking for ideas for a new production, they stumbled upon a radio show about the negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.Some parts of the show, Robertson recalled in a recent interview, made the culmination of those discussions about lowering global carbon emissions sound “like a thriller,” with politicians holding talks in locked rooms and exhausted negotiators falling asleep beneath their desks.The pair thought that the landmark climate agreement could be the basis for another impactful stage production, similar to “The Jungle,” their hit about a refugee encampment in northern France. The problem was that the negotiations had dragged on for years before the agreement was reached in Kyoto in December 1997 — and that process was at times far from exciting. Most of the action involved representatives from different countries arguing over the language, and even punctuation, they wanted in the protocol.Climate negotiations “are so bloody boring in one sense,” Robertson said. “The challenge,” he added, “was, ‘How do we do take them, put it onstage and make it dramatic?’”Raul Estrada-Oyuela, left, the negotiations’ chairman, and Hiroshi Oki of Japan’s Environmental Agency shook hands as the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997.The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty ImagesThe playwrights’ answer to that question is “Kyoto,” directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, and running at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, from Tuesday through July 13.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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    Review: In ‘Dark Noon,’ American History Is a Shoot-’Em-Up Western

    A play from Denmark, with a South African cast, turns the heroic tropes of horse operas into the tools of tragedy at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.The building boom in Dumbo, Brooklyn, may be waning, but onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse it flourishes. There, the hard-working seven-person cast of “Dark Noon,” which opened on Monday, spends much of the production’s 105 minutes assembling the edifices of westward-creeping American civilization, from home to brothel to church to jail. By the end, the playing space, like the once pristine frontier, is so overbuilt you can see little else.The same holds for the play, written by Tue Biering for the Copenhagen-based company fit+foxy. Directed by Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu, “Dark Noon,” which has been touring Europe to great reviews since 2021, has a lot on its mind: the plight of migrants, the brutality of expansion, the slaughter of Native people, the culture of violence that shaped modern life. But in the end, it is too cluttered — stylistically, tonally, ideologically — to offer much insight.Thulani Zwane, right. “Dark Noon” has a lot on its mind: the plight of migrants, the brutality of expansion, the slaughter of Native people, the culture of violence that shaped modern life.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf it is also too familiar, perhaps the saga of the United States is still news to those not steeped in it. (Biering is Danish; Mahlangu, like the cast, is South African.) I can imagine that if you’d never heard of the Trail of Tears, or read Howard Zinn, or questioned the bucolic Johnny Appleseed vision painted by children’s primers, you might have something to learn from its potted horse-opera history. As the pun on “High Noon” in the title suggests, “Dark Noon” means to rewrite the America of classic westerns by turning its heroic tropes into the tools of tragedy.For most in the audience, that aim will prove entirely unobjectionable, for some even salutary. And as stagecraft, “Dark Noon” begins promisingly enough. Accompanied by distorted versions of Ennio Morricone’s theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” it cleverly evokes the haunted vastness of the West in the mid-1800s. (One actor rolls along the floor like a tumbleweed.) Blond wigs, whiteface and slow-motion gunfights draw nervous satirical laughs, as do live video segments that, among other things, frame the conflict between European settlers and Native Americans as a football game, complete with color commentary.Bongani Bennedict Masango, center, with actors and audience members.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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    ‘Cats’ Returns, Ditching the Junkyard for Queer Ballroom

    Things seemed to change when the video came out.At the end of May, the Perelman Arts Center posted a clip on social media of “Jellicle Cats,” the catchy, effervescent opening number from the musical “Cats.” It showed a group of queer performers catwalking in a rehearsal room before breaking apart to freely dance and vogue. One singer wore a cap winkingly topped with feline ears; another stared down the camera and twirled her ponytail with declarative swagger.This was the first real glimpse of a new, ballroom-inspired revival of “Cats,” running through July 28 at PAC NYC, as the Perelman Center in Manhattan is known. Since it was announced nearly a year earlier, the show had been a subject of skepticism and mocking humor: “Cats” was ridiculous enough, but ballroom? Hardly a mention of the production went by without a snicker.Then the “Jellicle Cats” clip went viral, and jaws dropped. Celebrities chimed in, with the comedian Ziwe saying, “Ok go off” and the filmmaker Justin Simien simply writing, “AYEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” On TikTok, one person commented, “do I……do I suddenly want to see Cats?”In this version, performers, including Baby (in white) and Primo (in jeans), vie for ballroom glory instead deciding which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer. Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesFor over four decades, “Cats” has been something of a cultural punching bag. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of poetry by T.S. Eliot, unfolding as a dance-heavy, revue-like show about cats gathering in a junkyard for their annual Jellicle Ball, has been seen as strange at best, and kitsch at worst. Its earworms have driven theater critics mad; its costumes of unitards and leg warmers are just as impossible to dislodge from your memory. Tom Hooper’s film adaptation, from late 2019, flopped disastrously, and was jokingly referred to as a dark turning point that ushered in the pandemic.But, in a moment of stage directors reconsidering, and often reimagining, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals, such as a stark “Sunset Boulevard” transferring to Broadway from London this fall, perhaps it is also the time for “Cats” to shake off its pop culture clichés and say something new.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 Latches Onto Donald Trump’s ‘Johnson’ Mix-Up

    “The sad thing is under MAGA law, his name is now Ronny Johnson,” Jon Stewart said after Trump referred to his former doctor, Ronny Jackson, by the wrong name.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.The Wrong RonDuring a rally on Saturday, former President Donald Trump bragged about passing a cognitive exam before mistakenly referring to his White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, as “Ronny Johnson.”“The sad thing is under MAGA law, his name is now Ronny Johnson,” Jon Stewart said.“Do you know Ronny Johnson? Because Ronny Jackson is the name of the doctor.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s not Ronny Johnson — it’s Jackson. If that was another cognitive test, you failed it, OK?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Bragging about acing a cognitive test while forgetting the name of the doctor who gave it to you is like writing on a résumé that you speak three languages and misspelling the word ‘languages.’” — SETH MEYERS[Imitating Trump] “I love Ronny Johnson. Doc Ronny — Doc Ronny Johnson. He gave me the test, then I went home to my beautiful wife, Malaria.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s like walking into a glass door after the doctor says you have 20/20 vision.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Milwaukee Edition)“Just weeks before he heads to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he called Milwaukee ‘a horrible city,’ forcing liberals around the country to defend Milwaukee, a city they then had to pretend to have been to: ‘Oh, Milwaukee’s the finest city in, I want to say, Indiana.’” — JON STEWART“This man is about to be in a world of deep-fried hurt.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And what a beautiful name, ‘Milwaukee.’ Some say it’s from the Algonquin for ‘the good land.’ Others say Milwaukee is Potawatomi for ‘cholesterol.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I believe that if every city in America was destroyed tomorrow except Milwaukee, the republic would still roll on. Because Milwaukee is America. As Thomas Jefferson himself once said, ‘Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Trump’s team tried to defend the remarks, saying the former president wasn’t calling the whole city horrible, just crime in the city, with one aide saying, ‘He was directly referring to crime in Milwaukee.’ Now he does have a point. Milwaukee has become so soft on crime that their convention center is hosting a convicted felon.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon shared his “overwhelming” experience of meeting the pope at the Vatican on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightHannah Einbinder will promote her new Max stand-up special, “Everything Must Go,” on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutThe family drama “Appropriate” became one of the season’s buzziest plays, partly because of Sarah Paulson’s star power.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSarah Paulson, an Emmy winner, won her first Tony on Sunday, taking home best actress in a play for her role in the family drama “Appropriate.” More

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    First-Time Tony Winners on Their Awards: Daniel Radcliffe, Kecia Lewis and More

    All of the actors who took home Tonys were first-time winners. Here’s what they had to say after their wins.All of the performers who received Tony Awards last night have one thing in common: they were all first-time honorees. After accepting their prizes, the winners trekked across the Lincoln Center plaza to a press room where they answered questions from The New York Times and reporters from other news outlets. Here’s a sampling of what they said.Daniel Radcliffe, “Merrily We Roll Along”Radcliffe won best featured actor in a musical for his performance as the lyricist Charley Kringas in a revival of Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” It’s Radcliffe’s fifth Broadway show, but the first for which he was nominated for a Tony.What has the “Merrily” journey been like for you?It’s been a dream, especially with it ending like this. My singing teacher, who I mentioned, one of the first things he ever had me sing to him was “Good Thing Going” whenever I worked with him for “Equus.” Going from singing that for the first time in his office in London to singing it onstage and now this, it’s insane.What’s it like to find new success after spending so much of your career in your childhood on “Harry Potter?”When I finished “Potter,” I had no idea what my career was going to be. I had already started doing some stage stuff, but I didn’t know what the future held. To have had the last year with playing Weird Al [in the 2022 movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”] and also doing “Merrily We Roll Along,” it’s been awesome. And I do think playing a character for a long time builds up in you a desire to sort of do as many things as you possibly can. I’m doing that right now.Talk a little bit about the process of learning “Franklin Shepard, Inc.?” It’s a huge moment in the show and a huge patter song.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