Eliana Willis

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    Broadway Lights to Dim for Gavin Creel

    The landlords also said they would reconsider their process for determining who to honor with full and partial dimmings.Broadway’s theater owners, facing criticism for their decision to dim the lights outside fewer than one-third of the 41 theaters in honor of the musical theater performer Gavin Creel, have succumbed to the public pressure and agreed that all their venues would acknowledge his death.In addition to Creel, a well-known and well-liked actor who died on Sept. 30 at age 48, the theater owners said they would also dim the lights of all theaters to honor Maggie Smith, the British stage and screen star, as well as the actor Adrian Bailey, both of whom died last month. The lights for Bailey will be dimmed Oct. 17; the dimmings for Creel and Smith will be scheduled in consultation with their families.In an email on Wednesday, the theater owners described their decision via the Broadway League, the trade organization that represents them and speaks on their behalf.The lights-dimming ritual, which goes back decades, has been an increasingly fraught one for the nine entities that own and operate Broadway theaters. That small group decides not only which Broadway alumni merit such public recognition when they die, but also how many buildings should go dark, based on how those landlords evaluate the theatermakers’ contributions.In other words: Stephen Sondheim, James Earl Jones and Chita Rivera were recognized with lights dimmings at all theaters, but memorializing accomplished but less-universally known individuals with partial dimmings has been fraught. Those decisions have often been followed by pushback from artists and audiences: over whether to dim lights at all for the comedian Joan Rivers (the theater owners at first decided no, and then yes), and how many theaters should dim lights for the performers Jan Maxwell (at first one, then two), Marin Mazzie (at first six, then all) and Hinton Battle (at first nine, and then all).When the Broadway League announced, on Friday, that the theater owners had decided on a limited dimming for Creel — at first 11, and then 12 theaters after they added the Eugene O’Neill, where Creel starred in “The Book of Mormon” — a backlash arose on social media.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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    ‘The Wind and the Rain’ Review: How Sunny’s Bar Weathered the Storm

    On a barge in Brooklyn, the story of a beloved watering hole and a neighborhood’s recovery after Hurricane Sandy.How do we hold our shared history? Like a drink? Like a lover? Or does it slip through our fingers, like water from the bay? “The Wind and the Rain,” a new play by Sarah Gancher (“Russian Troll Farm”), which reclaims the recent past as pageant, offers one model.The play, which Jared Mezzocchi has staged on a barge that doubles as the Waterfront Museum and in the blocks of Red Hook, Brooklyn, just beyond, is ostensibly about Sunny’s, a bar that has occupied the ground floor of a brick building on Conover Street since 1907. Opened by Antonio Balzano and his wife, Angelina, each an immigrant from Italy, it survived world wars; prohibition; the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; urban blight; Hurricane Sandy, which sent the basin surging into the bar; and legal challenges. Now presided over by Tone Balzano Johansen, the bar remains a neighborhood stronghold. (Johansen is the widow of Antonio Balzano, an actor and painter named for his grandfather, and affectionately known as Sunny.) Every Saturday it hosts a bluegrass jam session. Johansen often sings.From a window of the barge, Sunny’s can almost be seen. Out another window, the Statue of Liberty beckons. The Vineyard Theater produced this show with En Garde Arts, a pioneer of site-specific and site-responsive performance. As the actors strut and a bluegrass combo strums and sings, the barge lurches underfoot. The play, performed by four actors on a narrow strip of stage in the barge’s center, is mostly Johansen’s story. Much of the text derives from interviews with her (Gancher is a Sunny’s regular) and she is played by Jen Tullock with lucid good sense. (Pete Simpson plays Sunny; Jennifer Regan and Paco Tolson fill out the other roles. Ample audience participation is also a feature.) Other vignettes are based on research, some are wholly invented. In a corner the band plays.The whole is affectionate, emotive, playful, but with a fuzziness around the edges — the way the world looks after one too many Manhattans. Instead of focusing only on Tone or on Sunny’s more generally, the play also offers a deep history of the neighborhood (from the British to the Dutch to the Lenape to the Laurentide ice sheet, all the way back to the Big Bang) and it lingers for a long time, too long, with the fraught love stories of Sunny’s grandparents and Romeo (Simpson again), a longtime bar employee.These discursions and the script’s fondness for philosophical postulates (“How do you make a play where everything past and future exists at once?” “How do you talk about time?”) tend to distract from the play’s core — the place of the bar within the greater community, the bar’s recovery after Sandy. The story of the bar is the story of the neighborhood, about a community coming together in the face of something as indomitable as a hurricane. It is a kind of living history, a collective memory in Christmas lights and scuffed wood.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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    ‘The Bachelor’ Is Shattering Its Own Fairy Tale

    Recent revelations about contestants’ troubling backgrounds have punctured the franchise’s fantasy — that reality TV is a secure place to look for love.Just three years ago, the “Bachelor” franchise was in serious need of a revival. The longtime host, Chris Harrison, had left the show and ratings sagged. Instead of 10 million viewers, premieres now brought in closer to 2 or 3 million.In 2023, ABC pumped new life into the franchise with “The Golden Bachelor,” a version of the dating contest that followed Gerry Turner, a 72-year-old widower who proudly wore a hearing aid and spoke of finding love after the death of his wife. The premiere brought in over 4 million live viewers (and totaled over 7 million including streaming), making it the franchise’s most-watched debut since 2020.But the show’s honeymoon has not lasted. “The Bachelor” and its various iterations have long promised viewers some semblance of a fairy-tale romance, providing charmed but closed environments where the leads can suss out the suitors’ intentions through extravagant dates, like hot air balloon rides and castle visits. Recent revelations about the show have punctured this fantasy.Just before Turner handed out his final rose, The Hollywood Reporter published details about his past (a spotty work résumé, a trail of scorned lovers) that challenged his image as a sympathetic figure, as put forth on the show. (Turner declined to comment for the article.) His subsequent marriage to Theresa Nist, the season’s “winner,” ended after three months.The most recent season of “The Bachelorette,” which debuted in summer 2024, cast Jenn Tran as the series’s first Asian American lead, a role she hoped would bring positive visibility. “Anytime Asians were in the media, it was to fill a supporting character role, to fulfill some sort of stereotype,” Tran said in an interview with The New York Times before the show’s premiere. “I always felt boxed in by that, because I was like, I don’t see myself onscreen. I don’t see myself as a main character.”But her quest for love ended in public humiliation. On the live special “After the Final Rose,” she revealed through tears that Devin Strader — the contestant she proposed to in the series finale — had broken off their engagement over the phone. Seeing him for the first time since the breakup, Tran sobbed uncontrollably on the show as producers made her watch the proposal in front of a national audience.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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    Jonathan Groff, Fresh Off Tony Win, Will Return to Broadway as Bobby Darin

    “Just in Time,” a new musical about the “Mack the Knife” pop singer, will open next spring at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Jonathan Groff, who won his first Tony Award in June for starring in a hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” will return to Broadway next spring to play Bobby Darin in a biomusical he has been developing for years.The musical, “Just in Time,” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 23 at Circle in the Square Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The theater, with its close approximation of an in-the-round experience, will be configured to accommodate an immersive nightclub-like staging, with a 16-person cast, an onstage big band, two stages and some cabaret-style seating.The show began its life in 2018 at the 92nd Street Y as a five-performance concert called “The Bobby Darin Story,” and has been developed through a number of workshops. In an interview, Groff said he hadn’t been sure what to expect from that initial run, but that “it lit me up.”“There is some sort of kinetic magic that happens with the live execution of his material,” said Groff, 39, who was also a Tony nominee for “Hamilton” (he played King George III) and “Spring Awakening” (his breakout role). He has worked extensively on television (“Glee,” “Looking” and “Mindhunter”) and reached global audiences with his voice work as Kristoff in Disney’s “Frozen” films.Darin, a singer-songwriter whose pop career peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, is best known for the songs “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” He suffered from a heart condition, and died at the age of 37.“Dramatically he’s really interesting, because what do you do when your whole career is on borrowed time?” said the musical’s director, Alex Timbers, who won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” “His life was lived at high-octane speed. A woman he thought was his sister ended up being his mother. He went on a whole voyage into folk and pop and then decided he was a nightclub animal.”The musical has a book by Warren Leight (a Tony winner for “Side Man”) and Isaac Oliver and will be choreographed by Shannon Lewis. The show was conceived by Ted Chapin, who wrote the initial script and produced it at the Y as part of that institution’s long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.“We all got invested and excited about the idea of telling his life story in this environment of a night club,” Groff said. “We’re playing with the genre of the biomusical, trying to find our own unique point of view and way into not only his story but also the genre itself. There’s a bit of experimentation happening here.”The lead producers of “Just in Time” are Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost; the musical is being capitalized for up to $12.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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    No Lie: George Washington Is Funny Now

    The first president is usually at the margins of popular culture. As a recurring character on “Saturday Night Live” and a trend on TikTok, is he finally having a moment?Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson were immortalized in “Hamilton.” John Adams had his own HBO mini-series, and Samuel Adams is a beer. Ben Franklin often appears experimenting with his kite when characters travel back in time to Colonial America.And then there’s George Washington.He might be the first president, but the stoic general who led the Americans to an unlikely Revolutionary War victory doesn’t exactly lend himself to memes and caricatures in popular culture. Other founders immersed in drama and scandal (Hamilton, Jefferson) or at least more quotable (Franklin, Adams) have gotten more attention.But Washington — “a marble man of impossible virtue and perfection,” as the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani once called him — might finally be having his moment.Over the weekend, “Saturday Night Live” brought back “Washington’s Dream,” one of its biggest hits last season. The comedian Nate Bargatze, known for his deadpan delivery, plays a subdued, earnest Washington who is trying to inspire his soldiers with his peculiar vision of a free America. In the original version, at camp, he dwells on a new, confusing system of weights and measurements (while consigning the metric system to “only certain unpopular sports, like track and swimming”).In the latest, Washington leads his soldiers across the Delaware River as he yearns to Americanize the English language, proclaiming: “I dream that one day our great nation will have a word for the number 12. We shall call it a ‘dozen.’”A soldier asks what other numbers would have their own words: “None,” Bargatze replied. “Only 12 shall have its own word, because we are free men.”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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    How ‘Nobody Wants This’ Became Netflix’s Latest Hit

    The Netflix rom-com checks every genre box, but it became a megahit by offering versions of everything you already like on TV.Two leads with nostalgia power. A meet cute. A series of fish-out-of-water mishaps, some of which rely on an almost alarming level of ignorance or ineptitude. A party that goes awry — probably from too much stress. (Probably a wealthy, maybe even icy woman has caused this stress.) Her: Frazzled, into her phone. Him: Safe, sensitive, sage.Make it about Christmas, and you have a Hallmark Channel original. Make it about interfaith romance, and it’s Netflix’s latest hit “Nobody Wants This.”A romantic comedy that checks every genre box, “Nobody” is about the star-crossed attraction between Joanne, a Los Angeles podcast host played by Kristen Bell, and Noah, a soulful rabbi played by Adam Brody. Since arriving on Netflix late last month, it has remained at or near the top of the service’s most-watched chart, sharing space with a show from the darker end of the replication factory, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.”“Nobody” has generated as much coverage as that grisly docudrama, thanks partly to its charms and partly to its shortcomings, namely its depictions of Jewish women that rely on hoary stereotypes.The draw of “Nobody,” though, is not that the show is so distinctive, it’s that it is so familiar. Rom-coms have thrived on streaming as they have mostly fallen out of fashion in theaters, and for this particular genre “formulaic” is no great diss — it is perhaps the opposite. (“Nobody” isn’t even the best opposites-attract rom-com to arrive on TV recently — that would be Season 2 of “Colin From Accounts,” on Paramount+.) Beyond the show’s ample joys and persistent irritants — “What about our podcast?” is this show’s “can MomTok survive this?” — there’s a Goldilocks ease to the endeavor that one can see as either finely honed or algorithmically precooked; simply reheat and enjoy.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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    ‘La Haine’ Is Back (as a Musical This Time)

    Mathieu Kassovitz has turned his cult 1995 movie into a stage musical. The France it represents is different — though much hasn’t changed.Watching the musical “La Haine” is a bit like looking at a beloved’s face under water: It’s familiar, but distorted.Almost three decades after Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic film became a political sensation and cult hit in France, the actor and director has transformed it into a stage show that opens at the Seine Musicale in Paris on Oct. 10 before touring the country.The musical tells the same haunting story of three close friends from Paris’s neglected suburban projects who, in the aftermath of a lethal confrontation with the police, go on a rambling journey into the capital with a gun and a thirst for vengeance.The same young men take center stage — the angry white character of Vinz, originally played by Vincent Cassel; the wise Black boxer Hubert; and the joker Saïd, of North-African descent — and repeat many of the movie’s lines, which became classics in French culture. A clock counts down the same way throughout, rushing toward the same terrible end.The most significant differences, of course, are the song and dance numbers, produced by some of the biggest names in French music, including the rapper Youssoupha and the pop star Matthieu Chedid, who goes by M. Although the film was saturated with hip-hop culture, it featured very little actual music. The soundtrack was urban percussion — roaring motorcycles and hissing trains.“I’m very curious to see how people react to it, because it’s close enough to the original movie so that people can feel comfortable. And far enough so people don’t feel betrayed,” Kassovitz, now 57, said in an interview during a rehearsal break, two weeks before opening night. “I’m dancing on a thin line.”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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    Should Famous People Be Telling Us This Much About Their Illnesses?

    For some celebrities, revealing all is part of the product. For others, it looks like a deeply unpleasant chore.This past summer, Celine Dion manufactured a breathtaking cultural moment. It was at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, just after a long, daffy and highly maximalist buildup to the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Suddenly, there she was, standing on a terrace of the twinkling Eiffel Tower in a scintillant Dior gown. As she sang, a swell of both applause and what sounded like a collective moan of pleasure rose from the audience. Celine Dion was alive and singing. And if you didn’t cry, it could only be because you didn’t know.It was hard not to know. A few weeks before the Olympics came the release of “I Am: Celine Dion,” a well-publicized documentary that took viewers inside what had become of her life since she became largely housebound with stiff-person syndrome — an exceedingly rare disorder that, in Dion’s case, causes terrifying whole-body spasms so severe that they can break bones. Anyone who has watched “I Am” knows what these crises look like, because Dion allowed herself to be filmed during one of them, for 10 minutes, her body frozen in agonizing contortions. By that point, we were already familiar with Dion’s universe of deep illness; we’d seen her holed up in her Las Vegas compound, surrounded by doctors, unable to walk properly, unable to sing properly, often supine, her body distended, her skin raw. In terms of radical transparency, “I Am” is a milestone: a completely new standard for Bravely Baring All.Dion is far from the only celebrity to have invited the public to witness life with a serious illness. Lady Gaga’s 2017 documentary, “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” revealed the star’s daily struggle with fibromyalgia, and in last year’s “Still,” Michael J. Fox — a groundbreaking figure in celebrity-illness transparency — further tugged down the curtain on how severe his Parkinson’s disease has become. Selma Blair, who spent a portion of her career hiding symptoms, eventually revealed a diagnosis of M.S. and then began posting intensely personal bedside updates on social media. Last year an issue of British Vogue had her on the cover, in a skinny beige column of a dress, patent pumps and a cane, with a headline announcing her as “Dynamic, Daring & Disabled.”For fans, these narratives can create a kind of whiplashing feelings roller coaster. You see Lady Gaga diminished and sobbing because of unrelenting full-body pain — and then, soon enough, suspended from the top of a Houston stadium for a Super Bowl halftime performance. You witness Celine Dion in a heartbreaking, horrible fit and then belting out an Edith Piaf song from such great heights. The intention here, surely, is to show that such stars are only human, that their lives and bodies have the same potential for suffering as ours. But the insane highs and pitiable lows these stories offer us feel almost inhumanly extreme. And in watching them, I began wondering if the stars in them didn’t end up feeling caged by the seemingly necessary Hollywood framing in which inspiration and drama need to take precedence over nuance and open-endedness. Dion and Gaga have to adapt to illnesses for which there is no known cure. So what do they do now? The answer is synonymous with their job: perform.Middleton’s video just feels so weird.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