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    ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway

    A new musical inspired by the 1997 hit album gives a fictional back story to the veteran performers of the Havana music scene.The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people.Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic” takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show’s Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.)As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album “Buena Vista Social Club,” on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”) identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater’s notoriously loose relationship with facts.The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he’s brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the “Buena Vista Social Club” album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn’t mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos’s role in putting together the band and singers.)The show toggles between 1996 and 1956, where the young performers Compay (Da’von T. Moody), Omara (Isa Antonetti) and Ibrahim (Wesley Wray) bond over their love of traditional Cuban music.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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    “We Had a World” Review: A Poignant New Play From Joshua Harmon

    Joshua Harmon’s new play features uniformly standout performances and tells a poignant story of family dynamics.At the onset of Joshua Harmon’s wonderfully textured new play, “We Had a World,” Josh (played by Andrew Barth Feldman) is in his tighty-whities, scribbling in a notebook with a mechanical pencil at a desk on a corner of the stage. Just then his Nana — his dying Nana, to be specific — shows up onstage with a request. She has an idea for a play her grandson should write, a vicious “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”-style work about their family.The play we’re seeing, in the intimate basement-esque New York City Center Stage II of the Manhattan Theater Club, is the playwright’s answer to his grandmother’s request. It’s not as vitriolic as Nana had asked for, but it is an all too relatable unpacking of the longstanding resentments and challenging dynamics of a family, particularly the ones between two of the central women in his life, his mother and his grandmother. If there’s viciousness here, it’s the complex, often vicious nature of the truth.“We Had a World” is a memory play in which Josh breaks the fourth wall to guide the audience through notable incidents of his childhood and adult life relating to his mother and grandmother. Though the play opens with a phone call between Josh and his Nana at the end of her life, he jumps back chronologically to explain growing up with his grandmother, Renee (Joanna Gleason), an eccentric Manhattanite who takes him to the theater to see “Medea” and to exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. She sneaks them in to catch movies for free and they make regular visits at the Met Museum. He credits his grandmother with helping him find his future vocation in the theater. But it’s not long before he discovers a secret about Renee: she’s an alcoholic, which is the source of years of animosity between her and Josh’s mother, Ellen (Jeanine Serralles), a tough lawyer with a chip on her shoulder.“We Had a World” gradually works its way back to, and a little bit past, Renee’s decline and death, though not in a way that’s at all predictable or even linear. Josh remembers and cleverly revises the story as he goes, with Renee and Ellen appearing onstage not just as puppets in his story, manipulated by his telling, but also as autonomous characters who express their own opinions (often, hilariously, at his expense) and intrude to offer their perspectives on events.Harmon’s script doesn’t feel as didactic or self-consciously stagy as many contemporary memory plays can be; it strikes an impressive balance of negotiating a story with many adverse emotional perspectives and moving parts while also maintaining a sense of honesty. I don’t just mean honesty in the sense of facts — though the verifiable biographical facts in Harmon’s story, and a bit of recorded material at the end, lend a gravitas to the characters and occurrences. I mean honesty in the sense of emotional transparency, the very real mix of love and resentment and insecurities and doubts that define all relationships, especially those within a family.Though the script successfully condenses several eras of Harmon’s life and captures the quirks and particularities of his mother’s and grandmother’s personalities, the performances really give the material its extra emotional heft. It takes less than 15 minutes to fall in love with Gleason as Renee, the native New Yorker with a dark sense of humor, a love for ornate French furniture and an inexplicable pseudo-British accent. And Serralles’s Ellen feels most real when she is at her most defensive and sardonic, though her shifts into the character’s more openly vulnerable moments still show some seams.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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    She May Be the Most Powerful Producer Working in Theater

    Sonia Friedman may just be the most prolific and powerful theater producer working today.Over the past 30 years, she has become a peerless figure in the West End, where last year she had a record-setting seven shows running simultaneously, and on Broadway, where she has produced five of the past six Tony Award winners for best play. She has been entrusted both with prestige work by celebrated writers like Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim and with stage adaptations of hugely valuable intellectual property like “Harry Potter,” “Stranger Things” and “Paddington.”But she’s endlessly restless. Taking for granted neither the sustainability of the business nor the security of her own place in it, she has become ever more worried about the industry’s future.A lifelong Londoner, Friedman spends about one-third of each year in New York, but she hasn’t bought an apartment, and only in January started renting, after decades of hotel stays.“I live, literally, with a suitcase in the hall,” she said during one of several interviews. “It could all end tomorrow here. It could all end tomorrow there. And it might. It really might. That’s always how I work. The drive is: It could all end tomorrow. It’s not necessarily a nice way to live, is it?”For years she has expressed concern about the high costs of producing on Broadway, particularly when compared to the West End, but her concern has intensified since the pandemic, as rising costs for labor, materials and services have driven show budgets — and ticket prices for hot shows — ever higher. She said, for example, that “The Hills of California,” a family drama by Jez Butterworth that she produced last year in both cities, faced production costs that were 350 percent higher in New York than in London.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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    On ‘Severance,’ the Food Is Its Own Chilling Character

    This article contains key details from previous episodes of “Severance.” It does not include any spoilers for the Season 2 finale.It wasn’t your imagination: Something was off about the food from the start.That first glimpse of cantaloupe and honeydew, arranged in the office to welcome Helly R., played by Britt Lower, was a little unnerving: Melons in jagged halves — severed! — filled with anemic, out-of-season fruit.“Severance,” the Apple TV+ show written by Dan Erickson and executive produced by Ben Stiller, follows a group of Lumon Industries employees with chips in their brains that divide their work selves (“innies”) from their main selves (“outies”). For innies, whose lives are confined to the office, who never sleep or see the sun, a snack is a treat. So why doesn’t it feel like one?The food on “Severance” leaves a bad taste in your mouth because it’s as fluent in doublespeak as the show’s most ambitious corporate climbers. In the show’s second season, which wraps up this week, food has acquired all the chilling, spine-tingling dissonance of upper management, refusing your request for a raise with a warm, unflinching smile.“Melon has been a theme over the two seasons, and each time we see it, we want to up the ante,” said Catherine Miller, the prop master for “Severance.”Apple“I always try to design the props and food to have some connection, some metaphorical undertone,” said Catherine Miller, the show’s prop master, who devised season one’s melon presentation to fit the “very graphic, very minimal” aesthetic of Lumon’s retro office. “I think food has the ability to define time and place and mood and overall emotional connection — it can become its own character.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘Good American Family,’ Ellen Pompeo Leaves the Hospital

    At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ellen Pompeo stood in a room of Picassos, mostly in the Cubist style. She paused in front of a portrait of a woman in a blue dress. The eyes were at strange angles, the mouth tucked to one side. The nose was somehow everywhere.Pompeo, 55, tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up.“There’s three sides to every story,” she said. “Or six sides. Or nine. That is why art keeps us alive: Because everybody gets to see things their way, to make sense of them.”For a long time Pompeo’s Hollywood story has been a simple one, the perspective fixed. She modeled sporadically throughout her 20s, had a starring role in one film and smaller parts in others. Since 2005 she has led the most popular medical show of the post-“ER” era, ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.” Pompeo plays the surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral center in a fervid, ethically uncertain world.In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on “Station 19,” a “Grey’s” sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits — a “Doc McStuffins” voice-over here, an appearance in a Taylor Swift video there. It wasn’t that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the “Grey’s” schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially after she became a mother. (She and her husband, Chris Ivery, a music producer, have three children.)In 2022, she renegotiated her “Grey’s” contract, reducing the number of episodes she would appear in. This allowed for her first new substantive role in nearly two decades, as a flawed suburban supermom named Kristine Barnett, in “Good American Family,” a limited series that premieres on Hulu on Wednesday.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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    Jimmy Fallon Parodies Trump’s Podcast-Length Call with Putin

    The “Tonight Show” host said President Trump had spent most of the call “trying to sell Putin a Cybertruck.”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.To and From Russia With LovePresident Trump and Vladimir Putin had a nearly three-hour phone conversation on Tuesday, during which Putin said he’d agree to a partial cease-fire in Russia’s war against Ukraine.On “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon said that Trump spent most of the call “trying to sell Putin a Cybertruck.””[imitating Trump] Think of it as a mini-tank with a mind of its own.” — JIMMY FALLON“Three hours. That’s not a phone call, that’s a podcast: [imitating Putin] ‘And now a message from ZipRecruiter.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Putting Trump on the phone with Putin is like putting your grandma on the phone with a Nigerian prince. [imitating grandmother] ‘This fellow is so charming!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Putin agreed to nothing today. People keep asking if Trump is getting played by Putin, which is like asking if ‘Hava Nagila’ is getting played at a bar mitzvah.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But both sides said the call went well, which makes sense, because they’re both on the same side.” — JIMMY FALLON“And, yeah, Russia actually described the call as ‘historic and epic.’ And nothing makes me feel safe like a happy Russia.” — JIMMY FALLON“But the White House said Putin agreed to a partial cease-fire. At least they think he did — it was tough to hear on the phone with Elon’s kids playing tag in the background.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Nine Months Later Edition)“Here’s some good news: Today, the Boeing astronauts who were stranded at the International Space Station for nine months finally returned to Earth. Welcome! Right now, they’re the first people in history to honestly text someone, ‘Sorry, just saw this.’”— JIMMY FALLON“Today, the astronauts were, like, ‘I just want to get home, watch “Joker 2,” make a three-egg omelet and dip my toes in the Gulf of Mexico. I can’t wait.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Wait till they find out what’s been going on down here — they might go back up.” — JIMMY KIMMELWe 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: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’

    In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.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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    ‘Amerikin’ Review: A White Supremacist’s Undoing: DNA

    The protagonist of Chisa Hutchinson’s new play is proud of his racial heritage, until he gets some unexpected test results.There was a guy I knew when I was in my teens. Blond and blue-eyed, popular at the beach, he named his puppy after a superstar. It made him laugh to let people in on the gut-punch nasty joke behind it: that, as far as he was concerned, both were black female dogs.Chisa Hutchinson’s layered new play, “Amerikin,” has me thinking about that for the first time in decades. Her central character, Jeff, has named his own dog in the same spirit — after a racist slur that he is not shy about shouting into the neighborhood to summon his pup. I’d hate for anyone to think that detail was too exaggerated. Not in these United States it isn’t.Directed by Jade King Carroll for Primary Stages, “Amerikin” is set in Sharpsburg, Md., which was Confederate country back when the bloody Battle of Antietam was waged nearby during the Civil War. In 2017, it is Trump country, and when the working-class Jeff (Daniel Abeles) and his wife, Michelle (Molly Carden), take their newborn son home, Jeff is eager to give the child he adores every social advantage in their small town.If that means accepting an invitation from his pal Dylan (Luke Robertson) to join the local white supremacist group, Jeff would be honored. It would bolster his sense of belonging in this place where he’s lived since childhood.But his nomination comes with an asterisk: He must take a DNA test to prove that he is 100 percent white. To his alarm, the results say otherwise — and even though his tech-savvy best friend, Poot (Tobias Segal), doctors the results, word gets out.And you know what happens when a band of white racists discovers a nonwhite family living in its midst. As Gerald (Victor Williams), a reporter for The Washington Post, frames it in a headline: “White Supremacist Hopeful Becomes Target of His Own Hate.”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