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    Climate Protesters Disrupt Broadway Play Starring Jeremy Strong

    A performance of a new production of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” was interrupted by protesters who shouted “no theater on a dead planet.”A trio of climate change protesters disrupted a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong, on Broadway Thursday night, shouting “no theater on a dead planet” as they were escorted out.The show they disrupted is selling quite well, thanks to audience interest in Strong, who is riding a wave of fame stemming from his portrayal of Kendall Roy in the HBO drama “Succession.” Strong stars in the play as a physician who becomes a pariah after discovering that his town’s spa baths are contaminated with bacteria; revealing that information could protect public health, but endanger the local economy.The protest, before a sold-out crowd at the 828-seat Circle in the Square theater, confused some attendees, who initially thought it was part of the play. It was staged during the second half, during a town hall scene in which some audience members were seated onstage and some actors were seated among the audience members. Although the play was written by Henrik Ibsen in the 19th century, this new version, by Amy Herzog, has occasionally been described as having thematic echoes of the climate change crisis.Strong remained in character through the protest, even at one point saying that a protester should be allowed to continue to speak, said Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, who was among many journalists and critics who were in the audience for a press preview night. “I thought it was all scripted,” Green said. “The timing was perfect to fit into the town meeting onstage, and the subject was related.”The protest was staged by a group called Extinction Rebellion NYC, which last year disrupted a performance at the Met Opera and a match at the U.S. Open semifinals. Other climate protesters around the world have taken to defacing works of art hanging in museums, but a spokesman for the New York group said that it had not engaged in that particular protest tactic.A spokesman for Extinction Rebellion NYC, Miles Grant, explained the targeting of popular events by saying, “We want to disrupt the things that we love, because we’re at risk of genuinely losing everything the way things are going.”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 Notebook’ Review: A Musical Tear-Jerker or Just All Wet?

    The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony.At “The Notebook,” I was the person next to you.You were sniffling even before anything much happened onstage. As the lights came up, an old man dozed while a teenage boy and girl frisked nearby in an unconvincing body of water. A wispy song called “Time” wafted over the footlights: “Time time time time/It was never mine mine mine.”But having seen (I’m guessing more than once) the 2004 movie on which “The Notebook” is based, and possibly having read the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, you perfectly well knew what was coming. That was the point of mounting the show, which opened on Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, in the first place.It therefore cannot be a spoiler — and anyway this block of cheese is impervious — to reveal that over the course of the 54 years covered by the musical, the frisky boy, Noah, turns into the dozing man. And that Allie, the frisky girl, having overcome various impediments to their love, winds up his wife. Nor does it give anything away to add that Allie, now 70 and in a nursing home with dementia, will not remember Noah until he recites their story from a notebook she prepared long ago for that purpose.So there’s a reason the producers are selling teeny $5 “Notebook”-themed boxes of tissues in the lobby. Love is powerful. Dementia is sad. The result can be heartbreaking.Or maybe, seen with a cold eye, meretricious.The movie, a super-slick Hollywood affair, did everything it could to keep the eye warm. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, as the young couple, could not have been glowier. The soundtrack relied on precision-crafted standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You” to yank at your tear ducts. The production design, like a montage of greeting cards come to life, celebrated valentine passion, anniversary tenderness and golden sympathy, releasing flocks of trained geese into a technicolor sunset to symbolize lifelong pair bonding.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 Effect’ Review: Dissecting the Science of Desire

    In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage at the Shed, where the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting production of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday night. By the time its content — a human brain — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of desire.What begins as the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into more slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the participants. As they circle each other, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the mind or the other way around.The simplicity of a brain plopped in a pail for scientific research becomes something of a mordant sight gag.Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of the study’s architects calls “nothing short of a revolution in medicine”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic aspect of the self. Lloyd’s production, which premiered in August at the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal plane that feels both cosmic and atomically intimate.During the experiment’s intake, we learn that Connie (Taylor Russell) gets sad but isn’t depressed (“when I’m sad, I’m sad,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the study’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a game and frank Michele Austin), while she asks about his medical history.Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, left, and Austin (with Essiedu and Russell seated onstage) portray the two psychiatrists running the pharmaceutical trial. 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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    ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

    Justin Peck, who directs and choreographs a narrative dance musical to Sufjan Stevens’s concept album “Illinois,” resorts to his usual standby: community.“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.Ricky Ubeda, top, and Ahmad Simmons.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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    A Broadway-Bound ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Leads Olivier Award Nominations

    The musical, starring Nicole Scherzinger, secured 11 nominations at Britain’s equivalent of the Tony Awards.A revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as a former screen idol descending into madness, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Savoy Theater in London and will transfer to Broadway this year, is in the running for 11 awards — two more than any other play or musical — including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Jamie Lloyd.When the production opened last fall, it impressed London’s often demanding theater critics. Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the production was, like its lead character, “a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.”“I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season,” Wolf added.Lloyd’s maverick production features hand-held cameras that are used to spotlight characters’ emotions at pivotal moments. Although critics appreciated the technique, Lloyd faces stiff competition in the best director category. The other nominees include Sam Mendes for “The Motive and the Cue,” which debuted last spring at the National Theater. The play, by Jack Thorne, dramatizes a fraught backstage relationship between Richard Burton and John Gielgud as they rehearse a Broadway production.Justin Martin, who directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” also received an Olivier nomination.Manuel HarlanRupert Goold is also nominated for best director, for “Dear England,” a play about the English national soccer team that also ran at the National Theater and transferred to the West End. That show secured nine nominations.Despite receiving mixed reviews, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a theatrical prequel to the Netflix show that is running at the Phoenix Theater, secured five nominations, including best new entertainment or comedy play. Houman Barekat, reviewing the production in The New York Times, said it was “exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.”This year’s nominations include a hint of TV glamour in many categories. Among the nominees for best actress in a play are Sarah Jessica Parker for “Plaza Suite,” which runs through April 13 at the Savoy Theater, and Sarah Snook (of “Succession”) for a one-woman “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at the Theater Royal Haymarket, through May 11.They will compete for that title against Laura Donnelly for “The Hills of California” at the Harold Pinter Theater, Sheridan Smith for “Shirley Valentine” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and Sophie Okonedo for “Medea” at @sohoplace.The best actor nominees include Andrew Scott for a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and James Norton for his performance in “A Little Life” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The other nominees are Joseph Fiennes for “Dear England,” Mark Gatiss for “The Motive and the Cue,” and David Tennant for “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse.The winners of this year’s awards are scheduled to be announced April 14 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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    ‘Corruption’ Review: Onstage, a Scandal’s Human Drama Is Muffled

    A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.“Corruption,” J.T. Rogers’s tantalizing new phone-hacking play, starts on Rebekah Brooks’s wedding weekend. In a village in the English countryside, the flame-haired power broker, one of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite tabloid editors, has drawn the cream of Britain’s political class to her celebration.Prime Minister Gordon Brown is there, and so is David Cameron, the Tory who will succeed him. But Brooks (Saffron Burrows) is sequestered in conversation with her charmless boss, Rupert’s son James (Seth Numrich). He informs her that television and new media are the company’s focus now.“Newspapers are a relic,” James says. So his contempt is already evident when he tells her that she is the new chief executive of News International, the Murdoch-owned British newspaper group. Congratulations?It will be on Brooks’s watch, anyway, that a many-tentacled scandal erupts, with the revelation that her journalists clandestinely acquired the voice mail messages not only of celebrities and politicians but also of a missing child who was later found dead. Multiple arrests ensue, with accusations of phone hacking, police corruption and perverting the course of justice. Rupert Murdoch shuts down News of the World, his top-selling Sunday tabloids. Through it all, he remains loyal to Brooks.As a news story evolving in real time, the scandal made for jaw-dropping reading. As a play, though, “Corruption” is uncompelling — counterintuitively so, given the inherent drama: the crimes, the coverup, the comeuppance (or not), the clashes of personality. Also the stakes, which include the well-being of a democracy in which one culture-shaping media magnate holds too much sway.Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), a Labour member of Parliament as the scandal brews, is the central figure. (Murdoch, frequently mentioned, is a looming unseen presence.) Rumpled and besieged, Watson is determined to expose the widespread, under-the-radar operation: the surveillance, the intimidation, the gathering of secrets. The police, in the meantime, are oddly incurious about the voluminous records of a private investigator who they know hacked phones for News of the World.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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    ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: Not Much of a Bandit, but What a Corpse

    The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of décor to spook the thrill seekers.More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “Dead Outlaw,” a mischievous but never meanspirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “The Band’s Visit.”Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with the book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books, previous plays and a documentary, it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.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 Ingrid Michaelson Made ‘The Notebook’ Into a Musical

    Family history is “wrapped up in these songs,” said the singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who is making the leap to Broadway with an adaptation of the popular romance novel.The stage manager’s office on the second floor of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in Times Square is about the size of a half bathroom and has the charm of a utility closet. It’s crowded and overlit, thanks to a high-wattage vanity mirror situated near a 1970s-era mini sink.Ingrid Michaelson surveyed the room where we were to begin our interview, and sighed. “It’s not glamorous at all — but it is,” she said. “There’s just a small, lucky group that gets to see these little rooms.”With the opening of “The Notebook” on Thursday, Michaelson will make the turn from a successful mid-list singer-songwriter to Broadway composer. Though other pop writers have made the same foray into musical theater — including Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, and Michaelson’s friend Sara Bareilles — Michaelson was an unlikely choice, because “The Notebook” is a huge franchise and she isn’t a hitmaker. “Quirky” is a word that turns up in articles about her, and quirky is rarely a mass-market trait.Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 romance novel was a publishing phenomenon that has sold 14 million copies worldwide. In 2004, it was adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and its feverishly passionate dialogue (“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!” Gosling shouts, in the middle of a rainstorm.) made it as beloved by fans as it was scorned by critics. Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”“I remember watching the movie with my friend — we rented it from Blockbuster,” Michaelson, 44, recalled. “I cried and cried and cried at the end.” She was dressed casually, in a gray knit cap, baggy flannel shirt and torn jeans. In conversation, she gravitated toward self-deprecation and the spilling-over candor of a lifelong New Yorker. She was droll and funny, but cried several times during our interview. At one point, on the topic of losing our parents, we both cried at the same time.“The Notebook” begins in an old age home, where Allie, who has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize her husband, Noah. He reads to her from a notebook, which tells the story of how they met and fell in love in their late teens, only to be separated by a conniving parent. They meet again 10 years later, when Allie is engaged to someone else. Will her marital pledge hold firm in the face of true love? We know the answer, but the reward of their reunion is offset by the pain of seeing them both in distress.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