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    ‘Forbidden Broadway’ Scraps Summer Broadway Run, Citing Crowded Season

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    The parody show was scheduled to begin performances in July at the Helen Hayes Theater.In a sign that there are not enough investors and ticket buyers to sustain all of the Broadway shows now onstage and in the works, the producers of “Forbidden Broadway” said Friday that they were canceling a planned summer run.The scrapped production, “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” was announced in February and was to be the first Broadway venture for the satirical revue, which has been performed periodically since 1982, mostly Off Broadway but also on tour. The show, consisting of comedic sketches that parody Broadway hits (and misses), has been frequently rewritten to remain reasonably timely and topical; the Broadway run was to feature a number of Sondheim spoofs, reflecting the heightened interest in his work since his death.In a statement, the producers, Ryan Bogner, Victoria Lang and Tracey Stroock McFarland, called the move a postponement, and cited the volume of offerings on Broadway — there are currently 36 shows running, 12 of which opened in a nine-day stretch before the Tony-eligibility season ended Thursday night.“The Broadway landscape is enormously crowded at this moment,” the producers’ statement said, “and while we adore Forbidden Broadway, we are disappointed that the show will not open at the Hayes on Broadway this summer.”The show, written by Gerard Alessandrini, was to begin previews July 15 and to open Aug. 5 at the Helen Hayes Theater, and was to be capitalized for $3.2 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is not clear if the producers had successfully raised all that money, and ticket sales, which began earlier this month, had been slow.“Without getting into the details of the financials or sales, it is self evident by looking at the current offerings on Broadway and their sales that in this incredibly crowded environment without recent precedent, the title would not have been served by launching at this time,” the producers said in a written answer to questions about the show’s economics.This is the second show to cancel a Broadway production this year; in February, the producers of a planned run of Rob Madge’s “My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)” announced that they were postponing that production less than three weeks before previews were to begin.As for Madge, the performer is planning to take “My Son’s a Queer” back to the Edinburgh Fringe, this summer. But first, next month Madge is planning a show in London, reflecting on the Broadway disappointment. The title, of course, is “Regards to Broadway.” More

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      ‘Harlequin, Refined by Love’ Review: A French Showman’s First Steps

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      The revival of a 2006 work by Thomas Jolly, the director masterminding the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, shows his gift for visual flamboyance.In three months, the French theater director Thomas Jolly will oversee the most monumental show in the world: the opening bash for the Olympic Games, set for July 26. But for now, his work is entertaining Paris audiences on a more modest scale.At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, an eastern suburb of the city, his work is not even playing on the biggest stage. On Thursday, an audience of around 250 people filed into the playhouse’s second, smaller auditorium to watch “Harlequin, Refined by Love” (“Arlequin poli par l’amour”), Jolly’s very first stage production, created in 2006.At the time, Jolly was a young graduate from the drama school attached to the National Theater of Brittany. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” was an unlikely choice of play for a budding director: Written in 1720 by Pierre de Marivaux, a master of romantic comedy, it taps heavily into the commedia dell’arte, a genre few current French theatermakers have explored.Yet “Harlequin, Refined by Love” became a box-office hit, touring for four years with its initial cast, followed by frequent revivals. (In 2014, a Russian-language version even joined the repertoire of the Gogol Center, in Moscow.) In Créteil, the production’s success is easy to understand. Even with minimal sets and props, the building blocks of Jolly’s style — visually flamboyant, brightly paced yet with a touch of dark satire — are already there.Marivaux’s compact play is built around stock comic characters. The hapless hero, Harlequin (Rémi Dessenoix), has been kidnapped by a fairy who fell for his beauty. She tries to educate him, yet Harlequin remains something of a slob — until he meets his match, the shepherdess Silvia (played with spot-on candor by Ophélie Trichard).Falling for her suddenly “refines” his manners, as the play’s title makes clear. Love, in Marivaux’s world, is a civilizing force — much to the fairy’s fury.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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      ‘Mary Jane,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and More New Broadway Shows

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      This past week has been jam-packed with openings. Our reviewers think these new shows are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.critic’s pickA ‘heartbreaker for anyone human.’Rachel McAdams as a mother struggling with her own moral agony in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of “Mary Jane” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Richard Termine for The New York Times‘Mary Jane’Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in Amy Herzog’s play about an impossibly upbeat mother caring for a gravely ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system.From our review:[Herzog] is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.Through June 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA family drama that ‘feels like it’s a healing.’Jessica Lange, center, is the titular mother in “Mother Play,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, with Celia Keenan-Bolger, left, and Jim Parsons playing her children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Mother Play’Paula Vogel’s tragicomedy is a showcase for Jessica Lange, who plays a ferocious matriarch to a sister and brother played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons.From our review:Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, [Lange’s Phyllis] is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.critic’s pickA show that all the critics love.From left, Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka as members of an increasingly fractured 1970s band in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s rock drama, with songs by a real rocker (Will Butler), follows a 1970s band (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) on the cusp of fame through the prolonged, drug-fueled process of making a new album.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: ‘Jordans’ Tackles Race at Work at the Public Theater

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      Alternating between funny and bleak, the Public Theater’s latest production tackles race and the modern workplace.The workplace in “Jordans,” an ambitious but unwieldy new play at the Public Theater, is so white that it’s a bit alarming. I don’t mean to say it’s full of white people (though it certainly is that, too), but rather that the aesthetic of the space itself catches your attention: minimalist, modern, white screens and walls. By the end of the play, however, those bright white spaces will be covered with blood.Jordan (Naomi Lorrain) is the only Black employee at Atlas Studios, a “full-service rental studio and production facility,” as she says to a potential client. She’s the one who answers the phones; she also gets the lunches, collects receipts and calls maintenance. When her boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), decides the company’s new path to revenue involves appealing to a more “diverse” demographic, she hires a director of culture: a young Black man also named Jordan (Toby Onwumere).Though their white colleagues somehow can’t seem to tell them apart, the two Jordans find themselves at odds: She knows how to “play the game,” even if that means compromising her integrity. He (dubbed “1. Jordan” in the script) imagines another path to success — a Jay-Z level of achievement that he will then put back into the neighborhood. But as Jordan sees an opportunity to advance, the team takes on a brand launch event for a rapper that transforms into a grisly horror-movie scenario.Written by the playwright Ife Olujobi (she/they) in their Off Broadway debut, and directed by Whitney White, “Jordans” feels a little “The Other Black Girl” and a little “American Psycho.” The play tries to make a satire about race in the workplace and then, within that, gender — the differences in how Black men and Black women might act and be treated in a predominantly white workplace. But it’s also largely a grim parable about the terrors of consumer culture, including the commodification and appropriation of Black people.Lorrain, far right, gives a sharp performance as Jordan, an employee so overworked she even does most of the show’s set and prop arrangements. The cast also features, from left, Matthew Russell, Brontë England-Nelson and Walsh.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany of the targets of the satire feel too obvious: hip influencers, like a twerking white pop star and super-masc energy drink bros; the white boss fumbling through hollow corporate-speak about diversity; the white female colleagues bonding over how unfairly hard they work while their Black female colleague endlessly bustles around in the background.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: A New ‘Great Gatsby’ Leads With Comedy and Romance

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      This musical adaptation, now on Broadway, is a lot of Jazz Age fun. But it forgot that Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel endures because it is a tragedy.Jay Gatsby — self-made enigma, party host extraordinaire and talk of the summer season in West Egg, Long Island — doesn’t carry his insecurities lightly. The facade of his wealth-drenched life is a grand and precarious creation, and propping it up requires constant vigilance.His is new money, so he has to prove his worth to the snobberati. Thus his pathetic habit of showing that photo of himself in his Oxford days to people he has barely met. Or, more endearingly, his over-the-top insistence on glamming up the humble cottage of his neighbor, Nick Carraway, when the lost love of Gatsby’s life, the fabled Daisy Fay Buchanan, is coming over for tea.In the new musical “The Great Gatsby,” which opened on Thursday night at the Broadway Theater, the grass outside the cottage is groomed, flowers are everywhere, and a fleet of servants is ferrying food. And Jeremy Jordan’s Gatsby is an adorably panicked basket case, second-guessing in charming comic song his plan to ambush Eva Noblezada’s Daisy with a reunion.“She is late, so I’m off to go scream in a jar,” he sings, but Daisy arrives before he can flee. Unsuavely, he topples into some greenery.It’s a perfectly winsome scene, and a highlight of this ultimately underwhelming new adaptation, which has a book by Kait Kerrigan (making her Broadway debut), music by Jason Howland (“Paradise Square”) and lyrics by Nathan Tysen (also “Paradise Square”). Comedy and romance are strong suits of this production by Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”), which ran in the fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.There are plenty of big dance numbers, too (by Dominique Kelley), with some standout tap. The 1920s costumes (by Linda Cho) are fun to look at, Daisy’s in particular: all those handkerchief hemlines, wafting on air. Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce and Tom’s blue coupe drive onstage, extravagantly. And while the fireworks we see in the distance are projections, other sparkling pyrotechnics are delightfully real.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: Jessica Lange Stars in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

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      Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid 30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.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 Culture Desk: Alicia Keys on Reimagining “Fallin” for Broadway

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      Alicia Keys was only 20 years old when her 2001 single “Fallin’” became an international sensation, topping the Billboard charts, winning multiple Grammys and helping propel her to stardom. Now, more than two decades later, the song appears in the new Broadway musical “Hell’s Kitchen.”The show — which draws from Keys’s life story and her discography — presents ”Fallin’” in a totally new way: as a song of seduction sung by a middle-aged man. Keys joins our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, to discuss the history of “Fallin’” and what she has learned from adapting the song for the stage.On today’s episodeMichael Paulson, a theater reporter for The Times. More

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      Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

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      Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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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      Carrie Robbins, Costume Designer for Dozens of Broadway Shows, Dies at 81

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      She made a classic wig and poodle skirt for “Grease” (using a bath mat and a toilet cover) and turned actors into Spanish inquisitors, British highwaymen and more.Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Ms. Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as the syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie.Ms. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink poodle skirt out of her own bath mat and furry toilet seat cover.To prepare for designing the costumes for “Grease,” Ms. Robbins studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s.Betty Lee Hunt AssociatesThe poodle skirt practically became a mandatory feature of “Grease” shows. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a production of “Grease” backstage, she saw a man taking a red Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she told him that the wardrobe department surely could afford a high-end custom hairpiece. He replied that only a Magic Marker would be authentic.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