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George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More
This year’s annual celebration of the best on Broadway is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo.Singing robots. Undead frenemies. A dead bank robber, and a dying cave explorer. A fumbling group of spies, and a bumbling group of pirates. Also: “Hamilton.”Welcome to the 2025 Tony Awards, which take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern at Radio City Music Hall, broadcast on CBS.The show is Broadway’s biggest night, because it introduces the latest plays and musicals to a television audience of several million, any of whom might turn into a theater lover, a ticket buyer, or even an artist (so many Broadway performers and producers have stories about watching the Tony Awards as children).Here’s what to expect:The HostThis year’s ceremony is being hosted by Cynthia Erivo, a 38-year-old British actress who won a Tony Award in 2016 for her breakout performance starring in a revival of “The Color Purple.”In the years since, she has focused on movies, television and music — she stars as Elphaba in the pair of “Wicked” films (the second one comes out Nov. 21), and she played Harriet Tubman in the film “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha.”After the Tony Awards, she’ll be returning to the stage. In August she’s playing Jesus in a one-weekend run of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and then early next year she’ll star in a one-woman version of “Dracula” in London’s West End.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
Her story, fashioned into an Off Broadway play and television movies, was later questioned by an investigator in a 2021 book.Sunny Jacobs, a former death row inmate who was convicted of a 1970s double murder in Florida and later freed, becoming a news media celebrity and a leading subject in an acclaimed Off Broadway play and two television movies, died on Tuesday in rural County Galway, Ireland. She was 77.Her death was announced by the Sunny Center, an anti-death penalty nonprofit organization founded by Ms. Jacobs, with locations in Galway and Tampa, Fla. It said she had “passed away after a fire at the Sunny Healing Center.” The circumstances of the fire were not immediately clear.Ms. Jacobs spent nearly 17 years in prison in Florida, five of them on death row, for the murders of two law enforcement officers in February 1976 at a rest stop near Fort Lauderdale.Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire.Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated.It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs’s subsequent, celebrated tale — that she had been an innocent, a “28-year-old vegetarian hippie,” as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, the Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023.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
Reed Birney and Lisa Emery in a two-hander, Taylor Mac in a Molière riff and Jay Ellis in a romantic drama — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.In the crowded June theater calendar, Pride fare figures prominently, but there’s a lot more out there, too. Here are some of the notable productions this month across New York City.‘Not Not Jane’s’Mara Nelson-Greenberg, whose absurdist workplace comedy “Do You Feel Anger?” was an Off Broadway wow several seasons back, fills the middle spot in this year’s Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival with this new play in which a young woman gets funding to start a community center, but with an asterisk: It’s at her mom’s house. The reliably fascinating Susannah Perkins is part of the cast in Joan Sergay’s production. (Through June 13, Wild Project)‘Blood, Sweat, and Queers’The early life of the Czech athlete Zdenek Koubek, a women’s track and field star of the 1930s who transitioned later that same decade, is the subject of this contemporary Czech play by Tomas Dianiska, translated by Edward Einhorn and Katarina Vizina, and starring Hennessy Winkler as Zdenek. Part of the Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival, it is directed by Einhorn, the festival’s artistic director. (Through June 15, Bohemian National Hall)‘Lunar Eclipse’Reed Birney plays George to Lisa Emery’s Em in this Thornton Wilder-inflected new play by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”), about a long-married couple moon-gazing in a field on their Kentucky farm. Keeping each other company through the summer night, they talk over fear and regret, mortality and memory, love and encroaching decline. Kate Whoriskey directs for Second Stage. (Through June 22, Pershing Square Signature Center)‘Prosperous Fools’Arching an eyebrow at philanthropy and its insincerities, Taylor Mac’s latter-day riff on Molière’s comedy-ballet “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” is set at a gala for a nonprofit dance company. With Mac leading a cast that also includes Sierra Boggess and Jason O’Connell, the Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) directs the world premiere for Theater for a New Audience — the final production in the 46-year tenure of Jeffrey Horowitz, its founding artistic director. (Through June 29, Polonsky Shakespeare Center)‘The Wash’From left, Bianca Laverne Jones, Margaret Odette, Kerry Warren and Alicia Pilgrim in “The Wash” at WP Theater.Hollis KingWe 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
Our critic listened to the cast recordings of all the nominated musicals and picked one of his favorite tracks from each.Great Broadway musicals must feature great songs, but not all the great songs are found in great musicals. That’s why I collect cast albums: There are obvious gems and hidden ones. To explore that range at the end of a generally fine and unusually eclectic Broadway season, I picked a song from every show that received a Tony Award nomination in any category. (The exception: “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” which will record its New Orleans-inflected Gilbert and Sullivan score after the awards are doled out on CBS this Sunday.) Some of the songs are delicate, others brassy. Some jerk tears, others laughs. Some forward the show and others stop it cold. In any case, even if you never see them onstage, they all repay a deep listen.‘Up to the Stars’ from ‘Dead Outlaw’Thom Sesma crooning “Up to the Stars” as Thomas Noguchi, a.k.a. the “coroner to the stars,” in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThom Sesma as Thomas Noguchi (Audible and Yellow Sound Label)For most of its 100 minutes, “Dead Outlaw,” a death-dark comedy about a man who became a mummy, accompanies its posthumous picaresque with songs (by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna) in a genre you might call rockabilly grunge. But near the end, the palette radically changes, when a formerly secondary character emerges as the show’s perfect avatar. He is Thomas Noguchi, the real-life Los Angeles “coroner to the stars” from 1967 to 1982. In a hilarious yet philosophical number called “Up to the Stars,” filled with sparkling, macabre lyrics, he details his most famous cases and corpses in the finger-snapping Rat Pack style of Dean Martin. As Noguchi, Thom Sesma sells what may be the best number ever about buying the farm.‘With One Look’ from ‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Songs like “With One Look” evoke the drama of Desmond’s contradictions.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond (The Other Songs)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
Expect wins for the musicals “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Sunset Boulevard,” but the races for best play and leading actress in a musical are too close to call.The Broadway season that just ended was the most robust since the pandemic, with record-setting grosses, a plethora of profitable plays and celebrities galore.Serious challenges remain — vanishingly few new musicals are making money — but there is a rich subject and stylistic diversity of offerings. Now, industry insiders face a lot of tough choices as they determine which shows to honor at Sunday night’s Tony Awards ceremony, which airs at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS.Over the last few days, I asked Tony voters which productions, and which performers in leading roles, they deemed the best. After consulting with more than one quarter of the 840 voters, these are my predictions.Expect wins for “Maybe Happy Ending” …Tell people the plot summary for “Maybe Happy Ending,” and they immediately think they don’t want to see it: It’s about two lonely robots in Seoul who go on a road trip and find, well, each other. But over the last seven months, the show has steadily won over fans thanks to strong reviews and excellent word-of-mouth; it has clearly won over Tony voters too.The show has what I believe to be an overwhelming lead over its closest competitors, “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her,” both of which are based on existing material. That’s one part of what’s working for “Maybe Happy Ending”: Voters over and over say they appreciate that, in an era in which Broadway is dominated by big-brand titles adapted from movies, books or popular song catalogs, this musical has both an original story and an original score.There are, of course, detractors, who find the four-performer show twee, but there are significantly more admirers, many of whom praise the way all the elements of Michael Arden’s production cohere — the performances, the direction, the story and the lavish set, with state-of-the-art automation and technology. “It’s delicate and intimate and engaging,” one voter told me, “and the scenic design came together to support the story in a very unified way.”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
Felton makes his Broadway debut this November for a limited engagement, playing a grown-up Draco, through March.Tom Felton, who rose to fame as Draco Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” film franchise, is reprising his role as the boy wizard’s blond archnemesis on Broadway, for a limited engagement beginning in November.He will be making his Broadway debut with his turn in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — his first return to the character in 15 years — and will be in the show through March, according to a news release.Felton said in a statement on Thursday that being part of the “Harry Potter” films had been one of the greatest honors of his life.“Joining this production will be a full-circle moment for me, because when I begin performances in ‘Cursed Child’ this fall, I’ll also be the exact age Draco is in the play,” he said. “It’s surreal to be stepping back into his shoes — and of course his iconic platinum blond hair — and I am thrilled to be able to see his story through and to share it with the greatest fan community in the world.”The Broadway show takes place 19 years after the original series ended. Draco is now a father, and he — along with Harry, Ron, and Hermione — sends his child to Hogwarts.Alexis Soloski wrote in a 2021 review for The New York Times that after the Covid pandemic forced the show to close, it returned with a shorter, streamlined story. The play, she wrote, remained “diamond-sharp in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.”Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, the producers for the show, said in a joint statement that Draco left an indelible impression on Harry Potter fans around the world and that Felton’s return to the franchise would offer Potterheads a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him again. “This moment is powerful on many levels,” they said, adding that the moment was charged with nostalgia, evolution and emotion. “Tom’s return to Hogwarts bridges generations of fans and breathes new life into a beloved story.”Since appearing in the “Harry Potter” films, Felton has acted in the movies “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.”In 2022, he released a memoir, “Beyond the Wand” and made his West End debut that year, as the star of “2:22 A Ghost Story.” More
Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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
