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      Phylicia Rashad Knows Her Purpose

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      The first time Phylicia Rashad realized what she wanted to do with her life, she was making her way to the exit of a bustling auditorium. This was November 1959, in Houston, after a student music festival at the 9,000-seat Sam Houston Coliseum.Rashad, who was then Phylicia Allen, had been the festival’s mistress of ceremonies. Only 11 years old, she had won the role in a contest, beating out students from other Black elementary schools in her district, which remained defiantly segregated five years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Rashad spent six weeks preparing for the concert — practicing introductions for the performers and memorizing a libretto for an orchestra. On the night of the show, she wore a brand-new yellow pinafore dress over a white shirt, white shoes, white socks with a ruffled trim and a flower tiara on top of freshly done curls.“When I walked out to the microphone to speak, I was suddenly in the spotlight for the first time,” she recalled in a recent interview. “The light was so bright, I couldn’t see anybody in the audience. So, every time I went up, I just talked to the light.”As she was leaving the venue, Rashad overheard the mothers of some students talking among themselves.“There she is,” she recalled hearing one say, gesturing toward her. “There’s that little girl who spoke so beautifully. Isn’t she beautiful?”Rashad had never thought of herself as beautiful. Among her family, she was sometimes teased because her rich brown skin was darker than that of her older brother, Tex, and younger sister, Debbie.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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      There’s Always Room in the Clown Car

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      For centuries, clowns have mostly been men. A new group of talent is changing that.AS A YOUNG woman in Mexico City, Gaby Muñoz, a 43-year-old performer known onstage as Chula the Clown, recalls, putting on makeup with her friends was always a fraught experience. “There was this whole idea of how to be a woman. They had this beautiful hair and these divine bodies, and I would look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, I guess not in this life.’ That made me laugh,” she says. As Chula — her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry — Muñoz, who this spring will begin touring through Europe and Central and South America, has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady. She’s used her open, expressive face and antic physicality to joke wordlessly about loss, aging in a woman’s body and other concepts that have long been overlooked in the male-dominated world of clowns. For Muñoz, laughter isn’t an end in itself but rather, she says, “a way to connect.”Clowns, jesters, harlequins and fools have, of course, played a similar role throughout history. In ancient Greece, they served as ribald choristers in epic dramas, while emperors in Han dynasty China delighted in the buffoonish exertions of the court paiyou. Shakespeare’s world-weary wags spoke truth to King Lear and other royals, while the heyoka, the holy fool of many Sioux tribes, inverted day-to-day logic to provoke healing laughter. The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, while the contemporary circus clown, with his exaggerated face paint and physical wit, debuted on a London stage around 1800. (The one dressed in an ill-fitting suit and oversize shoes emerged as his clumsy foil seven decades later.) Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer writes with Richard Erdoes in their 1972 book, “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions,” “sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.” They were also almost always men.During her childhood in Estonia, the 29-year-old London-based clown Julia Masli dreamed of acting in tragedies for exactly that reason: comedy, she assumed, was a man’s game. When, in 2017, she watched the legendary English clown Lucy Hopkins perform in Brighton for the first time, “seeing a woman do something so absurd and free felt like a revolution,” she says. In Masli’s show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and has since toured internationally, she appears onstage as a doe-eyed Victorian vagabond who asks audience members to share their problems. As she offers solutions both genuine and absurd — enlisting a bored office worker to record the show’s minutes; duct-taping a lonely young woman to a group of strangers onstage — she transforms the emotional labor so often foisted on women into a source of laughter and catharsis.OTHER RISING FEMALE clowns, like the 26-year-old English actress Frankie Thompson and the 32-year-old Swiss Mexican theater artist Paulina Lenoir, use womanhood itself as a source of humor. In the former’s “Body Show,” performed with her collaborator the 29-year-old trans masculine anarchist clown Liv Ello, Thompson forgoes exaggerated makeup and costume, combining lip-syncing and confrontational bouffon (an approach to clowning that emphasizes absurdity and shock) to discuss her history with anorexia. Small and blond — “people treat me like this tiny-angel special little bird to be protected,” she says — Thompson makes herself grotesque by, say, licking the stage or choking down Marmite, eliciting laughter that implicates the audience in the humiliations of body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, Lenoir’s persona Puella Eterna feminizes the physical exaggeration of the classic male clown by wearing a corset, a flamenco skirt and a giant Minnie Mouse bow in lieu of a bulging nose. As master of ceremonies at her Fool’s Moon cabaret, Puella displays the kind of unearned self-assurance that usually wins praise for men and scorn for women.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 ‘Othello,’ Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal Are Prey and Predator

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      Shakespeare’s leanest tragedy gets a starry, headlong production that embraces the action but misses the mystery.Just moments earlier, he was an infatuated new husband, and she his “gentle love.” Now, in Act III, Scene 3 of “Othello,” he vows to kill her.What has happened? Why does Othello, the great Black general, the savior of Venice in a war with the Ottomans, resolve to murder Desdemona, the pearl of the white aristocracy he has won at great risk?The scene in which this strange alteration occurs is one of the most gripping, baffling episodes in Shakespeare, and it remains so in the starry Broadway revival of “Othello” that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.We can be grateful for that — and yet, in Denzel Washington’s commanding performance, what’s especially gripping is perhaps too baffling. As in his many movies, he leads with action, giving us a general whose psychology is as obscure to us as it is to him. Speaking very fast, with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, and stiffened by his ramrod military bearing, he betrays little evidence of the sorrows and injuries that moved Desdemona when he wooed her. Speed and decisiveness (“to be once in doubt is once to be resolved”) seem to matter more than emotion.Usually the obscure one is Othello’s ensign, Iago. Though Shakespeare provides many possible reasons he might have wanted to poison his commander with lies about Desdemona, awakening the famous green-eyed monster of jealousy, we are typically still in the dark at the end, when the cur is sent to his punishment. “I am not what I am” is his paradoxical, irreducible credo. Then what is he?Yet in a fascinating reversal, this “Othello” offers an Iago far more legible than his master. Jake Gyllenhaal’s eely take, with a physical wiggle to match his moral one, is a little bit mad scientist, a little bit Travis Bickle. His blue eyes pierce the atmospheric murk as he tracks all possible routes to his goal, like a rat in a maze, in the process allowing us to see how a twisted man thinks. He is a calculator of grievance; havoc is the carefully tabulated result. He adds up.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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      ‘Love Life,’ the Lost Great American Musical, Returns Over 75 Years Later

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      Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s pioneering “Love Life” was thwarted by circumstance. Now, it is coming to Encores! at New York City Center.For some people, seeing the musical “Love Life” in 1948 was an eye-opening experience.As a new show with music by Kurt Weill, and a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, it was a major Broadway event. So Stephen Sondheim got himself a ticket, as did his future collaborator Hal Prince. One night Fred Ebb, of Kander and Ebb, was in the house; another night, Bob Fosse.All of them would be influenced by “Love Life,” which tells the story of an American marriage over 150 years through a series of vaudeville acts. It’s by no means a classic, but its form pioneered the concept musical, a genre that would blossom a generation later in shows like Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and Sondheim’s “Company” and “Follies.”Ebb would look back on “Love Life” as “a marvelous piece of theater.” Yet it hasn’t been seen in New York since that original run. Because of a musicians’ union strike, it was never recorded, nor was it published. Some songs lived on, but eventually it gained a reputation as the lost great American musical.The 1948 production (with Nanette Fabray, center) was inspired, in part, by Alan Jay Lerner, who was recently divorced and interested in writing “a cavalcade of American marriage.”Billy Rose Theater Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThat is about to change. “Love Life” is finally returning to Manhattan on Wednesday, after decades of neglect and a five-year pandemic delay, for an Encores! production at New York City Center, directed by Victoria Clark and starring Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell.“It’s always seemed that ‘Love Life’ was jinxed,” said the scholar Kim Kowalke, who runs the Kurt Weill Foundation. “Maybe the jinx is off now.”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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      8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

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      A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … 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.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel 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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      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: The Stiff Who Saved Europe

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      A proudly silly British musical comedy about the “Trojan corpse” of World War II comes to Broadway.In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person dies in the street after ingesting rat poison. Given a fake postmortem identity by British counterintelligence officers — no effort to find his family is made — he is dressed in a military uniform, sealed in a cooler, then ejected from a submarine near the coast of Spain. The papers planted on his corpse eventually make their way to Hitler, convincing him that the Allies will begin their invasion of Europe in Sardinia, when in fact they plan to do so in Sicily. As a result, Axis troops are diverted to the wrong Italian island.In short, Operation Mincemeat, as this real World War II operation was called, works.But is it funny?Whether “Operation Mincemeat,” the diverting if irksome musical comedy about the plan, works as well will depend a lot on your answer to that question. A hit in London, it has come to Broadway, where it opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, having paid close attention to differences in accent, dialect and usage between British and American audiences. (Public school there is private school here.) But neither the authors, a collective called SpitLip, nor the director, Robert Hastie, appear to have given sufficient thought to our different senses of humor.Theirs you will recognize. It combines Oxbridge snootiness with panto ribaldry to create a self-canceling middlebrow snark. You may detect in the show’s DNA elements of Monty Python, Benny Hill, “The Play That Goes Wrong” and the Hitchcock stage spoof “The 39 Steps.” But if those influences have made you laugh, even as much as they have made me, you may still experience diminishing returns in the nonstop tickling of “Operation Mincemeat.” The Pythons kept their satire sharp and their sketches quick.Not so here. At more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is hardly svelte. Nor, with its aim so scattershot, is it clear what it is satirizing.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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      ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway

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      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

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      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