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      ‘Ragtime’ Crushed Brandon Uranowitz’s Dream. Now It’s Healing His Wounds.

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      Nearly 30 years after being let go from the Broadway-bound show, this Tony Award winner is taking a lead role in a new revival at City Center.In 1997, Brandon Uranowitz was a 10-year-old from West Orange, N.J., who dreamed of being on Broadway. He got one small foot in the door that year when he replaced Paul Dano as the wide-eyed little boy Edgar in the musical “Ragtime” during its premiere in Toronto.A year later, “Ragtime” opened on Broadway, and the musical — about three families navigating America at the turn of the 20th century, based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel — featured most of the Toronto cast, a powerhouse roster that included Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Peter Friedman, Marin Mazzie and Lea Michele. But Uranowitz wasn’t chosen to make the move. (Alex Strange was cast in the role instead.)That disappointment remains an “open wound,” Uranowitz, 38, said.“It was just, see ya, thanks for coming,” he added. “It felt unfinished.”Uranowitz, center, and other cast members during a rehearsal for the show, which begins performances on Wednesday.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesUranowitz eventually got to Broadway, making his debut in the short-lived musical “Baby It’s You!” and later appearing in “Falsettos,” “An American in Paris” and other shows. Last season, he won a Tony Award for his role in Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstat.”Starting Wednesday, Uranowitz hopes to finally close that open wound when “Ragtime” is revived, not on Broadway but at City Center, where Lear DeBessonet’s new production is to begin performances. And Uranowitz, returning to the show for the first time since his Toronto run, will play the Jewish immigrant father-protector Tateh, the role for which Friedman received a Tony nomination.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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      ‘Bad Kreyòl’ Review: Dueling Cultural Identities Make for a Weighty Comedy

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      Dominique Morisseau’s new play explores the tensions between a Haitian American woman and her Haitian-born cousin.Concluding a four-show run as one of Signature Theater’s writers-in-residence, Dominique Morisseau looks beyond her usual American petri dish in the comic and contemplative “Bad Kreyòl.” It’s the second world premiere of her seven-year tenure (stretched from five because of the Covid pandemic) with the company, which has staged her explorations of 1940s jazz (“Paradise Blue”), campus race relations and slavery (“Confederates”) and the aftershocks of revolutionary movements (“Sunset Baby”).In “Bad Kreyòl,” Morisseau follows a Haitian American woman’s trip to the island, where she intends to work with nongovernmental organizations and reconnect with her cousin following their grandmother’s death. Directed by Tiffany Nichole Greene, this co-production with Manhattan Theater Club deftly tackles diasporic identity, as well as personal, familial and national duty.If that sounds like a serious undertaking, it never feels that way here. Morisseau is incredibly skilled at weaving her ideas into compelling human dramas, and “Bad Kreyòl” finds the writer at her funniest, operating in the digestible vacation comedy genre.When Simone (Kelly McCreary) arrives at the upscale Port-au-Prince boutique her cousin Gigi owns, her appearance is instantly assessed. Gigi (Pascale Armand) is a tough-love type, and their odd couple dynamic represents most of the play’s humor and duel of national mentalities. As opposed to Simone’s relaxed athleisure, Gigi is impeccably dressed in colorful fabrics (costumes by Haydee Zelideth). She is the picture of the hard-working Haitian who can’t understand why her American cousin lets things like personal happiness get in the way of a lucrative career in finance.Another point of contention: whether Pita (Jude Tibeau), their family’s longtime housekeeper, is more like their slave. Born into poverty, he was essentially sold to Gigi’s family in exchange for room and board through an underground Haitian practice called restavèk. Simone says it violates international labor laws, Gigi compares it to American foster care.In this case, Gigi says, it’s worked out for the best: In their homophobic country, the flamboyant Pita, who is gay, also finds protection in their home. Simone, of course, lives out a liberal fantasy by nudging him to join a queer activism group, an idea the fiercely protective Gigi knows could bring harm. But, again, Morisseau balances this gravity by making Pita the play’s beating heart, and often the source of its funniest lines.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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      Broadway Is Singing Louis Armstrong’s Songs. Here Are 6 Classics.

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      When Christopher Renshaw was growing up in England in the 1950s and ’60s, everybody knew about Louis Armstrong. “He was an icon for me as a child,” he said. “He was just there — he’s smiling, he’s funny.”But when Renshaw — whose directing credits include the 1996 Broadway production of “The King and I” and “Taboo,” which he conceived with Boy George — was approached about creating an Armstrong musical, he quickly learned that the musician was far more than just the affable, popular entertainer he saw on television.Armstrong’s story sprawls across five decades, numerous musical and social upheavals, and his own creative breakthroughs from the revolutionary 1920s recordings with his Hot Five band to worldwide celebrity with the ’60s pop smashes “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World.”That story is now being told on Broadway in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” which is in previews at Studio 54, following a 2021 premiere in Miami and runs in New Orleans and Chicago. For the show’s creative team, exploring the offstage struggles and tensions of this cultural and musical titan was as important as illustrating his pioneering, radical work as a trumpeter and singer.“Louis Armstrong was a real Black man,” James Monroe Iglehart, who is portraying Armstrong and is one of the directors, said, noting the ways Armstrong’s image was cleaned up and deracinated for Hollywood and television. “We worked really hard to show that side of him, the good and the bad.”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: ‘We Live in Cairo’ Falls Short of Being Revolutionary

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      Egyptians stand up to their government in a play that excels in its design but rings hollow when its subtext and character development are scrutinized.Building a new world is just as difficult, maybe even more so, as tearing down an old one. Just ask the Arab Spring revolutionaries of “We Live in Cairo,” whose solidarity fractures after they get what they were fighting for.The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s show, which opened on Sunday at New York Theater Workshop, is divided into a before and after, with intermission sitting neatly in the middle: The leadup to the violent protests of January and February 2011, which prompted the resignation of the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, followed by the buildup of bitterness and strife. But while passions supposedly run high, the temperature of this new musical — which at best and at worst feels like “Rent” on the barricades — almost never rises above tepid.Like Mark Cohen, the aspiring filmmaker in “Rent,” Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer, takes on the responsibility of documenting the action, in this case the resistance of a handful of young Cairenes fighting government oppression.Layla meets them through her boyfriend, Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the lead in the recent revival of “The Who’s Tommy”). The group’s firebrand, Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni), who comes from an activist family, landed in jail for criticizing Mubarak on Facebook. Its levelheaded pillar is Amir’s brother, Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), who wants to attend law school in New York, and its party-loving jester is Fadwa’s wealthy cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), an artist who spray-paints caricatures of the country’s leaders.Those murals connect to some of the brightest elements of Taibi Magar’s production — the physical ones. Tilly Grimes’s set, with carpets in red tones and a place for the band at the back of the stage, has a lived-in quality that suggests the warmth of the friends’ relationship as well as the feeling of relative safety that prevails at their hangout. David Bengali’s video design does the heavy lifting when the outside world intrudes, and includes illustrations by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer that represent Karim’s work alongside projected news images, some of them appropriately brutal. (Raphael Mishler designed the papier-mâché head of Mubarak that Karim wears when we meet him.)Unfortunately, design alone does not a musical make, and piddly details like book and score must be taken into account. There is no questioning the Lazours’ passion for the project, which has been in the works for a decade and premiered at American Repertory Theater, in Massachusetts, in 2019 — the album “Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo)” was recorded remotely with various singers the following year. But the characters are never convincingly defined, except for Fadwa, who also benefits from Tarabzouni’s fiery performance.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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      Mimi Hines, a Replacement Star in ‘Funny Girl,’ Dies at 91

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      She was best known as half of a comedy team with her husband, Phil Ford, until her hall-filling voice earned her raves in a role made famous by Barbra Streisand.Mimi Hines, a powerful singer and live-wire comedian who etched her name in Broadway lore as the replacement for Barbra Streisand in the original production of “Funny Girl,” died on Oct. 21 at her home in Las Vegas. She was 91.Her death was confirmed by her lawyer and friend Mark Sendroff.A “mischievous sprite,” as The New York Times once called her, the diminutive Ms. Hines brought an outsize energy to her work, whether she was dishing out one-liners in nightclubs as half of a comedy-and-song duo, Ford & Hines, with her husband, Phil Ford, or delivering showstopping numbers to packed houses on Broadway.During her peak in the 1950s and ’60s, journalists often noted her elfin quality and her distinctive facial features — cleft chin, deep dimples and wide, toothy grin — which she was not shy about using as a comic prop.When Mike Wallace interviewed her and Mr. Ford in 1961, he informed her that a newspaper writer had recently described her as “two buck teeth and a carload of talent.”“That’s not true,” she responded. “My whole mouth is buck.”Ms. Hines and Mr. Ford got their first big break in 1958 on “The Tonight Show,” which at the time was hosted by Jack Paar. It was the first of several “Tonight” appearances they would make over the years. Her rendition of the song “Till There Was You” from “The Music Man” moved Mr. Paar to tears.“It was a magic night on TV,” Ms. Hines said in a 1963 interview with The Prince Herald Daily Tribune of Saskatchewan. “They say 12 million people saw it.” They also appeared on several episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as on many other variety and talk shows.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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      ‘Attack on Titan’ Shows that Anime and Broadway Could Be a Good Match

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      “Attack on Titan: The Musical” showed what a crossover between two seemingly different types of fans could look like.There are a few things that New York theatergoers can always expect to see on Broadway stages: some Disney, some Sondheim, some Hollywood stars. One may not expect to see the Colossal Titan.What is the Colossal Titan? That would be a giant, skinless humanoid creature, all red tendons and exposed ligaments, that has a taste for humans. This is basic knowledge, of course, for the legions of fans of “Attack on Titan,” the internationally popular Japanese manga that takes place in a dystopian world where people live in a penned-in society hidden behind towering walls.About 2,000 of those fans, many dressed as their favorite characters, filled New York City Center to see “Attack on Titan: The Musical” on the first night of its recent run earlier this month. This particular brand of manga-based onstage entertainment, and the fans who enjoy it, may at first seem like a novelty, but that’s only true in America — and perhaps only for the moment. In Japan, anime plays and musicals are omnipresent.Three sold-out performances later, it was easy to think that maybe the center of a Venn diagram between anime fandom and theater fandom is not as tiny or unusual a space as it may at first seem. Broadway presently banks on pop culture, already established intellectual properties and the fans who invest in them; the success of this performance of “Titan” made it possible to see a future in which anime doesn’t once again get mis-characterized as niche, or separate from mainstream culture, but rather as part of it.In other words, who’s to say that in a few years, anime won’t be another standard sight on Broadway?For now, it’s still uncommon to see what unfolded onstage earlier this month. Each time a titan appeared, it was a spectacle. Some materialized on a digital backdrop, crushing buildings and people below. Others were massive puppets, requiring a small battalion of coordinated handlers. And then there was the Colossal Titan, rendered with an inflatable head and arms.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 ‘McNeal,’ a Play About A.I., Lured Robert Downey Jr. to Broadway

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      In “McNeal,” the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores the way artificial intelligence is disrupting the literary world and raising questions about creativity.This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage, where he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered recently to talk about “McNeal.” “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”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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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Revive ‘Romeo + Juliet’ for a TikTok Generation

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      Who can forget the classic first line of “Romeo and Juliet”: “How y’all doin’ today?”Well, perhaps not so classic. But as uttered at the start of the play’s 36th Broadway revival, which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square, the words are certainly more welcoming to the production’s youthful target audience than the traditional iambic pentameter ones: “Two households, both alike in dignity.”Not that there are two households in the director Sam Gold’s rec-room adaptation anyway. Romeo’s parents, along with a clutch of other characters, have been discarded. Juliet’s are both played by one actor, with little more than a change of inflection. And though Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler, the box-office draws, cover just one star-crossed lover each — he a beagly Romeo, she a beamish Juliet — the other eight cast members take on 17 roles, adorably if often indistinguishably. It’s a puppy pile.But before you wonder whether this production was sponsored by CliffsNotes, with only as much poetry and staying power as an Instagram story, bear in mind that many of the characters are teenagers, and that the play may most usefully be directed at people seeing it for the first time, not the 36th. Certainly Gold has used everything in his formidable toolbox — scissors, hammers, punches, wrenches — to get young people interested in a world that looks more like theirs than Elizabethan London or Renaissance Verona.So after an energetic preshow, filled with flirting, peacocking and snits of aggression, the story begins with that casual greeting from Gabby Beans, the play’s Chorus. Beans, later a hotheaded Mercutio, a beneficent Friar Lawrence and a barely there Prince Escalus, makes a relatable hype woman, introducing the rest of the cast by first name and telling us whom they’ll be playing. If you’re confused — and even a frequent flier might be — you can consult a program insert that visualizes the Montagues and Capulets as a mood board.Feeling the groove: Gabby Beans, far right, leading Tommy Dorfman (center), Kit Connor (far back) and other cast members in a dance in Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” at Circle in the Square.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