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      ‘Lucy’ Review: There’s Something About the Babysitter

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      A workplace comedy set at home, this cleverly detailed production explores child care as both labor and primal instinct.Hiring a babysitter is a high-stakes leap of faith. How well can you really know someone before trusting them with your kids? And what’s going to happen when you’re not at home? Maybe she won’t quite be Mary Poppins, but let’s hope the glint in her eye doesn’t remind you of the unassuming villain in a psychological thriller.With her Pre-Raphaelite curls, plinking bangles and wide-eyed smile, the candidate who sweeps through the door in “Lucy,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater Monday night, appears closer to the former ideal. Ashling (she’s distantly Irish) calls herself a career nanny with 40 years of experience, despite seeming not quite as old herself. Played with a sly incandescence by Lynn Collins, Ashling colors her speech with generous emphasis, insisting that child care keeps her young and that she considers her role on par with a co-parent.The client, Mary, looks like she could give birth at any minute, and has let her search for help come down to the wire. Played with delicate, white-knuckled composure by Brooke Bloom, Mary is an overworked radiologist and single mother with a 6-year-old daughter (Lucy, for whom the play is named) and a son on the way. She is the sort of tightly wound person motherhood has only somewhat unraveled; when she offers Ashling the job, it comes with a stack of guidelines as thick as a novella.Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, “Lucy” is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. When Mary discovers, for example, that she can smell Ashling’s perfume on her infant son at night, it feels like an intimate intrusion. But when Mary awkwardly confronts her, Ashling is breezily evasive.“Lucy” is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn, as tension between the two builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two-hour running time. Mary is undoubtedly a micromanager. Ashling, meanwhile, relishes her freedom, reminding Mary of what she has sacrificed to become a mother. And though Ashling’s strangeness is undeniable, it’s also slippery to pin down. The most telling clues may come from Lucy (Charlotte Surak, adorable), but how reliable can a young child be?Schmidt, who recently adapted “Cyrano” into a stage musical and whose play “Mac Beth” recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, “Lucy” is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, it confronts questions of power, possibility and human nature.Schmidt’s staging, produced by Audible, is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. The tasteful austerity of Mary’s open-plan kitchen-living room aptly reflects her strict minimalism, as does her understated, mostly black wardrobe (the set is by Amy Rubin and costumes by Kaye Voyce). Cha See’s dynamic lighting underscores the play’s subtly eerie shifts in mood, and there’s unexpected humor in the music from sound designer Justin Ellington (perhaps a nod to the play’s future release as an audio play).“Lucy” is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not, and the systems that assign value to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.LucyThrough Feb. 25 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; lucytheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      How ‘Some Like It Hot’ Tunes In to the Jazz Age

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      From the set design to the wig styles, the Broadway musical creates a richly detailed vision of the 1920s and ’30s. Its creators share their inspirations.During the 1920s and well into the next decade, there was an explosion of creativity in artistic expression and popular entertainment.The Chrysler Building stood proud and tall on 42nd Street, with a headdress worthy of a Ziegfeld girl. Bootleggers ensured liquor was flowing in the speakeasies. A fiery new music called jazz hit the airwaves, courtesy of Duke Ellington and his band in Harlem’s Cotton Club. Hemlines were higher, hair was shorter, and new moves were showing up on the dance floor and on the cinema screen.It was the Jazz Age, a period whose energy and excitement was in determined defiance of Prohibition and the Great Depression.The era comes to splendid life in “Some Like It Hot,” a new musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder film, now playing at the Shubert Theater. A lyric in the opening number sets the tone for the show while capturing the mood of 1933: “Let’s keep dancing till the crack of dawn … Tomorrow we may all be gone!”“It’s a world where our lead characters have to keep things hidden and underground,” the show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, said of the setting. “A place where you could be a little bit naughty.”In a series of interviews, members of the creative team detailed how they drew on the Jazz Age for several aspects of the show: the music and lyrics, the book, the choreography, the scenic and costume design, and the looks.A Big, Brassy SoundChristian Borle, foreground left, and J. Harrison Ghee portray jazz musicians and lifelong friends who go on the run to escape from gangsters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Chicago during Prohibition, “Some Like It Hot” follows Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), a sax player and a bass player who go on the run after witnessing a mob hit. They disguise themselves as women — now going by Josephine and Daphne — and join up with an all-female band, Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, traveling with the group aboard a cross-country train.Appropriate for a story crowded with musicians, the show makes full, boisterous use of an onstage band whose 17 players cover many more instruments. The songs, by Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Wittman (lyrics), take their cues from the sounds of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford, with their bold melodies, ecstatic performances and dare-you-not-to-dance rhythms.The sound of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators also nods to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially integrated, all-female jazz band that rose to prominence in the 1940s.The decision was made early on to recreate the “hot, joyous, sexy” sound of the big band era. Shaiman and Witman were ready for it. “We have been researching for this show our entire lives!” Shaiman said. “Those acts have always been top of the list for us.”For the character Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams), the Syncopators’ bandleader, Shaiman and Wittman found a model in the sassy blues of the singer and songwriter Victoria Spivey. They explored a moodier palette for the character of Sugar (Adrianna Hicks), the Syncopators’ star performer, originally played by Marilyn Monroe in the film. “As soon as the idea of Sugar being Black came up, thoughts of the legendary women of color who toured with bands came to mind,” Wittman said. Sugar’s sultry ode to the sax, “A Darker Shade of Blue,” was written with the vocal stylings of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald in mind.Dance, With a KickThe show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, began with the dance styles of the 1920s and ’30s and adapted them into performances that could still feel fresh to modern viewers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDancing had gotten wilder and looser after World War I. Naughtier, too — a sensibility that Nicholaw sought to capture throughout, but especially in the flirtatious Charleston dancing in the number “Let’s Be Bad.”But it was the Lindy Hop, another popular dance craze of the time, that Nicholaw was most excited to bring to Broadway. “I jumped into that vocabulary right away,” he said.Originating in 1920s Harlem, and named in honor of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, the dance features brisk swing outs and lightning footwork. Set to the opening number, “What Are You Thirsty For?,” it’s the perfect dance to welcome the audience into the world of the show. “There’s a veracity and excitement to it,” Nicholaw said, while admitting that some liberties were taken. “Authenticity isn’t always theatrical. I wanted to create dances that had some humor and felt fresh now as well as capturing the authentic style of the period.”“Some Like It Hot” also embraced plenty of tap dancing, which had its heyday on American movie screens in the 1930s, with the films of Bill Robinson (better known as Bojangles) and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.Early on, Joe and Jerry’s tap routine expresses the simpatico nature of their lifelong partnership. And in an Act 2 fantasy sequence, the show uses tap to reveal the budding romance between Joe and Sugar. Here, Nicholaw looked to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for inspiration. (The pair first danced together onscreen in 1933, in “Flying Down to Rio.”) Nicholaw strove for something like Astaire and Rogers’ introductory dance in “Swing Time” (1936), whose kinetic movements convey the thrill of discovering a new dance partner — while providing the firecracker percussion of fancy footwork. “While romantic, it has a more playful feel to it.”Lyrics and LingoLyrical wordplay and Prohibition-era slang give a sense of authenticity without overwhelming the audience with detail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen it came to conjuring the era through the lyrics, the urbane, “playfully bawdy” couplets of Cole Porter were a touchstone for Shaiman and Wittman. In the words to songs like “Let’s Misbehave,” Porter “found a million and one ways to refer to sex without ever using a single actually naughty word,” Shaiman said.In similar fashion, Shaiman and Wittman find endless fun with the title of the show, producing lines like: “Some like it rough, some like it tame/ Bring me a moth who loves the flame,” and “Now on some sultry summer day, some consummate with consommé.”“Some Like It Hot” is also peppered with scat singing, the improvised, syllabic gymnastics (“zee bap zeh bootlee atta feet bam-bam!”) that at times serve as the characters’ secret code. The vocal improvisations of scat singing greats like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway provided inspiration, though here, of course, the effect is precisely scripted.In writing the book, Matthew López and Amber Ruffin wanted to evoke the period without letting things get too cartoonish. Speakeasy slang, like “Cheese it!” and “Move those getaway sticks!” found their way into the dialogue. “I think at first I went full ‘Bugsy Malone,’” Ruffin said. “I love where the show landed. It’s just enough lingo of the era that you’re not distracted by it and you also don’t miss it.”López and Ruffin’s book channels the wit and attitude of such pre-Production Code Hollywood films as “Merrily We Go To Hell,” “The Public Enemy” and “The Gay Divorcee.” Sweet Sue gets some zingers, redolent of a time when women no longer felt as constrained by the pressure to be polite. “I just heard from the doctor,” she says, “and I tested negative for patience.” “Sue always felt to me like a character out of a Jazz Age movie,” López explained, “except in a way she never would have been depicted at the time.”Sets From the Machine AgeSweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators meet Josephine and Daphne aboard a cross-country train.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhile Duke Ellington was jazzing up the airwaves, a new kind of architecture and design sensibility was jazzing things up visually. Art Deco, with its striking geometry and gleaming surfaces, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s — the height of the Machine Age, as the show’s scenic designer, Scott Pask, points out — and was epitomized by the Chrysler Building in New York. For Pask, the decorative metalwork of that building was a jumping-off point for myriad onstage details, including stair rails and light fixtures. The receding parabolic arches in the Chrysler’s crown even inform a wallpaper pattern.The color of the sets throughout is rooted in the metallic palette of the Machine Age: steel, silver, chrome, graphite. Even before the show starts, the audience sees, instead of the traditional scarlet Broadway show curtain, a series of narrow, folded silver vertical planes, framed within a metal proscenium.In one dazzling scene, a train, designed by Pask, rolls into Chicago’s Union Station and traverses the entire width of the stage. It was modeled on the aerodynamic feel of locomotives in the ’30s. “It’s a design element that brings me a lot of joy,” Pask said.For the curtains, tables, chairs and other onstage furnishings at the Hotel del Coronado, Pask took inspiration from the work of the furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, which conveyed luxury through strong shapes and ornamental restraint when it was shown at the International Exhibition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.Hairdos With PizazzAngie Schworer as Minnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJ. Harrison Ghee as Jerry, as Daphne.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Jazz Age was “really the time when women started cutting their hair short,” Josh Marquette, the show’s hair and wig designer, explained. “In fact, if you had long hair, you were either old or considered old-fashioned. The styles of the day were so elaborate and gorgeous, with finger wave and pin-curled hairstyles. Women went to great lengths to create these styles. But the hair still had to ‘dance’ and not fall apart when out at a jazz club.”Marquette studied footage of Lindy Hoppers, searching for the secret to hairstyles that could withstand a session on the dance floor. “They almost always ended a number with hair intact,” he said, “but most hats and hair ornaments were gone!”Marquette’s lookbook included the likes of Greta Garbo and Bette Davis. Daphne’s wig at the end of the show is directly and admiringly borrowed from Josephine Baker’s sleek “Eton crop” hairstyle, with curls pasted on the forehead and cheeks. “It’s just too good of a hair style to not include,” Marquette said.As for Sugar’s hair, though it was not modeled on anyone specifically, it has both the sculpted quality of Baker’s crop and a hint of Clara Bow’s curls and, he said, “with maybe one ounce of Betty Boop!” More

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      In Russian Plays, Don’t Mention the War

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      Paris productions of Chekhov, Turgenev and Ostrovsky avoid current events and focus on profound truths. But the plays’ message is clear: If you rebel, you will be crushed.Since Russia invaded Ukraine almost a year ago, cultural institutions in Europe and the United States have contemplated what to do with Russian art. Tchaikovsky’s militaristic “1812 Overture?” Potentially offensive, and dropped from many concerts. Dostoyevsky? One of President Vladimir V. Putin’s favorite authors, cross-examined, in Ukraine and elsewhere, for his expansionist views.Chekhov’s plays, on the other hand? So far, nobody is pulling them from the stage.The Russian dramatic repertoire, more widely, has flown under the radar. In Paris, no fewer than four Russian plays were on at prominent playhouses in late January and early February, including Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and “Uncle Vanya,” as well as lesser-known works, such as pieces by Turgenev (“A Month in the Country”) and by Ostrovsky (“The Storm”).And the artists involved appear to be staying away from mentioning the war. While the Ukrainian flag was unfurled regularly on French stages in 2022, it made an appearance just once at the performances I saw of those four plays: At the end of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country,” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, an actor brought it out and held it during the curtain calls. Only one playbill, for “The Seagull” at the Théâtre des Abbesses, mentioned Ukraine.In a country like France, where support for Ukraine is steadfast, this is hardly for lack of sympathy. It probably has more to do with Russian theater’s reputation for universalism — the belief that a playwright like Chekhov revealed profound truths about the human condition that went far beyond Russia’s borders. As the performer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected from Soviet Russia in 1974 and has spoken against the war, told The New York Times last year: “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture.”The directors of these four Russian plays presumably didn’t select them in connection to geopolitical events. The sets for all the productions I saw were tastefully vague, and the costumes mostly modern. Since theater productions in France are typically planned at least two years before they reach the stage, all would most likely have been scheduled before the invasion of Ukraine last February.Sébastien Eveno and Cyril Gueï in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.Marie LiebigStill, watching 19th-century plays by Chekhov, Turgenev and Ostrovsky in short succession offers a fascinating window onto Russian culture, which has long prized the performing arts. After a few nights in a row, the characters started to feel connected. The unhappily married Natalya Petrovna, in “A Month in the Country,” had a kinship with Helena in “Uncle Vanya” and Katerina in “The Storm.” All three suffer from ennui and neglect in the countryside; all three seek solace in affairs that end badly.The State of the WarA New Offensive: As the war intensifies in Eastern Ukraine, doctors struggle to handle an influx of injuries and soldiers fret over the prospect of new waves of conscripts arriving from Russia.Russia’s Economy: Shunned by the West, Russia was for a time able to redirect its oil exports to Asia and adopt sanction evasion schemes. But there are signs that Western controls are beginning to have a deep impact on the country’s energy earnings.Leadership Shake-Up: President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political party will replace Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. The expected move comes amid a widening corruption scandal, although Mr. Reznikov was not implicated in wrongdoing.Nuclear Fears Abate: U.S. policymakers and intelligence analysts are less worried about Russia using nuclear weapons in the war. But the threat could re-emerge, they say.It’s no coincidence, of course. Ostrovsky and Turgenev were acquainted, and Chekhov, who came of age later in the 19th century, knew his predecessors’ work and name-checks both in “Uncle Vanya.”The themes they explored speak to social rifts that manifest across cultures. Class struggles, such as landowners’ power over regular workers or the disdain of urban professors and artists for country life, underpin the characters’ relationships, as does this patriarchal society’s hold over women. (Bad weather and alcohol also feature prominently.) Patriotic wars don’t come calling for local men, unlike in many Russian novels.Pauline Bolcatto and Naasz in “The Seagull.” The production makes an impassioned case for Chekhov as a vessel for the world’s feelings rather than for any specific sense of Russian-ness. Gilles Le MaoBrigitte Jaques-Wajeman’s “The Seagull” makes the most impassioned case for Chekhov as a vessel for the world’s feelings rather than for any specific sense of Russian-ness. She has opted for a very spare production at the Théâtre des Abbesses, the second stage of the Théâtre de la Ville: Beyond a painted backdrop evoking the lake mentioned in the play, the cast only has a small elevated stage made of wooden blocks and a few tables and chairs to work with.Yet every element is used beautifully. One of Jaques-Wajeman’s great strengths lies in the precision of her work with actors, and here, she brings individual color out of each. As Nina, the country girl who dreams of becoming an actress, Pauline Bolcatto starts off as a ball of innocent enthusiasm, while Hélène Bressiant brings a touch of goth nihilism to the resigned Masha. As Arkadina, the successful and snobbish actress visiting her country home, Raphaèle Bouchard rocks improbable turbans and fuchsia pants.This “Seagull” brought out a constant from Russian play to Russian play: Practically everyone in them, no matter how rich or successful, feels emotionally stunted.It is true, too, of “A Month in the Country” and “The Storm,” two plays that are seen much less often in the West. The plot of Ostrovsky’s “The Storm,” which had its premiere in 1859, is perhaps better known outside Russia through “Kat’a Kabanova,” the 1921 Janacek opera named after the play’s central character. Kat’a, or Katerina, is saddled with a husband she doesn’t love and an overbearing mother-in-law. She starts a covert relationship with Boris, who has recently arrived in her small town, only to become overwhelmed by the moral implications.Denis Podalydès brought a sensitive, visually elegant production of “The Storm” to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, led by the arresting Mélodie Richard as Katerina. A photograph showing the Volga River is reproduced in the background on wooden panels, which are later turned over to create a simple, two-tiered structure for Katerina and Boris’s nighttime escapades in the bushes.Stéphane Facco and Clémence Boué in “A Month in the Country” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet.Juliette Parisot“The Storm” and “A Month in the Country” both show humans chafing against curtailed horizons. In “A Month in the Country,” Natalya Petrovna, a woman who falls for her son’s young tutor, isn’t the only one to suffer. Like Masha in “The Seagull,” the young Vera, an orphan who lives with Natalya’s family, sees her options in life for what they are and resigns herself to a joyless marriage.Juliette Léger conveys Vera’s arc with admirable ease in Clément Hervieu-Léger’s captivating production of “A Month in the Country.” The entire cast, in fact, struck a bittersweet, realistic balance between comedy and tragedy, from Clémence Boué (Natalya) to Stéphane Facco (wondrous in the role of Rakitin, Natalya’s platonic companion).Yet for all the emotional truth in these characters, from Turgenev and Ostrovsky to Chekhov, the sentence for those who stray is harsh. They all fail. At best, they return to a dull life; sometimes, suicide is their preferred option.It is a bleak outlook for domestic dramas. Nobody is calling for these plays to be canceled, but to call them “universal” is a little too easy. In Russian theater, if you rebel against social norms, you will be crushed.That, in itself, is a message. More

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      On ‘Pictures From Home’ on Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets

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      The actor Nathan Lane had been planning to play the American anti-father Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) when that production fell apart. Restless during the pandemic and casting about for his next project, he read a draft of Sharr White’s “Pictures From Home,” which recalled “Salesman” to him: The two scripts share an almost incessantly angry, backward-looking gaze at the glory days of midcentury American masculinity, embodied by a discontented businessman. Now, as White’s play opens on Broadway this week, Lane, 67, will star as Irving Sultan, a former Schick razor executive who’s supported both emotionally and financially by his doting if frustrated wife, Jean Sultan (Zoë Wanamaker), while sparring with their childish 30-something son Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein, also doting, also frustrated), both of whom tend to Irv in their artichoke-colored Southern California ranch home even as he struggles to return their affection.The show, says Lane, is “about parents and mortality,” the latter of which has been on the actor’s mind since his 2020 cancer treatment. “They’re all fighting to tell their own story, and certainly Irv is fighting to protect this fantasy of his success.” Indeed, many arguments unfurl over 100 or so minutes, often in the form of direct audience address — it’s “part family dramedy, part documentary, part three-way TED Talk,” as Lane describes it — and the sorts of overlapping conversations native to people, like the Sultans, with Brooklyn roots and Palm Springs aspirations.Jennifer LivingstonWhat moves the play beyond that living room drama tradition is the source material: It’s based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same name, which the Bay Area-based artist published after dozens of visits to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home in the 1980s. Sultan then combined a decade’s worth of staged photographs and recorded interviews of his mother and father, both of whom died soon after the book’s release, with stills from home movies taken during his childhood to create a vulnerable family portrait that’s as much about aging as it is about accountability — and loyalty — to those we care about most. Photographers like Alec Soth and Stephen Shore still venerate the project, a longer version of which was republished in 2021; White discovered it in 2015, six years after the photographer’s death, as part of Sultan’s first career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afterward, the playwright contacted the artist’s widow, Kelly Sultan, and, over dinner, convinced her to let him option the book. She also agreed to open the archives so that White might achieve a new kind of bioplay, one that its director, Bartlett Sher, signed on to for its “multivariable potential,” he says, using found footage from the Sultans’ garage and photographic projections that, onstage, heighten the divide between truth and fiction.White, who also writes for television and has had two other plays on Broadway, both in different styles, says the half-decade he spent finishing this script was, from the start, an “investigation” into the Sultans’ power dynamics. In memoir and play alike, Jean and Irving are willing subjects … until they become skeptical co-conspirators, wondering why their son seems obsessed with chronicling them so harshly. “There’s lots of conflict, but it’s not the end,” adds White, 52, who had a strained upbringing with his own parents and is now raising two teenage sons in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, Evelyn Carr White, an artist and interior designer. “I was fascinated by this idea that you can say the worst thing, and ultimately nothing breaks.”And yet it’s Irv — depicted by Lane with jocular, egotistic bravado that barely masks his deep fear of irrelevance — who always seems to get the last word: “I’ll tell you about mess, Larry,” he says near the show’s conclusion. “You know what mess is? It’s intimacy. Intimacy is a big fat [expletive] mess. But I’ll tell you another thing. It’s love, too. OK? This thing you think you’re capturing. This evidence? This mess? It’s love.” More

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      Jesse Tyler Ferguson Tips His Cap to ‘Take Me Out’

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      The actor, who won a Tony Award for playing a baseball star’s business manager in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, called the role the most personal of his career.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday night, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, standing in front of the black outline of a baseball stadium silhouetted against a pink, orange and yellow sky, closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the lights went dark.“Right before that moment, I was like, ‘If I say these last words, it’s really over,’” Ferguson said later, after returning to his fifth-floor dressing room after his final performance in the Tony Award-winning revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “Take Me Out.” “And that hit me hard. I was just trying to hold it together.”The sold-out show capped a 15-week return by Ferguson to the role that won him a Tony Award last spring, for best featured actor in a play.The curtain call on Sunday evening at the final performance of “Take Me Out.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesFerguson played Mason Marzac, a business manager for a player portrayed by Jesse Williams.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s definitely the most personal role of my career,” said Ferguson, 47, who played Mason Marzac, a fanboy business manager for a player (Jesse Williams) who comes out as gay. “It’s a role that meant something to me before I started learning it myself.”The revival, which was originally slated to debut in spring 2020, finally opened last April at the Helen Hayes Theater and ran through June 11. It received near-universal acclaim from critics and won two of the four Tonys for which it was nominated (it also took home best revival of a play).After the initial run, which was produced by Second Stage Theater, the producers Barry and Fran Weissler announced in August that they would bring it back for a limited encore at the Schoenfeld starting last October, with most of the original cast of the revival — giving Ferguson his first chance to walk onto a Broadway stage as a Tony winner.“We just felt like there was unfinished business with this play,” Ferguson said in a conversation in the Blue Room at the Civilian Hotel before his final performance, surrounded by Broadway memorabilia like a pair of women’s Emerald City boots from “Wicked.” Ferguson saw the play during its original Broadway run in 2002, with Denis O’Hare in his role. “To take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special,” he said.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThough Ferguson is best known for playing the high-strung lawyer Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” he was a regular on New York’s Off Broadway stages before turning to the small screen.“I just love the intimacy of an audience,” he said. “I love being in a room and whatever happens, happens that day, and it’s just for these people.”In conversations before his final performance and then after the curtain call — life-size cutouts of the show’s cast lined the stairwell up to his dressing room — Ferguson discussed the role’s personal meaning, how the show changed his relationship with baseball and what’s next for him. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.How are you feeling? I’m having a lot of heartbreak right now, being done. And Mason is not — he’s the opposite of heartbreak, his heart’s been cracked open. So I was fighting against this thing happening inside me, with what my character needs. In a few hours, I’m probably going to have a really good cry about this.How did you first become involved with “Take Me Out?”I was approached almost three and a half years ago. I was getting ready to do my last season of “Modern Family,” and it worked out that I was going to go right from that into this show.What appealed to you about it?I saw this play 20 years ago, and Denis O’Hare, who originally played the part, was so wonderful and spectacular in it, and that performance reinforced my desire to be a theater actor. So to take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special.“I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had,” he said of the show’s second engagement.George Etheredge for The New York TimesHow has your performance changed in the encore run?When we all came back, the performances were so much richer and deeper. I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had.Did you play or watch baseball growing up?No, though I certainly appreciate it more from working on this. It’s an infectious thing, and I’ve fallen in love with it in a way I never anticipated.Your character’s sudden baseball fandom is largely a means of redirecting an impossible crush. What is a time you’ve similarly become obsessively devoted to something?I’ve felt that way about theater, certainly. I sometimes use that as a replacement when I’m doing a show. I think about being on the stage at the Delacorte Theater, and I can replace that with being on a field by myself and looking at all these empty seats.It’s hard to believe this play was written more than 20 years ago. Are you surprised it’s still so relevant?It’s heartbreaking that it feels so relevant. We all kind of assumed that this play was going to feel like a relic after a while because it was like, “Oh, 20 years from now, that’s not going to be a thing, and people are going to be very open about who they are in professional sports.” And we haven’t gotten there yet. So few professional athletes have come out of the closet. The actor Eduardo Ramos joined Ferguson on the fire escape of the Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday in order to greet the actor Bill Heck who was unable to perform that night.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBecause the play has nude scenes, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches during the performance. Have you noticed that people are more attentive?I do notice that, in the second act, they’re immediately with us because they haven’t been spending 15 minutes scrolling through Instagram. They’ve spent that time discussing the play with the people they’ve come with and just staying in the moment. I wish more theaters would do this.You are one of the few cast members who remain clothed in “Take Me Out.” But have you ever been naked onstage?When I was 21 or 22, I did a production of “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” which is a Paul Rudnick play. It was terrifying, and the internet wasn’t what it is now and social media didn’t exist. I really look up to these guys who are doing this. It takes a lot of bravery. There’s three actors in this show who don’t have to get naked and we’re all looking at one another like, “Oh, we can have carbs!”What have you learned about yourself through this role?My last few times on Broadway, I played a kid in a spelling bee, or I did this quirky one-man show about reservations. I just never thought of myself as an actor who had the ability to take on a part as meaty as this.You recently became a father to your second son, Sullivan, in November. And your oldest, Beckett, is 2. How are you sleeping?My kids are in Los Angeles right now. So I’ve been going back and forth to see them in L.A., which has been a series of red-eyes to get back in time for the Tuesday night shows. And that’s been taxing. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of my husband.What’s next for you?I’m in “Cocaine Bear,” which is my first studio film. I saw a screening of it a few weeks ago, and it’s absolutely bonkers. I’m so excited to see it with a big audience. And they’re talking about doing “Take Me Out” as a mini-series or an ongoing series, so we’ll see if that gets any traction.OK, before I let you go get some food, let’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.OK!Next up for Ferguson is a role in the film “Cocaine Bear,” which is scheduled to be released later this month.George Etheredge for The New York TimesYou know all the lyrics to “Miss Saigon.”All the lyrics? There was a time when I did. I don’t know if I still have it in my head. So what is that, a confirm and a deny?“Shake It Off” is the best Taylor Swift song.No, though I love “Shake It Off.” My favorite changes daily, but I’m currently obsessed with “Champagne Problems.”If your options to save your life were to either hit a Major League fastball or fight off a cocaine bear, you would —I don’t think I’d survive either. But because I have been mauled by a cocaine bear, I’m going to have to try the baseball.You own a pair of dad shoes, a.k.a. white New Balance sneakers.(Sighs) Yes, I can confirm that.New York is basically Los Angeles now.Deny. There are a lot more juice bars, but beyond that — I don’t think so.If you could guest star on either “The White Lotus,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Yellowjackets” or “The Gilded Age,” you would choose — Oh, shoot! [thinks for a minute] “Schmigadoon!”You can also throw in a wild card if you want —“Severance!” Something dark or different — I need to crawl out under the rock of Mitchell Pritchett and surprise people. More

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      Book Review: ‘Up With the Sun,’ by Thomas Mallon

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      In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.UP WITH THE SUN, by Thomas MallonAlfred Hitchcock liked to talk about the MacGuffin, a plot device of great interest to the characters onscreen that keeps the story moving along, yet turns out to be of little consequence. “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,” he said, “and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” (Famous MacGuffins: Rosebud, from “Citizen Kane”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the Maltese Falcon.)In Thomas Mallon’s nostalgic new showbiz novel “Up With the Sun,” the MacGuffin is a fraternity pin: a prop from a real, if forgotten, 1951 Broadway musical called “Seventeen,” worn by an actor who was a success in it (and not much else): Dick Kallman. Kallman presses a fine-jewelry version on his cast crush, the male lead, who refuses the gift. The pin will also pop up as a tie clip worn in friendship; a token of love on a lapel; a tool of sadomasochistic sex; and — most Hitchcockishly — an object of value sought by murderous thieves. Mallon specializes in animating imagined versions of historical figures, and ambitiously so; he recently wrapped up a Washington trilogy about three different Republican presidencies. Unlike Nixon or Reagan or George W. Bush, Kallman clears the bar of “historical” only because the internet, as they used to say of elephants, never forgets. In 1975, his acting career on the rocks, Kallman was quoted in The New York Times’s fashion column advising women to wear terry-cloth dresses designed by a business partner. The next time he was mentioned, five years later on the front page of the paper’s Metropolitan report at age 46, was not because he’d switched to dealing art and antiques. It was because he and a “business assistant” 20 years his junior had been killed in cold blood while in various states of undress in a luxury apartment off Central Park.Mallon swipes the story of Kallman’s short life and shocking end and runs with it like Cary Grant under the crop duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (where the MacGuffin was the government microfilm hidden in a Tarascan warrior statue). Grant doesn’t make a physical cameo in “Up With the Sun” — even in death, he’s maybe too major for this, a book that’s about making one’s peace with minorness.But many other celebrities of all gradations do, including Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon, her ring finger smashed into a piece of scenery after Kallman felt she was upstaging him on the tour of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “You sick bastard,” she hisses at him when he’s seat-filling at the Golden Globes years later.The recreated Cannon is onto something: In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom “ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience’s complete belief in almost any character he was playing.” He’s good-looking, like “a less perfect Tony Curtis,” but has a belligerent, possibly misogynistic streak that puts off casting directors and colleagues.In a short-lived TV show, “Hank,” he plays an orphan sneaking college classes (the novel’s title is taken from a lyric in Johnny Mercer’s theme song). It’s canceled after he becomes what his agent calls “the first person in history to be the subject of a takedown profile in TV Guide.”“Did he have a soul?” wonders Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter, in whose workshop Kallman unfruitfully participated. One pit musician imagines the actor beating the female lead of “Seventeen” to death with her parasol.His foil is that production’s (so far as I can tell wholly fictional) pianist Matt Liannetto, whose story Mallon counterposes to Kallman’s in alternating chapters rendered in sans-serif typeface. A divorced father who’s slowly emerging from the closet, Liannetto is also, in his way, doomed — a cough, diminished appetite and night sweats hint why — but morally secure, a walking indictment of fame. “I’d been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did,” he thinks, comparing himself to Salieri in “Amadeus,” “rather than mediocre at something bigger that I tried to do.”As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — “Up With the Sun” is an unqualified success. It’s replete with amusing walk-ons, most notably the underused actress Dolores Gray, Kallman’s partner in a décor concern called Possessions of Prominence; with knowing, affectionate references (Hal Hastings! “They’re Playing Our Song”! Manhattan Plaza!); and with sidelong observations of cultural change.Kallman, for example, hates “A Chorus Line,” disgusted by the “backstage sweat-stink and poor-me agonizing put out in front of the audience. No more hitting your mark with a big grin and singing, full-out, a joyful lyric.” Liannetto, more deeply as is his wont, mourns the “eternal orbits” of an analog watch. We time-travel to Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and Billy Rose’s funeral. Who could ask for anything more?A coherent crime story, maybe. The man convicted IRL of Kallman’s killing, Charles Lonnie Grosso — whatever happened to him, I found myself wondering, tilting inexorably back toward fact. The perpetrators here are given other names, and so many stock characters tromp through in the investigation and courtroom scenes — a Columbo-like detective, a “no-nonsense” judge — it’s hard to understand the particulars or why the main character met his untimely end, other than getting mixed up with a bad drug crowd. The murder was lurid; the motive seems mundane and not fully explained, and Liannetto’s relationship with a police assistant a little too neat.What he and the antihero Kallman have in common is that they’re both “throwbacks,” he soliloquizes. “All my life I’ve loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world, sleeping and finished, that can’t push you around.”“Up With the Sun” raises the drapes on a weird corner of this past, rousing and rummaging through. We’re left rubbing our eyes.UP WITH THE SUN | By Thomas Mallon | Illustrated | 353 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      Charles Kimbrough, Actor Best Known for ‘Murphy Brown,’ Dies at 86

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      In a career that included a Tony nomination for “Company,” he specialized in playing uptight characters, notably Candice Bergen’s stuffy straight man.Charles Kimbrough, an actor known for his patrician looks and stately bearing who was nominated for an Emmy Award for portraying a comically rigid news anchor on the hit sitcom “Murphy Brown,” died on Jan. 11 in Culver City, Calif. He was 86.His son, John Kimbrough, confirmed the death.After decades of stage work in New York, including a Tony Award-nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Steven Sondheim musical “Company,” Mr. Kimbrough finally got his first taste of mainstream fame alongside Candice Bergen on “Murphy Brown,” the popular series set in a television newsroom that ran for 10 seasons on CBS starting in 1988. (He reprised his character for three episodes of the 2018 reboot.)As Jim Dial, Mr. Kimbrough artfully toyed with the wooden archetype of a 1980s newsman, with his lacquered helmet of hair, Walter Cronkite-like air of seriousness and old-boy swagger (he lovingly referred to Ms. Bergen’s investigative reporter character as “Slugger”).The cast of “Murphy Brown,” from left: Faith Ford, Candice Bergen, Mr. Kimbrough, Grant Shaud and Joe Regalbuto.Byron J. Cohen/CBSHis rigid, pompous manner made him the ideal straight man for the show’s ever-topical plotlines. In one 1997 episode, Jim is tasked with finding marijuana for Murphy, who is seeking to ease the symptoms of her chemotherapy. “Wow, look at all of this, you must have spent a fortune,” Murphy exclaims as she holds aloft a large plastic bag of cannabis. “Damn right I did!” Jim responds. “Nickel bag, my Aunt Sally.”It was hardly the first role that allowed him to explore fussy or priggish characters. In the 2012 Broadway revival of “Harvey,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play about a man (played by Jim Parsons) who ends up in an sanitarium because of his friendship with a six-foot-tall imaginary rabbit, Mr. Kimbrough played the exacting psychiatrist who is obsessed with the image of his institution.Mr. Kimbrough received strong reviews for his performance in the 1995 production of A.R. Gurney’s “Sylvia” at the Manhattan Theater Club. He played Greg, a middle-class husband struggling with midlife crisis, a wobbly career and his marriage to Kate (Blythe Danner), which grows more complicated after he brings home a new dog, Sylvia, played in very human form by Sarah Jessica Parker.Not that Mr. Kimbrough ever sought to play stiffs. “Unfortunately, I’m really good at playing jackasses of one kind or another,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I’ve always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity.”Mr. Kimbrough with Tracee Chimo, left, and Jessica Hecht in the 2012 production of “Harvey” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Starting when I was 30,” he continued, “I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attaché case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in. That wasn’t the response I wanted. I was in anguish.”It was not always so. As a younger actor, “he played a wide variety of characters who were much more dynamic,” John Kimbrough said in a phone interview. “Some of my earliest memories are of watching him in ‘Candide’” — a 1974 production of the Leonard Bernstein musical, in which Clive Barnes of The New York Times described Mr. Kimbrough’s performance as “brilliant” — “he played five different characters, and he was a dynamo, jumping in and out of costume changes.”That was not his only kinetic performance. As Mr. Kimbrough put it in a 2002 interview with Newsday: “When I first came to New York I’d played these sweaty, physical guys who bounded all over the stage. I didn’t do a show when I wasn’t soaking wet at the end.”Even so, he had a natural feel for playing emotionally repressed characters, in part because of his own family background.“He came from a buttoned-up Midwestern family, and so he had grown up with people very much like the characters he played,” his son said. “They felt very deeply, but kept it hidden beneath a facade of manners and propriety. Somehow he was able to communicate that feeling to audiences, even as the guys he played were keeping it all inside.”Charles Mayberry Kimbrough was born on May 23, 1936, in St. Paul, Minn., the older of two children of Charles and Emily (Raudenbush) Kimbrough. When he was a young child, the family moved to Highland Park, Ill., near Chicago, where his father sold commercial heating equipment.A lover of music, particularly opera, Mr. Kimbrough majored in music and theater at Indiana University and later received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama.Moving to New York, he endured the typical struggles of a young actor until he got his big break as Harry, a hard-drinking husband fighting off the lure of the bottle, in the Harold Prince production of “Company,” the celebrated Sondheim musical about a single man, his girlfriends and the couples he knows as they navigate the complexities of loneliness and love in New York City.In a roundabout way, Mr. Kimbrough found love himself through the production, albeit three decades later. In 2002, years after his divorce in 1991 from his first wife, Mary Jane (Wilson) Kimbrough, an actress he had met at Yale, he married Beth Howland, who had played alongside him in “Company” as an anxiety-ridden bride, and who later found fame as Vera, the flighty diner waitress, on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” which debuted in 1976.Ms. Howland died in 2016. In addition to his son, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by a sister, Linda Kimbrough, and a stepdaughter, Holly Howland.Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Kimbrough continued to work steadily, appearing on television shows like “Kojak” and in films like “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979), with Alan Alda, while also paying the bills as a wholesome American in television spots for Imperial margarine and Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs.But it was only with “Murphy Brown,” his son said, that he found the degree of fame where fans recognized him on the street. And his success allowed him to make peace with being typecast as stodgy.He came to realize that “stuffiness is not dullness,” Mr. Kimbrough told Newsday. “And that gave me a new lease on life.” More