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      Mia Farrow Bows Out of ‘The Roommate’ With Covid; Marsha Mason Steps In

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      Mason, an associate director of the comedy, which opened on Broadway last week, will step in as Patti LuPone’s counterpart.On Thursday, Mia Farrow celebrated opening night of “The Roommate,” the new Broadway play in which she is starring opposite Patti LuPone. On Saturday, Farrow was homebound after testing positive for Covid.The production canceled both of its scheduled Saturday performances, and on Sunday planned to go forward with Marsha Mason in Farrow’s stead. Mason, best known as an actor, is one of the play’s associate directors and had been working with Farrow on her performance.The play’s producers asked Mason to fill in for Farrow, according to the show’s spokesman, Rick Miramontez. Mason will be performing with the show’s script in hand, Miramontez said.Farrow, 79, posted on X Saturday about her “first Covid bout,” but then deleted the post.The show has an understudy, Carol Halstead, but apparently opted to go with Mason, who is far better known, and whose own name recognition might help stanch cancellations by ticketholders hoping to see Farrow. In the years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been several previous instances in which directors have stepped in for absent performers on Broadway.Farrow, LuPone, Mason, and the show’s director, Jack O’Brien, all have homes in Western Connecticut and are friendly with one another.“The Roommate” is a comedic two-character play, written by Jen Silverman, about what happens when an Iowa City woman takes on a boarder from the Bronx who turns out to have a fondness for fraud.The play, capitalized for $5.5 million, is among the first in a string of shows this season that are hoping the combination of big name stars and short runs will lead to high ticket demand. More

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      The Wicked Witch of the West: A Heroine for Our Time

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      “Wicked,” which arrives to the big screen this fall, redeems the villain who is barely a character in L. Frank Baum’s classic novel.“And what, you may ask, are the reasons why?” Ray Bradbury asked in his foreword for the Kansas Centennial edition of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel. “‘The Wizard of Oz’ will never die?”More than 20 years after the musical “Wicked” became a Broadway megahit, the first part of big-screen adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, will arrive this fall. The second film comes out next year. It might be time to pose a related question: Why won’t the Wicked Witch of the West ever die?The character has grown in stature since she first appeared as the villain in just one chapter of Baum’s novel nearly 125 years ago. Every subsequent adaptation has made her more visible, more memorable and — in a twist — more heroic. Much like the Land of Oz’s symbolic meaning as a stand-in for the United States, her fate reflects our nation’s continuing debates about race, gender and who is and isn’t considered American.Narratively, her evolution has been striking. Barely present in Baum’s book as an enemy of Dorothy, the young Kansan on a journey through Oz, the witch emerged as a formidable green-faced foe made famous by the white actress Margaret Hamilton in MGM’s 1939 movie classic, “The Wizard of Oz.” In the 1970s, Mabel King played her as the cruel factory owner Evillene in the all-Black Broadway and movie versions of “The Wiz.” Her showstopping number, “No Bad News,” stole the spotlight from Dorothy and Glinda, the Good Witch. Two decades later, her transformation was complete when Gregory Maguire depicted her as the sympathetic, misunderstood, magically powerful, though still green-hued Elphaba in his 1995 novel, “Wicked.” That’s the version in the Broadway musical and now the forthcoming two-part film.Credited with writing the first great American fairy tale, Baum began Dorothy’s turn-of-the-century tour in the frontier state of Kansas. Though Baum was neither born nor lived there, his general interest in the region was reflected in his move from upstate New York to Aberdeen, a Dakota Territory town, in 1886. After opening a novelty store there, he started a newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in which he wrote editorials that ranged from advocating women’s suffrage to calling for the complete extermination of Indigenous communities.Margaret Hamilton, left, made an indelible witch opposite Judy Garland in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.”MGMWe 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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      ‘Counting and Cracking’ Review: One Family’s Tale Fit for an Epic

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      No theatrical wizardry is needed for this compelling drama about a woman’s journey to Australia from war-torn Sri Lanka and the generations that follow.Some shows use an extended running time to challenge the audience and its perceptions. Pulling viewers into a trance state and testing their endurance is the ultimate artistic gambit.Then there are the shows that are long simply because they have a lot to tell.Such is the case with “Counting and Cracking,” which fills its three and a half hours with an absorbing tale of family ties and national strife, from Sri Lanka to Australia, across almost five decades. When the first of two intermissions arrived, I had barely recovered from a head-spinning plot twist. And the production, which is at N.Y.U. Skirball in partnership with the Public Theater, had more in store. It’s that kind of good yarn.Written by S. Shakthidharan, who drew from his own family history and is also credited with associate direction, “Counting and Cracking” starts in 2004 Sydney. The show opens with Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera) briskly instructing her son, the 21-year-old Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar), to disperse his grandmother’s ashes in the Georges River, and then immerse himself in the water, as required by tradition.“In Tamil we don’t say goodbye,” Radha tells Siddhartha. “Only, I will go and come back.”As the show progresses, we gradually realize what these words really mean to her, and to her family and community. In 1983, when she was pregnant and living in her home country of Sri Lanka, Radha was told that her husband, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), had been killed in the budding civil war between the minority Tamil and the majority Sinhala. She fled the violence and settled in Australia, where she gave birth to a child who would grow up largely unaware of his heritage.At a steady clip, Shakthidharan and the director Eamon Flack (also credited with associate writing) hopscotch between Sydney and Sri Lanka, from the 1950s — when the South Asian nation was still known as Ceylon — to the 1980s and 2000s and back again. Even the language is in constant movement as the 16 actors juggle English, Sinhala and Tamil, providing instant translation when necessary.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: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Clean Up in ‘The Roommate’

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      A Bronx grifter and an Iowa homebody share a house and eventually learn from each other in this Broadway star vehicle.“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, parroting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robyn.A ditsy 65-year-old divorcée, Sharon is a convert to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which options for growth seemed few.But Robyn, who encouraged the experimentation from the minute she arrived to rent a room in Sharon’s Iowa City home, is alarmed by the change from meek to monster. A plate of pot brownies for the book club ladies is one thing; larceny is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” she warns, “are two different activities.”Because Robyn is played by the surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not especially amusing in itself, gets a big laugh. And because Sharon is played by the preternaturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither evokes a sigh.Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth.But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.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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      ‘Why Am I So Single?’ Review: After ‘Six,’ a Scrappy, Sappy Dating Musical

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      The duo behind the Broadway hit follow it up with a meta reflection on finding love online that is relatable and fun but lacking narrative drive.In London’s West End, two lonely singles are feeling sorry for themselves. Nancy (Leesa Tulley) and her gay, nonbinary best friend, Oliver (Jo Foster), conduct a two-hour inquest into their romantic failures while quaffing cheap bubbly on a peach-colored couch. At the same time, they bat around an idea for a musical based on these travails, which — you guessed it — turns out to be the musical we’re watching.“Why Am I So Single?” is written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the duo behind “Six,” the breakout hit feminist musical about Henry VIII’s wives. Running at the Garrick Theater through Feb. 13, 2025, this unabashedly crowd-pleasing — though ultimately somewhat vacuous — show goes all in on relatability and schmaltz, carrying a peppy message about friendship and self-care.The songs unpack the modern dating experience in a mélange of familiar rock and pop styles. “C U Never” is a catchy tap number about the importance of not getting too hung up on people who ghost you. During “Meet Market,” several members of the supporting cast are wheeled around in pink shopping carts to symbolize the transactional nature of online dating. “Disco Ball” is about being the life of the party while feeling lonely inside, and “Men R Trash” is self-explanatory.In “I Got Off the Plane’” Nancy and Oliver lament their love-hate relationship with the sitcom “Friends,” which they blame for popularizing an unrealistic and heteronormative view of romance — whereupon members of the supporting cast take to the stage in Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer wigs and urge the pair to get over themselves.The show, directed by Moss, has the chaotic, playful energy of a student revue, with lots of amusingly forced rhymes, tenuous puns and self-aware jokes about the metafictional conceit (“Twist my arm and call me expositional”; “before we rebuild the fourth wall …”). There is a heavy reliance on bathos that borders on the formulaic: Whenever characters pour their hearts out in song, another will immediately say something dismissive. After Nancy sings a tender ballad about her dead father — the only genuinely moving song in the show — Oliver quips, “So what you’re saying is, it was the daddy issues after all?”Leesa Tulley, center, as Nancy.Matt CrockettWe 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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      Shaw Festival Presents ‘The Orphan of Chao’ and ‘Snow in Midsummer’

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      By presenting “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer,” the Shaw Festival is helping “the past to smash its way into the modern world.”For 35 years, the Shaw Festival had one central criterion for its programming: Any and all plays had to have been written during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime.This is not as confining as it sounds. Shaw, after all, was born in 1856 — when Abraham Lincoln was still an Illinois lawyer — and died a few months after Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” hit the comics pages in 1950.Nonetheless, two of the festival’s nine productions this season fall well before that time period. “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer” are adaptations of perhaps the two best-known plays from the Yuan period of classical Chinese drama, which stretched from 1279 to 1368.“To twin ‘Orphan’ with ‘Snow’ gives our audience the chance to see two very different approaches to legendary material,” said Tim Carroll, the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. “Both pieces, in very different ways, allow the past to smash its way into the modern world.”At the center of this confluence is Nina Lee Aquino, one of the most significant figures in Canadian theater. The festival not only enlisted Aquino to direct “Snow” (her debut there), but also cast her husband, Richard Lee, an actor and fight director, and their 17-year-old actress daughter, Eponine Lee, in both plays.The director Nina Lee Aquino, center, with her husband, Richard Lee, and their daughter, Eponine.Katie GalvinWe 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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      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Musical Plans Broadway Bow Next Year

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      The show, adapted from the play and movie, was first staged last winter at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.A musical adaptation of “Real Women Have Curves,” Josefina López’s exploration of immigrant experiences through the story of a group of Latina women working at a Los Angeles garment factory, will run on Broadway next year, the show’s producers said Thursday.The story began its life as a play, which had an initial production in San Francisco in 1990, and has been staged many times since. In 2002, a film adaptation was released, starring America Ferrera.Directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, the musical was first staged last December and January at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It features music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez and a book by Lisa Loomer, with additional material by Nell Benjamin.The musical is set in 1987 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, and focuses on an 18-year-old woman who is torn between staying home to work at the family factory and relocating to New York to enroll at Columbia. In addition to its immigration theme, the show also deals with body image issues.The critic Don Aucoin, writing in The Boston Globe, called the show “outstanding,” but Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times, was less impressed, deeming it “ungainly.”The Broadway run is being produced by Barry and Fran Weissler, the lead producers of the long-running Broadway “Chicago” revival, along with the actor Jack Noseworthy, who is married to Trujillo. In a news release, the producers said the play would open on Broadway in 2025; they did not specify whether it would be during the current Tony Awards eligibility season, which ends in April, or the following season, and a spokeswoman said no further information was available.The musical is being capitalized for $16.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.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