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      How Ivo van Hove Turns a Novel Into a Play

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      He draws inspiration from his neighbors, whom he studies from afar as they sit at the cafés near his apartment, drinking coffee in the morning or beer in the late afternoon. “They’re like little Greek choruses,” he says. “Even if you don’t know them, you know them.”

      “Combats” follows a son and his mother as she breaks out of her violent marriage. In one of the play’s most tender scenes, the pair escape their house and enjoy a rare night out at a chic restaurant in Paris. Van Hove chose a white tablecloth to convey the simple power of the moment. Amid the darkness of the play, he says, “there is always hope. There’s always a capacity to transform.” More

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      ‘Burbank’ Review: When Disney’s Animators Went on Strike

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      Cameron Darwin Bossert’s smart new play fictionalizes a 1941 labor dispute to explore the tension between passions and paychecks.On the lawn outside Walt Disney’s snazzy new animation studio in Burbank, Calif., a young woman is out cold. The apple that was going to be her meager lunch has slipped from her grasp and rolled away.It is 1941, her name is Betty Ann Dunbar, and her ambition is to become an animator — though at Disney, being a female artist means having almost no chance of that. She works as a painter and inker instead, and if her salary is so measly that she can’t afford to eat, so be it. She isn’t living her dream, but she is living dream-adjacent, with work on films like “Snow White” and “Fantasia.”“I mean, the stuff we get to make here,” she gushes, after a worried colleague rouses her. “I just love this place so much.”But that’s where you’re vulnerable, isn’t it, if the job you get undercompensated to do also fills your life with meaning. Throughout Cameron Darwin Bossert’s smart and entertaining new play, “Burbank” — a fictionalized retelling of a 1941 strike by Disney animators and the events leading up to it — the tension between passion and paycheck thrums like an underscore.In a spare, well-acted production by the company Thirdwing at the Wild Project, in Manhattan’s East Village, Walt himself bestrides this lively drama, played by the author with a cigarette frequently in hand. On the cusp of 40, stymied by the war that’s eaten into the European box-office prospects for “Pinocchio,” Walt views himself as benevolent, much the way he sees his cherished Mickey Mouse. Sure, Walt expects his people to work long hours — the studio needs a smash ASAP — but it’s not like their environment is unpleasant.“Why the hell would anybody need to unionize at a place like this?” he asks, as baffled as any 21st-century overlord who’s provided every amenity to a captive staff. “We got volleyball.”Except that his employees’ lives are falling apart. Not everyone blames Walt for that; Betty Ann (Kelley Lord) figures she can’t afford to eat because she’s single and bad at budgeting. But many Disney workers, like the animator Art Babbitt (Ryan Blackwell), want a union.The creator of Goofy, Art is watching his marriage collapse because he’s paid more attention to his drawings than to his wife, the dancer whose movements were a model for Disney’s Snow White. And he is haunted by the fate of Adriana Caselotti, who voiced that same character in the studio’s 1937 hit.“Adriana’s contract stipulates that she cannot sing. Or act. In anything else. Ever again,” Art says to Walt. “Why would you do that to someone?”The theme of taking a woman’s voice is woven through this slender play, with its repeated mentions of “The Little Mermaid,” a fairy tale that has lately captured Walt’s imagination. Online, Thirdwing puts the spotlight on female characters in “Disney Girls,” the “teleplay series” that’s a streaming companion to the play. But “Burbank,” the second half of a diptych that started with “The Fairest” — Bossert’s 2021 play about the women of Disney’s ink and paint department — is primarily focused on Walt and Art.Curiously for a piece whose characters are all deeply invested in visual art-making, it’s in appearance that this production falls short — not because it looks like it was made on a shoestring, which it does, but because the set and lighting design, which are uncredited, are underconsidered. The fake-grass mat standing in for the lawn is distractingly bad, while the lighting lacks the fluidity that the play’s shifting moods and locations demand. But the period costumes, by Yolanda Balaña, are nicely done.What’s remarkable about “Burbank,” which does not have a credited director, is that while it’s a labor drama, it sidesteps all of the traps that that phrase implies. Warm and alive, it’s layered with nuance as it captures the anxiety that can grip a workplace amid a labor struggle — and the ruthlessness that can ensue on all sides.BurbankThrough Sept. 18 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thirdwing.info. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      An Inscrutable Monarch, Endlessly Scrutinized Onstage and Onscreen

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      Queen Elizabeth II was portrayed in plays and highbrow films, in made-for-TV movies and broad comedies and, of course, in “The Crown.” Many sought to answer the question: What was she like?She was the most opaque of celebrities, a silent film star somehow thriving in a TikTok world. If no one except her closest friends and family knew what Queen Elizabeth was really like, that’s exactly how she wanted it.Her regal reserve, her impassive expressions, her resistance to personal revelation — all of it made the queen, who died Thursday at 96, an irresistible object of imaginative speculation. She was an outline of a woman that people could fill in however they fancied. And fill it in they did. Over the years, Elizabeth was a character in an endless stream of feature films, made-for-TV movies and television series — biopics, satires, dramas, comedies, you name it — as well as in the occasional documentary, play, musical and novel.Her life was remarkable for being long, her reign remarkable for encompassing so much history. But no one was beheaded, no one was plotted against, no one was imprisoned in a tower. Dramas about her predecessors in the job — Elizabeth I, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II, to name a few — are full of grand plots and high stakes. Dramas about Elizabeth II were more inward-looking, all trying to address the tantalizing and unanswerable question about her: What sort of person was she?In “The Crown,” three actors played Elizabeth at different ages. From left, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton. From left, Alex Bailey/Netflix; Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix; Alex Bailey/NetflixThe actors who have wrestled with that issue are too many to count. “The Crown” alone needed three different women to portray Elizabeth at different eras of her life: Claire Foy in her early life, Olivia Colman in the middle years, and Imelda Staunton as the queen in winter.Here are some additional highlights of the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth on film and onstage, and occasionally in fiction, over the years.As PrincessIn the 2010 film “The King’s Speech,” a very young Princess Elizabeth was played by Freya Wilson, right.The Weinstein Company, via AlamyElizabeth’s early years were marked by two cataclysmic events: her uncle King Edward VIII’s abdication, in 1936, from the throne, which automatically catapulted her fragile father into the job of king and put her next in the line of succession; and World War II, which took place when she was still a teenager.In “The King’s Speech” (2010), the young Princess Elizabeth, played by Freya Wilson, appears briefly in the backdrop of the drama about the efforts of her father, now King George VI, to overcome his stutter and address the nation with confidence and authority when Britain enters the war, in 1939. (The real-life queen was said to have found the movie “moving and enjoyable.”)“A Royal Night Out” (2015) takes place amid the euphoria of V-E Day in London in 1945. Sprung from Buckingham Palace to mingle, incognito, with the ecstatic crowds, Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and her younger sister, Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), indulge in a wild night of drinking, dancing, flirting, wading in a fountain and riding a city bus.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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      New York City Center Taps Veteran Arts Administrator as Its Next Leader

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      Michael S. Rosenberg, the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center, will succeed Arlene Shuler as the City Center president and chief executive.New York City Center, a nonprofit known for its starry short-run musical revivals as well as its contemporary dance programming, is naming a New Jersey arts administrator as its new leader.The City Center board has selected Michael S. Rosenberg, currently the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., as its next president and chief executive. Rosenberg will start Nov. 1, succeeding Arlene Shuler, who is stepping down after 19 years at the organization.“City Center is a singular performing arts center, not just in New York, but in the U.S., with its combination of dance and musical theater,” Rosenberg said in an interview. “It’s can’t-miss artists and performances, time and time again.”Rosenberg said he had seen multiple programs at City Center over the years, and that he considered a 1988 show he saw there, Bill Irwin’s “Largely New York,” as having significantly influenced his thinking about theater.City Center, which was founded in 1943 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and operates in a city-owned neo-Moorish theater in Midtown, is a sizable organization: Its current annual budget is $29 million, and it employs 157 people (some of them part-time).The chairman of the City Center board, Richard E. Witten, said the organization was in strong financial shape and had multiple applicants from which to select Shuler’s successor. “We saw a lot of people in the process, and Michael stood out repeatedly,” Witten said.Rosenberg, 54, has been at the McCarter since 2018. He previously spent nearly a decade as the managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse, a San Diego theater with an outsize history of developing Broadway-bound musicals.City Center is best known for two annual programs: Encores!, which is a series of minimally staged, concert-style productions of older Broadway musicals, many of which have been forgotten or abandoned because — for one reason or another — they have been considered unrevivable, and Fall for Dance, an affordably priced festival of international dance companies.Encores! is in the early stages of its own transition — Lear deBessonet took over the program during the pandemic, and her first season of in-person programming was bumpy: The initial two shows, “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” were not particularly well-received, prompting hand-wringing about whether Encores! was in trouble. But then deBessonet directed a rapturously received revival of “Into the Woods” that quickly transferred to Broadway, where it has been both popular and successful. The program also has a new music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, and a producing creative director, Clint Ramos, who is working with deBessonet.Both Rosenberg and Witten said they were fully supportive of the Encores! program. “Not every show was a critical hit, but it was a successful year in terms of what was planned and what Lear hoped to do, and it wound up with a bang,” Witten said. “We’re very excited about the upcoming year.”Before the pandemic, City Center also ran an Encores! offshoot — Encores! Off Center — that revisited Off Broadway musicals; that program has not yet returned, and Rosenberg said its future had not been decided, but that “it’s another interesting way of opening up the canon and having more projects from which to choose.”City Center has already outlined plans for a 2022-23 season that is more robust than the one that just ended, which was slimmer than usual because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The next season will include a wide array of dance, including the first Fall for Dance Festival featuring international companies since 2019, as well as work from Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, the National Ballet of Canada, Dance Theater of Harlem, Ballet Hispánico and many more.The theater programming will include a fund-raising run of the musical “Parade,” starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. And then, next spring, Encores! will feature revivals of “Light in the Piazza,” “Dear World” and “Oliver!” More

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      A Last Taste of Summer Theater, as Paris Heads Back to Work

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      As offices and schools reopen, ParisOffFestival brings a carnival atmosphere to an area of low-income housing in the city.PARIS — “Dear neighbors!” an affable puppet called out from a third-floor window here last week. In the packed street below, a mix of theatergoers, local families and passers-by looked up. As more puppets appeared in the windows of an apartment building in the city’s south and addressed the crowd about loneliness and the “bitter pills” of daily life, the spectators murmured in approval.The strangely uplifting spectacle was part of ParisOffFestival, an annual event that began two years ago, but which already occupies a special niche in the Paris theater calendar. Run by the Théâtre 14 over three days in early September, it strives to keep the spirit of summer festivals going, even in the midst of “la rentrée,” the reopening of offices and schools that signals the end of the lengthy summer holidays in France.Seven theater productions, as well as readings, were performed during daytime hours in the courtyards of subsidized apartment buildings, in the Théâtre 14’s garden and at a local stadium, all a short walk apart. Also close by, the small pedestrian street where the puppets made their appearance acted as a welcome area for the public to hang out, with beer, cotton candy and loungers at the ready.All of the festival’s performances were free, a big investment from the small Théâtre 14, a city-run playhouse inaugurated in 1982, whose annual budget of around $800,000 is just a fraction of what the biggest stages in Paris receive.The Théâtre 14 used to keep a low profile, but since 2020, a new management team — the actor-director Mathieu Touzé and the arts administrator Édouard Chapot — has found creative ways to insert the institution into the national conversation, from partnerships with high-profile playwrights to yearly events like ParisOffFestival and Re.génération, a spring festival devoted to site-specific work.The first edition of ParisOffFestival, in the summer of 2020, was a quick-thinking response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the cancellation that year of the Avignon Festival, French theater’s biggest event, Touzé and Chapot offered their help to 15 companies that had been due to perform in the Avignon Fringe. The Fringe is known as “le Off” in French, hence the name of the festival, which has stayed, even as Avignon reopened for business.That first edition, Chapot said recently, allowed the new team to meet locals who had never set foot inside the Théâtre 14. While the red brick buildings in the area near the playhouse look, at first glance, like standard bourgeois Paris dwellings, the neighborhood is primarily composed of low-income housing developments. For many there, going to the theater is an unnecessary luxury, even when it’s just a few yards away.Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar in “Florence & Moustafa.”Théâtre 14So ParisOffFestival takes theater to them instead, with additional funding coming this year from Paris Habitat, the city’s social housing authority. Last Saturday, two of the shows were staged in the courtyards of apartment complexes that Paris Habitat runs. As the mock wedding depicted in Guillaume Vincent’s “Florence & Moustafa” unfolded, a few people stepping out of their homes were stopped in their tracks and watched a scene or two, looking startled. (Others sped past, headphones firmly on.)For those paying attention, the selected shows proved engaging, with “Florence & Moustafa” an especially witty choice. It was designed as an offshoot of a much larger production, Vincent’s sprawling and extravagant “One Thousand and One Nights,” first seen at the Odéon playhouse in 2019. Like that show, “Florence & Moustafa” puts a contemporary spin on Arabic folk takes, but it requires only two actors, a table and a few props.The action started at the housing project’s gate. In full wedding attire, the performers, Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar, welcomed audience members as the bride and groom might greet guests at a slightly unhinged reception. As they directed people to their seats, they traded thinly veiled barbs between declarations of love — and then asked someone in the first row to help them butter slices of toast.The audience didn’t get to share the food, but the interplay between Janas’s over-the-top unpredictability and Bentahar’s quiet confidence kept the proceedings lively. Like “One Thousand and One Nights,” “Florence & Moustafa” constantly slips between modern references and folk tales, which are interwoven as the characters’ back stories. Florence, we hear, tricked a former husband who had already married and disposed of seven wives; Moustafa found a magic lamp and squandered his three wishes, in a case of penis enlargement gone very wrong.That surreal energy carried over to some of ParisOffFestival’s other offerings. “Crust,” a one-man show starring the juggler Guillaume Martinet, made delightful use of the event’s backdrop. As the audience waited for him near the edge of a street, he peeked at us from behind parked cars, then sheepishly came closer wearing just white underwear and moon boots, like a curious alien, at once eager and scared.His supple juggling came as an extension of his loose-limbed stage character, catching props even as he spun, hung from window rails and crawled on the floor. When a photographer attempted to snap him up close, he played hide and seek, then climbed on top of a construction site container and continued his act there.Other productions felt more haphazard in their attempts to craft an overall narrative, including “The Windows,” the puppet show, which was designed by the company Les Anges au Plafond. Leaning out from the casements of a single building, the various characters — lonely inhabitants, a care services worker for the elderly and, inexplicably, some birds and a goat — never really made sense in relation to one another.“Divine Wind,” a one-man show directed by Cécile Bernot, brought a virtuosic performance from David Jonquières, a gifted mime who can also mimic cartoonish sound effects. While his imitation of a plane going down is uncanny, his attempt to retell a part of World War II history — the events of 1941 in the South Pacific — felt repetitive and came uncomfortably close to offensive caricature in its depiction of Japanese characters.Adrian Saint-Pol and Elsa Guedj in “Infinity Minus One.”Théâtre 14On the other hand, Luna Muratti’s “Infinity Minus One,” also staged in a housing project courtyard, never lost its sense of grace, despite being drowned out at times by gusts of wind and passing cars. The show was inspired by a young French poet, Alicia Gallienne, who died at the age of 20; her work was published posthumously in 2020 by her cousin Guillaume Gallienne, a star actor in France.Gallienne’s poetry is a lovely discovery, full of dreamlike visions and suspended non sequiturs addressed to an elusive other, and here it was ideally delivered by the actress Elsa Guedj, seen recently in the Netflix series “Standing Up,” with help from the flutist Adrian Saint-Pol. Guedj has that rare ability to convey emotions bubbling up without yet being fully formed.“I have eyes in the shape of departure,” she whispered early on, before addressing Saint-Pol, who doubles as the love interest in Gallienne’s poems. By the time she covered his eyes with her hands and closed hers, at the end of “Infinity Minus One,” the surrounding noise was forgotten. The summer festival season may be over, but this was a welcome encore. More

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      Review: In ‘Kate,’ Tracing the Tears of a Clown

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      The comedian Kate Berlant’s latest experiment, directed by Bo Burnham at the Connelly Theater, positions her as an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story.There are more than 40 individual muscles in the human face, and when Kate Berlant tries to cry, she gives all of them a workout. An open-mouthed frown suggests the mask of Greek tragedy; a pout transforms her into a gargoyle. Her brow furrows and smooths. Eyes squint, widen and cross. Lips quiver. Nostrils flare. A camera captures each shift, and a projector then throws the image onto a giant screen. Still, the tears don’t come. Some people in the audience will laugh at this. Some won’t. Some will be too busy wondering if this bit is ha-ha funny or cringe funny or merely mortifying, a convergence of pleasure, perplexity and embarrassment that is, I would hazard, exactly where Berlant and her 15-foot-face face want us.A grande dame of experimental comedy, Berlant is a thinking woman’s comic. To put it a little more precisely, she is a comic for all the girls out there who think too much. Her latest experiment, at the Connelly Theater, is “Kate,” directed by Bo Burnham, a brainy, busy, dizzy, prankish one-woman show. The confessional solo is a hallowed form downtown; Berlant desecrates it from every side. She plays with its creeds the way that a cat might toy with a mouse — teasing, batting, swiping, mauling.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work. “Kate” is structured — loosely, like drawstring pants — around Kate’s failed attempts, from childhood onward, to cry on camera. Crying functions here as the high-water mark (salt water, presumably) of actorly truth and authenticity. But what is authenticity anyway? And why would you go looking for it at a theater-comedy hybrid like this one? Sincerity doesn’t live here anymore. Joke’s on you.Impatient, stylized, cerebral, Berlant’s comedy has never been for all markets. (Or maybe she’s not for … men?) Nearly a decade ago, my colleague, Jason Zinoman, described her as “not to everyone’s taste.” Marc Maron, on a recent episode of the WTF podcast, introduced her this way: “She’s an odd presence. But funny.” Her comedy resembles an infinite recursion, a hall of mirrors in which the reflections rarely flatter.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, the auto-fictional games begin as soon as you enter the lobby of the Connelly, a dainty theater folded into an East Village side street. Berlant is already everywhere, in a way that suggests both formal daring and pathological narcissism. Her stage outfit is on display behind a glass vitrine, as though borrowed from the Met’s Costume Institute. Her notebook is on exhibit, too. You can buy a beer at the “Katecessions” stand, pose with black-and-white photos of Berlant, visit a reproduction of her childhood living room, view the lunar phase at the moment of her birth. And there in the middle of it all is Berlant herself, in dark glasses and with luxuriant curls, wearing a sign that says, “Ignore Me.”If her previous projects — her film and television cameos; her sketch show with John Early; her podcast with Jacqueline Novak, Poog — have not yet won you over, how you respond to “Kate” may have to do with how much you enjoy seeing theatrical tropes savaged. (Me, I enjoy that a lot.) The accents, the miming, the assumption of multiple characters, the buildup to some terrible trauma, all are satirized here. Berlant is very much in on each joke. But Kate, her serious and self-possessed character, is not.“I’m going to be talking about something I’ve never talked about,” she says in an early scene, in the sleek, practiced rhythms of someone who has spent too long in the rehearsal room. “See, I have this secret? The show is a mess. It’s about me, so of course it is.”Berlant can run hot, like a Cassavetes heroine with big theater kid energy, tumultuous, but bright with it. Burnham’s more detached style, most conspicuous in the filmed segments, cools her down, further levering open the gap between performer and character. The Kate of the show insists that everything depends on whether or not she can cry on camera. (Part of the show’s schtick is that there’s a Disney+ executive whom she wants to impress.) But Berlant and Burnham seem up to something more destabilizing, the suggestion that authenticity is just one more act, that truth is, at best, contingent and transitory. Although “Kate” borrows elements of Berlant’s biography, it’s fiction through and through, which means that it withholds the very thing the lobby teases: knowledge of Berlant herself.It’s a great joke, if a nihilistic one. And here’s one more, a swipe at the theater itself. Because if you really were going to reveal your terrible secret, unpacking your heart with words, why would you do it for 150 people on the Lower East Side? Wouldn’t you just put that mess online?Here is how Kate, in a moment of outrage explains it: “Do you realize that if I posted a video to Instagram and it got 150 likes, I would kill myself?”KateThrough Oct. 8 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; kateshow.net. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

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      Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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      On the Scene: Lea Michele in ‘Funny Girl’ 🎭

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      Julia Jacobs/The New York TimesEntering the show, theatergoers shook off the rain and buzzed with anticipation. One fan of Michele’s, Stephen Carella, 24, said it felt surreal to be there after watching her play Brice on the TV show “Glee.” “It is just a pop cultural moment,” Carella said. More