Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares92 Views

      in Theater

      Paul Libin, a Forceful Presence On and Off Broadway, Dies at 94

      by

      He staged a revival of “The Crucible” in a Manhattan hotel ballroom in 1958, helped run Circle in the Square and oversaw the operations of Jujamcyn Theaters.Paul Libin, a prolific producer and respected Broadway theater executive whose first major endeavor was an Off Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” that he staged in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel in 1958, died on June 27 in Manhattan. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Charles.In his nearly 70-year career, Mr. Libin ran Circle in the Square Theater with Theodore Mann, one of its founders, and together they produced more than 100 shows. Later, Mr. Libin was in charge of operations at Jujamcyn Theaters, the owner of several Broadway houses.Rocco Landesman, the former president and owner of Jujamcyn, said Mr. Libin had a wall-penetrating voice, a forceful presence and enormous energy.“I depended on Paul entirely,” Mr. Landesman said in an interview. “Someone had to run the company. But I wouldn’t describe his role as corporate. He was as likely to be climbing into the air-conditioning ducts at the St. James Theater as he was to be sitting at his desk. He came in every day with enthusiasm.”That enthusiasm dated to Mr. Libin’s early days as an assistant to Jo Mielziner, a Tony-winning scenic designer and producer. When Mr. Mielziner produced the Broadway musical “Happy Hunting,” which opened in late 1956, he promoted Mr. Libin to stage manager.In 1958, on his way to a dentist appointment, Mr. Libin passed the Hotel Martinique, on West 32nd Street near Broadway, and saw a sign advertising the ballroom’s availability. He thought of it as a space that he and the director Word Baker could turn into a theater-in-the-round for a production of “The Crucible,” the 1953 Tony-winning Broadway play about the Salem witch trials and an allegory of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.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

    • 138 Shares55 Views

      in Theater

      Ronald Ribman, 92, Dies; His Plays Mined the Absurdity of Existence

      by

      He set his frequently neurotic characters in bleak, morally ambiguous situations where laughter, as he put it, “is a measure of the sickness of society.”Two men are on the rooftop garden of a hospital in Manhattan. One is an Armenian grocer. He has cancer and a big mouth. The other is an art dealer, a self-loathing Holocaust survivor who also has cancer and is tired of his own voice. In between medical procedures, they bicker about the quagmire of the past.“You came out a big winner,” the grocer says.“Because I survived?” the art dealer says. “It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”“That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage,” the grocer replies. “It’s never happy with what we do for it. I once took my mind down to Barbados for two weeks, and you know what it said to me? ‘You should have taken us to Jamaica!’”The verbal jousting took place in “Cold Storage,” a 1977 play staged at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway and written by Ronald Ribman, a mordantly funny playwright whose frequently surreal works grappled with God’s impatience, the past’s invasion of the present and, as he once put it, “a person’s right to fail as a human being.”Mr. Ribman’s “Cold Storage,” staged on Broadway in 1977, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. PlaybillIn “Harry, Noon and Night,” a 1965 Off Broadway production set in postwar Munich, Dustin Hoffman played a gay Nazi with a hunchback who quarrels with his roommate, a disturbed American painter who believes a caterpillar gave him syphilis. “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” (1966), also Off Broadway, was based in part on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” and starred Mr. Hoffman as an editor at a publishing house who rejects a posthumous memoir by a 19th-century landowner who died friendless and broke. In “The Poison Tree” (1973), inmates and guards battle over the moral high ground in prison.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

    • 138 Shares85 Views

      in Theater

      Mark Brokaw, Theater Director Known for Slight-of-Set Magic, Dies at 66

      by

      On and off Broadway, he worked with rising talents like Kenneth Lonergan and Paula Vogel, combining complex storytelling with the simplest possible productions.Mark Brokaw, a director of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional productions, who shepherded the work of rising playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Kron, Paula Vogel and Nicky Silver beginning in the early 1990s, died on June 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 66.His husband, Andrew Farber, said the cause was prostate cancer.Mr. Brokaw was comfortable with the classics. He directed productions of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Constant Wife” and the musical “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” — albeit a Cinderella with a fresh, feminist gloss.Sienna Miller and Jonny Lee Miller in Mr. Brokaw’s 2009 production of “After Miss Julie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMark Ruffalo and Missy Yager in Mr. Brokaw’s 1998 production of “This Is Our Youth.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut he was a specialist in new plays, including Patrick Marber’s “After Miss Julie,” which he directed in 2009; Mr. Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth,” which he directed in 1996 and again in 1998; and Ms. Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride,” in 1999. And he had something of a subspecialty in the nonlinear storytelling seen in works like Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown” and Ms. Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive”; he directed both in 1997.“Mark was especially good with plays that jump around in time, and you had multiple people playing multiple parts,” said the actor Cynthia Nixon, who worked with Mr. Brokaw on “As Bees in Honey Drown” and Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted” in 2009.Cynthia Nixon in the 2009 production of Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares101 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Matchmaker’ Review: Before ‘Hello, Dolly!’ She Was Just Dolly

      by

      Thornton Wilder’s play became a blockbuster musical, but a production under an upstate tent makes the case for its stand-alone virtues.Though Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed play “The Matchmaker” is not a musical, it’s nevertheless a great pleasure for musical theater lovers. That’s only partly because so much of its dialogue sounds unexpectedly familiar if you know “Hello, Dolly!” — the 1964 blockbuster built on its bones. Lines that the songwriter Jerry Herman turned into lyrics, barely having to alter a word, keep popping up in Wilder’s script like old friends at a crowded party.“I am a woman who arranges things,” says Dolly Levi, the good-hearted widow who’s up in everyone’s business. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on,” says Cornelius Hackl, the 38-year-old Yonkers clerk who devises a plan for adventure in New York City. “This summer we’ll be wearing ribbons down our backs,” says Irene Molloy, the milliner he falls in love with there.But even beyond the spark of recognition that has you humming along with the script, “The Matchmaker,” now enjoying a fine revival at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y., is a musical lover’s delight, besotted with song. Wilder frequently calls for his characters to sing and dance to popular favorites of the period, roughly the 1880s. “The Sidewalks of New York,” the “Les Patineurs” waltz and others decorate and turn the plot while also dramatizing the play’s central theme: the necessity of engaging in the culture of one’s time.This production, directed with high spirits by Davis McCallum, ups the musical ante. Beneath the festival’s open-sided tent in a dell on the grounds of a former golf course, a three-piece band (fiddle, banjo, accordion) plays on a platform above the action. The Hudson Valley setting is neatly invoked at the start by a poem Wilder wrote for “The Merchant of Yonkers” — a “Matchmaker” predecessor — set charmingly to music by Alex Bechtel. “The Map of New York,” another Bechtel song, is the aural equivalent of sepia rotogravure.But the play is hardly old-fashioned — or to put it another way, it’s eternal. (Wilder, the author of “Our Town,” is always interested in the eternities.) No surprise there; the story has a provenance going back via England and Germany to the Greeks and Romans. Dolly (Nance Williamson, looking a bit like Bette Midler) is a jollier version of the parasite character of ancient comedy, who through flattery and persistence attains a place at the rich man’s table. In this case, the rich man is Horace Vandergelder (Kurt Rhoads), a Yonkers merchant whose half-million dollars, hoarded and fondled but otherwise never touched, do nothing for the world.Though Dolly finagles to land Vandergelder and cure his miserliness, you understand from the start that she is not meddling merely for her own gain. She also seeks to match the impoverished Cornelius (Carl Howell) to the widowed Irene (Helen Cespedes), and to marry Vandergelder’s niece (Anvita Gattani) to a painter (Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook) whom the blowhard merchant derides as unpromising. (“You artists produce something nobody needs at any time,” he thunders.) If Dolly must bend the truth to reach these ends — she invents a young woman named Ernestina Simple, then makes her disappear opportunely — she does so in part, as she explains with good cheer, because life should be exciting and people must live in it.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

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita’ for the Masses

      by

      The actress is making her West End debut in Jamie Lloyd’s latest take on an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.“She’s a diamond in their dull gray lives,” sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in “Evita,” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband’s government, and “Evita” expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler (“Snow White” and “West Side Story”), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)The show begins and ends with Evita’s death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, “Don’t you just love the smack of firm government?” (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)Diego Andres Rodriguez as Che, Zegler, center, and James Olivas as Juan Perón. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.Marc BrennerEvita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd’s decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show’s signature tune, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” on the theater’s exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.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

    • 100 Shares104 Views

      in Theater

      The Best Theater Moments of 2025, So Far

      by

      Our critic picked 10 moments that tapped into a range of emotions, often all at once.The theater is more than the sum of its parts; it is also the parts themselves. As I began to look back at the first half of 2025, I found myself primarily recalling those parts: the scene, not the script; the props, not the production. Here are 10 such moments, some sad, some funny, some furious, most all at once.Audra’s Turn at the Tonys“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock number to end them all, is often described as a nervous breakdown in song. It was certainly that when I first saw Audra McDonald slay it in the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” But by the time she performed it on the Tony Awards months later, it was no longer just a personal crisis: a mother grieving the lost opportunities her daughter now enjoys. The lyric “Somebody tell me, when is it my turn?” now rang out with greater depth and anger as McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, invoked the lost opportunities of generations of talented Black women behind her.Read our review of “Gypsy” and our feature about “Rose’s Turn.”A Multiplicity of GreenspansDavid Greenspan as an impeccably dressed palace publicist in Jordan Tannahill’s play at Playwrights Horizons. The actor takes on multiple roles in the production, each meticulously specific.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThough he was the subject of the recent Off Broadway play “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” most people don’t. Nor will Greenspan’s astonishing quadruple performance in the Off Broadway production of “Prince Faggot,” Jordan Tannahill’s shocker about a gay heir to the British throne, help pin him down: He’s that shape-shifty. A bossy palace publicist, a discreet royal servant, even the possibly gay Edward II are among his perfectly etched characters. And the monologue in which he supposedly plays himself? Indescribable (at least here).Read our review of the play.A Face and a Name to RememberNow it can be told. In the Broadway show “Smash,” based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, the big number (“Let Me Be Your Star”) was deeply undersold in the opening scene. That was a marvelous feint because, at the end of Act I, to bring the curtain down with a huge surprise bang, out came Bella Coppola, as a suddenly promoted assistant choreographer, performing the same song when no one else could. Can you oversell something? Turns out, no.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

    • 163 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      André Bishop Takes a Bow After Hundreds of Shows at Lincoln Center Theater

      by

      He is moving on from 33 years at Lincoln Center Theater and will head to Rome to focus on his memoirs.André Bishop, the longtime producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, could have chosen almost anything for the final Broadway production of his tenure. He’s known for Golden Age musicals, and has a long history with new plays. But he opted to exit with “Floyd Collins,” a dark and tragic 1996 musical about a trapped cave explorer.Why would anyone select that as their swan song?“I just thought it’s the kind of serious musical that I want to go out on, because everything in it is something that I believe, in terms of the musical theater,” he told me in an interview last week at his nearly empty office — nearly empty because he’s been giving away his theater memorabilia after deciding he didn’t want his home to turn into a museum. He donated his archives — 174 cartons of papers, photos and notebooks — to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, his alma mater.“Now there would be some people who say, ‘Why do you have to do all these sad shows? Why can’t you do something toe-tapping?’ Well, that’s just not my nature,” he said. “I felt that Floyd’s looking for a perfect cave was very close to mine looking for a perfect theater — that somehow these theaters that I’ve worked in for 50 years were these perfect caves that I happened to stumble on.”Jason Gotay, in the background, and Jeremy Jordan in “Floyd Collins” at Lincoln Center Theater. “It’s the kind of serious musical that I want to go out on, because everything in it is something that I believe, in terms of the musical theater,” Bishop said.Richard Termine for The New York TimesBishop, 76, has spent the last 33 years running Lincoln Center Theater, which has a $50 million annual budget, 22,000 members, 65 full-time employees, two Off Broadway stages, and one Broadway house (the Vivian Beaumont). He programmed over 150 plays and musicals, 15 of which won Tony Awards, and then announced in 2023 that he would retire this summer; Monday was his last day on the job, and he is being succeeded by Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of the Encores! program at City Center.His departure is part of a wave of change at Broadway’s nonprofits; all four of the nonprofits with Broadway houses are naming successors for artistic leaders with decades-long tenures.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

    • 150 Shares82 Views

      in Theater

      In Three Off Broadway Shows, They’re Coming Out and Out and Out

      by

      Several recent productions have featured a range of L.G.B.T.Q. stories, from strained familial relationships to self-discovery via Disney cosplay.For decades, describing a boy or a man as “artistic” was a way to imply they did not fit the accepted heterosexual mold. Of course the expression’s double meaning could be literal, as illustrated by recent coming-of-age shows in which the narrators are both gay and, well, artistic. (As for lesbians, they have long been called “handy” — bring on the tool belts.)Douglas Lyons and Ethan D. Pakchar’s “Beau the Musical” follows many of the conventional signposts of the “growing up different” genre. As a 27-year-old, Ace (Matt Rodin) revisits his middle and then high school years, when he navigated an affair with his bully, Ferris (Cory Jeacoma); figured out how to better understand his mother, Raven (Amelia Cormack); and reconnected with a once-estranged grandfather, Beau (Chris Blisset), who had secrets of his own.Josh Rhodes’s production for Out of the Box Theatrics, through July 27 at Theater 154 in Manhattan, goes how you’d expect a story involving same-sex attraction in Tennessee to go: clandestine trysts, self-loathing, violent encounters, art (in this case music) as an outlet and escape. This is well-trod terrain, but Lyons has a flair for recycling tropes, as he did in his popular comedy “Chicken and Biscuits.” And Rodin, who played a gay teacher in the musical “All the World’s a Stage” this spring, gives a warm portrayal of someone trying to find his place through music-making.The bulk of “Beau the Musical” takes place over the late 1990s and early 2000s, while Rob Madge’s autobiographical “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” largely looks back at events from the 2000s and 2010s, when Madge, who identifies as nonbinary, was growing up. The shows’ time frames overlap somewhat, but the experiences they depict are starkly different.A British production that had a five-performance run at New York City Center in June, “My Son’s a Queer” is a portrait of a child who was unconditionally loved and accepted, even when bossing their father around in a D.I.Y. Disney tribute — which we see because the Madges were fond of making home videos. Everybody in the family supported young Rob’s artistic-ness, both literal and euphemistic: Granny Grimble made them a Maleficent costume, and when problems erupted at school (“not the best of times,” the adult Rob says in a rare display of understatement), their mother took a job as a “lunch lady” to keep watch.Madge revisits those years with unflagging, if solipsistic, brightness — the young Rob often asks their parents, “Are you filming?” and a robust ego seems to have been a constant. The downside is that the City Center performance I saw did not always bear out Madge’s confidence in their talent, with performances of original songs (written with Pippa Cleary) that rarely rose above adequate.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