Theater

“This World of Tomorrow,” based on the actor’s 2017 short story collection, is scheduled to begin performances in October at the Shed.Tom Hanks, the acclaimed film actor, has written a new play about love, longing and time-travel, and is planning to star in an Off Broadway production of it this fall.The play, “This World of Tomorrow,” will be staged in a 550-seat theater at the Shed, a performing arts venue on Manhattan’s Far West Side that has been helping Hanks develop the work over the last year. The play is scheduled to run for just eight weeks, from Oct. 30 to Dec. 21.“This World of Tomorrow” is about a scientist from the future who travels back in time — to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens — searching for love. It is based on elements of Hanks’s “Uncommon Type,” a collection of short stories published in 2017.Hanks, who will play the scientist, will lead a cast of 10 to 12 performers, some of whom will take on multiple roles. A two-time Oscar winner (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”), Hanks has one Broadway credit, “Lucky Guy,” a 2013 newsroom drama for which he received Tony Award nomination.Hanks wrote the new play with James Glossman, a playwright and director with whom he has collaborated on other projects, including “Safe Home,” which had a production in 2022 at Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, N.Y. (It was also based on “Uncommon Type” stories.) The director of the new play will be Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed, said Hanks’s team approached him last year when they were looking for a place to develop the show. Poots leapt at the opportunity, he said, thinking “he’s one of the most beloved and trusted storytellers of our time.” Poots called the play “a classic love story,” but also noted that, because parts of it take place in 1939, “there is reference to the rise in authoritarianism.”“This World of Tomorrow” is one of three upcoming theater pieces to be staged at the Shed. It will present, in collaboration with Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse, a revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” starring André Holland, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 28. And from June 17 to Oct. 19 it will present “Viola’s Room,” an immersive audio production narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It was created by Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.” More

Nazareth Hassan’s play follows the tender romance (and acid-fueled hallucinations) two skateboarders share.The play “Bowl EP,” written and directed by Nazareth Hassan, is really more of a double LP.The titles of its discrete scenes (25 in total!) are projected as track names onto the sunken, in-the-round skatepark set of this exuberant premiere at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, co-produced with the National Black Theater in association with the New Group. The first half conjures a fun flirtation between two queer aspiring rappers, while the second is a jagged refraction of its ideas. At 80 minutes, the whole play pulses with a concentrated immediacy.The main M.C.s, if you will, are the jovial Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje) and the seductively internal Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus): two 20-somethings who skate absent-mindedly while spitting potential rhymes. While deciding on a name for their duo, they strike up a playful romance over an indeterminate period of time.The two are tender with each other, fooling around between skate tricks and occasionally revealing glimpses of inner turmoil. Hassan charts these low-key adventures through impish scene titles (projected in inventive typefaces by Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor) like “picking a name for their rap group attempt four” and “skating and drinking.” The drained swimming pool that is Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek’s set, and the skateboarders’ “bowl,” often places the actors below the gaze of the audience, which is seated on all four sides, lending an analytical lens to the stage interactions.Substances, from the casual vape pen to MDMA, help the pair find inspiration and grow closer. But like most of what’s played off as typical youthful behavior, this recreational habit returns under a new light in the piece’s second half, which is triggered by an acid-fueled sex act between the couple.That jarring shift comes with the arrival of Lemon Pepper Wings, a pangender demon who haunts Quentavius’s mind, and is suggested to have once pestered Kelly. (Hassan, who is nonbinary, winks at the clunkiness of communicating gender by referring to the creature as every combination of “he/she/they.”)Lemon is played by Felicia Curry in a bravura psychedelic freakout of a commedia dell’arte performance that begins in full anime cosplay, plush head mask and all. (DeShon Elem’s costume design here wildly expands from D.I.Y. skater outfits.) Shattering the fourth wall — all four of them, in this case — as the “patron demon of the intimate,” Lemon cuts through the issues pushing the lovers together and pulling them apart.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

Amber Iman lives up to the title of a musical about the divine gift of song.If you’re going to call your show “Goddess,” you’d better have one handy. Luckily, the musical with that name that opened on Tuesday at the Public Theater stars Amber Iman, who fully fits the bill. Whether scatting or belting or just standing tall in gold eye shadow and regal gowns, she conveys the combination of power and ease that inevitably elicits words like “otherworldly.”When Saheem Ali, the director of “Goddess,” gives Iman and the rest of the talented cast a chance to display that otherworldliness, mostly while performing the songs by Michael Thurber and dances by Darrell Grand Moultrie, the show makes a strong case for live performance as a central expression of our divided nature. “What is human? What is divine?” goes one of Thurber’s better lyrics. “Do either exist until they intertwine?”But when merely talking, “Goddess” descends. The book by Ali, with additional material by James Ijames, is labored, with a conventional plot about a young Kenyan man torn between furthering his family’s political dynasty and baring his artistic soul. (He plays saxophone.) It doesn’t take long to get bogged down in banalities of both the domestic and the folkloric variety.Because yes, the goddess of the title is literal. Iman plays Marimba, a mythic East African queen who, we learn in a flashback, taught humans to sing and gave them their first instruments. But like Omari, the saxophonist, Marimba has parent problems. Her mother wants her to go into the family business, which to judge from Julian Crouch’s amazing puppets and masks is evidently Evil Incarnate. But Marimba, refusing to accept the mantle of war goddess, instead escapes to Mombasa to live under a new name, Nadira, in an underground nightclub called Moto Moto.Arica Jackson, left, plays a spunky nightclub owner and Nick Rashad Burroughs, seated in the chair, is its exuberant emcee.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt is there that Nadira becomes a queen in the secular sense: a star. Singing Thurber’s mélange of music, which encompasses smooth jazz, R&B, theatrical pop and an aura of Afrobeat, she draws an audience that is similarly diverse. Moto Moto, run by the spunky Rashida (Arica Jackson) and emceed by the exuberant Ahmed (Nick Rashad Burroughs) becomes a hotbed of heterogeneity (there’s even a shaman) in a culture that is otherwise intolerant of mixing.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

Intimacy is at the heart of this rare revival of William Inge’s 1955 play, about stranded passengers learning from one another and about themselves.When a blizzard strands stagecoach passengers in a lodge in Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight,” violence and mayhem erupt. Death looms.Eight people are also marooned by a snowstorm in William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop,” but what looms for them is life: Some take stock, others try to figure out what awaits.Best known for its movie adaptation starring Marilyn Monroe, “Bus Stop” isn’t seen much in New York these days, so Classic Stage Company, the National Asian American Theater Company and Transport Group should be thanked for this revival.The director Jack Cummings III staged Inge’s “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic” in repertory for the Transport Group in 2017, and is familiar with the delicate bard of the Midwest, whose deceptively plain work captures the lives of working people. The most consequential decision here is to forgo amplification, creating a sense of intimacy at the Kansas diner where four bus passengers and their driver (David Shih) wait out the weather. The diner’s owner Grace (Cindy Cheung) and a waitress, the high school student Elma (Delphi Borich), are used to parades of customers, but maybe not for such extended stays. Conversations stop and start as the visitors chat among themselves and with the locals, who include the sheriff, Will (David Lee Huynh). Elma, for example, is fascinated by Dr. Gerald Lyman (Rajesh Bose), a former professor whose flowery verbiage evokes a broader, more literate world than hers — and a more perverse one, too, as he has a taste for underage women.But the most striking of the newcomers is Cherie (Midori Francis), a nightclub singer who has been whisked away by Bo (Michael Hsu Rosen), a smitten young cowboy who plans to take her to his Montana ranch, whether she likes it or not.The story line is rattling to a contemporary audience. But the beauty, humanity and complexity of Inge’s writing is that he makes us understand what drives Bo and, even more important, who Cherie is, and why she stays with Bo.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

Some big shows and troupes will perform, while others will stay away. And in a shift, the center will present some Broadway shows with nonunion casts.As the Kennedy Center reinvents itself for the Donald J. Trump era, it announced on Monday that its next season would feature some big names in theater and dance, but also some conspicuous absences. And, in a break with the past, the center said it would present several touring Broadway shows with nonunion casts.Artists have been divided about whether to perform at the center since President Trump became its chairman after purging its previously bipartisan board of members appointed by Democrats.The upcoming theater season will feature “The Outsiders,” which won last year’s Tony Award for best musical, but not “Hamilton,” which canceled a planned run there, citing dismay over Mr. Trump’s takeover. And its dance season will include performances by American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet but not by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, an annual fixture at the center in recent years, which said in a statement that it would pursue another opportunity next season.Mr. Trump, who continues to play a big role in trying to reshape the center, was expected to meet Monday evening with Kennedy Center board members and executives for dinner at the White House. He attended a board meeting at the center in March, recently requested $257 million from Congress to help with capital repairs and plans to attend a gala fund-raiser performance of “Les Misérables” in June.The upcoming theater season underscores some of the changes unfolding at the center. In addition to “The Outsiders” it will include tours of “Back to the Future,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “Spamalot,” all of which feature unionized casts, as has been standard at the center in recent years.But two of the tours coming to the Kennedy Center next season will feature nonunion casts, which tend to be paid less and cost less to present: “Chicago” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”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

When JaDonna Harris and Marquian Harris married in 2015, they did it alone, before a justice of the peace. As their 10th anniversary approached, they contemplated a do-over that would include friends and family. But the cost was an issue, as was agreeing on a venue. Then JaDonna Harris received an email from Arena Stage. An upcoming play was looking for real couples interested in getting married or renewing their vows. She and her wife replied immediately.“We were like, this is kismet,” JaDonna Harris recalled.That play, “We Are Gathered,” is a new work by Tarell Alvin McCraney that began Friday, overlapping with Washington’s World Pride festivities. A celebration of love, each performance will culminate with what Arena Stage is calling “Love Takes Center Stage,” an immersive experience in which one or more couples will join the actors for a real marriage ceremony or vow renewal. One of the stars, Craig Wallace, has been ordained. Over the course of the show’s 30 scheduled performances, several dozen couples will participate. After each show, Arena Stage will hold a reception with cake, champagne and dancing.“We’re going to be discovering a great deal each night,” said the director Kent Gash, right, with the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesThe Harrises can’t wait.“We are happy to celebrate queer love, to celebrate the love in general all over the world and everybody’s ability to find a person that they are attached to,” JaDonna Harris said. “That’s all that matters.”McCraney began to dream up “We Are Gathered” during World Pride in Sydney, Australia, in 2023. A theater there was staging a revival of his 2012 play “Choir Boy,” a drama about a young gay man at an all-Black preparatory school. McCraney admired the production, but he wished that the play, which deals with anti-gay prejudice, didn’t feel quite so relevant. He decided that by the time the next World Pride came around, two years later, he would offer actors a script that felt more playful, more joyful.In searching for a subject, McCraney, now 44 and the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, kept returning to the idea of marriage. When he was growing up, marriage wasn’t available to gay men, but a 2015 Supreme Court decision had changed that. Now friends were asking him why he wasn’t married and he was beginning to ask that question of himself. Recent opposition to gay rights and transgender rights — including book bans and a Florida law nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” — had made that question feel more urgent. “Those things were happening pretty regularly and beginning to remind me there isn’t a lot of time and nothing is promised,” he said. “I decided, OK, I’m going to find out what this means to me.”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

Liev Schreiber stars in an update of the bleak Strindberg classic about a husband and wife and the man who seeks to destroy them.If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist?I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself.His excess of rage found its way into plays — “Miss Julie” (1888) and “The Dance of Death” (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive.The contradiction is at its most vexing in “Creditors,” a follow-up to “Miss Julie” that flips the earlier play’s love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense.That “Creditors” is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play’s balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman’s thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account.The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of “dead languages,” are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi’s professional failures, connecting them to Tekla’s galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what’s to stop her from doing the same to her second?The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them “The Roommate,” “The Moors” and “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg’s three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought.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

The composer’s musicals, including “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” captured essential elements of American culture. Here are five of his most memorable songs.“Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” the composer Charles Strouse’s most popular musicals, were not just big hits that are regularly revived on professional and amateur stages. They captured essential elements of American culture, including a yearning for escape from an older generation’s shackles and a can-do spirit to overcome adversity.Strouse, who died Thursday at 96, wrote jingles, pop songs and movie scores, but he remains famous for his Broadway shows. In addition to those two blockbusters, three others help make up his career peaks.Here are five numbers that illustrate Strouse’s suppleness as a composer and his knack for instantly hummable melodies.1960‘Bye Bye Birdie’Few musicals showcase as many great numbers as this hit about the Elvis Presley-like star Conrad Birdie, who, as a publicity stunt, visits a Midwest family before shipping off to the Army. The movie version, from 1963, is one of Hollywood’s best musicals of that decade, even though it made big changes to the show. The most egregious was casting Janet Leigh in the role of Rose Alvarez, played by Chita Rivera on Broadway. But it is hard to nitpick with the focus being shifted to Kim, a teenager discovering her sultry side, because she was played by Ann-Margret in an explosive performance that made her a star — she was particularly electric in the number “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”Bonus video: In 2024, Vanessa Williams performed that song at the annual Miscast event, keeping the pronouns originally sung by Conrad Birdie intact.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