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      ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’: An Origin Story for the Broadway Stage

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      This Broadway production delivers lots of spectacle as it winds back to the teenage years of Henry Creel, an antagonist from the Netflix series.If the economic point of entertainment franchises is to generate new forms of interconnected content, then theater is merely another logical outlet for a property, alongside movies, TV shows, comic books, video games and theme parks. So now here we are with “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the latest pop-culture phenomenon to manifest into the Broadway dimension.As far as its plot is concerned, the play that just opened at the Marquis Theater fits neatly into the lore of “Stranger Things,” a wildly popular Netflix series about a fictional Indiana town at the juncture of terrifying government experiments and supernatural forces. This production is big, loud, often ingenious and occasionally breathtaking, in a “how the hell did they do this?” kind of way.In other words, “The First Shadow” fulfills its franchise requirements in terms of spectacular art direction and compliance to the series’ canon (to which it adds tantalizing tidbits). Whether it is satisfying as a piece of theater is a dicier proposition.Based on a story by the Duffer Brothers (who created the series), Jack Thorne (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a co-creator of the current Netflix phenomenon “Adolescence”) and Kate Trefry, “The First Shadow,” written by Trefry, is a prequel to the series. More specifically, it piggybacks on Season 4, which is set in 1986, and tells the origin story of that season’s primary antagonist, Vecna — the teenager Henry Creel in 1959, when the main plot of the Broadway play takes place.If Vecna doesn’t ring a bell, or if you don’t know that Eleven is better than One, don’t fret: It’s possible to follow the show anyway, and to enjoy it. But it’s hard to deny that audience members who understand those references will have access to more layers of “The First Shadow.”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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      Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Sisyphean Beach Balls

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      “I hate large beach balls,” Celia Rowlson-Hall said at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week.A director, choreographer and performer best known for her quirky and surreal work in film, Rowlson-Hall was rehearsing “Sissy,” an idiosyncratic hybrid of dance and theater. It draws on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down. The boulder is represented by a giant beach ball, and in rehearsal the performers were having trouble lofting it into a net suspended above the stage. After failing a few times, they succeeded, only to have the ball bounce back out again.This Sisyphean moment was not planned, but it might easily have been part of the choreography. “Sissy,” which runs at the Baryshnikov Center Thursday through Saturday, is the kind of production that playfully blurs the line between real life and make believe. It’s about a director-choreographer (Zoë Winters), a new mother who is making a dance piece that uses the metaphor of Sisyphus to symbolize the difficulties of balancing motherhood with her artistic life. Rowlson-Hall came up with the idea while she was pregnant and working on a feature film.From left, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Ida Saki and Marisa Tomei at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “Being with the dancers, I’m in heaven,” Tomei said, adding she has relished the opportunity to be physically expressive, “thinking in shapes and body sculpture.”Thea Traff for The New York Times“It was a camera movement in my head,” she said during a rehearsal break. “I saw the camera coming around and revealing this woman who had been hiding behind the rock the whole time. And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s her story?’”Much of the story that Rowlson-Hall wrote is drawn from her life, but it’s nested in layers of fiction and art making. In “Sissy,” which alternates between scenes of dialogue and dance, Winters’s character presents a work-in-progress set in a rock quarry. (Lucas Hedges plays a quarry worker.) A dancer (Ida Saki) pushes the beach ball around, dances out childbirth, then pushes a slightly smaller beach ball (representing the moon) while holding her child — a child played by Saki’s own 1-year-old son.The showing seems to be going fine when it’s interrupted by a paleobotanist, who announces that she has made a “once in a millennium” discovery in the parking lot: the fossilized root system of the world’s oldest forest. It seems the boulder that is the director’s show is rolling down the mountain again, and she will have to adjust to the new circumstances — a process made more farcical because the paleobotanist is played by the gifted physical comedian and actress Marisa Tomei.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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      ‘Macbeth in Stride’ Review: A Leap and Stumble Into a Classic

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      One of the most performed and reimagined works of English literature becomes a fourth-wall-breaking musical revue.“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.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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      ‘Floyd Collins’ Review: Trapped in a Cave and in a Media Circus

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      One of the wonders of this glorious-sounding new Broadway production is how far from claustrophobic this Kentucky cave saga feels.Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.Jordan, below, and Taylor Trensch.Richard Termine for 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

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      There’s No People Like Show People

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      In a new book, the Broadway photographer Jenny Anderson captures the craft and camaraderie of making theater.When Jenny Anderson was 7, her mother was cast in a local production of “Annie” in Brookhaven, Miss., near their hometown; Anderson, who had auditioned to be an orphan, was not. But sitting backstage watching her mom rehearse, she discovered a kind of “magic.” Where an actor’s job is to be seen, Anderson, even at 7, loved to look — not just at the razzle-dazzle happening onstage but at the alchemy that happened beyond it, transforming 1990s suburban kids into Depression-era orphans and a Mississippi theater into the streets of New York City.Anderson eventually made her way to New York, where she built a career as a theater photographer. THE IN-BETWEEN (Applause, $45), her first book, collects 16 years of her work behind the Broadway stage. The volume is a celebration of the labor and love that go into making theater — the trial and error of the rehearsal room; the transformative process of layering on costumes, makeup and wigs; the back-alley cigarettes and stairwell quick changes; the frenzied laughter, reflective calm and tears that all pour into a performance, and that turn a bunch of strangers into a momentary family.Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara in 2023, dressed to go on as a couple battling alcoholism in the musical “Days of Wine and Roses.”Jenny AndersonSarah Paulson warms up backstage at “Appropriate” in 2024.Jenny AndersonThough not a performer, Anderson is undeniably a member of that club called show people, and she suffuses each of her photographs with a palpable tenderness. Devotees of Broadway will find many familiar faces here; in the span of a few pages, you can trace Caissie Levy or Gavin Creel from baby-faced hippies in the 2010 “Hair” tribe to confident veterans leading the casts of “Frozen” (2019) and “Into the Woods” (2022). This is a book, in many ways, about becoming: a twisted mother, an underdog boxer, the goddess of the underworld, a bona fide Broadway star.Caissie Levy, Gavin Creel and Will Swenson rehearsing for “Hair” in 2010.Jenny AndersonLevy starring as Elsa in “Frozen” in 2019.Jenny AndersonAndy Karl prepares for his role as the titular boxer in the 2014 musical “Rocky.”Jenny AndersonThey say magicians should never reveal their secrets. But in exposing the inner workings of so many showstopping performances, Anderson pulls us all under the theater’s spell — holding our breaths as we race toward that moment when the room is hushed and everything is possible, just before the curtain goes up.Shaina Taub — the writer, composer and star of “Suffs” — at the 2024 Tony Awards, where she took home the prizes for best book and best original score.Jenny AndersonAmber Gray pauses before performing a number from “Hadestown” at the 2019 Tony Awards.Jenny AndersonCherry Jones and Celia Keenan-Bolger share a lighthearted moment backstage at “The Glass Menagerie” in 2013.Jenny AndersonLeslie Odom Jr. takes a moment for reflection before a 2023 performance of “Purlie Victorious.”Jenny Anderson More

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      Review: Caryl Churchill Times Four Makes an Infinity of Worlds

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      “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp,” a new collection of one-acts by the great British playwright, is a cause for celebration, wonderment and grief.A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle.Just another day in Caryl Churchill’s world.The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. “Cloud Nine” (1979) explored gender as colonialism; “Escaped Alone” (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You” (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician’s precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both.Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin.“Glass” is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he’s useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs.The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They’re just us.In a 12-minute monologue, Deirdre O’Connell looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness.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

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      Jinkx Monsoon Sails From ‘Drag Race’ to ‘Pirates! The Penzance Musical’

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      Jinkx Monsoon talks about feeling like a lifetime of hard work is finally paying off, and her return to Broadway as a zany maid in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical.”As she prepared to discuss a part in the upcoming Broadway show “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” with the director Scott Ellis, Jinkx Monsoon had only one outcome in mind. “I knew I was going in for a meeting, but I wanted to leave with that role,” she said in a recent conversation.And she was not coy about it. “The first thing she said was, ‘I’ve never wanted anything more than this,’” Ellis recalled, laughing.Now Monsoon is above the show’s title in playbills, alongside Ramin Karimloo and David Hyde Pierce. A lifetime of hard work has added up.“I’ve done so many freaking things!” Monsoon said. “I’ve been a stand-up comedian, I’ve been a singer and a dancer and a stripper. I think auctioneer is one thing I haven’t done.”A two-time winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Monsoon, 37, a Portland, Ore., native, has an eclectic résumé that includes cabaret shows, guest starring on “Doctor Who” and a wildly popular seasonal bauble, “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” (created and performed with BenDeLaCreme). When she made her Broadway debut in January 2023 as Matron “Mama” Morton in “Chicago,” casual — or perhaps cynical — observers might have assumed she was just another TV personality crossing off another item on her wish list, like headlining Carnegie Hall. (Monsoon did that, too, in February.)Instead it was a big step toward her end goal. She then took an even bigger step, professionally and personally, last year, when she was cast as Audrey in the hit Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” and ended up surprising even people who know her well.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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      Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring

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      An actor, musician and writer, White is also now an in-demand stage director. “I am looking, I am hungry, I am searching,” she said.This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama “Liberation” Off Broadway, then the two-hander “The Last Five Years” on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing “Macbeth in Stride,” her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.During the song “Reach for It,” White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. “Power’s not supposed to look like me,” she sang into a microphone.Maybe it should.A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series “I’m a Virgo”) and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said.White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.“There’s nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,” she said.With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of “Macbeth in Stride” in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris.Elias Williams for 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