Theater

A revival of the sweeping musical will open at Lincoln Center Theater in October, starring Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy and Brandon Uranowitz.“Ragtime,” an epic musical that explores early 20th-century American aspirations through three fictional families whose lives intersect with historical figures and events, is returning to Broadway.The musical, based on a 1975 E.L. Doctorow novel and set mostly in New Rochelle and other locations in and around New York, first opened on Broadway in 1998, won Tony Awards for best score and best book, and ran for two years. There was a short-lived revival in 2009.This new production will be staged at Lincoln Center Theater, which is one of four nonprofit organizations that operate Broadway houses. It will be the first production during the tenure of Lear deBessonet, who is taking over as the nonprofit’s new artistic director; deBessonet will direct the production.This revival, scheduled to begin previews Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 16 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, began its life with a 12-day run last fall in a New York City Center gala presentation, also directed by deBessonet. The new production is scheduled to run for just 14 weeks.The Broadway production, like the City Center production, will star Joshua Henry as Coalhouse Walker Jr., an African American pianist; Caissie Levy as Mother, the matriarch of an affluent white family; and Brandon Uranowitz as Tateh, a Jewish immigrant. The intersection of those individuals and their communities, with each other and with the history of the United States, drives a complex plot of intertwined narratives that touch on North Pole exploration, early filmmaking, the labor movement, Houdini’s escapades, and, of course, ragtime music.The musical is among the best-known and most acclaimed works from the longtime collaborators Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the lyrics, and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the music. The book is by Terrence McNally, an acclaimed playwright who died in 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.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 last time Lencia Kebede lived in New York, in 2015, she was a 21-year-old college intern at the United Nations, taking and translating notes for the ambassador from Guatemala, who was working on an anti-poverty initiative.What a difference a decade can make. Instead of pursuing a career as a human rights lawyer, Kebede is now a working actress in New York defying gravity eight times as week as the first Black actress to play Elphaba full time in “Wicked” on Broadway.It’s a dream role that is also allowing her to tend to her two passions. “The place where Elphaba and I meet,” she said, “is empathy and advocacy for justice.”After her internship, she returned to college and graduated from Occidental with a bachelor’s degree in diplomacy and world affairs. But she knew that she had to follow her musical theater ambitions instead of going to law school.In “Wicked,” a prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” Elphaba, born with green skin and preternatural sorcery skills, is the young adult version of the Wicked Witch of the West. But the story reveals that she is neither evil nor envious, and instead is a consummate outsider who uses her powers to protect herself and others from the authoritarian rule in Oz.Kebede, whose parents immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s to escape a military coup in Ethiopia, said her own back story is helping her bring a fresh global and political perspective to Elphaba’s heroism.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

Senior officials announced their resignations after the Trump administration withdrew grants from arts organizations around the country.A group of senior officials at the National Endowment for the Arts announced their resignations on Monday, days after the Trump administration began withdrawing grants from arts groups across the nation.Their departures, which come as the endowment has been withdrawing current grant offers and President Trump has proposed eliminating the agency altogether next year, became public on Monday in a series of emails and social media posts.An N.E.A. spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.Among those leaving the agency are directors overseeing grants for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, museums and visual arts, and theater. Also departing are the directors of arts education, multidisciplinary works and the “partnership” division, which oversees work with state and local arts agencies. Those officials announced their departures in newsletters sent out by the endowment starting at midday on Monday.The head of the agency’s literary arts division is leaving as well, along with three members of her team, according to a newsletter sent on Monday morning by LitNet, a coalition of literary organizations.The announcement of the departures left the besieged agency facing even more uncertainty. It is not clear how or whether the agency would issue grants without this tier of officials. A round of grant cancellation notifications that went out Friday night indicated that the agency expected to continue making grants, but in areas prioritized by Mr. Trump.Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York and one of the leaders of the Professional Non-Profit Theater Coalition, said the staff resignations were “worrisome.” He added that while he did not criticize anyone for leaving, he feared the departures could make it easier to eliminate the agency.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

“It’s the most surreal day ever,” the playwright said as he learned the news while getting ready to attend his first Met Gala.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was getting ready for his first Met Gala on Monday afternoon when he got the news: his latest play, “Purpose,” which is now on Broadway, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama.The Pulitzer board described “Purpose” as “a play about the complex dynamics and legacy of an upper middle class African-American family,” and praised it as “a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage.”The other finalists were Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” which is also running on Broadway, and “The Ally,” by Itamar Moses, which had an Off Broadway run last year at the Public Theater.Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, for “Gloria” in 2016 and for “Everybody” in 2018, and last year he won a Tony Award for “Appropriate.” In 2016 he also won a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.He grew up in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. “An Octoroon” and “The Comeuppance” are among his other well-received works.“Purpose,” directed by Phylicia Rashad, was first staged last year by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, which had commissioned the play; Jacobs-Jenkins wrote it for the company’s actors. The Broadway production opened in March, and has been nominated for six Tonys, including best play.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 James Joyce’s masterpiece faced banning, the American justice system came to the rescue. A new play wonders if it would today.Though it was a civil case, the defendant faced capital punishment.Or so the defendant’s attorney, Morris Ernst, argued, because his client was a book. And not just any book, but a particular copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” that had been impounded at U.S. Customs and charged with obscenity.“If the book loses,” Ernst proclaimed, “it will be destroyed — burned — hanged by the neck until it is dead.”Ernst’s florid oratory in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was successful. On Dec. 6, 1933, as soon as the judge, John Munro Woolsey, delivered his decision finding “Ulysses” not obscene — thus permitting a hardback of the French edition to pass through customs — Random House began typesetting an American version, the first to be published in an English-speaking country. Woolsey’s landmark order, along with a foreword by Ernst calling it a “body-blow for the censors,” is included in most copies of “Ulysses” to this day.Lawyers and judges are not typically heroes in literature, and of late almost never in plays. They are mostly depicted as preening and eely. Yet in “The United States vs Ulysses,” a play by Colin Murphy now at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, Ernst and Woolsey (if not Samuel Coleman, who represented the government) are offered as paragons of progressivism in action. Indeed, the playwright has elevated them almost to the level of Joyce himself.And yet for all its worthiness, liberal uplift and pressing topicality, the play, directed by Conall Morrison, proves just how unmatchable Joyce remains. Murphy’s complicated schema, though less complicated than that of “Ulysses,” is ultimately less expressive, as nearly anything would be. Its account of the trial, drawn from transcripts and other historical sources, is but the middle of three shells. The innermost shell is “Ulysses” itself, represented by passages either specifically mentioned in court (like the scandalous “Nausicaa” episode) or thematically relevant to the proceedings (like the fantastical trial of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s main character, in “Circe”).The outermost shell introduces another unlikely hero these days: the media. The play is set two days after Woolsey’s verdict, as the five-person cast of the CBS radio program “The March of Time” awaits the scripts for that evening’s live episode. With the help of sound effects from the foley table — gavel bangs, telegraph taps — the voice actors will play all the roles, both in the courtroom and in the dramatized “Ulysses” segments. Even their director will chip in, playing Bloom.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

In “Goddess,” an original musical about a mysterious singer in Mombasa, Kenya, Moto Moto is not just an Afro-jazz nightclub, it’s a great equalizer, where Kenyans of all faiths, tribes and social classes shake and spin their bodies in rapture.“I’ve literally met the loves of my life on dance floors,” the director Saheem Ali said. “So I understand the power of a life-changing event that happens in a space of communal dancing and joy.”It’s that electric sense of belonging that Ali sought to recreate in “Goddess,” now in previews at the Public Theater after an 18-year development process.“My first child is Liban,” Ali said to his cast on the first day of rehearsal for “Goddess.” “He was born in 2006.”“My second child is ‘Goddess,’” he said, referring to the musical. “And she was born in 2007. Eighteen years, never again for one show.” (It arrives on the heels of his Broadway production of “Buena Vista Social Club,” the lively stage adaptation of the beloved 1997 album that is set in Havana nightclubs and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including for Ali’s direction.)Creating an original musical from scratch is its own tall order. And at the heart of this passion project is the African folklore myth of Marimba, the goddess of music who created songs from heartbreak. It took Ali years to find the right collaborators and hone the plot.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

Online, onstage and onscreen, performers are playing multiple parts. The effect of watching someone shape-shift can be both thrilling and unnerving.The much-anticipated season finale of one of my favorite sitcoms was recently derailed when its creator, Shawna Lander, ran into a few snags. In the story I’ve been following for months, a peppy if scatterbrained woman named Jennifer McCallister has gone into labor after a pregnancy that’s transformed her relationship with her sister-in-law (also named Shawna) from antagonistic to amiable. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s mother, Barb — passive-aggressive to a comically villainous degree — is getting drunk on margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and terrorizing the wait staff when she gets a call to meet Jennifer at the hospital.But just as Jennifer was about to give birth, the story stopped. Lander announced that due to technical difficulties and illness, the audience would have to wait a few days to see what shenanigans Barb got up to, and whether this birth would help her and her son, Jennifer’s brother John, smooth over their rocky relationship. Illness foils shooting days all the time, but typically one creator’s bout of fever wouldn’t force audiences to wait well past the target air date to find out what happens. The difference with Lander’s show, which chronicles the ever-sprawling antics of the McCallister family — most sketches are actually stealth explorations of relationship dynamics — is that Lander is the show. She writes it. She produces and distributes it. She directs and shoots it.Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.” He’s one of many performers this season playing multiple parts in a production.Warner Bros. PicturesAnd, most important, like several actors in hit TV shows, big-budget films and Tony-nominated Broadway productions this season, she plays every single character: Jennifer, Barb, Shawna, John, other male partners, assorted friends, the waitress, even Shawna’s two small children. They’re all Lander in wigs and different shirts, shot in close-cropped vertical framing for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where she posts under the handle @shawnathemom. Her performances are so funny and specific that it’s shockingly easy to forget it’s all just her.The McCallister family saga boasts considerable viewership. The chronicles are followed by two million TikTok users, with nearly a million more on Instagram. Add it up, and that’s a bigger audience than watched the Season 3 premiere of “The White Lotus.”Lander’s format — playing every part herself, with shots framed and edited so the characters seem to be conversing with each other — involves a visual vocabulary familiar to comedians on vertical video platforms, who often post satirical sketches about corporate life or marriage. Just recently, a creator who goes by Sydney Jo posted the multi-episode “Group Chat” series, in which she played the multitudinous members of a friend group experiencing mounting drama over one girl’s boyfriend, culminating in a “Real Housewives”-style reunion episode. The series was such a viral hit that Sydney Jo was invited onto the “Today” show to talk about 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

A new novel, “The Butcher’s Daughter,” imagines the haunting past of Mrs. Lovett, the infamous baker who assisted the serial killer Sweeney Todd.THE BUTCHER’S DAUGHTER: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett, by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh ClarkFor half a century — much longer, if you go back to the original 1840s penny dreadfuls — people have thrilled to the story of Sweeney Todd, the murderous London barber who cut short the lives of priests, fops, sailors and one especially loathsome judge before he met his own gruesome end. Sweeney’s tragic losses and appetite for vengeance have been well documented, most notably by the musical genius of Stephen Sondheim. But what of his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, who popped his poor victims into her pies? Does her tale not need attending, too?David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark’s epistolary novel “The Butcher’s Daughter: The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett” gives the woman beside the man her own turn in the spotlight. Part Victorian historical fiction, part grisly horror, the book follows a mysterious woman, Margaret C. Evans, a.k.a. Margery, as she recounts her life story to a never-seen (and, we learn at the opening of the book, missing) journalist, who is investigating the disappearance of Mrs. Lovett 50 years before. Though she does not disclose her true identity outright until fairly deep in the novel, it is clear within the first few pages that Margery is Mrs. Lovett, who — in a departure from the source material, where she is killed by Sweeney — is very much alive and confined to a nunnery.Margery’s harrowing tale reframes Mrs. Lovett not as a villain but as a maligned girl fighting to survive. She’s a seductively evocative narrator, making it easy to forget that her every word should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.It will surprise nobody familiar with the musical that this is a gory book. The violence starts early, at Margery’s father’s butcher shop, where she is awakened each morning by the sounds and smells of sheep being slaughtered, and where it is a shame bordering on sin to let anything go to waste.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