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      Ned Eisenberg, New York Actor Known for ‘Law & Order,’ Dies at 65

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      Eisenberg performed in several Broadway productions between appearances as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler on NBC’s long-running police drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ned Eisenberg, a character actor known for his work on popular shows including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Mare of Easttown,” died at his home in the Jackson Heights section of Queens on Sunday. He was 65.The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct, and ocular melanoma, according to a statement from his agent, Jeanne Nicolosi, issued on his family’s behalf.Eisenberg was a New York character actor whose roles in film, theater and television spanned the past four decades on Broadway and in Hollywood.Fans of the NBC police procedural “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” may best remember him as the defense lawyer Roger Kressler, a recurring character on the long-running drama. From 1999 to 2019, he appeared in two dozen episodes of the show — mostly as Kressler, but twice early on in other roles, according to IMDb. He also appeared in other series in the “Law & Order” franchise, playing different roles.Ned Eisenberg was born on Jan. 13, 1957, in the Bronx. He grew up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he attended Riverdale Junior High School.In 1975, he graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, in Manhattan, where he studied acting.He began his professional theater career in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and appeared on Broadway as Truffaldino in Julie Taymor’s “The Green Bird” (2000) and as Uncle Morty in Bartlett Sher’s “Awake and Sing!” (2006), according to Nicolosi.In a New York Times review of “The Green Bird,” Eisenberg and other cast members were credited with bringing “a balletic grace” and “antic shtick” to the performance, in which he and Didi Conn played “a Punch-and-Judy pair of sausage makers.”He performed in lead roles in theaters around the Northeast including the Theater for a New Audience, New York City Center and the Williamstown Theater Festival.He was an early member of the Naked Angels Theater Company along with Kenneth Lonergan, Frank Pugliese and Joe Mantello. The actors Rob Morrow, Mary Stuart Masterson, Nancy Travis and Gina Gershon were also among the founding members of the group, which was started in 1986 to serve as a “creative home for new voices.”In 2009, he played Iago in a Theater for a New Audience production of “Othello.” In a review for The Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Eisenberg’s performance was “decked out in small, witty flourishes,” noting that “the bitter half-smile with which Iago looks on at the waste he has wrought in the final scene says everything about his shriveled soul.”In supporting roles throughout his career, Eisenberg worked with Academy Award-winning directors and filmmakers.In 2004, he played the boxing manager Sally Mendoza in Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which starred Hilary Swank and won the Oscar for best picture. Eisenberg played the photographer, Joe Rosenthal, in “Flags of Our Fathers,” another film by Eastwood, about the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.Eisenberg also acted in “World Trade Center,” a 2006 Oliver Stone drama about police officers who responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2011 thriller “Limitless,” starring Bradley Cooper.Last year, he appeared in the Emmy Award-winning HBO drama “Mare of Easttown” as Detective Hauser.He is expected to return as the manager Lou Rabinowitz in a coming episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.He is survived by his wife, the actress Patricia Dunnock, and a son, Lino Eisenberg. More

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      Julianne Hough and Vanessa Williams to Star in Broadway Farce 'POTUS'

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      “POTUS,” by Selina Fillinger, will star Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams and Rachel Dratch are among the stars of “POTUS” on Broadway.Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images, Caitlin Ochs/Reuters, Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Add one more curveball to this unusual Broadway spring: a political comedy by a 28-year-old writer whose previous New York production took place in a 62-seat basement theater.The new play has a mouthful of a title — “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” — and is a farce about a group of women doing damage control for a problematic president.Selina Fillinger, the playwright, is working with the Broadway veteran Susan Stroman, who will direct. The cast will include Julianne Hough, Vanessa Williams, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, Lilli Cooper, Suzy Nakamura and Julie White.Previews are scheduled to begin April 14 and the opening date is set for May 9, which will most likely make it part of the next Broadway season, not the current one, if the Tony Awards stick to an expected late April opening deadline for eligibility for this season’s awards. The “POTUS” run, at the Shubert Theater, is limited, and scheduled to end Aug. 14.Fillinger, an Oregon native who has been working in Los Angeles as a writer on “The Morning Show,” said she started “POTUS” six years ago. (POTUS is an acronym for president of the United States.)“For years we’ve had this endless cycle of headlines about powerful men abusing their power, and each time I was fascinated by the women orbiting the men and enabling them,” she said in an interview. “The more I started to think about these women, the farce started to write itself.”And is the show about a particular president, such as, say, the last one?“It is an amalgamation of many men in power,” she said. “I set it in the White House because that’s the highest office in the land, but you could set it in any company and any institution and many homes.”Fillinger’s previous work, “Something Clean,” was staged by Roundabout Underground in 2019 and was praised by the New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a beautifully observed, richly compassionate new drama.”Fillinger said there is some thematic overlap between “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” which was about a mother grappling with her son’s conviction for sexual assault. Her first play, “Faceless,” was about an American jihadist.“I think I am interested in complicity,” she said. “POTUS” and “Something Clean,” she noted, “are both centered on somebody who is never seen onstage, and that is because I am interested in who we give airtime to, and who we don’t give airtime to, and flipping the switch on that.”Stroman, who over the last 30 years has won five Tony Awards for choreography and direction, including both categories for “The Producers,” is best known for musicals. This will be her first time helming a play on Broadway; Off Broadway she directed a Colman Domingo drama, “Dot,” in 2016.In an interview, Stroman said an agent sent her the “POTUS” script, and she was immediately interested. “It’s very funny, and it has an important message within the comedy. At some point there’s a reckoning about what it’s like to keep these people in power who are not worthy.”The play’s lead producers are four companies: Seaview, led by Greg Nobile; 51 Entertainment, founded by Lynette Howell Taylor; Glass Half Full Productions, managed by Gareth Lake; and Level Forward, co-founded by Abigail Disney. The production is permitted to raise up to $6.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but a spokeswoman said the play’s actual capitalization would be $5.9 million. More

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      In a New Memoir, Harvey Fierstein Shares Gossip and Regrets

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      “As much as it hurts, tell the truth,” says the Tony-winning performer and playwright, tracing his path from Brooklyn to Broadway.Harvey Fierstein contains multitudes. The playwright, screenwriter, actor and drag performer has inhabited at least as many personalities as Walt Whitman. With trademark wit and empathy, he has written about himself in “Torch Song Trilogy”; a father with a drag queen partner and a straight son in “La Cage Aux Folles”; the bootlegging song and dance man Legs Diamond; English factory workers and an unlikely firebrand in “Kinky Boots”; heterosexual cross dressers in “Casa Valentina”; striking newspaper boys in his Broadway adaptation of “Newsies”; and a sissy duckling for an HBO animated special.And he has revised the script for the musical “Funny Girl,” a show about Fanny Brice, an unlikely star like himself, which opens on Broadway this spring.Now, at 69, the multitalented Tony Award winner has added memoirist to his kaleidoscopic résumé. “I Was Better Last Night,” published by Knopf and described as “warm and enveloping” and full of “righteous rage” in a New York Times review, just released.The title refers to what Fierstein would often say to friends after a performance. But it’s also about regret. “What’s the harm in looking back?” he writes. “If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to dig.” This video interview has been edited and condensed.Can we get this out of the way at the top? What’s with your voice?My father had the same voice. It’s enlarged secondary vocal cords. It’s the most boring answer. You end up with a voice kind of like Harry Belafonte, except not so pretty because I abused it early in my acting career. I had no training and I listened to no one because children listen to no one.Like all your writing, your memoir is full of humor. Do you think it’s a form of defense?I think of humor as perspective. Perspective plus time. When I started writing, I realized that when you’re looking to talk to an audience, you have to find that line between the tragedy and the comedy and the humanity. The man slipping on the banana peel. What makes that funny is how human it is, how it could be you.In the book, your adolescence sounds pretty great.I arrived at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, this total innocent from Brooklyn into this world of kids that wanted to be artists. And all the teachers were professional artists and everyone was gay. I used to tease them that they bused in heterosexuals because it was the law. All of a sudden, I had a community.It almost coincided with Stonewall.I was too young to go to the bar. But I was already hanging out in the Village.As a teen you also did community theater with the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, and there was this gay male couple involved there that made a big impression on you.They had been together for 30 years, and they were the very first gay couple I knew. They had dinner parties. They had fights. And so, as a kid I was introduced into the world of gay couples as something I recognized. When I started reading and seeing gay theater, I was shocked by how negative it was. It wasn’t the gay people I knew.You were in drag in a Warhol play at La MaMa and Ellen Stewart, the legendary producer there, had her eye on you. Why?The closest I could tell was when she called me up to her office one day and said, “Mama’s baby don’t wear bloomers no more.”Meaning drag?Right. “These other people, Mr. Fierstein, I love them,” she said. “They’re all talented and wonderful and they run around in their bloomers, and I let them do it here because it’s a safe place, but that’s all they will do. Mr. Fierstein, you are made for something else. I don’t know what that is, but we’re going to find out.”So, after some wild plays that imitated others, you wrote an honest and personal monologue after an anonymous sexual encounter.It was already 5 o’clock in the morning and I had a meeting at La MaMa, so it made no sense to go home to Brooklyn. I sat down on a bench and I wrote this monologue. Then I read it to a friend on the steps of La MaMa and she laughed and thought it was absolutely fabulous. But here’s the thing — she saw the character I wrote as a woman, not a gay man. She felt exactly the same way about her sexual encounters. She saw the humanity, and it wasn’t gay or straight. It was about being used as a sexual object. It was an eye-opening moment that taught me that as much as it hurts, tell the truth. And in that truth, you will find an audience, you will find other people feeling exactly the way you feel. And you will even find humor.Fierstein as Arnold Beckoff in his career-making 1982 Broadway play, “Torch Song Trilogy.”Gerry GoodsteinWhen your mother came to see the first part of “Torch Song” at La MaMa in 1978, she noticed that you were wearing earrings she’d been missing.When I was doing drag early on, I would snatch a lot of her jewelry. When I took my jewelry course at Pratt, where I went to college, I gave her everything I made.You felt supported by your parents, didn’t you?My father was raised in an orphanage. He instilled in me and my brother that all you have is your family, and he would always be behind us. I’m sure he and my mother had many sleepless nights talking about what I was up to, wearing dresses, whatever. My brother once told Lesley Stahl in an interview that never aired, “Harvey was just always Harvey, we always accepted him as Harvey.”So how did your mom respond to those early plays that were tender, but also brutal?First of all, she loved the theater and took me as a kid every chance she got. And she knew my boyfriends and stuff. She wasn’t an innocent.It’s a different world now. When you wrote your trilogy, gay couples didn’t have kids so often.But at that time, there were all of these gay kids thrown out of their homes and getting beaten up in group homes. And so there was this need for us to go beyond our own needs as individuals and start becoming this community and take care of our children. My mother was a New York City schoolteacher, and we had a fight over the Harvey Milk school for gay kids. She told me that if you don’t mainstream these kids now, they will never have lives. Then she had a gay student and all of a sudden, she changed her mind.You refer to L.G.B.T.Q.L.M.N.O.P. in your book. Could you get canceled for being glib?No, because everybody knows we’re an ever-growing group. When I was a kid, I thought there were gay people and straight people, and everybody else was in the closet. As I grew up, I started realizing there are many colors in our crayon box. The men in my play “Casa Valentina” were based on real-life straight cross-dressing men in the 1950s, and not one of them agreed on anything. The great lie is that we’re all the same. Not one of us is like the other. We are all so magnificently individual.In 2003, the makeup artist Justen M. Brosnan doing Fierstein’s makeup for the role of Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray.”Richard Perry/ The New York TimesWell said for a man who, in one year, went from playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” to Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”I was so happy onstage as Edna in that wig and persona. And I was happy offstage when people called me Mama. Then I go into playing Tevye, and I am surrounded by five daughters and I’ve grown my own beard and I’m talking to God and I’ve never been happier. I was completely and utterly in ecstasy when anyone called me Papa.You were playing Bella Abzug before the pandemic in a solo play you wrote and had a Gloria Steinem incident.At the end of the play Bella is saying, if only women would vote the way they should and not the way their husbands tell them to. And Gloria stood up and said, “No, no! White women!” She was telling me that white women vote in the interest of the men who are supporting them. Gloria will always be about encouraging independent women who take care of themselves.Do today’s changes around sexuality and gender surprise you? Nonbinary pronouns, kids considering hormone replacement therapy? And what about polyamory and open relationships?I’m going to be 70 in June, so I still have to make adjustments. But this is where the world is, and the conversation now was not my conversation then. But I love it. I love young people telling us where to go. I love young people defining the world and saying, “This is the world I want to live in.” Although I don’t know how my friends who are raising teenagers do it.You’ve lived in Connecticut for years. What’s the appeal?I never breathe freely in the city. It’s always there, calling you or frightening you. Here I live on top of a hill. I come home from work, walk straight through the house pulling my clothes off, and I fall into the swimming pool.You write about lovers and heartbreaks in the memoir. Now you’re happily single. Are you on dating apps?Not right now, but I once met a really nice guy on one who I’m still close with.“When you’re looking to talk to an audience,” Fierstein says, “you have to find that line between the tragedy and the comedy and the humanity.”Michael George for The New York TimesWouldn’t people recognize you on a dating app?That’s why I don’t go on them much, but when I did, I was totally open. I once put up a picture with my beard, and I think I labeled myself “Tevye is in town.” I was not trying to hide. And I did meet a few people interested in meeting Harvey Fierstein. That was fine.Not Harvey Weinstein, as happens on occasion?I was in a diner in Connecticut and this guy’s saying, “Oh my god, it’s Harvey Weinstein.” And I said, “No, I’m not Harvey Weinstein.” And he says, “Yes, you are,” and he wouldn’t stop accusing me of doing terrible things. I told him that that Harvey was in prison somewhere and that I was Harvey Fierstein.Did that end it?I paid for his dinner on my way out and that shut him up.Your memoir has some dicey celebrity anecdotes. You got in a hot tub with James Taylor at Canyon Ranch?I didn’t get all crazy and ask for his autograph or anything.Did you ask for a selfie?I didn’t do any of that. That’s fangirling.But you managed to compliment him on his private parts.Is that such a terrible thing? More

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      Review: In ‘sandblasted,’ Seizing the Day. Also the Nose.

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      When their body parts start falling off, two women go on a spiritual journey with an Oprah-esque guru in Charly Evon Simpson’s new play.As the lights go up, we discover two women half-buried in sand — which is one more woman than stingy Samuel Beckett offered in “Happy Days.” But Beckett’s semi-subterranean Winnie faced only the terrors of eternity. For Angela and Odessa, the main characters in Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which had its world premiere Off Broadway on Sunday, the problem is closer to home.A lot closer: not even arm’s length, you might say. Because less than a minute into the action, it is that appendage that falls off Odessa’s body like an overripe fruit from a tree.Kudos to the prosthetic designer, Matthew Frew, for the lifelike limb, and to Simpson for the bolt of surreal humor at the start of a play that wants to be a Beckettian comedy about Black women in extremis. If it doesn’t succeed, it’s not for lack of trying.For me, it tries too hard. The central metaphor — that Black women are literally falling apart — is assiduously explored, but the issues that might give it heft are left, like Angela and Odessa, buried in the sand. Random racist violence and the increased rate of infant mortality are name-checked only.Which is not to say that every play about Black women must be a tragic news bulletin. In some ways it’s a relief that when Angela and Odessa do rise from the sand, there’s some enjoyable interplay between them. There’s not much development, though, unless you count the further shedding of body parts. Angela (Brittany Bellizeare) loses her nose and a toe; Odessa (Marinda Anderson) reglues her arm but drops the occasional finger.The women are, at first, strangers, having come to the same beach seeking the sand and fresh air they have heard might “slow the process” of their apparently epidemic condition. They both fit the at-risk demographic: stressed-out Black women, especially those living in big cities. Though joined by common disaster, they are meet-cute opposites: Odessa blingy, fatalistic and cool; Angela nerdy, anxious and eager to please. She calls herself a “safety cat” as opposed to a “scaredy cat.”Marinda Anderson, left, as Odessa, and Brittany Bellizeare, right, as Angela, join Rolonda Watts, as a guru named Adah, on a spiritual quest.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut with the beach treatment more or less a bust, they nevertheless set out together on a mad mission to seek the advice and care of an Oprah-like wellness guru named Adah. Adah, who says she is “somewhere below 100” in age, has not been afflicted by the disease, and has thus become a popular source of inspiration about it, writing books, giving lectures (“Girl, Stop Falling Apart!”) and preaching the murky gospel of self-help.Yet “sandblasted” is not a satire of Oprah or Oprah-ism; especially as played by the former newscaster and talk show host Rolonda Watts, Adah is at least as warm as she is sententious. You can’t help but like her even though she’s oblivious to the way her privilege provides insulation and her prescriptions turn out to be riddling and fickle. As she joins Angela and Odessa on a journey that seems more spiritual than medical, she suggests they travel east. Oh wait, no, west. Well, somewhere.The play is similarly wayward: its path sometimes random, its chronology scrambled for no reason. Angela and Odessa seem scrambled, too; they exchange positions in their arguments, perhaps to maintain the semblance of conflict where little exists. Lively disagreement comes into the picture only when Angela’s playboy brother does; Jamal (Andy Lucien) attends an Adah lecture so he’ll “seem more understanding when I go on dates” and tries to pick up the not-having-it Odessa, whom he meets too coincidentally at the bar where he works.The actors, under the direction of Summer L. Williams, are all enjoyable, making the most of characterful writing when it’s provided, and doing what they can with the big gulps of self-conscious poetry Simpson has otherwise asked them to deliver.And “sandblasted” — a coproduction of the Vineyard and WP theaters — looks handsome, too, its surreal landscape represented in Matt Saunders’s set by heaps of sand, a cotton-ball sky and doors and windows cut into the cycloramic horizon. The witty costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) and alfresco lighting (by Stacey Derosier) help counter the vagueness of time and locale. Despite those felicities, the play, with 18 scenes totaling an hour and 40 minutes, is too long for its own good, a problem not ameliorated by stodgy pacing and shaggy transitions.Not everyone will feel that way. Some people in the audience on the night I attended were signifying with murmurs and finger snaps their appreciation for the well turned phrases and tender encomiums about caring for one another and seizing the day. And though I found the pileup of metaphors oppressive, I have to admit they were eye-opening. An especially elaborate one introduced me to the phenomenon of fulgurites: tubes of glass formed underground when lightning hits sand.In the context of “sandblasted,” they are clearly meant to symbolize Black women themselves, the lightning strike of disaster having fused with their own nature to make something beautiful and precious — and, all too often, buried.sandblastedThrough March 13 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Daughter-in-Law’ Review: Sons and Wives

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      In this D.H. Lawrence play, a production by the Mint Theater, men are trouble, “pure and simple.”In the darkness before dawn, a sleepless woman and her daughter-in-law keep each other company.There is no love lost between these two — Mrs. Gascoyne, a miner’s widow who keeps her miner sons close in their small English town; and Minnie, a former governess who, just weeks earlier, had the gall to marry one of them. But late in D.H. Lawrence’s play “The Daughter-in-Law,” the women are gentle enough with each other to have a heart-to-heart.“A child is a troublesome pleasure to a woman,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie, “but a man’s a trouble, pure and simple.”If that’s unfair as a generalization, it certainly applies to Mrs. Gascoyne’s Luther, who has passed 30 without exhibiting the slightest twinge of ambition.An enduring mystery of the play is why Minnie, a go-getter with some money of her own, elected to marry him. As a spousal choice, he seems a distant second even to his aimless brother Joe, who still lives with their mother and, in the play’s opening minutes, sits down to a supper that she cuts up for him.In Martin Platt’s diverting revival for the Mint Theater Company, at New York City Center Stage II, the men are not what’s captivating about this play. Rather, it’s Lawrence’s women, drawn with a capacious, conflicted sympathy that recognizes how frustrating it is for a keen-minded person to try to carve satisfaction from a stifling domestic world.Portrayed with a fine ferocity by Sandra Shipley, Mrs. Gascoyne nurtures a bitterness about Luther’s “hoity-toity” new wife — a resentment that’s about class and clannishness, but also about loss of control, because what if her boy doesn’t need her anymore? When an acquaintance, Mrs. Purdy (Polly McKie), breaks the news that her daughter is four months pregnant with Luther’s child, Mrs. Gascoyne’s desiccated heart swells in anticipation of the humiliation this will bring to Minnie.The gentle-mannered Minnie, in a beautifully nuanced performance by Amy Blackman, has trouble enough already. Her new marriage has descended into bickering, and Luther (Tom Coiner) is a self-pitying grump. Still, when she says in the heat of anger that she would have preferred “a drunken husband that knocked me about” to a mama’s boy, it seems a stretch.Written in a thick, distinctive dialect of the East Midlands, where Lawrence grew up, the text leaves room for Luther to have some appealing qualities, but here he is all roughness and no complexity. There’s not even a sexual spark that would make sense of Minnie’s choice to be with him — which is a problem, because we are meant to have a stake in their relationship’s success.His brother Joe (Ciaran Bowling) is at least kind to her, mostly; when he isn’t, the change of tenor is more confusing than anything.As with many Mint productions, the play’s back story is part of the allure. Lawrence’s father was a miner; his mother, to whom he was exceptionally close, came from a slightly higher class. He wrote the script in the years after her death in 1910, around the time he wrote his novel “Sons and Lovers,” which has similar themes.Not staged in Lawrence’s lifetime (and previously directed by Platt for the Mint in 2003), “The Daughter-in-Law” feels at times like a purgation — a 20-something playwright rebelling at last against the beloved mother who demanded too much of him emotionally. When Minnie blames Mrs. Gascoyne for hobbling Luther, as if he had no agency, she can sound like she is channeling the playwright’s own wounded outrage. Rebellion, though, is not the same as revenge.“The world is made of men for me, lass,” Mrs. Gascoyne tells Minnie.But in the world of Lawrence’s play, the women are the stars.The Daughter-in-LawThrough March 20 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Review: Conversation and Conflict, as Warhol Meets Basquiat

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      Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as the odd couple artists in Anthony McCarten’s new play, “The Collaboration.”Jeremy Pope, left, and Paul Bettany will also star in the forthcoming film version of “The Collaboration.”Marc BrennerLONDON — Opposite art world titans attract in “The Collaboration,” a new play that opened Thursday at the Young Vic Theater here. Chronicling the creative partnership between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat during the 1980s, Anthony McCarten’s play offers bravura performances from Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope as the two cultural icons.And if the writing isn’t fully the equal of its star turns, well, a film version of this play is already planned. A movie should give McCarten the opportunity to sharpen a script that, as of now, only begins to deliver on its promise in the second act.This writer’s track record with biopics certainly bodes well for Bettany and Pope when they transfer to the screen: The movies McCarten wrote about Stephen Hawking (“The Theory of Everything”), Winston Churchill (“The Darkest Hour”) and Freddie Mercury (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) brought Oscar wins for each of their leading men. His 2019 film, “The Two Popes,” earned nominations for the co-stars Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins and is the closest of those movies in structure to “The Collaboration.”Like that film, with his new play McCarten imagines a duo’s conversations and conflicts. At the beginning, Bettany’s lean, languid Warhol isn’t sure about the commingling of talent that the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (an excitable Alec Newman) has in mind for him and Basquiat: a joint exhibition to decide which of the two is the world’s greatest artist. Bischofberger has an eye on publicity and regards painters, he says, as boxers.Bettany’s Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature.Marc Brenner“Gee,” Warhol objects to the gallerist, “you make it sound so macho, like a contest.” Pope’s initially indrawn, pouty Basquiat, 30 years Warhol’s junior, isn’t any more certain that he wants to be part of a double act: “He’s old hat. Does anyone really care about Warhol now?” One man traffics in brands and pop culture iconography (we see Warhol’s signature Marilyn Monroes on the walls of Anna Fleischle’s flexible, white-walled set), the other sees logos as the enemy. Art, Basquiat maintains, “has to have a purpose.”The material follows a dramatically predictable course from mutual wariness to admiration, leading eventually to love. In fact, that very word is voiced in the penultimate line. Dismissive of Warhol’s attraction to surfaces at the expense of substance, Basquiat comes to adore him as a protective rival turned father figure, of sorts.“I hope you don’t die, Jean,” Warhol cautions, insisting that the addiction-prone Basquiat clean up his act. The younger artist’s reply is to insist on his own immortality, unaware, of course, that both men would die not long after, within 18 months of each other. When they do actually collaborate — on a sequence of paintings — it’s given surprisingly little stage time; you miss the specific attention to the artistic process that fueled a play like John Logan’s Tony-winning “Red,” about Mark Rothko.The director Kwame Kwei-Armah gets up close and personal with Warhol and Basquiat as the duo move beyond some fairly labored exposition (like when Basquiat, on cue, details his Haitian-Puerto Rican parentage) to achieve real power. The two actors manage to find something primal beyond the boilerplate writing.As Basquait, Jeremy Pope is a springy, restless stage presence.Marc BrennerPope, an Emmy and two-time Tony Award nominee, fills with fury as we see Basquiat at work on “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart),” a painting created in response to the police brutality that resulted in the death of a young graffiti artist in 1983. The canvas inevitably chimes with the Black Lives Matter movement Basquiat never got to see, and lends “The Collaboration” a wrenching topicality.A springy, restless stage presence, that sweet-faced actor communicates the heightened edginess of a man hurtling toward disaster. It’s a shame, therefore, that the belated arrival into the play of Basquiat’s girlfriend Maya (Sofia Barclay) seems perfunctory, as if McCarten weren’t sure quite how to broaden the story beyond the artist duo.Bettany, in turn, is a marvel in his first stage role in several decades. The Englishman, a longtime U.S. resident, has starred in Marvel movies and recently impressed as a forbidding Duke of Argyll in the BBC TV show “A Very British Scandal,” which will come to the United States in April.A figure of white-wigged insouciance still reeling from having been shot by Valerie Solanas some years before the play starts, this Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature. Survival, you sense, is no less precarious for him than it is for Basquiat. The two legends are hellbent on self-laceration, reminding us that, no matter how great our cultural legacy, we’re all mortal.The Collaboration.Through April 2 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      Musical Comedy ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ to Open on Broadway Next Fall

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      The new musical, by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, will star Victoria Clark as a teen girl who ages too quickly.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a musical comedy about a young girl with a medical condition that causes rapid aging, will transfer to Broadway next fall.The show, based on a play by David Lindsay-Abaire, had an initial Off Broadway run that opened late last year at the Atlantic Theater Company, where it ran through the peak of the Omicron surge of the coronavirus and was greeted with strong reviews. Jesse Green, in The New York Times, called it “funny and moving.”The musical stars Victoria Clark, a 62-year-old actress playing a 15-year-old girl who is managing not only her affliction — a condition that limits her life expectancy — but also life with a ludicrous family.“It’s a coming-of-age story, but an unusual one because the clock is ticking from the get-go,” Clark said in an interview. “She has a limited amount of time left, and what draws me to her is her joie, and watching how someone can triumph who you least expect to succeed.”Clark, who stars alongside a company of much younger actors, said playing an adolescent had deeply affected her.“There is a boldness and a rawness to adolescence, and at the same time a balance between holding back and going for it that is so beautiful,” said Clark, who won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.” “This character has taught me the beauty of impulse, and the beauty of being present, and not just accepting one’s fate. After the show I just wanted to run and find everyone I loved and tell them how much they meant to me.”The show features music by Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Fun Home,” and a book and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Rabbit Hole.” It is directed by Jessica Stone, a longtime actress making her Broadway directing debut, and choreographed by Danny Mefford (“Dear Evan Hansen”).The Broadway cast will feature the same actors as the Off Broadway production, including Steven Boyer (“Hand to God”) and Alli Mauzey (“Cry-Baby”) as the protagonist’s parents, Bonnie Milligan (“Head Over Heels”) as her aunt, and Justin Cooley making his debut as one of her classmates.“Kimberly Akimbo” is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 12 and to open on Nov. 10 at an unspecified Shubert theater. The lead producer is David Stone, who is also the lead producer of “Wicked”; other producers include the actress LaChanze and the theater owner James L. Nederlander, as well as Patrick Catullo, Aaron Glick and the Atlantic Theater Company. More

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      Interview: Harpy on with Noga Flaishon

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      Founded in 2011, Everything Theatre started life as a pokey blog run by two theatre enthusiasts and – thanks to the Entry Pass Scheme for 16-25 year olds – regular National Theatre goers. Today, we are run by part-time volunteers from a wide array of backgrounds. Among our various contributors are people who work in […] More