Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares75 Views

      in Theater

      Jimmy Fallon Makes His Broadway Debut in “All In”

      by

      The “Tonight Show” host is performing in the new comedy “All In,” which features a starry cast. “It’s a dream,” he said.Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night. “It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”Fallon, backstage with one of his co-stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda.Graham Dickie/The New York Times“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares132 Views

      in Theater

      Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

      by

      The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

      by

      Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,’ by Michael Owen

      by

      In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words, by Michael OwenThe lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

      by

      The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cult of Love’ Review: We Wish You a Wretched Christmas

      by

      A hilarious, harrowing holiday gift from Leslye Headland, who brings another unhappy family to Broadway. Zachary Quinto and Shailene Woodley star.Though figgy pudding is on the menu, Evie Dahl has a different Yuletide horror in mind. “Christmas is exactly the time to talk about the things we never talk about,” she tells her reluctant siblings.No, Evie, no!Alas, despite the happy presence of stars including Zachary Quinto, Shailene Woodley and Mare Winningham, the annual ritual dinner of the Dahls is doomed from the start of Leslye Headland’s “Cult of Love,” a rip-roaring home-for-the-holidays dramedy that opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater. What begins as a cheery reunion in a New England farmhouse decked out like Santa’s workshop ends as a collective meltdown with carols.Because Evie, even if she’s bossy, is right. The four Dahl children, now in their late 20s through early 40s, have plenty of grudges that urgently need airing. But how? Ginny, their passive-aggressive control freak of a mother, will not admit into her home any problems, doubts or identities that violate her sense of upbeat Christian propriety. So what if her husband, Bill, is hovering on the edge of the abyss of Alzheimer’s? Ignore it, excuse it; it will go away.The same applies to the couple’s firstborn, Mark, a divinity student turned lawyer who has lost his faith in both callings. (When he says he’s no longer a Christian, Ginny responds, “That’s not true.”) Evie, their second, a chef, is a lesbian. (“Or not,” Ginny adds.) Johnny, their third, of no known profession, is a recovering drug addict. (“If you all say so,” Ginny allows.) And Diana, the youngest? She’s either a Christmas miracle, complete with baby on board, or just psychotic, espying the devil and speaking in tongues.If that setup doesn’t exactly sound funny, there’s a reason. Though “Cult of Love,” like many unhappy family reunion plays, draws big buckets of humor from the toxic brew of religion and repression, those buckets also draw blood.Headland knows just how to get there, suggesting deep familiarity with the territory. But she also has a gift for complication and construction, as was already evident in “Bachelorette,” her Bridezillas Gone Wild breakthrough play of 2010. (That play, like this one, was a Second Stage Theater production, and later became a movie.) Loading pattern on pattern — a holiday-season design don’t for most — is for her an opportunity to dizzy us down to hell.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Interview: S.E. Hinton on ‘The Outsiders’ and Her Reading Life

      by

      What books are on your night stand?I am currently rereading “Middlemarch” (it takes rereading), and “The Last of the Wine,” by Mary Renault. Socrates is a character in that book. So is Plato. To have them appear casually in a novel, yet be very faithful to what we know of them, is great.How do you organize your books?I have a beautiful library, organized by subjects: History (early to late), Author Biographies, Exploring, Women’s Studies, Journalism, Entertainment, English Fiction, American Fiction and Children’s Books. The Paranormal books are organized by Ghosts and Hauntings, Reincarnation, Coincidences, Strange but True.Why so many books on the paranormal?I have had many strange things happen in my life.Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).Any time, on the sofa, with good lighting, my cat and a small glass of wine.What’s the last great book you read?“Demon Copperhead.” I don’t know a whole lot of Dickens but I know “David Copperfield” inside and out. I love the way Barbara Kingsolver followed some of the plot. Also, Demon is a great narrator — talking the way you can imagine him talking, thinking the way you can imagine him thinking.What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?I wish I knew more Shakespeare.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?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