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      ‘Sinners’ and Shows like ‘Severance’ Give an Old Form New Life

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      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

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      Book Review: ‘The Butcher’s Daughter,’ by David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark

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      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

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      Pierre Audi, Eminent Force in the Performing Arts, Dies at 67

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      After turning a derelict lecture hall into the daring Almeida Theater, he had a long career as a director and impresario in Europe and New York.Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario whose transformation of a derelict London lecture hall into the cutting-edge Almeida Theater was the opening act in a long career as one of the world’s most eminent performing arts leaders, died on Friday night in Beijing. He was 67.His death, while he was in China for meetings related to future productions, was announced on social media by Rachida Dati, the minister of culture in France, where Mr. Audi had been the director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018. The announcement did not specify a cause.Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded the Almeida, which opened in 1980 and swiftly became a center of experimental theater and music. He spent 30 years as the leader of the Dutch National Opera, and for part of that time was also in charge of the Holland Festival. For the past decade, he had been the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York.The Almeida Theater in London. Mr. Audi was in his early 20s when he founded it in 1980, and it soon became a center of experimental theater and music.View PicturesAll along, he continued working as a director at theaters around the world. Last year, when the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels cut ties with Romeo Castellucci halfway through his new production of Wagner’s four-opera “Ring,” the company turned to Mr. Audi as one of the few artists with the knowledge, experience and cool head to take over such an epic undertaking at short notice.“He profoundly renewed the language of opera,” Ms. Dati wrote in her announcement, “through his rigor, his freedom and his singular vision.”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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      The National Endowment for the Arts Begins Terminating Grants

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      The endowment told arts organizations that it was withdrawing or canceling current grants just hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the agency in the next fiscal year.The National Endowment for the Arts withdrew and canceled grant offers to numerous arts organizations around the country on Friday night, sending a round of email notifications out just hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the agency in his next budget.The move, although not unexpected, was met with disappointment and anger by arts administrators who had counted on the grants to finance ongoing projects.In Oregon, Portland Playhouse received an email from the endowment just 24 hours before opening a production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” an acclaimed work that is part of the playwright’s series of 10 dramas about African Americans through the course of the 20th century. The N.E.A. had recommended a $25,000 grant for the show, which would have paid about one-fifth of the production’s personnel costs.“Times are tough for theaters — we’re already pressed, and in this moment where every dollar matters, this was a critical piece of our budget,” said Brian Weaver, the theater’s producing artistic director. “It’s ridiculous.”The emails were sent to arts administrators from an address at the endowment that did not accept replies. “The N.E.A. is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the president,” the emails said. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”The emails went on to say that the endowment would now prioritize projects that “elevate” historically Black colleges and universities, and colleges that serve Hispanic students. The emails also said the endowment would focus on projects that “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster A.I. competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”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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      Trump Seeks to Eliminate the NEA

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      The president’s budget proposal also called for getting rid of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the budget he released Friday, taking aim once again at two agencies that he had tried and failed to get rid of during his first term.The endowments, along with the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, were among the entities listed in a section titled “small agency eliminations” in his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year. The document said that the proposal was “consistent with the president’s efforts to decrease the size of the federal government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities” and noted that Mr. Trump’s past budget proposals had “also supported these eliminations.”In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump proposed eliminating both the arts and the humanities endowments. But bipartisan support in Congress kept them alive, and in fact their budgets grew during the first Trump administration.Since Mr. Trump returned to office this year, his administration has taken aim at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, canceling most of their existing grants and laying off a large portion of their staffs. But the arts agency had yet to announce major cuts.The proposal to eliminate the endowments drew a quick and furious reaction from Democrats. One, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, vowed to fight the plan to eliminate the N.E.A. “tooth and nail.”Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who serves as the top Democrat on the House subcommittee overseeing the N.E.A., said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “making a broad-based attack on the arts, both for funding and content.” She cited his proposals to eliminate the endowments as well as his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and his efforts to influence the Smithsonian Institution.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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      Stephen Mo Hanan, Who Played Three Roles in ‘Cats,’ Dies at 78

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      He sang arias on the streets of San Francisco, performed on Broadway and collaborated on a musical about Al Jolson, which he also starred in.Stephen Mo Hanan, a vibrant performer who sang arias and other music as a busker in San Francisco before playing Kevin Kline’s lieutenant in the acclaimed 1981 Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance” and three felines in the original Broadway cast of “Cats,” died on April 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.Gary Widlund, his husband and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack.At his audition for “Cats,” Mr. Hanan (pronounced HAN-un) told Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, and Trevor Nunn, the director, that he had spent several years singing and accompanying himself on a concertina at a ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.“As a matter of fact, I’ve brought my concertina,” he recalled telling Mr. Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. “He said, ‘Give me something in Italian.’ Well, I’ve never had a problem with shyness. I sang ‘Funiculi, Funicula.’”Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Puccini’s “Turandot.”During rehearsals, Mr. Hanan kept a detailed journal, which he published in 2002 as “A Cat’s Diary.”Mr. Hanan was cast in the original production of “Cats.” During rehearsals, he kept a detailed journal, which he later turned into a book.Smith & KrausIn an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Mr. Nunn: to “pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.”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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      Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,’ a Party for Writers and Weirdos

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      An awkward Encores! revival of the 1953 musical celebrates the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the years when oddballs could still afford to live there.Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind’s eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers.That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly “Wonderful Town,” their 1953 musical set in and around the Village’s crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it’s really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine.But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme “learned to read” with “André Gide.” And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play “My Sister Eileen,” “Wonderful Town” is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall’s 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003.The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs.It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script’s comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as “the place for self-expression.”But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make “Wonderful Town” wonderful. Rose’s way with a throwaway line, and Jackson’s delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what’s happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein’s “Ohio” with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they’re singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest.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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      Idina Menzel’s ‘Redwood’ to Close Following Tony Nominations Shutout

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      The Broadway musical will play its final performance at the Nederlander Theater on May 18.“Redwood,” a musical starring Idina Menzel, will end its Broadway run on May 18, an unexpectedly early closing announced just 24 hours after the show failed to garner any Tony Awards nominations.The show’s producers, Eva Price, Caroline Kaplan and Loudmouth Media, which is Menzel’s production company, announced the closing on Friday morning, acknowledging in a statement that “we had of course hoped for a longer run.” It had been scheduled to run at least until Aug. 17.“Redwood” was among 13 Tony-eligible shows that did not receive any nominations on Thursday. And although it had started off well at the box office, the show faced a worrisome decline in weekly grosses last month. It is the first production to decide to close following the Tony announcements, but it is not likely to be the last — several musicals are exhibiting signs of weakness at the box office at a very competitive and challenging time for Broadway shows, when it has become increasingly difficult for shows to become profitable because the costs of producing have risen.“Redwood” is a passion project for Menzel and her main collaborator, Tina Landau, who conceived the show with the actress and then wrote the book and directed the production. Kate Diaz wrote the music and collaborated with Landau on the lyrics. It had an initial production last year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.The musical is about a New York City gallerist, who, grieving the death of her son, drives cross-country and winds up in a redwood forest, seeking some kind of solace while tree-sitting. The set features enormous LED screens that are used to depict the landscape, and Menzel and several of her co-stars perform part of the show while climbing a large prop tree.The show was named a Critic’s Pick by Jesse Green of The New York Times, who wrote, “You have to admire the guts it takes to have put a deeply serious show about trauma and resilience on Broadway right now.” But other critics were less impressed; the reviews were mostly mixed to negative.The producers said that, during the production’s run, the show helped raise more than $2 million for charities, much of it in support of redwood forests.“Redwood” began previews at the Nederlander Theater on Jan. 24 and opened Feb. 13. At the time of its closing, it will have had 127 performances. It was capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. More