Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares50 Views

      in Theater

      How Patina Miller, of Starz’s ‘Power’ Series, Spends Her Sundays

      by

      Patina Miller may play a fearless New York City drug queenpin inspired by 50 Cent’s mother on television, but for a long time, something scared her: having a child of her own.“I thought maybe I wouldn’t be good at it,” said Ms. Miller, 40, who plays the indomitable Raquel Thomas on the crime drama “Power Book III: Raising Kanan.” (The fourth season premieres Friday on Starz.)“I was always afraid of holding other people’s babies because I thought I’d break them,” she said.But now that she is a mother — to a 7-year-old daughter, Emerson Harper Mars, with her husband, the venture capitalist David Mars — she couldn’t imagine her life any other way.“Sundays are about being comfy, being with family,” said Ms. Miller, whose 15-year-old niece, Alanna Miller, also lives with her. She added, “It’s nice to sit and talk to each other without being on our phones.”Ms. Miller was born in Pageland, S.C., and raised by a single mother who encouraged her love for gospel music. She has lived in New York since 2007, when she moved from South Carolina after college and subsequently landed her breakout role as the nightclub singer Deloris Van Cartier in the Broadway adaptation of “Sister Act.” She won a Tony Award in 2013 for her performance as a circus artist in the musical “Pippin.”She has called the Upper West Side home for the past three years. Her family lives in a brownstone between Central Park and Riverside Park with their English bulldog, Maddie.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

    • 113 Shares60 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Mary Said What She Said’ Review: A Hypnotic Huppert

      by

      In this Robert Wilson production, Isabelle Huppert is everywhere onstage, all at once, reciting a nonstop script that may well touch on everything.Isabelle Huppert stands upstage center, demurely holding her hands in front of her waist, and starts to speak. She is motionless and in silhouette so we don’t see her mouth, creating a sense of dislocation as to where the words we hear are actually coming from. And as we quickly discover, the Robert Wilson production “Mary Said What She Said” interpolates live and recorded lines.But wait: After a few minutes, Huppert is standing a little closer to the audience. Moments later she is almost downstage. The entire time I could have sworn she wasn’t moving. How did she pull off that sleight of hand — or feet?Huppert is playing Mary Stuart and wearing a 16th-century-style dress, which means she can take tiny steps without the audience seeing them, as if she were on casters. This creates the illusion of stillness in motion, or perhaps freeze-framed movement — either way a neat encapsulation of Wilson’s art as a theater maker — that contrasts with the simultaneous verbal stream flowing in an almost uninterrupted manner over the course of this 90-minute monologue. (The show is in French with subtitles.)Written by Darryl Pinckney, who drew from the Queen of Scots’s letters, “Mary Said What She Said,” which is at NYU Skirball through Sunday, is inconceivable without Huppert, and she is the reason to see it.She gives a performance of rarefied virtuosity and rigor as she seemingly effortlessly handles the precise blocking and light and audio cues, the swings between immobility and fastidiously choreographed movement, the abrupt changes in tempo and pitch — and of course the dense, nonlinear text full of echoing repetitions, which must be a beast to memorize. Even when she’s not moving or speaking, she always needs to be committed to the moment. It is a marvel to behold.This is Huppert’s third collaboration with Wilson, after “Orlando” (1993) and “Quartett” (seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009), so at least she knows his exacting M.O. She was also familiar with the character, having played her in Schiller’s “Mary Stuart” at the National Theater in London in 1996.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 Shares54 Views

      in Theater

      A Disruptor Asks, Is New York Finally Ready for ‘DOOM’?

      by

      Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous.But last week, at her first rehearsal for “DOOM: House of Hope” at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight.There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory’s rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — the new project’s starting point.Belying her works’ fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal.“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” the 46-year-old Berlin-based artist told me. “There has to be enough openness to it that the performers have agency.”“I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,” said Imhof, 46, who conceived of “DOOM” as a performance best suited for the Armory, rather than an artwork for a museum. She had wanted to do a ballet for a long time.Tess Mayer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares82 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Dakar 2000’ Review: Which One Is the Liar?

      by

      In Rajiv Joseph’s two-hander, a couple of Americans in Senegal twist, deflect, massage, stretch and maybe even tell the truth.We can’t say we weren’t warned. Boubs, the narrator of Rajiv Joseph’s new play, kicks off the show by informing the audience that “all of it is true. Or most of it, anyway.”That “most of it” does a lot of work in “Dakar 2000,” which just opened at Manhattan Theater Club. But while ambiguity and uncertainty have long been great fertilizers for storytelling, Joseph’s two-hander about a couple of Americans in Senegal remains strangely uninvolving.Some of the things Boubs (Abubakr Ali), a Peace Corps volunteer, tells the State Department employee Dina (Mia Barron, from “The Coast Starlight” and “Hurricane Diane”) may well be fabrications. Over the course of her friendly but insistent interrogation of Boubs, who was involved in a truck accident, we begin to suspect that Dina is no slouch, either, at fudging the facts.“You’re a good liar!” she tells Boubs at one point. “I don’t begrudge that skill set.”It’s a useful one for playwrights, too. Mining his own history, Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” “King James”) did go on a Peace Corps mission in Senegal after college, an experience he credits as instrumental in his becoming a writer. It’s unclear whether, as happens to this play’s hero, Joseph was ever asked to possibly fingerprint an alleged terrorist who was passed out, or maybe dead, in his hotel room. Has Joseph been the Le Carré of the Rialto all these years?But while the possibility of exciting action always hovers on the periphery, May Adrales’s low-energy production is bereft of any tension. That is an achievement of some kind for a show dealing with covert operations, and one in which a character is traumatized (or claims to be) by the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Tanzania.“Dakar 2000” begins promisingly as Dina grills Boubs about his accident, then starts making demands. It’s fun to watch her run rings around him, and Joseph and the cast keep the action moving as we ponder what Dina really wants, and whether Boubs is a useful idiot, a cunning faux-naïf, an idealistic young man, or all of the above. That Dina appears to be haunted by apocalyptic feelings — the play takes place during the chaotic, unsettled final lead-up to Y2K, when the world felt as if it was built on shifting sands — should make the stakes even weightier.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

    • 150 Shares70 Views

      in Theater

      Theater Company’s Lost French New Wave Film Gets Its New York Premiere

      by

      Future members of Mabou Mines produced the footage over 50 years ago. Now it’s a film with new dialogue spoken by children of the original cast.The French film industry was hardly the only force spurring the barricades, Molotov cocktails and worker strikes that were synonymous with Paris in May 1968. But the French government’s attempt to fire the head of the Cinémathèque Française earlier that year supplied crucial kindling. And while the Cannes Film Festival managed to open amid the unrest, with a glittery restoration of “Gone With the Wind,” Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were among those who helped scuttle the festival at the halfway point.This is the environment in which Lee Breuer and other ambitious New York theater artists found themselves dubbing French films into English for the Hong Kong market. They were also absorbing lessons in elliptical, pugnacious, visually striking theater from the likes of the Berliner Ensemble and the Living Theater, a group of New Yorkers living in voluntary exile in Europe.By 1970, Breuer had returned to New York and formed Mabou Mines, the influential Off Off Broadway theater troupe. (The other founding members included fellow dubbers Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, as well as JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass.)But first the Paris-based gang set out to produce a silent film, called “Moi-même,” about a 13-year-old boy who tries to create a film collective through begging, hustling and sometimes armed robbery. They wrote some provisional lines of dialogue on a few envelopes and grabbed cameras, bankrolled by the man who owned the dubbing studio.They began shooting just as the protests were winding down — and then their unfinished project ground to its own halt. Now, over 50 years later, “Moi-même” will finally make its New York debut at L’Alliance New York on Thursday, co-directed and co-written by Breuer and his son Mojo Lorwin, who wasn’t born until 1984. Additional screenings are scheduled at Yale University Film Archives (April 24) and as part of a film festival in Athens, Ohio.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 Shares62 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class’ Doesn’t Satisfy

      by

      The New Group production of Sam Shepard’s classic tragicomedy comes off as disjointed and self-consciously stagy.When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in “Curse of the Starving Class” — it’s with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak.The Tates’ fridge is almost always empty, and there’s a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group’s lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play.“Curse of the Starving Class,” which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.)But the cause wasn’t a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze “like some rank old animal” and breaking the door. Though Weston’s tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they’re part of the starving class, or if it even exists.The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all.Like Shepard’s “Buried Child” and “True West,” “Curse of the Starving Class” is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical.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

    • 150 Shares74 Views

      in Theater

      At France’s Oldest Theater, Things Change, but They Also Stay the Same

      by

      A new leader for the Comédie-Française, Clément Hervieu-Léger, is an insider who looks set to keep the venerable Paris company on a steady course.Later this year, the actor and director Clément Hervieu-Léger will assume one of the most influential positions in French theater: general administrator of the Comédie-Française, the country’s oldest active company. France’s culture ministry announced the appointment last week.For now, however, Hervieu-Léger, 47, remains a player in the company’s acting ensemble, and through June 1, he is starring in a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” that he also directed. Onstage on Sunday, Hervieu-Léger blended in discreetly as Trofimov, an aging student who hovers around the play’s central landowning family. (It took me a minute even to recognize him.)The venerable Comédie-Française was founded in 1680, when a troupe begun decades earlier by the playwright Molière merged with a rival institution. With Hervieu-Léger’s appointment, it has opted — as so often — for continuity. Since 2001, every general administrator has come from the company’s ranks. Éric Ruf, who holds the position until this summer, had over two decades of experience as a Comédie-Française actor before his appointment in 2014.His successor has followed a remarkably similar path. A lithe, elegant performer, Hervieu-Léger was hired by the troupe in 2005 and has since been seen in a vast repertoire of plays, including Molière comedies and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”In 2018, he joined the ranks of the “sociétaires,” or “shareholders,” a core group of company members who own stakes in the Comédie-Française, make up the board and oversee the theater’s operations. All must abide by the company’s motto: “Simul et singulis,” which means, “Together and individual.”Hervieu-Léger, left, as Trofimov in “The Cherry Orchard.”Vincent Pontet, coll. Comédie-FrançaiseWe 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 Shares66 Views

      in Theater

      Bill Burr Is About to Hit Broadway. Broadway Better Duck.

      by

      Inside a spacious room on Manhattan’s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene.It was a Friday morning, and the show’s British director, Patrick Marber, back after being briefly out sick, approached two of his stars, Bill Burr and Michael McKean. They were sitting inside a makeshift restaurant booth, getting ready to play desperate real estate salesmen entertaining the idea of robbing their office.Then Marber noticed a satchel in front of them that he hadn’t seen before. “You were gone, so the play changed,” Burr responded in his staccato Boston cadence.Marber looked somewhere between annoyed and amused. Getting teased by one of the greatest living stand-up comics is an honor. But there was work to be done. Previews would start in just a few weeks, on March 10, at the Palace Theater. He turned, walked back to his table, picked up a vape and took a puff. Burr pounced. “What’s that?” he asked, a scornful snap in his voice. “Smoke a cigarette like a man!”Burr loves messing with people. There’s a more accurate verb than “messes,” of course, but I’m not going to use it here. It’s so intrinsic to his needling personality that when I asked him minutes before rehearsal why he’s studying French, Burr described a revenge fantasy of sorts: an eventual stand-up set in France meant to irritate Parisians snooty about Americans mangling their language. Only Bill Burr learns French “out of spite.”Ed Harris as Moss and Alec Baldwin as Blake in the 1992 film adaptation of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”New Line CinemaWe 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