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      As Avignon Festival Turns to Dance, It Trips Up Some Onlookers

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      The festival opener “Nôt,” from Marlene Monteiro Freitas, drew both boos and applause. Elsewhere, for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the spectacle was kept to the stage.The Avignon Festival, in the south of France, has long had an ambivalent relationship with dance.The monthlong event, founded in 1947, is a European theater mecca where the reputation of directors and actors are made every July, while choreographers have tended to remain on the margins. In recent years, they have frequently been relegated to the festival’s later dates, when many audience members and professionals have already left.Not this year. For the first time since 2011, dance took center stage on the festival’s biggest night: the opening performance in the monumental Cour d’Honneur, the open-air courtyard of the city’s Papal Palace. And the reaction from the theater-inclined audience was mixed on Saturday: Many looked bewildered, some left midway through, and others stayed long enough to boo as soon as the lights went down — though they were quickly drowned out by applause.The choreographer for the show was Marlene Monteiro Freitas, from Cape Verde, whose absurdist, carnivalesque work has become a phenomenon of European contemporary dance in recent years. Still, with her Avignon opener, “Nôt,” which means “night” in Cape Verdean Creole, she arguably overpromised.The production was billed as inspired by “One Thousand and One Nights,” the collection of Middle Eastern tales — a nod, Freitas said in the playbill, to the focus placed on Arabic at this year’s festival. (For the first time, preshow announcements were delivered in Arabic, the second-most-spoken language in France, as well as in French and English.) Yet Freitas is no conventional storyteller, and “Nôt” is more like a loose collage of scenes, with overt references to “One Thousand and One Nights” few and far between.Mariana Tembe, a standout performer in “Nôt.”Christophe Raynaud de LageThe style she has honed with her excellent performers relies heavily on stilted, puppetlike movements and clownish mime; for “Nôt,” Freitas has added whimsical full-face masks. Hidden behind, one performer shuffles across the stage, awkwardly cleaning the props. Another goes into the vast auditorium with a chamber pot, which he hand around the audience members while pretending to relieve himself in their laps.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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      Laurie Metcalf to Star in Broadway Play Produced by Scott Rudin

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      The production, of the Samuel D. Hunter play “Little Bear Ridge Road” that got strong reviews in Chicago will be the first produced by Rudin since news reports of his bullying behavior in 2021.“Little Bear Ridge Road,” Samuel D. Hunter’s acclaimed small-cast play about loneliness, compassion and a search for connection between an aunt and her nephew in rural Idaho, will come to Broadway this fall in a production starring Laurie Metcalf and Micah Stock.The production, directed by Joe Mantello (“Wicked”), will mark the return to Broadway of the producer Scott Rudin, who in 2021 paused his producing activities and resigned from the Broadway League amid reports of bullying behavior toward assistants and others.Rudin is producing the show with Barry Diller, the billionaire media mogul who has frequently backed his shows.The play is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 7 and to open Oct. 30 at the Booth Theater for an 18-week limited run.Hunter, the playwright, is best known for “The Whale,” which was adapted into a 2022 film. He was raised in Idaho and many of his plays are set there and feature socially isolated working-class characters. This will be Hunter’s first play staged on Broadway.“My initial impulse for writing the play — which I told to Joe and Laurie, and I credit them that they still had faith in me after I said this — is that I wanted to write a play about people watching television,” Hunter said in a telephone interview. “That was the platform for the play, but the play became this story of this aunt and this nephew who have almost no relationship, and a lot of painful history between them, hunkering down together during the pandemic, and both of them trying to figure out a path forward in a deeply complicated reality.”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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      11 Off Broadway Plays to See in July

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      Here’s what’s onstage in New York: a new musical about Joy Mangano of Miracle Mop fame, and two plays from the “Oh, Mary!” director Sam Pinkleton.‘Out of Order’In his new show, staged in an intimate basement space, the playwright and actor Carl Holder shuffles the autobiographical-solo genre by picking out prompts and questions written on a bunch of index cards and enacting them. The result is, by turns, emotional, funny, wrenching, not adverse to interpretive dancing and occasionally interactive. Decked out in an Adidas tracksuit, Holder holds the 90-minute production together thanks to a performance that feels openhearted. “Out of Order” is underground in every sense of the word, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. (Through July 22, East Village Basement)Hot FestivalCreated in 1992 by Dixon Place’s founding director, El Covan, the Hot Festival would be a miracle of longevity by any standards, but it’s particularly impressive by Off Off Broadway ones — all the more since the annual event focuses on queer theater, which lands the double whammy of being perennially underfunded and under attack. The festival presents queer-focused shows at various stages of their artistic lives. Among the ones likely to be further along the creative journey are the New York Neo-Futurists’ “The Infinite Pride” (July 9), a special edition of their long-running show “The Infinite Wrench” — an ever-evolving patchwork of 30 very short plays performed in about an hour. Another promising entry is David Dean Bottrell’s “Teenage Wasteland: Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen” (July 16), in which the actor recounts his coming of age in the Bible Belt of the 1970s (Through July 25, Dixon Place)‘Berlindia!’A production whose credits includes an entry for “choreography and techno” may well pique the interest of adventurous theatergoers. Here said choreography and techno (by Mia Pak and Nicholas Webster) are deployed in a new play with an absurdist tinge by Daniel Holzman, directed by Noah Latty and produced by Emma Richmond (who also worked on Kallan Dana’s buzzy recent show, “Lobster”). The cast of “Berlindia!” includes Mike Iveson (“What the Constitution Means to Me”) and Pete Simpson (“Is This a Room”). Add that this is playing at the Tank, a haven for hard-to-describe theater that’s steps from Penn Station, and most tickets cost under $40, and you have something worth gambling on. (Through July 27, the Tank)Megan Hill in Crystal Skillman’s “Open.”Maria Baranova‘Open’In one of the summer’s most welcome surprises, Crystal Skillman’s wondrous monologue returns six years after its premiere at the Tank. It’s not so much a revival as a reprise, since the production brings back the original team of star Megan Hill (“Eddie and Dave”) and director Jessi D. Hill. The first easily holds our attention as Kristen, a woman who attempts to channel her anguish and grief through magic tricks. “Open” is a love story with an aching heart — let’s welcome back this delicate slice of summertime sadness. (July 8-27, WP Theater)‘Joy: A New True Musical’There is something inspiring about Joy Mangano’s life and entrepreneurial spirit: A decade after the movie “Joy,” in which she was played by Jennifer Lawrence, comes this new musical starring Betsy Wolfe (most recently of “& Juliet”). Wait, you haven’t heard of Mangano? She is most famous for unleashing the self-wringing Miracle Mop onto America’s dirty floors. The musical’s book is by Ken Davenport and its score by AnnMarie Milazzo (best known for her orchestrations and vocal arrangements on Broadway). Intriguingly, the choreographer Lorin Latarro directs, while Joshua Bergasse (a recent Tony nominee for “Smash”) handles the choreography (Through Aug. 17, Laura Pels Theater)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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      Paul Libin, a Forceful Presence On and Off Broadway, Dies at 94

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      He staged a revival of “The Crucible” in a Manhattan hotel ballroom in 1958, helped run Circle in the Square and oversaw the operations of Jujamcyn Theaters.Paul Libin, a prolific producer and respected Broadway theater executive whose first major endeavor was an Off Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” that he staged in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel in 1958, died on June 27 in Manhattan. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Charles.In his nearly 70-year career, Mr. Libin ran Circle in the Square Theater with Theodore Mann, one of its founders, and together they produced more than 100 shows. Later, Mr. Libin was in charge of operations at Jujamcyn Theaters, the owner of several Broadway houses.Rocco Landesman, the former president and owner of Jujamcyn, said Mr. Libin had a wall-penetrating voice, a forceful presence and enormous energy.“I depended on Paul entirely,” Mr. Landesman said in an interview. “Someone had to run the company. But I wouldn’t describe his role as corporate. He was as likely to be climbing into the air-conditioning ducts at the St. James Theater as he was to be sitting at his desk. He came in every day with enthusiasm.”That enthusiasm dated to Mr. Libin’s early days as an assistant to Jo Mielziner, a Tony-winning scenic designer and producer. When Mr. Mielziner produced the Broadway musical “Happy Hunting,” which opened in late 1956, he promoted Mr. Libin to stage manager.In 1958, on his way to a dentist appointment, Mr. Libin passed the Hotel Martinique, on West 32nd Street near Broadway, and saw a sign advertising the ballroom’s availability. He thought of it as a space that he and the director Word Baker could turn into a theater-in-the-round for a production of “The Crucible,” the 1953 Tony-winning Broadway play about the Salem witch trials and an allegory of the McCarthy-era Red Scare.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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      Ronald Ribman, 92, Dies; His Plays Mined the Absurdity of Existence

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      He set his frequently neurotic characters in bleak, morally ambiguous situations where laughter, as he put it, “is a measure of the sickness of society.”Two men are on the rooftop garden of a hospital in Manhattan. One is an Armenian grocer. He has cancer and a big mouth. The other is an art dealer, a self-loathing Holocaust survivor who also has cancer and is tired of his own voice. In between medical procedures, they bicker about the quagmire of the past.“You came out a big winner,” the grocer says.“Because I survived?” the art dealer says. “It doesn’t feel like a triumph.”“That’s because nothing we ever do feels like a triumph, because the mind’s a piece of garbage,” the grocer replies. “It’s never happy with what we do for it. I once took my mind down to Barbados for two weeks, and you know what it said to me? ‘You should have taken us to Jamaica!’”The verbal jousting took place in “Cold Storage,” a 1977 play staged at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway and written by Ronald Ribman, a mordantly funny playwright whose frequently surreal works grappled with God’s impatience, the past’s invasion of the present and, as he once put it, “a person’s right to fail as a human being.”Mr. Ribman’s “Cold Storage,” staged on Broadway in 1977, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. PlaybillIn “Harry, Noon and Night,” a 1965 Off Broadway production set in postwar Munich, Dustin Hoffman played a gay Nazi with a hunchback who quarrels with his roommate, a disturbed American painter who believes a caterpillar gave him syphilis. “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” (1966), also Off Broadway, was based in part on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” and starred Mr. Hoffman as an editor at a publishing house who rejects a posthumous memoir by a 19th-century landowner who died friendless and broke. In “The Poison Tree” (1973), inmates and guards battle over the moral high ground in prison.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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      Mark Brokaw, Theater Director Known for Slight-of-Set Magic, Dies at 66

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      On and off Broadway, he worked with rising talents like Kenneth Lonergan and Paula Vogel, combining complex storytelling with the simplest possible productions.Mark Brokaw, a director of Broadway, Off Broadway and regional productions, who shepherded the work of rising playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Kron, Paula Vogel and Nicky Silver beginning in the early 1990s, died on June 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 66.His husband, Andrew Farber, said the cause was prostate cancer.Mr. Brokaw was comfortable with the classics. He directed productions of Molière’s “Tartuffe,” W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Constant Wife” and the musical “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella” — albeit a Cinderella with a fresh, feminist gloss.Sienna Miller and Jonny Lee Miller in Mr. Brokaw’s 2009 production of “After Miss Julie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMark Ruffalo and Missy Yager in Mr. Brokaw’s 1998 production of “This Is Our Youth.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut he was a specialist in new plays, including Patrick Marber’s “After Miss Julie,” which he directed in 2009; Mr. Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth,” which he directed in 1996 and again in 1998; and Ms. Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride,” in 1999. And he had something of a subspecialty in the nonlinear storytelling seen in works like Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown” and Ms. Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive”; he directed both in 1997.“Mark was especially good with plays that jump around in time, and you had multiple people playing multiple parts,” said the actor Cynthia Nixon, who worked with Mr. Brokaw on “As Bees in Honey Drown” and Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted” in 2009.Cynthia Nixon in the 2009 production of Lisa Loomer’s “Distracted.”Sara Krulwich/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

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      ‘The Matchmaker’ Review: Before ‘Hello, Dolly!’ She Was Just Dolly

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      Thornton Wilder’s play became a blockbuster musical, but a production under an upstate tent makes the case for its stand-alone virtues.Though Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed play “The Matchmaker” is not a musical, it’s nevertheless a great pleasure for musical theater lovers. That’s only partly because so much of its dialogue sounds unexpectedly familiar if you know “Hello, Dolly!” — the 1964 blockbuster built on its bones. Lines that the songwriter Jerry Herman turned into lyrics, barely having to alter a word, keep popping up in Wilder’s script like old friends at a crowded party.“I am a woman who arranges things,” says Dolly Levi, the good-hearted widow who’s up in everyone’s business. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on,” says Cornelius Hackl, the 38-year-old Yonkers clerk who devises a plan for adventure in New York City. “This summer we’ll be wearing ribbons down our backs,” says Irene Molloy, the milliner he falls in love with there.But even beyond the spark of recognition that has you humming along with the script, “The Matchmaker,” now enjoying a fine revival at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y., is a musical lover’s delight, besotted with song. Wilder frequently calls for his characters to sing and dance to popular favorites of the period, roughly the 1880s. “The Sidewalks of New York,” the “Les Patineurs” waltz and others decorate and turn the plot while also dramatizing the play’s central theme: the necessity of engaging in the culture of one’s time.This production, directed with high spirits by Davis McCallum, ups the musical ante. Beneath the festival’s open-sided tent in a dell on the grounds of a former golf course, a three-piece band (fiddle, banjo, accordion) plays on a platform above the action. The Hudson Valley setting is neatly invoked at the start by a poem Wilder wrote for “The Merchant of Yonkers” — a “Matchmaker” predecessor — set charmingly to music by Alex Bechtel. “The Map of New York,” another Bechtel song, is the aural equivalent of sepia rotogravure.But the play is hardly old-fashioned — or to put it another way, it’s eternal. (Wilder, the author of “Our Town,” is always interested in the eternities.) No surprise there; the story has a provenance going back via England and Germany to the Greeks and Romans. Dolly (Nance Williamson, looking a bit like Bette Midler) is a jollier version of the parasite character of ancient comedy, who through flattery and persistence attains a place at the rich man’s table. In this case, the rich man is Horace Vandergelder (Kurt Rhoads), a Yonkers merchant whose half-million dollars, hoarded and fondled but otherwise never touched, do nothing for the world.Though Dolly finagles to land Vandergelder and cure his miserliness, you understand from the start that she is not meddling merely for her own gain. She also seeks to match the impoverished Cornelius (Carl Howell) to the widowed Irene (Helen Cespedes), and to marry Vandergelder’s niece (Anvita Gattani) to a painter (Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook) whom the blowhard merchant derides as unpromising. (“You artists produce something nobody needs at any time,” he thunders.) If Dolly must bend the truth to reach these ends — she invents a young woman named Ernestina Simple, then makes her disappear opportunely — she does so in part, as she explains with good cheer, because life should be exciting and people must live in 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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      Review: Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita’ for the Masses

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      The actress is making her West End debut in Jamie Lloyd’s latest take on an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.“She’s a diamond in their dull gray lives,” sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in “Evita,” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband’s government, and “Evita” expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler (“Snow White” and “West Side Story”), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)The show begins and ends with Evita’s death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, “Don’t you just love the smack of firm government?” (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)Diego Andres Rodriguez as Che, Zegler, center, and James Olivas as Juan Perón. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.Marc BrennerEvita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd’s decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show’s signature tune, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” on the theater’s exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.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