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      ‘N/A’ Review: For Nancy Pelosi and A.O.C., It’s a House Divided

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      Is moral leadership possible without parliamentary power? Two very familiar congresswomen battle it out onstage.The publicity for “N/A,” a two-hander that opened at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Thursday, has been careful to point out that, despite all appearances, the N in the title is not Nancy Pelosi, and the A is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rather, the playwright, Mario Correa, argues in a program note that “N/A” is about a battle of “ideas and ideals,” which are “bigger than any one person (or even two).”I vote nay on that proposition.The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers, down to Pelosi’s golden Mace of the United States House of Representatives brooch and A.O.C.’s signature “Beso” red lipstick. The gimmick also gives Holland Taylor (as N) and Ana Villafañe (as A) tasty roles and a meaty conflict to sink their teeth into.Correa frames that conflict as ideological, not personal. In five scenes starting with the 2018 midterms (when the Democrats win control of the House) and ending with the 2022 midterms (when they lose it), he broadly traces their seesawing power.At first the seesaw is profoundly unbalanced. We meet A just after her surprise primary victory against a machine Democrat and N’s handpicked successor. (In real life, that would be Joseph Crowley.) Though still a savvy street fighter, A is awed and a little cowed by the Washington she discovers. “So, yeah, we are not in Kansas anymore,” she tells her Instagram Live followers, invoking a surprising image of fragility.By then, N has been in Congress for 31 years. Having lost the House speakership when “that man” was elected, she intends to reclaim it. Her favorite number — the only one that counts for a parliamentarian — is 218, the number of votes needed to get work done. Anything shy of that is zero.So even though she and A find that they agree on many policy goals, especially ending the inhumane treatment of migrants at the southern border, they are irreconcilably opposed about how to achieve them. N wheedles, calls in chits, holds her nose and plays footsie with lobbyists, and if she doesn’t have the votes to pass a bill, she doesn’t waste her political capital trying. Naturally, A wants to blow that all up.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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      Betty Boop Time Travels to New York, and Broadway, Next Spring

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      “BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” had a run in Chicago last year. It is slated to open at a Shubert theater in April.A long-in-the-works musical about Betty Boop, a curvy flapper first featured in animated films of the 1930s, will open on Broadway next spring following a run in Chicago last year.“BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” has some thematic echoes of last year’s “Barbie” movie, although it was in the works before that film came along. The stage production imagines that Boop leaves her early-20th-century film life to travel to present-day New York, where musical comedy ensues. (Her first stop: Comic-Con.)The show was staged late last year at the CIBC Theater in Chicago, where The Chicago Tribune gave it an encouraging review (“there is a great deal to like, and much more work still to be done,” wrote the critic Chris Jones). The Broadway production is to open next April at a theater operated by the Shubert Organization, according to a statement from the production on Thursday; the production did not announce specific dates, theater or cast.“BOOP!” features music by David Foster, a songwriter and music producer who has won 16 Grammy Awards. The lyrics are by Susan Birkenhead (a Tony nominee for “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Working”) and the book is by Bob Martin (a Tony winner for “The Drowsy Chaperone”). The show is being directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, who won Tony Awards for choreographing the 2004 revival of “La Cage aux Folles” and the 2013 production of “Kinky Boots.”The musical’s lead producer is Ostar Productions, led by Bill Haber, who was among the founders of Creative Artists Agency and who has credits on more than 50 Broadway shows. “BOOP!” is being capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Even for Broadway, where musicals often take years to develop, this one has had a remarkably long journey: Haber has been working on a Betty Boop musical for more than two decades, changing creative team members and collaborators along the way. In 2003, Variety reported that a Boop musical was planned for Broadway in 2005; in 2008, The New York Times reported that Foster was attached and a Broadway bow was expected in the 2010-11 season. (Neither of those productions happened.)Betty Boop was created by Max Fleischer and was initially depicted, in a 1930 film, as a poodle with some human characteristics; subsequently the character was fully human, although with improbable proportions. The character has been adapted in various forms over the years, including for merchandise that has kept her image in the public eye. She has been seen as a sex symbol of sorts, often with short dresses, a squeaky voice and a signature expression, “Boop-Oop-a-Doop.” More

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      Second Stage Becomes First Broadway Nonprofit in Decades to Name New Leader

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      The organization, which won this year’s best play revival Tony Award for “Appropriate,” has chosen Evan Cabnet as its next artistic director.Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofit organizations with Broadway houses, on Thursday named a new artistic director as the sector braces for a wave of leadership turnover.Founded in 1979 and distinguished by its commitment to presenting work by living American writers, Second Stage said that its board had chosen Evan Cabnet as its next artistic director. Cabnet is currently the artistic director of LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging writers, directors and designers. Cabnet will succeed Carole Rothman, one of the theater’s founders, who led the organization for 45 years and is stepping down in August.Second Stage has a proud history of presenting acclaimed work, including the Pulitzer-winning shows “Between Riverside and Crazy,” “Water by the Spoonful” and “Next to Normal.” Its plays and musicals have won multiple other honors; most recently, the organization’s production of “Appropriate” won this year’s Tony Award for best play revival.Second Stage owns Broadway’s smallest house, the 600-seat Hayes Theater. Like many nonprofit theaters, Second Stage has reduced its footprint since the pandemic — it let go of its Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side, and at the end of this year is letting go of its Off Broadway venue in Times Square, although it plans to continue to produce such work in other spaces, starting next spring at the Pershing Square Signature Center. The organization currently has 47 staffers and an annual budget of $27 million; this season it is planning to stage two Broadway shows, two Off Broadway shows and a Next Stage Festival for early-career work.The leadership of the four Broadway nonprofits has not changed for decades, and the industry is closely watching to see how a new generation of leaders might differ from its predecessors. Two of the other nonprofits will also be looking for new artistic leaders: Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, André Bishop, is ending his 33-year tenure next spring, and Roundabout Theater Company’s artistic director and chief executive, Todd Haimes, died last year after 40 years at that organization. (The fourth Broadway nonprofit, Manhattan Theater Club, is led by Lynne Meadow, who has been that organization’s artistic director for 52 years.)Cabnet, 46, is a Philadelphia native who has lived in New York since 1996 and currently resides in Brooklyn. He has led LCT3 since 2016; previously he was a freelance director and an artistic associate at Roundabout. He will start his new job on Sept. 1; the first season to feature shows he chooses will begin in the fall of 2025. In an interview, he talked about his plans; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      After a Brief Run, ‘Tommy’ Revival to Close on Broadway

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      “The Who’s Tommy,” which has a rock score by Pete Townshend, will end on July 21. A national tour is in the works.A revival of “The Who’s Tommy” that arrived on Broadway three decades after a successful original production will end its run on July 21. The show opened strong but faced dwindling sales at the box office.The production, which had a successful pre-Broadway run in Chicago, will now pin its hopes on a national tour, beginning in Providence, R.I., in the fall of 2025.With a rock score by Pete Townshend, “Tommy” dates back to a 1969 album from the Who; the original Broadway production opened in 1993 and ran for a little more than two years.Set in London, the show has a wild plot: A young man who loses the ability to hear, speak and see in response to childhood trauma develops a gift for pinball that allows him to attract a cultlike following.The revival began its life last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago; the Broadway production began previews on March 8 and opened on March 28 at the Nederlander Theater. At the time of its closing, the revival will have played 20 previews and 132 regular performances on Broadway.Des McAnuff, who directed the original production, returned to direct the revival. Townshend and McAnuff collaborated on the show’s book.The revival, starring Ali Louis Bourzgui in the title role, scored mostly positive reviews, but The New York Times, which can have an outsize influence, was an outlier: Jesse Green, its chief theater critic, characterized the show as featuring “relentless noise and banal imagery.”The production was nominated for a Tony Award for best musical revival but lost to “Merrily We Roll Along.”“Tommy,” with Stephen Gabriel and Ira Pittelman as lead producers, was capitalized for $15.7 million, according to a spokesman. That money has not been recouped.The show is the third musical to announce a closing since the start of May, following “Lempicka” and “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” More

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      ‘I Might Be Real-Life Good at This’: Shooting for Broadway at the Jimmy Awards

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      The awards, which celebrated excellence in high school musical theater on Monday, have become a launchpad for future stars and Tony nominees.Shortly after Damson Chola Jr. sang the powerful “Ragtime” anthem “Make Them Hear You,” in a commanding performance that drove the Minskoff Theater to delirium on Monday night, the young singer accepted the Jimmy Award for best actor. He gave an equally poised acceptance speech, expressing gratitude with a calm cadence and the occasional wry chuckle of someone who’s seen and heard it all.“Is he 40?” my neighbor mused.Hardly. The Jimmys celebrate excellence in high school musical theater, and Chola, a recent graduate, is 18. The winner for best actress, Gretchen Shope, perhaps more expected for their age group, included in her thanks “the girl on TikTok that said I looked like Chappell Roan.” Then again, Shope had just killed with “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” from “Funny Girl,” so who’s to say what’s typical when it comes to theater kids?The actor Telly Leung led group coaching sessions at the Juilliard School, which was also home for the Jimmy Award nominees during their stay in New York.Bess Adler for The New York TimesFormally known as the National High School Musical Theater Awards, the Jimmys were founded in 2009 by the theater organization Pittsburgh CLO and a division of the Nederlander Organization. (The nickname derives from that company’s onetime chairman, James M. Nederlander.) The awards have since grown significantly in size. This year, tens of thousands of participants from across the country were narrowed down, through regional awards programs, to 102 nominees.The Jimmys have also grown in esteem: Casting agents for Broadway and national tours see them as a prime way to scout for promising performers. And you don’t even have to win to be noticed. Eva Noblezada, a 2013 finalist, went on to earn Tony Award nominations for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown” in 2017 and 2019, and she currently stars in “The Great Gatsby.” Casey Likes, a 2019 finalist, made his Broadway debut as the lead in “Almost Famous” and is now playing Marty McFly in “Back to the Future.” The guest presenters at the Minskoff included Justin Cooley, a 2021 finalist whose Tony nomination for his performance in “Kimberly Akimbo” came just two years later.During a whirlwind week that included intensive rehearsals, the young nominees attended the Tony Awards. “I went back to my dorm and I just cried,” said Theo Rickert, a rising senior from Illinois.Bess Adler 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

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      Review: In ‘Find Me Here,’ Sisters Grapple With a Father’s Will, and His Legacy

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      A family gathering fuels Crystal Finn’s new play, in which an excellent cast teases out the many complications of inheritance.Weddings, anniversaries, holidays: The family get-together is a dramatic gift that keeps on giving to both screen and stage. Crystal Finn’s new play, “Find Me Here,” at Wild Project, falls into a subcategory of the funerals subgenre — the opening of a will. In this case, a patriarch’s last wishes are discovered by his three daughters and their families. Truths and conflicts emerge gingerly, almost tentatively, because Finn is less interested in confrontation than in gentle poking and prodding.Unfortunately, “Find Me Here,” the third and final installment of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2024, is also unwilling to commit to any particular point. Its cast, however, including Constance Shulman, Miriam Silverman and Frank Wood, is so good that the production feels like the theater equivalent of handing Formula 1 drivers keys to an economy sedan. The actors are experts, but there is only so much the vehicle can do.The story revolves around the siblings Nancy (Lizbeth Mackay), Dee-Dee (Shulman) and Deborah (Kathleen Tolan), whose ages range from the mid-60s to the early 70s. Deborah is the oldest and has spent the past 30 years on an island, having followed a guru there. Tolan gives her the beatific mien of someone who can see a light invisible to others, which contrasts nicely with the acerbic Dee-Dee and the stressed-out Nancy.The will’s most consequential revelation is that Deborah was left nothing, an outcome she shrugs off. When Nancy tells Deborah that their father did love her, Dee-Dee says, “Well that’s … we just don’t know … he did, Deborah.”Mind you, Nancy also calls their father a tyrant and says that when she informed him that she was getting divorced, he replied, “Three daughters, and not one of them a success.”Though there are three sisters in the play, Finn (who was in the cast of “Usus,” the first installment of Summerworks 2024) doesn’t nod toward Chekhov so much as to some kind of American portraiture painted in small, innocuous brushstrokes.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: A ‘Ulysses’ That Squeezes Bloomsday Into 2 Hours, 40 Minutes

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      Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the huge James Joyce novel retains much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness.Looking at the stage as you enter the Luma theater, the smaller of the auditoriums at Bard College’s Fisher Center, you might think your ticket had been switched with one for a zoning board meeting. Enjoy the splendor of chairs lined up behind three conjoined conference tables! Admire the care with which pens, stacks of paper and wee bottles of water have been laid like dinner settings! Warily consult the large clock on the upstage wall that offers the real time — at least at first.And wonder whether this thing called “Ulysses” can possibly capture, in a reading, the richness of Joyce’s gargantuan novel about everything under the sun and also in the dark.With caveats, it can. The Elevator Repair Service production, playing at Bard through July 14, somehow manages to reduce the novel’s more than 260,000 words to 2 hours and 40 minutes with much of its humor, pathos and bawdiness intact. It’s not the complete text, of course; for that you must spend 24 hours at a Bloomsday marathon, during which even the readers may fall asleep.Instead, the edition used here, though verbatim, is highly intermittent. When each of its hundreds of cuts occurs, we hear the squeal of sped-up tape, and we see the seven cast members blown back in their chairs as if by a strong wind of gibberish.Still, this redacted “Ulysses” manages to touch down for at least a brief visit in each of the novel’s 18 episodes. These are roughly modeled on the ones in Homer’s “Odyssey” — Ulysses being the Latin name for Odysseus. But instead of tracing the watery wanderings of that Trojan War hero on his 10-year journey home to faithful Penelope, Joyce traces the bibulous wanderings of a Dublin ad canvasser named Leopold Bloom on a daylong journey back to his cheating wife, Molly.Center front, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, who plays both Stephen Dedalus and Bloom’s sharp-tongued cat. Left to right, at the desk: Dee Beasnael, Knight, Kate Benson and Maggie Hoffman.Maria BaranovaWe 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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      Leslye Headland’s ‘Cult of Love’ to Open on Broadway in the Fall

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      The play will be produced by Second Stage, which is also planning an Off Broadway production of a two-character drama by Donald Margulies.“Cult of Love,” a play about a fractious holiday gathering of a Christian family, will come to Broadway this fall via Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses.The announcement on Tuesday is a further sign that the current season is shaping up to be a robust one for plays, which had been considered an endangered species on Broadway, but which seem to be proliferating as the economic climate for musicals worsens.“Cult of Love” is written by Leslye Headland, a creator of the Netflix series “Russian Doll” and the Disney+ series “The Acolyte.” She has also written and directed films including “Sleeping With Other People.”The play is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 20 and to open Dec. 12 at the Hayes Theater.“Cult of Love” is Headland’s final work in a series, called “Seven Deadly Plays,” that is inspired by the seven deadly sins; this one is about pride. The play was staged in 2018 at IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles and there was a run early this year at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California. (A planned 2020 production at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts was canceled because of the pandemic.)The Broadway production, like the Berkeley production, will be directed by Trip Cullman. The play has 10 characters and casting has not been announced.Second Stage also said on Tuesday that it would stage an Off Broadway production of “Lunar Eclipse,” a two-character play by Donald Margulies (a Pulitzer winner for “Dinner With Friends”) that had a run last year at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.The new production, directed by Kate Whoriskey, is to star Reed Birney (a Tony winner for “The Humans”) and Lisa Emery as a long-married couple. It is to begin previews Oct. 9 and to open Oct. 30 at the Tony Kiser Theater.“Lunar Eclipse” is expected to be Second Stage’s final production in that space, which the company is exiting at the end of the year, citing financial considerations. Second Stage expects to present its spring season at the Pershing Square Signature Center while it explores options for an Off Broadway home. More