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      The Highs and Lows on London Stages in 2024

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      Our critics discuss which A-lister performances on the West End were worth the ticket price, and why so many new musicals struggled this year.This year saw London host buzzy productions like Jamie Lloyd’s “Romeo and Juliet,” starring Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, and Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus,” with Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. Other productions struggled, including more star vehicles — and some musicals, particularly.Matt Wolf and Houman Barekat, The New York Times’s London theater critics, discuss the triumphs and the disappointments of the last year in British theater, and also look ahead to 2025.Which productions impressed you most?HOUMAN BAREKAT James Macdonald’s “Waiting for Godot” at the Theater Royal Haymarket was superb. The Beckett estate is famously proscriptive about what can be done with his plays, so the performers have to make their mark in small, subtle ways. Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati delivered a master class in timing as the leads.I was hugely impressed by Rachel O’Riordan’s take on “Faith Healer” at the Lyric Hammersmith, featuring Declan Conlon as an insidiously charismatic Svengali. On a lighter note, I also loved the National Theater’s arch, camped-up version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” with its gorgeous staging and costumes.The cast of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” including Hugh Skinner, center, as Jack Worthing.Marc BrennerMATT WOLF I second Houman’s choices, and would extend further kudos to the writer-director Robert Icke’s scorching take on “Oedipus,” whose sold-out run proved that there is still an appreciative audience in London for serious theater. Special shout-out to Icke’s Jocasta, Lesley Manville, who is well on the way to becoming a giant of British 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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      Martin Benson, Regional Theater Impresario, Dies at 87

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      South Coast Repertory, which he founded with a partner, was a major force in Southern California theater. He directed more than 100 of its productions.Martin Benson, a founder and longtime artistic director of South Coast Repertory, a nationally renowned regional theater in Southern California that won a Tony Award in 1988, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Huntington Beach, Calif. He was 87.Justin Krumb, his stepson, said the cause was probably a heart attack.Mr. Benson and David Emmes, friends and former theater students at San Francisco State College (now University), started South Coast Repertory in 1964 and developed it as a home for classic works and newly commissioned plays and musicals. As Orange County’s first professional theater, it filled a void.“We’ve always been a theater of literature,” Mr. Benson told The New York Times in 1988. “Shaw, Synge, Wilde and new playwrights.”South Coast’s many world premieres included Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wit,” Donald Margulies’s “Sight Unseen,” Craig Lucas’s “Prelude to a Kiss” and Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” — all of which went on to Off Broadway and Broadway runs. Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with Ed Harris and John Ashton, made its Southern California premiere in 1981. Ten of Mr. Greenberg’s plays were commissioned by South Coast and had their premieres there.Mr. Benson directed 119 productions and won seven Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards: three for plays by George Bernard Shaw, whose works he specialized in, and the others for “Wit,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” and Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days.”Mr. Benson, left, in an undated photo with David Emmes, with whom he founded South Coast Repertory, and Jerry Patch, the company’s resident dramaturg.Glenn Koenig/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Raygun Shuts Down Musical Inspired by Her Jeered Olympic Breaking

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      The comedian behind the parody about the Australian breaker who became a summer celebrity said she was willing to make some changes to avoid legal drama.A performance of “Breaking: The Musical,” a parody exploring the journey of the Australian breaker known as B-girl Raygun, whose unusual routines at the Paris Olympics this summer led to mockery and memes, was shut down after a cease-and-desist letter.Steph Broadbridge, the show’s creator and star, said she was willing to make changes so the show could move forward, but not at the expense of art. She said the show in Sydney was designed to be intimate enough that she could receive feedback from friends and other comedians with the goal of having it fully ready by May.“I was trying to get notes and bump up the jokes and make it funnier,” she said.The breaker, Dr. Rachael Gunn, a professor with a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Macquarie University who has a background as a ballroom, jazz and tap dancer, became an unlikely Olympic celebrity after losing all three of her head-to-head battles with routines that featured her thrashing about on her side and hopping around like a kangaroo.The one-hour show was supposed to feature a dozen actors and songs like “You May Be a B-Girl, But You’ll Always Be an A-Girl to Me,” “I’m Breaking Down” and “I Would Have Won but I Pulled a Muscle,” according to an Eventbrite listing.Broadbridge, 42, said in a video posted to her Instagram account that Gunn’s lawyers had said that the musical could damage the dancer’s brand and that she was not allowed to perform any of Raygun’s signature moves.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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      Adam Lambert Is Finding the Fun, and the Fear, in ‘Cabaret’

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      Making his Broadway debut as the show’s Emcee, the singer is reveling in what he calls “a thinking piece of musical theater.”Over at the Kit Kat Club, the change in “Cabaret” is apparent in the show’s first moments. The Emcee, as played by the singer-songwriter Adam Lambert, is nothing like the Emcee as played by the film star Eddie Redmayne, who opened the current Broadway revival last spring after it transferred from London.Lambert, in his Broadway debut, turns out to have theatrical chops: He’s lending his Emcee not only vocal shapeliness but also puckish warmth. The alienation so central to Redmayne’s interpretation has been replaced by humanity.To Rebecca Frecknall, the show’s director, Lambert’s rock-star charisma was part of his appeal.“What I didn’t anticipate was how naughty and funny he was going to be and how much he was going to enjoy that relationship with the audience,” she said by phone. “There’s also just something brilliant about what he brings of his personal identity to the role — having a queer, Jewish artist step into that space with that material.”Lambert and ensemble members in the show’s latest revival at the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan.Julieta CervantesSet in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, “Cabaret” starts out light and decadent and grows steadily, stealthily darker, with gut-punch songs like “If You Could See Her,” a satire of antisemitism. There’s also the ballad “I Don’t Care Much” — recently released as a single — which Lambert describes as “a real emotional moment” of “struggle with indifference” for the Emcee.“They were so kind to raise the key to make it more of a torch song for me,” Lambert said.With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, “Cabaret” became a hit with its original Broadway production in 1966. Lambert, 42, has known the musical ever since he was a theater kid growing up in San Diego, when his voice teacher showed him the movie adaptation.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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      In ‘Our Town,’ the Characters Are Fictional. The Smells Are Real.

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      The curtain had just come down on a recent Wednesday matinee of the Broadway revival of “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play set in a small New Hampshire town. But cast and crew members were already in the basement of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, lining up to assemble BLTs.The fixings were arrayed on a table: hot bacon, romaine hearts and tomato slices, white toast, mayonnaise (traditional and vegan) and, for iconoclasts, honey mustard and avocado. There were noisy debates about whether crispy or chewy bacon makes a superior sandwich.There was consensus on one matter. “What’s better than bacon?” barked Julie Halston, one of the show’s 28 actors. “Nothing.”This was not a catered meal or a special occasion. It was a BLT Wednesday, and the bacon had been fried up in the wings, just steps away from the actors as they performed the play’s final stretch. To add a sense memory, two pounds of bacon are fried at every performance.The “Our Town” cast members (from left) Heather Ayers, Hagan Oliveras and Greg Wood assembled BLTs after a recent Wednesday matinee.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesKenny Leon, who directed the show, said he was inspired by David Cromer’s 2009 Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which featured the onstage cooking of bacon during the same third-act scene, when the ghost of Emily, a leading character, visits her childhood home at breakfast 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

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      9 Best Theater Moments of 2024

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      “The Outsiders,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ragtime” were among the productions with stage moments that stood out this year.Climate protesters disrupting a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” the outdoor walking scene in “Sunset Boulevard” and the giggles prompted by a character’s reaction to a hunky celebrity’s glutes in “Hold On to Me Darling”: The rewards of live theater were aplenty this year. Here, nine other stage moments that especially stood out, listed chronologically. NICOLE HERRINGTONExpert FloppingSutton Foster does some playful mugging in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSutton Foster’s performance as the unorthodox Princess Winnifred in “Once Upon a Mattress” was full of playful mugging. But it was in the show’s indelible scene that her best physical comedy shone through: sprawling atop a tower of mattresses stacked on a pea, flailing, flopping, hopping and then propped, rear-end up, like a fitful child protesting bedtime. It’s the kind of clowning that few can pull off with Foster’s ease and charm. MAYA PHILLIPSCoroner’s Cabaret ActAndrew Durand, left, and Thom Sesma in the musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beguilingly strange new Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” retold the true tale of an Old West bank robber whose mummified corpse landed, in 1976, on the Los Angeles autopsy table of Thomas Noguchi, coroner to the stars. Noguchi is this dark comedy’s conscience — and in Thom Sesma’s performance, a fabulous showman, too. Grabbing the dangling microphone intended for postmortem notes, he delivered a slab-side nightclub number, boasting of celebrities he had cut up. Suddenly, surreally, death was a cabaret. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESVirtuosic ViolenceA balletic rumble in “The Outsiders” is stagecraft at its best. 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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      Best Theater of 2024

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      Broadway roared back, but the kitties were downtown and the prayer service was in Brooklyn.Broadway always looks its healthiest around the holidays, and indeed, right now, most of its 41 theaters are lit, with the rest soon set to load in new tenants. Box office grosses, if not quite back to prepandemic levels, seem likely to meet or exceed last year’s $1.6 billion. But the real health of the commercial theater, for me, is demonstrated by how much it offers its audiences, not its investors. That’s why, most years, my list of best shows is top-heavy with the provocative work being brewed Off Broadway. If my latest list tilts the other way, perhaps that reflects Broadway’s liberal borrowings from the noncommercial sector — borrowings and often improvements. My Top 10, listed chronologically and covering the period from December 2023 through the end of November, are therefore mostly shows that, wherever they started and wherever they wind up, put a premium on provocation, sure, but also entertainment. That’s what I call healthy.‘Appropriate’ by Branden Jacobs-JenkinsSarah Paulson, center, in her Tony Award-winning performance in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMost plays about racism dramatize the damage done to its victims. But “Appropriate,” which opened last December in a Second Stage Theater production, looks instead at the sickening effects that hatred can have on its perpetrators — and their heirs. On the surface a “dividing the estate” play, with the children of a good ol’ boy squabbling over their inherited real and unreal estate, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s uproarious tale of family guilt (directed by Lila Neugebauer and with a blistering, Tony-winning performance by Sarah Paulson) was in effect a corroded mirror reflecting America’s worst (and worst-kept) secrets. (Read our review of “Appropriate” and our profile of Paulson.)‘Terce: A Practical Breviary’ by Heather ChristianThe new year brought with it a new prayer, if you were willing to go to a former Sunday school in Brooklyn to find it. At the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, a large cast of “caregivers and makers” offered an unusual liturgy, performing Heather Christian’s ritual of praise for “the divine feminine.” The visionary composer’s typically catholic musical references — plainsong, gospel, electronica, soul and New Orleans funk — short-circuited rational analysis, inviting transcendence in much the way the rituals of the established church do. But this time, in Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s richly welcoming staging, the transcendence was for everyone, of any faith or none. (Read our review of “Terce.”)‘Dead Outlaw’ by David Yazbek, Erik Della Penna and Itamar MosesAndrew Durand, in the coffin, as the title character in the Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe afterlife of a mummy sounds more like an “I dare you” literary project than a hook for a good-time musical. But the mostly true story of Elmer McCurdy — wastrel, roustabout, schnook and sideshow attraction — got a brilliant coda in this Off Broadway show at the Minetta Lane Theater. The lovingly serious direction by David Cromer tempered the absurdity of the tale with sweetness and humor, and the cast, let by Andrew Durand as McCurdy, responded to the tumbleweed of a score with gorgeous singing. It’s the kind of musical you’d never find on Broadway — except that you might, next year. (Read our review of “Dead Outlaw” and the story behind the show.)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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      Marvin Laird, Musical Presence on and Off Broadway, Dies at 85

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      He conducted Broadway shows and worked with Bernadette Peters. But he was probably best known for writing the music for the darkly comic “Ruthless!”Marvin Laird, a conductor for Broadway musicals and for performers like Bernadette Peters who also composed the music for “Ruthless!,” the campy, award-winning Off Broadway show about a girl who will do anything — including kill — to star in a school play, died in a hospital on Dec. 2 in Bridgeport, Conn. He was 85.His partner in marriage, Joel Paley, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of an infection.Mr. Laird was the assistant musical director for a summer stock production of “Gypsy” in Lambertville, N.J., in 1961 when he met Ms. Peters, who was 13 and was playing two small roles.“He was just the most energetic, charismatic fellow you’d ever want to meet,” Ms. Peters said in a phone interview.He later conducted the orchestras for her concerts and for two Broadway revivals in which she starred: “Annie Get Your Gun” in 1999 and “Gypsy” in 2003. When Ms. Peters appeared in a revival of “Follies” in 2011, he was the associate conductor.“The orchestras loved him,” Ms. Peters said. “He had a great sense of humor and they respected his musicianship.” She added: “He knew what I was going to do before I did it. I don’t sing a song the same way twice; it’s whatever happens to the song. And Marvin could get the whole orchestra to breathe with him.”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