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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Headline Broadway ‘Romeo and Juliet’

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      A production featuring the screen stars, with music by Jack Antonoff, will open in October at Circle in the Square.Rachel Zegler has already played a Juliet-inspired figure, starring as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” And Kit Connor has played a Romeo of sorts, starring as a yearning adolescent in the boy-meets-boy television series “Heartstopper.”Now the two actors are bringing a new production of “Romeo and Juliet” to Broadway. Their version, which seems to be leaning into the alienation of youth in a world of violent adults, is to begin performances Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 24 at Circle in the Square Theater.The production, which announced its timing and location on Wednesday, has said little about its concept, but there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas: The show is to feature music by Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer best known for his successful collaborations with Taylor Swift, and it is being marketed with a vulgarity about the plight of young people. On Wednesday, the show released a video of Zegler and Connor, in contemporary clothing and setting, flirting and dancing to a song from Bleachers, which is Antonoff’s band.“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and this will be its 37th production on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database. This production is to be directed by Sam Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” who has previously directed Broadway productions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and who is directing this season’s revival of “An Enemy of the People.” Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge!”, will add a dancer’s sensibility to the production; she is being credited with “movement.”This revival, first announced last month, is being produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea and partially owned by Sony Music Masterworks. More

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      ‘Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha’ Review: Julia Masli Is a Problem-Solving Clown

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      A hit at Edinburgh Fringe last year, Julia Masli’s show arrives at SoHo Playhouse for its New York debut.For a show that has its audience in stitches, “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” is not without solemnity. On a recent evening, its sole performer, Julia Masli, called a spectator “the symbol of evil.” Another was “a symbol of the futility of mankind.” No matter: The crowd was doubled over from beginning to end. Was it the Estonia-born Masli’s strongly accented English? Her tone, which ranged from deceptively blank to deceptively sweet?To be fair, these remarks landed in the general context of Masli trying to help people. In her breakthrough show, a hit last year at Edinburgh Fringe and now running at SoHo Playhouse in Manhattan, she goes up to audience members and simply asks, “Problem?” Then she proceeds to offer a solution.Early in the evening, someone just as simply answered, “Sleep.” So Masli took him onstage, gave him an eye mask and had him lie down on a chaise longue, where he stayed for the remainder of the show. Another man revealed dating frustrations: “Gay men are insufferable,” he said. Masli appeared confounded, or at least acted that way, and replied, “I don’t know what to say.” Twice she made us hug our neighbors.Moving up and down a single aisle with a discernible deliberateness, Masli projected a persona that was halfway between curious child and ingenuous alien just landed on Earth — that she is among us but not like us is reinforced by her having a golden mannequin leg for a left arm, with a mic attached at the end. Her otherworldliness is underlined by the work of the sound designer Alessio Festuccia and the sound tech Jonny Woolley, which creates an eerie mood that can turn discordant unexpectedly, and peaks in a fantastic coup de remix that shouldn’t be spoiled.Masli wants to be of assistance, but her facade of naïveté leaves plenty of room for impishness. She is clown, comedian and trickster, revealing people to themselves and others, but also making them do her bidding. That last feat is quite impressive: The theatergoers may think of themselves as game for anything, but a more cynical observer might also marvel at the degree of obedience, and muse, “So that’s how cults are born.”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 Lonely Few’ Review: Rocking Out and Falling in Love

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      Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.Of all the juke joints in all the towns in all the South, Amy had to walk into Paul’s.OK, yes, he invited her. A musician with a touch of fame, whom he’s known since she was a child, she’s stopping in for a visit on a break from her solo tour.For Lila, the front woman of the local band that’s playing the bar that night, the world shifts permanently when Amy glides in, trailing all the glamour and cool of a life so much bolder than anything Lila has ever lived.“Great set,” Amy tells her afterward. And when Lila bashfully shrugs off the compliment, Amy repeats it. “No, really — great set,” she says, her words unambiguously flirtatious. The chemistry between these two is instant, and profound. As soon as they sing together, so is the harmony.“The Lonely Few,” the achingly romantic, softly sexy, genuinely rocking new musical by Rachel Bonds (“Jonah”) and Zoe Sarnak at MCC Theater, is Lila and Amy’s love story. The telling of it gives us more of Lila’s world than of Amy’s, though — the same way that the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill” is grounded more in the world of the ordinary bookseller than of the movie star who wanders in and claims his heart.Meticulously directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, “The Lonely Few” is beautifully cast, and it has an absolute ace in its Lila: Lauren Patten, bringing the full-voiced ferocity that she unleashed in “Jagged Little Pill” — and won a Tony Award for — and the endearing awkwardness that she lent to “The Wolves,” alongside a vulnerability that could just about break you.In Lila’s tiny Kentucky hometown, music-making is the passion she gets up to when she isn’t working her grocery store job with her bassist and best friend, Dylan (Damon Daunno), or keeping an anxious eye on her brother, Adam (Peter Mark Kendall), whose drinking is out of control.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 ‘Three Houses,’ a Dark Karaoke Night of the Soul

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      It’s open mic at the post-pandemic cocktail bar where Dave Malloy’s hypnotic triptych of monodramas takes place.It’s only fitting that a bar, replete with liquor and raised like an altar, presides over Dave Malloy’s “Three Houses,” which opened on Monday at the Signature Theater. Malloy’s music is, after all, intoxicating. Alcohol is the accelerant for the show’s linked monodramas. And hung over is how it leaves its pandemic-sozzled characters at the end of a dark karaoke night of the soul.You may feel that way too: lost in a morning-after fog like Malloy’s three protagonists, each having radically relocated during lockdown. Susan (Margo Seibert) found herself in her dead grandmother’s ranch home in Latvia, pointlessly alphabetizing the library. Sadie (Mia Pak) moved into her auntie’s New Mexico adobe, where a life-simulation game akin to Animal Crossing was her only companion. Having holed up in a “red brick basement in Brooklyn,” Beckett (J.D. Mollison) soon turned into an Amazon shopaholic.As each now takes the open mic at the metaphysical bar to sing about going “a little bit crazy living alone in the pandemic,” it becomes clear, though, that more was at play. Encouraged by a bartender not incidentally called Wolf (Scott Stangland) — “don’t be afraid to go deep,” he says — they reveal to us, and perhaps to themselves, that Covid wasn’t the only threat to their well-being. Love, too, was a lockdown.A recent seismic breakup is part of all their stories. Susan’s ex, Julian, moved to another state for work. Sadie’s Jasmine kept “messing up” household routines with her spontaneity. Beckett did not feel safe letting his wife, Jackie, see fully “the darkness within” him. That these accusations are so transparently thin does not weaken their effectiveness as defenses — or, because we recognize the behavior, as storytelling.But Malloy’s attempt to cross-reference the stand-alone 30-minute stories with psychological and literal echoes palls. It’s easy enough to write off the twee alliteration of the three J-named exes as a kind of light rhyme or fairy-tale resonance. Same with the eight jugs of red currant wine in Susan’s tale that become eight cases of mezcal in Sadie’s and eight bottles of plum brandy in Beckett’s. Why eight? Why not? The point is that people drink heavily in isolation.The meaning of the more ornate linkages is less clear. Each segment includes an obligatory puppet — a Latvian house dragon, a video game badger, a creepy spider, all designed by James Ortiz — that feels more like a stab at theatrical variety than an expression of a relevant human need. (Even so, Annie Tippe’s staging grows monotonous.) The bar’s orange-vested waiters (Ching Valdes-Aran and Henry Stram) reappear as various loving grandparents, indistinguishable despite their accents. But all the characters seem to have been reverse engineered from templates, suggesting structural desperation.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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      Choreographer’s ‘Dog Poop Attack’ on a Critic Inspired This New Play

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      At this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival, one production explores an incident that shocked the German theater world last year.On Feb. 11, 2023, the choreographer Marco Goecke cornered a dance critic, Wiebke Hüster, during intermission of a performance at the Hanover State Opera in northern Germany. After asking her about negative reviews that she had written about his past productions, Goecke took out a bag of dog feces and smeared her face with it.That shocking incident, which generated headlines around the world, is the starting point for “The Dog Poop Attack,” a production at this year’s Theatertreffen festival in Berlin.Of the 10 shows at the event, a celebration of German-language theater, “The Dog Poop Attack” has arguably generated the most excitement, thanks to its explosive subject matter and its unlikely place of origin: Jena, a city in eastern Germany that is hardly known as a theatrical capital.After the incident, Goecke gave up his position as Hanover company’s ballet director “by mutual agreement.” He was later suspended from the Nederlands Dans Theater, the Dutch company where he was an associate choreographer. Hüster filed a criminal complaint against him; Goecke was ordered to pay 5.000 euros in damages. And while he has issued public apologies, Goecke has remained more defiant than contrite, and disturbingly equivocal: He has both admitted to overreacting and also tried to justify his behavior.“The Dog Poop Attack” mulls over the incident, the attention it generated and what it says about the state of the performing arts in Germany. The play’s premise is simple: A troupe of actors at a provincial theater hope that mounting a production has the idea of making a production about the infamous affair will help them gain wider attention. This meta-conceit recalls backstage farces like “Noises Off” and “Waiting for Guffman,” but this show, devised and written collectively by the six performers, the director Walter Bart and the dramaturg Hannah Baumann, does something so straightforward yet daring that it’s a minor miracle that it works.The production’s gambit is to dramatize the creative process itself. For the bulk of the evening, the actors — playing themselves, or thinly fictionalized versions of themselves — dramatically narrate their email exchanges about how to stage the show. The lively way they put their brainstorming, discussions and quarrels onstage, along with a healthy dose of irony, makes for provocative and absorbing 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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      ‘Nobody Cares’ About Laura Benanti, but They Let Her Entertain Them

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      While poking fun at her own agreeable malleability, Benanti flexes her talents in a show that will be available on Audible, without the physical dimension.Laura Benanti’s show “Nobody Cares,” at the Minetta Lane Theater, is being recorded and will soon be available from the comfort of your home. Future audiences are likely to enjoy Benanti’s autobiographical romp through her family life, her romantic and professional travails, her insecurities (see the title) and her often overwhelming need to please. They will appreciate the handful of original songs, which she wrote with the music director Todd Almond — Benanti is a fabulous singer, with a Tony Award on her mantel for her sultry turn as Louise in “Gypsy.”But because the show will be on Audible, those audiences will be made up of listeners, and they will miss out on the physical comedy of a woman who can communicate more with one raised eyebrow than most actors can with a lengthy monologue. Benanti dramatically throws herself on the floor during the number “Give It to Me” before effortlessly slithering back up. This might be an exorcism of the time she broke her neck while doing a pratfall as Cinderella in the 2002 revival of “Into the Woods.”Did that accident make her change her reflexive compliance? Nope: “There wasn’t a strong enough neck brace in the world that could have kept me from nodding ‘yes’ to something I strongly disagreed with,” she says in the show.That Benanti is a terrific all-around comedienne won’t surprise those who have seen, say, the musical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” her impersonation of Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” or videos like the one in which she reimagined the obsessive Fosca from Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” as a Times Square mascot. Now she’s exploring new-ish terrain in an evening-length show, directed by Annie Tippe, that stands out from her past solo projects by relying more on narration and embracing a confessional mode. The general approach is a little reminiscent of Sherie Rene Scott’s “Everyday Rapture,” from 2009 (though that piece had more songs, and they were covers).After a beginning that feels stiffly self-conscious, Benanti loosens into her comedic rhythm and packs a lot into 90 minutes: a childhood as a theater nerd, three marriages, two daughters, perimenopause, shooting a nude scene in a recent prestige TV series. The production’s biggest missed opportunity might lie in how little Benanti interacts with Almond, who leads the five-piece band and occasionally pipes up with impeccably timed rejoinders, or with her backup singers, Barrie Lobo McLain and Chelsea Lee Williams.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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      A Times Reporter Visits the Latest Broadway Shows

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      What’s it like to attend twelve productions in nine days? Michael Paulson, the Times theater reporter, shared his sprint around Midtown Manhattan.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times, which means I see a lot of plays and musicals — about 100 a year. But I don’t often go to opening nights. Those evenings are celebratory, and audiences are filled with the productions’ friends and supporters. The press is generally invited to attend performances on the nights just before (those are called previews) or after the openings.This year was different. My colleagues and I noticed some months ago that April — always a busy time for Broadway as shows scramble to open by the deadline to be eligible for the Tony Awards — was shaping up to be more congested than usual. Twelve shows were opening in a nine-day stretch.Oprah Winfrey attends the opening night performance of “Hell’s Kitchen.”Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThis is a tough time for Broadway. Production costs have risen and overall attendance has fallen since the pandemic. I suggested to the Culture desk’s editors that it might be interesting if we sent a reporter and photographer to every opening, chronicling these moments of hope at a time of challenge.As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.That’s how I wound up spending nine days with the photographer Landon Nordeman, lurching from show to show; watching as many performances as I could; hanging out on red (and yellow, and pink, and blue) carpets; listening to curtain call speeches; and even popping in to a few after-parties.I worked with two photo editors, Jolie Ruben and Amanda Webster; a visual storytelling editor, Josephine Sedgwick; the theater editor, Nicole Herrington; and the Arts & Leisure editor, Andrew LaVallee, to hash out a strategy. We asked ourselves: How would we differentiate the openings from one another? And how could we use the sea of events to help our readers, most of whom live far from Broadway, understand more about this industry and this art form?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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      Bebe Neuwirth on the Part of a Stage That Feels Like Home

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      “I love older theaters in particular,” said the actress, who is up for her third Tony for “Cabaret.” “The new ones don’t have as many ghosts.”Even when Bebe Neuwirth isn’t dancing, she’s dancing.“I am a dancer first,” she said in a phone interview from her apartment in Greenwich Village. “I’m a physical performer, and that impulse, that expression doesn’t go away even if I’m standing still and listening to someone.”Neuwirth, 65, is a Tony Award nominee for her performance as Fräulein Schneider in “Cabaret” and is already a two-time winner for her roles in “Sweet Charity” in 1986 and “Chicago” in 1997. She has also gained fans for her television work on the Julia Child dramedy “Julia” and the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” But it’s theater that keeps calling her back.“I’ve been onstage since I was 7,” she said. “It’s my home.”On a rainy afternoon, Neuwirth discussed her love for the city’s Art Deco buildings, why the Jersey Shore is magical in winter and where to find the best softball in Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Flea MarketsSome of my first flea markets were at the Rose Bowl, and now I seek them out wherever I am. I go down to the one under the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes. Most of my house is filled with things I’ve collected from flea markets, but I’m always looking.2Ceramics StudiosFor the last four years, off and on, I’ve been going to ceramics studios and throwing clay, hand building clay. I love spending time there. Friendships get made just like they do in ballet class.3Dog ParksI don’t have one — though I do have three cats — so I love walking through a dog park and watching them play and interact. I love big dogs — German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, huskies, Weimaraners. And I like small dogs who are really big dogs at heart. I love Pomeranians because those tiny little fluff balls are actually huge dogs on the inside — they crack me 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