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      Review: Jessica Lange Stars in Paula Vogel’s ‘Mother Play’

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      Jessica Lange stars as a ferocious matriarch alongside Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons in Vogel’s latest family drama.In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes.“There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.”Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy.Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 14, Martha 12. Phyllis is in her mid 30s, barely treading water after a foundered marriage. At times, when she can pry her hands from a gin bottle, she clings to her children as if they are life rafts. Otherwise, she regards them as jetsam. Phyllis, we learn, never wanted to be a mother.On finding herself pregnant: “I thought: Other women aren’t mother material, but they get through it. Just hang on, Phyllis, hang on. But it is never over. It’s a life sentence.” How’s that for a bedtime story?As a single working mother, Phyllis can afford only custodial apartments, and those early evictions come when she complains too loudly about the roaches and maggots. The vermin are brought to life, extravagantly, in Shawn Duan’s projections. And David Zinn’s flexible set nimbly conveys each new abode. The later, more fraught expulsions come when Phyllis rejects first Carl, who comes out as gay in college, and then later Martha, who is also queer.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 Culture Desk: Alicia Keys on Reimagining “Fallin” for Broadway

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      Alicia Keys was only 20 years old when her 2001 single “Fallin’” became an international sensation, topping the Billboard charts, winning multiple Grammys and helping propel her to stardom. Now, more than two decades later, the song appears in the new Broadway musical “Hell’s Kitchen.”The show — which draws from Keys’s life story and her discography — presents ”Fallin’” in a totally new way: as a song of seduction sung by a middle-aged man. Keys joins our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, to discuss the history of “Fallin’” and what she has learned from adapting the song for the stage.On today’s episodeMichael Paulson, a theater reporter for The Times. More

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      Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

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      Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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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      Carrie Robbins, Costume Designer for Dozens of Broadway Shows, Dies at 81

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      She made a classic wig and poodle skirt for “Grease” (using a bath mat and a toilet cover) and turned actors into Spanish inquisitors, British highwaymen and more.Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Ms. Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as the syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie.Ms. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink poodle skirt out of her own bath mat and furry toilet seat cover.To prepare for designing the costumes for “Grease,” Ms. Robbins studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s.Betty Lee Hunt AssociatesThe poodle skirt practically became a mandatory feature of “Grease” shows. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a production of “Grease” backstage, she saw a man taking a red Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she told him that the wardrobe department surely could afford a high-end custom hairpiece. He replied that only a Magic Marker would be authentic.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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      Improv Is Making a Comeback in New York

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      The pandemic dealt a major blow to the once-thriving comedy form, but a new energy can be seen in performances throughout the city.Improv comedy became so influential in the first two decades of this century that you could make an argument it mattered more to popular culture than stand-up.Lines regularly ran down the block outside Upright Citizens Brigade. Students who once would have studied Method acting took classes in “Yes, and.” The author Sam Wasson described it as “America’s most popular art,” and its major theaters were training grounds for stars like Tina Fey, Jordan Peele and Stephen Colbert.Then, all of a sudden, the boom went bust. The pandemic hurt every live art, but arguably none more than improv. Not only did struggles force the sale of three of its biggest institutions (Second City, iO and U.C.B.), but the prestige surrounding the form faded as criticism mounted over business models built on free labor and racist treatment of artists. The title of the new book “Winging it: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump” captures its new mixed reputation.From left: Drew Reilly, Jordan Savusa, Ashley Leisten and Ben Rameaka at Second City.Carlos PerezBut with a flurry of improv theaters opening or moving into new homes in this city, one of the major questions hovering over comedy today is: Can improv make a comeback?“Second City” began as a New Yorker’s insult, then became a Chicago institution, so its arrival in Brooklyn is a return home of sorts. Not only is its vast Williamsburg complex fancier than any other improv house in town — the Manhattan Theater Club to everyone else’s La MaMa — but its first revue represents an aesthetic shift and possibly a changing of the guard.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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      How a Broadway Theater Was Remade Into a Queer Cabaret

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      Scutt set up the theater so the audience enters through a neon-lit alleyway rather than through the main entrance. “For me, design is about how the story is meeting the public,” he says. “I want to open up new possibilities of theater-going.” Coming out of the pandemic, he felt the need to celebrate “the joy of being together — a group of people experiencing something alive.”

      The arch also features images of a blue comb and hat, a golden key and a scarlet drop of blood — symbols derived from a plaque on the theater’s cornerstone, dating to 1925, which says, “Within these walls the human mind shall once again celebrate with gaiety, with pity and with truth the divine pageant of the human soul.” As Scutt thinks of it, “That’s ‘Cabaret,’ full stop.” More

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      ‘Oh, Mary!,’ a Surprise Downtown Hit, Will Play Broadway This Summer

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      Cole Escola’s madcap comedy about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln will begin performances in June.“Oh, Mary!,” an outrageously madcap comedy that imagines the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an oft-inebriated chanteuse-wannabe, will transfer to Broadway this summer after becoming a surprise hit downtown.The show, which is gleefully tasteless and also ahistorical, is the brainchild of Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who built a cult following with a series of YouTube sketches and reached a wider audience with a role on Hulu’s “Difficult People.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews June 26 and to open July 11 at the Lyceum Theater. It is scheduled to run until Sept. 15.“Oh, Mary!” began its life in January at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. That commercial Off Broadway run has been extended twice and is scheduled to end May 12. The run has been sold out, and has attracted a stream of celebrities, including Bowen Yang, Timothée Chalamet, Amy Schumer and Jessica Lange; one night Steven Spielberg, who directed the 2012 film “Lincoln,” showed up with Sally Field (who played Mary Todd Lincoln in the film) and Tony Kushner (who wrote the screenplay).“Oh, Mary!” was written by Escola and is directed by Sam Pinkleton. The Broadway run will feature the same cast as the Off Broadway run, including Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln; it is being produced by Kevin McCollum, Lucas McMahon, Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia. More

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      ‘Orlando’ Review: A Virginia Woolf Fantasy That Plays With Gender

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      In this revival of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the Woolf novel, now starring Taylor Mac, the flashes of comedy can’t make up for the loss of poetry.There’s a slight pause and a knowingly raised eyebrow — enough to provoke laughter from the audience — when the title character of “Orlando” begins to introduce himself with this line: “He — for there could be no doubt of his sex.”But the play is set in a universe in which there is, in fact, doubt. And this Orlando is played by the protean writer and performer Taylor Mac, who delivers the line while cutting a resplendent androgynous figure in shiny red boots and white, vaguely Elizabethan garb.Sarah Ruhl’s play, in a revival that opened on Sunday at Signature Theater, is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s fantasy of the same title. Published in 1928, the book has traversed the decades as seemingly unscathed by time as its protagonist. When it starts, Orlando is a 16-year-old boy during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. About halfway through, he abruptly wakes up as a woman, and continues on, barely aging, until the story ends in the Roaring Twenties. Orlando might still be at it somewhere, for all we know.In an era of questioning and rethinking gender norms, you can see why this tale would particularly resonate — and indeed we just can’t seem to quit it. In the past few years alone, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado explored his path as a trans man through the mirror of Woolf’s novel in his film “Orlando, My Political Biography,” Emma Corrin starred in Neil Bartlett’s 2022 stage adaptation, and in 2019 the director Katie Mitchell and the playwright Alice Birch offered their own take.Ruhl’s version premiered Off Broadway in 2010, and casting Mac, a shape-shifter of the highest order, in this revival’s main role is certainly a coup. Will Davis’s production, however, seems to think that’s enough.The show gets off to a clunky start, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and using that device as a crutch. This may be an attempt to echo Woolf’s own distancing technique (she styled the novel as a biography), but it just comes across as broad, as if Davis didn’t trust that the text’s humor would still charm us. Mac is also a little tentative at first, which is odd for a performer known for boundary-crossing fearlessness. (Mac’s most recent creation, the musical epic “Bark of Millions,” paid tribute to queer figures.)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