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      George Clooney Is Making His Broadway Debut With ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

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      George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.In the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney, standing, played the news producer Fred Friendly, while David Strathairn, seated in the background, played Edward R. Murrow.Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Independent PicturesWe 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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      Cynthia Erivo Will Host This Year’s Tony Awards

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      The actress won a Tony Award for “The Color Purple,” and is now nominated for an Oscar for playing Elphaba in the film adaptation of “Wicked.”Cynthia Erivo, the Tony Award-winning actress whose Oscar-nominated performance in the “Wicked” film has brought her wide recognition, will host this year’s Tony Awards.The American Theater Wing and the Broadway League — the two organizations that present the awards — announced on Wednesday that Erivo would host the ceremony on June 8 at Radio City Music Hall. Much of the event will be broadcast on CBS.Erivo, 38, is a British actress who had her breakout role in “The Color Purple,” starring as Celie in a revival of the musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel. That production opened on Broadway in 2015; Erivo’s performance was the talk of the town that season, and she won the Tony Award for best leading actress in 2016.She pivoted quickly to work in film and television, picking up two Oscar nominations, for best leading actress and for best original song, for the 2019 film “Harriet,” and this year she is nominated as best leading actress for “Wicked,” which is the first installment of a two-part film. (The second half, in which Erivo also stars, is to be released in November.) In the “Wicked” films, Erivo plays Elphaba, the green-skinned witch whose debatable wickedness is the subject of the story.Erivo has been busy this year — ubiquitous as she has promoted “Wicked” with her co-star Ariana Grande, but also pursuing her own projects. On Tuesday, the Hollywood Bowl announced one more: in August Erivo will star as Jesus in a one-weekend revival of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”The Tony Awards honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway; this year’s ceremony will consider shows that open between April 26, 2024, and April 27, 2025. This year’s nominees are to be announced on May 1. More

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      Drawing From Bob Dylan’s Songbook, Learning Lessons in Mortality

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      Ordinarily, the actor-writer-musician Todd Almond is a pretty unflappable stage presence. But normal rules do not apply when you discover at intermission that Bob Dylan is in the audience of the performance you’re giving of a musical that’s saturated with his songs — and your harmonica solo is coming up.“I don’t know if you’ve ever panicked,” Almond writes in his new book, “Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl From the North Country’ and Broadway’s Rebirth.”An oral history, it chronicles the journey of Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country” from the Public Theater in 2018 to Broadway in 2020, then through the theater’s traumatic pandemic shutdown to a restart in 2021 on a much more fragile Broadway. Rigorously footnoted, informed by interviews with fellow company members as well as industry figures, the book is shaped by Almond’s own memories as a cast member making his Broadway debut.Its publication dovetails with Audible’s audio release of Almond’s surreal, nearly solo musical “I’m Almost There,” about one man’s fear-filled, distraction-strewn path to love. Inspired by “The Odyssey,” it had a limited run at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan last fall, directed by David Cromer.Earlier this month, Almond, 48, spoke by phone from his house on an island in Maine. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Almond, center, in the musical “Girl From the North Country” at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan in 2020.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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      For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger

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      Act 1 was a constant struggle for rent and opportunity. But now that these emerging dramatists have emerged, what will they make of Act 2?“Absolutely not,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared.Leslye Headland chuckled. “Oh never, no.”“I don’t know anyone who could!” was Samuel D. Hunter’s astonished response.“Not really,” hedged Bess Wohl. “Until maybe last year.”The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: “Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?”To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of “An Octoroon,” which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a “horrible sublet on an air shaft,” with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play “Bachelorette” made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he’d earned in any one year from his plays — including “The Whale” and “A Case for the Existence of God” — was “less than $30,000.”Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It’s hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity?Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. (“Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night” and “Othello” are dead center in Shakespeare’s professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can’t survive the start?Or so I have often worried.Katherine Waterston, Tracee Chimo and Celia Keenan-Bolger in Leslye Headland’s 2010 play “Bachelorette.”Joan MarcusWe 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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      Jonathan Bailey’s Bratty, Bad-Boy ‘Richard II’ at the Bridge Theater

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      The actor, on a hot streak after “Wicked,” takes on his biggest stage role to date. In London, he plays Shakespeare’s unfortunate king as a flouncing sociopath.The Bridge Theater is within walking distance of the Tower of London, where in 1399 King Richard II was imprisoned and forced to abdicate England’s throne in favor of his cousin, who became Henry IV. Where better to stage a new production of William Shakespeare’s play about Richard’s downfall? From the playhouse foyer, theatergoers can look out at the tower across the River Thames, and the distance of those 600 years shrinks to nothing.In this modern-dress take on “Richard II” directed by Nicholas Hytner and running through May 10, the hapless king is played by the English actor Jonathan Bailey, who is on a hot streak following recent high-profile screen roles — as Fiyero in “Wicked” and Anthony Bridgerton in “Bridgerton” — and is now taking on his biggest stage role to date.Bailey gives an engrossing performance as Richard, whose corrupt misrule fuels popular support for the usurper cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (Royce Pierreson), despite the medieval doctrine that the monarch is anointed by God and therefore untouchable. After making a series of strategic blunders, Richard is decisively outmaneuvered by Bolingbroke’s rebel army and meets a swift, brutal demise.Historical accounts remarked upon Richard’s effeminacy and in Bailey’s adroit rendering he is a capricious, flouncing sociopath whose every utterance is suffused with performative irony. He declares with mock solemnity that he has no choice but to raise taxes — and then gleefully helps himself to a line of cocaine. Moments after his uncle’s death, he hops onto the recently vacated hospital bed and blithely scoffs down grapes. When Richard finally agrees to hand over power, he proffers the crown and then retracts it — twice — like a petulant child refusing to part with a toy. All this badness is great fun to watch.Bailey with Royce Pierreson, whose Bolingbroke has the abstracted air of a man impelled by forces greater than himself.Manuel HarlanIn contrast, Pierreson’s Bolingbroke has the abstracted air of a man impelled by forces greater than himself. With his hulking frame, balled-up fists and blunt vocal delivery, he is a striking counterpoint to the dissipatedly charming Richard. (After one of the king’s more florid speeches, a bewildered Bolingbroke impatiently asks one of his cronies to translate: “What says his majesty?”) Michael Simkins is the pick of the supporting cast as the Duke of York, who tries in vain to straddle the warring factions. His finger-wagging exasperation, verging at times on slapstick, gives an audience-friendly commentary on the unfolding intrigue.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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      Hundreds of Artists Call on N.E.A. to Roll Back Trump’s Restrictions

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      In one of the first signs of collective pushback to the Trump administration’s arts initiatives, several hundred American artists are calling on the National Endowment for the Arts to roll back restrictions on grants to institutions with programming that promotes diversity or “gender ideology.”Among the 463 writers, poets, dancers, visual artists and others who signed the letter are the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Jackie Sibblies Drury, Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel. There is also one name with striking historical resonance: Holly Hughes, a performance artist who in 1990 was one of the so-called N.E.A. Four, denied funding by the agency because of concern from conservative critics at the height of that era’s culture wars.“In some ways this just feels like déjà vu all over again,” Ms. Hughes, now a professor of art and design at the University of Michigan, said in a telephone interview. “These funding restrictions are a good barometer for who is the easy punching bag in American culture at the moment.”The artists on Tuesday sent a letter to the N.E.A. objecting to new requirements for grant applicants that the organization put in place this month to comply with executive orders signed by President Trump. One of the requirements is that applicants “not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws”; the other is that federal funds not be used “to promote gender ideology,” referring to an executive order, prompted by Mr. Trump’s concern about public policy toward transgender people, that declares that American policy is “to recognize two sexes, male and female.”The artists’ letter asks the N.E.A. to “reverse” the changes, saying “abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.”“Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to ‘discrimination’ and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes ‘gender ideology’ (whatever that is),” the letter adds. “But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody.”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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      Barrie Kosky Is the Director New York Has Been Waiting For

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      One of the busiest stage directors in Europe is fully arriving, at last, with “The Threepenny Opera” this spring.When “The Threepenny Opera” returns to New York this spring, for an all-too-brief visit to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it will be notable for a few reasons.For one, it will be a homecoming. Although “Threepenny” was born in Berlin, an artifact of Weimar-era culture, with music by Kurt Weill and text by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, it had a midcentury resurgence on the level of a pop-culture phenomenon when it was revived Off Broadway in 1954.And it will be performed by the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded by Brecht and still operates out of the theater where “Threepenny” had its premiere in 1928. The group is a trustworthy custodian of a work that is often mishandled today, especially in recent New York productions.But what is most important about this run of “Threepenny,” presented by BAM and St. Ann’s Warehouse April 3 through 6, is that it will be the first real opportunity for New York audiences to see the work of the director Barrie Kosky.Though Kosky, 58, graced local playbills once before, when his production of “The Magic Flute,” a collaboration with the company 1927, came to the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2019, “Threepenny” will be the first show that is purely his own. Which should come as a shock, since Kosky is one of the busiest and most brilliant, not to mention entertaining, directors working in Europe today.He is a director accomplished in theater and opera. His work could fit easily on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera, with a balance of intelligence and showmanship that would breathe new life into both. This “Threepenny” will be an opportunity for him to win over New York audiences. Will impresarios be watching?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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      Hear How a ‘Smash’ Song Got a Broadway Makeover

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      “Let Me Be Your Star,” which evokes an actor’s longing to shine, has come a long way from its TV days. Here’s how the song evolved on its way to the stage.On a recent morning at a rehearsal room on 42nd Street, the actress Robyn Hurder stood atop a pedestal, red lips parted, arms outstretched, blond curls vibrating as she sang the final notes of “Let Me Be Your Star.” Then she collapsed, breathless.“This number’s hard,” she said, her face glistening with sweat. “Who did this?”Well, plenty of people. “Let Me Be Your Star” was written over a dozen years ago for the pilot episode of NBC’s “Smash,” a backstage-set nighttime soap about the hectic creation of a Broadway musical, “Bombshell.” There were plans to bring “Bombshell,” a biomusical about Marilyn Monroe, to the real Broadway, but those plans never came to fruition. Neither did “Smash,” which was canceled after two seasons.But “Let Me Be Your Star,” a classic “I want” song that its composer and co-lyricist, Marc Shaiman, has described as a “neck-bursting showstopper,” endures. Originally sung at the close of the pilot by Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee, the song, which was nominated for Grammy and Emmy Awards, has been covered by Andrew Rannells on “Girls,” by Jonathan Groff and Jeremy Jordan at MCC Theater’s Miscast benefit, by Ben Platt and Nicole Scherzinger in concert and by masses of fans (and the occasional Muppet, on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Ostensibly a song about Monroe’s life, it resonates for any actor — and really, anyone — who longs to shine.Now it’s been reimagined as the opening number of “Smash,” a new Broadway musical that riffs on the TV show. Hurder plays Ivy Lynn, a Broadway actress tasked with playing Marilyn in “Bombshell.” This opening version of “Let Me Be Your Star” is staged by the director Susan Stroman and the choreographer Joshua Bergasse (also a veteran of the TV “Smash”) as a Great White Way fever dream featuring elaborate harmonies, athletic dance and a brassy, big-band sound. The song recurs, in a very different style, at the end of the first act, though the producers are keeping those details secret. And it may return a third time.“It’s possible!” Stroman said.The stage version of “Smash” follows the backstage meltdown of a fictional show called “Bombshell” as it approaches opening night.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAt that morning rehearsal, Stroman had Hurder and the ensemble run the number again. There were flips, lifts, mambo moves, thrilling vocal frills. More