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      On Broadway, ‘Suffs’ Has a New Tune (and 6 Tony Nominations)

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      A reworked opening number, less historical bulk and a general push to “have fun with these women” helped a musical find its way.Two ambitious overhauls are on Broadway right now: the Palace Theater and the musical “Suffs.”When “Suffs,” a show about the suffragists’ crusade for the right to vote, staggered to its Public Theater premiere in April 2022, few people would have bet that it had much of a future. Yet here we are with “Suffs” on Broadway, where it received generally positive reviews and six Tony Awards nominations, two for Shaina Taub’s score and book.What happened? The director Leigh Silverman (who also received a Tony nomination) recalls struggling with supply-chain issues and having to cancel 18 performances, including opening night. “No theater maker, no artist of any kind I think anywhere was able to do their best work in any circumstance coming out of Covid,” she said.Silverman and Taub (who also portrays the suffragist Alice Paul) said they immediately began tinkering. “We were working on it before it was even closed,” Silverman said in a joint interview in Taub’s dressing room at the Music Box Theater. Taub, laughing, added: “Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, you went back to the drawing board.’ But we never left the drawing board.”The original score has been whittled down from 38 songs to 34. But numbers are a poor indicator of the extensive renovation that took place in the past two years (some songs have the same title but different lyrics, for example). Here are five ways “Suffs” changed on its journey to Broadway.More book“The biggest substantive formal change has been book,” Taub said. While the show’s earlier version was essentially sung-through, the story was so dense with historical material that she realized she needed spoken scenes to “tee up” the songs, as she put it. Taub revisited some of her favorite book musicals, like “Ragtime” and “Into the Woods,” to study how they handled those passages. One of the most apparent changes in “Suffs” is the number “The Young Are at the Gates.” Taub described the first version, which previously closed Act I, as “a 12-minute sung-through odyssey”; now it opens Act II and incorporates brief book scenes. “I felt free, finally, of the confines of having to musicalize everything,” said Taub, who called book writers “the unsung heroes of the American musical.”From left, Ally Bonino, Nadia Dandashi, Kim Blanck and Taub in the musical on Broadway.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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      How ‘The Outsiders’ Staged a Broadway Fight Club

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      In a park, at night, as a train screams nearby, the teenagers punch, kick and grapple. They roll over and over, gravel sticking to their rain-soaked clothes, in a terrible embrace, beating one another bloody. “We didn’t want to romanticize it or sugarcoat it or make it easy,” the director Danya Taymor said of this scene in the Broadway musical “The Outsiders.” “It felt really important that these moments of violence be terrifying, be brutal.” More

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      ‘Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’’ Review: A Bittersweet Premiere

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      An Arabic production of Wajdi Mouawad’s 1991 work, planned to open in Lebanon, was canceled because of his perceived ties to Israel. It found a home in France.What happens when the roots you long for keep eluding you? This question has long been central to the work of the playwright and director Wajdi Mouawad, and never more so than in a new production of his 1991 work “Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’.”Currently the director of Théâtre National de la Colline, a high-profile Parisian playhouse, Mouawad was born in Lebanon. In 1978, he fled the country’s civil war with his family, at the age of 10. As a writer, he has returned to his Lebanese heritage over and over — and this year, he went back to the country to stage his first production with local actors, an Arabic-language adaptation of “Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’.”But in April, just weeks before the premiere, Le Monnot playhouse in Beirut was forced to cancel all performances of the play over Mouawad’s perceived ties to Israel, which Lebanon considers an enemy state. Several Lebanese lobbying groups had called for the show to be stopped, with one, the Commission of Detainees Affairs, filing a legal complaint with the country’s military courts and demanding Mouawad’s arrest.According to a report in the French newspaper Le Monde, Mouawad was accused of allowing the Israeli Embassy in France to pay for three plane tickets in 2017 to bring two Israeli actors and a translator to the country for his production “All Birds.” In another perceived transgression, last season Mouawad programmed a work by the Israeli artist Amos Gitai at the Théâtre National de la Colline.Mouawad quickly left Lebanon. In a public statement, the Beirut venue blamed “unacceptable pressure and serious threats made against Le Monnot as well as some artists and technicians.”It was an astonishing turn of events for a playwright who has always asserted his Lebanese identity, regardless of his childhood exile, and dissected it onstage. In the end, in lieu of Beirut, “Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’” premiered over the weekend at the Printemps des Comédiens, a theater festival in Montpellier, France, ahead of an international tour (whose dates remain to be confirmed) with the cast that was scheduled to perform in Lebanon.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 Cave Explorer Died 99 Years Ago. Now His Story Is Broadway Bound.

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      “Floyd Collins,” a musical about a trapped spelunker and the media circus surrounding his failed rescue, had a brief Off Broadway run in 1996.In 1925, a spelunker named Floyd Collins got trapped in a Kentucky cave and the unsuccessful efforts to rescue him became a media sensation, with print and radio reporters breathlessly tracking the endeavor.Now a musical about the tragedy is heading to Broadway, three decades after it was first performed and a century after Collins’s death.Lincoln Center Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, said on Monday that it would stage a revival of “Floyd Collins” at its Vivian Beaumont Theater next spring, with previews beginning March 27 and an opening on April 21.The musical features a bluegrass score by Adam Guettel and a book, as well as additional lyrics, by Tina Landau, who will direct the production. No cast has been announced.The show debuted in Philadelphia in 1994, and then had a generally well-received Off Broadway production in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons; it won an Obie Award for music, has periodically been staged at theaters in the United States and Britain, and has fans thanks to an Off Broadway cast album.Guettel, a Tony winner for “The Light in the Piazza,” is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. He is a Tony nominee again this year, for “Days of Wine and Roses.” And next spring, in addition to “Floyd Collins,” his new musical “Millions,” adapted from the novel and film of the same name, will have an initial staging at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.“Floyd Collins” will be one of two Broadway shows staged by Lincoln Center Theater this season, which is the final season of its longtime producing artistic director, André Bishop. The nonprofit previously announced that this fall it would stage a Broadway production of “McNeal,” a new play by Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a novelist.The theater also announced on Monday that it would stage Off Broadway productions of “The Blood Quilt,” written by Katori Hall and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” revised by Mark O’Rowe and directed by Jack O’Brien.They join an already announced Off Off Broadway production of “Six Characters,” a new play by Phillip Howze, directed by Dustin Wills. As a fund-raiser in December, the theater is planning a one-night reunion concert of its Tony-winning 2008 revival of “South Pacific.” More

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      In ‘Dark Noon,’ Hollywood Westerns Get a South African Reboot

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      At St. Ann’s Warehouse, a collaboration between a Danish director and a South African troupe that questions the tropes of Western films.The saloon is there. So are the dusty cowboy hats, the freshly laid railroad tracks and the Native American headdresses.But while “Dark Noon” basks in these hallmarks of Hollywood westerns, it examines them through new eyes, leaving no triumphalist cliché unquestioned. Virtually every scene in this collaboration between a Danish director and a South African theater company (at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in previews before opening June 17) ends with at least one bullet-riddled corpse on the parched red earth of the set. Many of the dead are female or Indigenous.“It is a western town,” Nhlanhla Mahlangu, the co-director and choreographer, said of the archetypal tumbleweedy community that rises up over the course of the action, “but it is all the settlement towns of South Africa as well. We are also talking about the shootings in our country.”Nearly all of the play’s seven actors piled into an increasingly crammed green room with Mahlangu to discuss the work after their final performance at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., and they agreed about these similarities. “So much of our own lives are connected to these tropes,” said Mandla Gaduka, a cast member.The narrative in which the white-hatted cowboy tames the Wild West, typically through the explicit or (usually) implicit genocide of his Indigenous predecessors, comes in for withering scrutiny in “Dark Noon.”John Ford’s 1956 film “The Searchers,” starring Harry Carey Jr., Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne, is considered a classic of the western genre.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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      Pride Month 2024: An Abundance of Theater of All Stripes

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      From Broadway to the city’s smaller stages, a flurry of shows with wide-ranging appeal, familiar faces and rising talent.American theater has long been more welcoming to queer lives and stories than Hollywood has been, so the abundance of shows during Pride Month is unsurprising. It’s also overwhelming — there is just so much to see.On Broadway, queer characters play central roles in productions as starkly different as “Illinoise,” a dance-theater work based on a Sufjan Stevens album, and Paula Vogel’s autofictional “Mother Play,” starring Jessica Lange. In the Max Martin jukebox “& Juliet,” a romance involving Juliet’s nonbinary best friend makes up a sweet subplot.And of course, the gayest show of the year returns on June 26, when Cole Escola’s madcap comedy “Oh, Mary!” — about Mary Todd Lincoln’s secret life and aspirations — begins previews on Broadway after a popular run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. As Joshua Barone wrote in his review, “Escola’s humor is tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’”Cole Escola, left, as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” which is moving to Broadway after a run at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSusannah Millonzi, left, and Purva Bedi in Bailey Williams’s “Coach Coach.”Maria BaranovaSave some money for the city’s smaller stages, though, because they are offering a flurry of shows for Pride Month and are where you can spot rising talent.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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      Andy Cohen, Fran Lebowitz and Others Gather for Little Island Performance

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      “It’s a miracle on the water,” the actress Candice Bergen said, gazing at a grove of trees on Thursday evening as she took shelter from the sun beneath a canopy.It was the opening night of the summer performance season at Little Island, the three-year-old floating park built on a reconstructed pier in the Hudson River.Despite thunderstorms earlier in the afternoon, around 700 actors, designers and media moguls turned up under a smattering of canopies near the island’s amphitheater, among them Andy Cohen, the Bravo host and executive producer; Annie Leibovitz, the photographer; Fran Lebowitz, the writer; Natasha Lyonne, the actress; Bryan Lourd, the chief executive of the talent agency CAA; and Jason Blum, the film producer.As waiters ferried watermelon spears and cartons of boxed water on silver platters, attendees trickled into the glade over twin gangways on the north and south sides of the island.The writer Fran Lebowitz.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesAnnie Leibovitz, right, with her daughter, Sam Leibovitz.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesBryan Lourd, the chief executive of the talent agency CAA, and Natasha Lyonne, the actress.Rebecca Smeyne 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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      Dolly Parton Says a Musical About Her Life Is Broadway Bound

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      The show, expected to arrive on Broadway in 2026, will be called “Hello, I’m Dolly.”Dolly Parton’s long-gestating biographical musical is aiming to arrive on Broadway in 2026, the singer-songwriter said Thursday.The musical will be called “Hello, I’m Dolly,” which is both the title of Parton’s first studio album and an allusion to the classic Broadway show “Hello, Dolly!”Parton announced plans for the show in remarks to CMA Fest, a gathering of country music fans in Nashville.“I just wanted to say that I wouldn’t be here, if you hadn’t been there, and I mean that — and that happens to be the name of one of the songs that’s going to be in my new Broadway musical,” she told the crowd. “I’ve written a whole lot of original songs for it, as well as all the hit songs that you know.”She added that, “You’ll get to know all of my life, up to now” and that “It really does have a lot of story, a lot of family.”Parton has been working on the musical for about a decade. In 2016, she told Variety she thought it would hit the stage two years later; at the time, she said the first act would be about her pre-Nashville life, and the second act would be about her Nashville-based career.Parton and Maria S. Schlatter will write the musical’s book; in 2020, the two collaborated on the film “Christmas on the Square.”Parton, who has numerous business ventures in addition to her songwriting and performing career, is planning to produce the musical with Danny Nozell, who is Parton’s longtime manager, and ATG Productions, the British theater company producing this season’s Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”This will not be Parton’s first Broadway venture: She wrote the music and lyrics for the 2009 musical “9 to 5,” which was adapted from a film in which she starred, and in 1993 one of her songs was featured in a Broadway holiday show called “Candles, Snow & Mistletoe.”It’s also not the first Parton-themed musical out there: A show called “Here You Come Again,” about a devoted Parton fan, has had several productions in American regional theaters over the last few years and is now touring Britain. More