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Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.
Even at a challenging time for a pandemic-weakened industry, they found razzle-dazzle.Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.Broadway is in the midst of a rolling celebration — of artistic expression, of audience enthusiasm, of song and dance and storytelling itself.The overlapping runs constitute a risky bet by producers and investors, who have staked tens of millions of dollars on their ability to sell seats. Even in the best of times, most Broadway shows fail, and these are not the best of times: Production costs have soared, and season-to-date attendance is 18 percent below prepandemic levels.But the shakeout comes later. First: fanfare and flowers, ovations and optimism.WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17‘The Wiz’Easing on down the road … to BroadwayDeborah Cox, left, who plays Glinda the good witch, and Nichelle Lewis, who plays Dorothy, at the opening night of “The Wiz.” Many of the 1,600 in attendance wore green for the Emerald City.A revival of a 1975 musical that reimagines “The Wizard of Oz” for an all-Black cast.Of course “The Wiz” was going to have a yellow carpet. The show’s recurring song is “Ease on Down the Road,” and that road is the yellow brick one — the path to Oz, but also, to self-discovery.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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‘Ash’ Review: Elfriede Jelinek Confronts Environmental Collapse
Elfriede Jelinek’s latest play deals with collective calamity and individual grief, but is let down by a chaotic production.Twenty years ago, when the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature it was a surprise that the award had gone to an author who was barely known outside the German-speaking world. It set off a scandal, too. A juror from the academy that makes the decision resigned, calling Jelinek’s work “unenjoyable, violent pornography.”Despite her Nobel and the controversy that it engendered, Jelinek is still hardly a household name in the English-speaking world. In Germany and Austria, however, the premiere of a new play by this prolific and divisive writer is always an event. When the Münchner Kammerspiele presented the opening night of Jelinek’s “Ash” on Friday, every seat in the playhouse’s main theater was full.Outside Europe, Jelinek is known, if at all, for her novels, which include “The Piano Teacher” (adapted into a 2001 movie by Michael Haneke) and “The Children of the Dead,” a gruesome 500-page opus that has just appeared in English, nearly 30 years after its original publication. But in Germany and Austria, she is the most widely performed female playwright writing in German, according to her publisher, having written nearly 50 scripts since 1979.Like most of her stage works, “Ash” bears little resemblance to a conventional play. Jelinek’s signature dramatic form is the theatrical monologue: lengthy paragraphs of discursive text without clearly indicated characters, stage directions or conventional plot. It is left to directors to determine the size of the cast and to divide up Jelinek’s finely chiseled writing, which is by turns poetic, punning, allusive and philosophical.Yet sadly, Jelinek’s prose is poorly served by the director Falk Richter in his hopelessly cluttered production of “Ash.” Throughout, our attention is diverted from the text by a barrage of ominous projections, creepy AI-generated video and the distorted sound design.“Ash” continues the exploration of ecological themes that Jelinek has addressed, often with alarm, in much of her recent work, including her 2013 “stage essay” “rein GOLD,” which brings together Wagner and environmentalism, as well as her plays “Black Water” and “Sun/Air,” with which “Ash” constitutes a loose climate trilogy.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 Starry Cast Navigates ‘Uncle Vanya’ and ‘Every Emotion Under the Sun’
Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill and Anika Noni Rose discuss the new translation of Chekhov that brought them to the farm.Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison Pill, to support Sonia’s largely absentee father, portrayed by Alfred Molina.William Jackson Harper, best known for “The Good Place,” plays Astrov, the eco-nerd doctor whom Sonia loves. Anika Noni Rose, a Tony Award winner for “Caroline, or Change,” is the glamorous Elena, Sonia’s stepmother, for whom both Vanya and Astrov yearn.In mid-April, a week before the show’s opening on April 24, Schreck, Neugebauer, Carell, Harper, Pill and Rose gathered to talk over their dinner break in a room off the Beaumont lobby. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Along with Harper and Carell, both at left, the play also features Alfred Molina, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak in supporting roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was your relationship to “Uncle Vanya” and Chekhov before this show?HEIDI SCHRECK I lived in Russia right out of college for two years. When I moved back to Seattle, I started this theater company with my husband, and there was this Russian company who would come and perform Russian plays. They invited me to be the translator. Basically I would do live interpretation.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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What to Expect From the 2024 Tony Awards Nominations
The contenders from a crowded season will be announced by Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry.At a time when Broadway is overflowing with plays and musicals but could use more ticket buyers, this season’s Tony Award nominations will be announced on Tuesday, offering a boost to some shows and dashing the hopes of others.Here’s what you might want to know about the Tony nominations, which this year will recognize plays and musicals that opened on Broadway between April 28, 2023, and April 25, 2024:When and how are the nominations announced?A few categories are to be made public shortly after 8:30 a.m. Eastern on the Tuesday broadcast of “CBS Mornings.” (CBS airs the Tonys, so it has first dibs on the news.) The full list of nominees will be announced on the Tony Awards YouTube channel starting at 9 a.m. Two previous Tony winners, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Renée Elise Goldsberry, will read the list of nominees.The New York Times’s live coverage of the announcements will continue all day, with the list of nominees as well as news and analysis.How were the nominees chosen?The Tony Awards have a nominating committee made up of people knowledgeable about theater (many are theater artists or administrators), but who do not have a financial stake in any of the season’s shows. This season 36 Tony-eligible plays and musicals opened; nominators were required to see all of them.The nominating committee started with 60 members, but then — as always happens — some had to recuse themselves because they couldn’t get to all the shows or because a conflict of interest arose. About 45 nominators are expected to vote.What are the leading contenders?The race for best musical — generally the prize with the biggest economic impact — is wide open, with 15 eligible contenders, none of which have immediately broken out as a unanimous critical darling or a box-office smash. Five to seven shows will be nominated for the best musical award.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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‘Forbidden Broadway’ Scraps Summer Broadway Run, Citing Crowded Season
The parody show was scheduled to begin performances in July at the Helen Hayes Theater.In a sign that there are not enough investors and ticket buyers to sustain all of the Broadway shows now onstage and in the works, the producers of “Forbidden Broadway” said Friday that they were canceling a planned summer run.The scrapped production, “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” was announced in February and was to be the first Broadway venture for the satirical revue, which has been performed periodically since 1982, mostly Off Broadway but also on tour. The show, consisting of comedic sketches that parody Broadway hits (and misses), has been frequently rewritten to remain reasonably timely and topical; the Broadway run was to feature a number of Sondheim spoofs, reflecting the heightened interest in his work since his death.In a statement, the producers, Ryan Bogner, Victoria Lang and Tracey Stroock McFarland, called the move a postponement, and cited the volume of offerings on Broadway — there are currently 36 shows running, 12 of which opened in a nine-day stretch before the Tony-eligibility season ended Thursday night.“The Broadway landscape is enormously crowded at this moment,” the producers’ statement said, “and while we adore Forbidden Broadway, we are disappointed that the show will not open at the Hayes on Broadway this summer.”The show, written by Gerard Alessandrini, was to begin previews July 15 and to open Aug. 5 at the Helen Hayes Theater, and was to be capitalized for $3.2 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is not clear if the producers had successfully raised all that money, and ticket sales, which began earlier this month, had been slow.“Without getting into the details of the financials or sales, it is self evident by looking at the current offerings on Broadway and their sales that in this incredibly crowded environment without recent precedent, the title would not have been served by launching at this time,” the producers said in a written answer to questions about the show’s economics.This is the second show to cancel a Broadway production this year; in February, the producers of a planned run of Rob Madge’s “My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)” announced that they were postponing that production less than three weeks before previews were to begin.As for Madge, the performer is planning to take “My Son’s a Queer” back to the Edinburgh Fringe, this summer. But first, next month Madge is planning a show in London, reflecting on the Broadway disappointment. The title, of course, is “Regards to Broadway.” More
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‘Harlequin, Refined by Love’ Review: A French Showman’s First Steps
The revival of a 2006 work by Thomas Jolly, the director masterminding the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, shows his gift for visual flamboyance.In three months, the French theater director Thomas Jolly will oversee the most monumental show in the world: the opening bash for the Olympic Games, set for July 26. But for now, his work is entertaining Paris audiences on a more modest scale.At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, an eastern suburb of the city, his work is not even playing on the biggest stage. On Thursday, an audience of around 250 people filed into the playhouse’s second, smaller auditorium to watch “Harlequin, Refined by Love” (“Arlequin poli par l’amour”), Jolly’s very first stage production, created in 2006.At the time, Jolly was a young graduate from the drama school attached to the National Theater of Brittany. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” was an unlikely choice of play for a budding director: Written in 1720 by Pierre de Marivaux, a master of romantic comedy, it taps heavily into the commedia dell’arte, a genre few current French theatermakers have explored.Yet “Harlequin, Refined by Love” became a box-office hit, touring for four years with its initial cast, followed by frequent revivals. (In 2014, a Russian-language version even joined the repertoire of the Gogol Center, in Moscow.) In Créteil, the production’s success is easy to understand. Even with minimal sets and props, the building blocks of Jolly’s style — visually flamboyant, brightly paced yet with a touch of dark satire — are already there.Marivaux’s compact play is built around stock comic characters. The hapless hero, Harlequin (Rémi Dessenoix), has been kidnapped by a fairy who fell for his beauty. She tries to educate him, yet Harlequin remains something of a slob — until he meets his match, the shepherdess Silvia (played with spot-on candor by Ophélie Trichard).Falling for her suddenly “refines” his manners, as the play’s title makes clear. Love, in Marivaux’s world, is a civilizing force — much to the fairy’s fury.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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‘Mary Jane,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and More New Broadway Shows
This past week has been jam-packed with openings. Our reviewers think these new shows are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.critic’s pickA ‘heartbreaker for anyone human.’Rachel McAdams as a mother struggling with her own moral agony in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of “Mary Jane” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Richard Termine for The New York Times‘Mary Jane’Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in Amy Herzog’s play about an impossibly upbeat mother caring for a gravely ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system.From our review:[Herzog] is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.Through June 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA family drama that ‘feels like it’s a healing.’Jessica Lange, center, is the titular mother in “Mother Play,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, with Celia Keenan-Bolger, left, and Jim Parsons playing her children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Mother Play’Paula Vogel’s tragicomedy is a showcase for Jessica Lange, who plays a ferocious matriarch to a sister and brother played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons.From our review:Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, [Lange’s Phyllis] is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.critic’s pickA show that all the critics love.From left, Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka as members of an increasingly fractured 1970s band in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s rock drama, with songs by a real rocker (Will Butler), follows a 1970s band (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) on the cusp of fame through the prolonged, drug-fueled process of making a new album.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
