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      Michael Stuhlbarg Is Attacked in Central Park Before ‘Patriots’ Debut

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      The actor was walking on the Upper East Side on Sunday when a man threw a rock at him, striking the back of his neck, the police said. He is set to appear on Broadway on Monday evening.One day after he was struck with a rock in a random attack on the Upper East Side, the actor Michael Stuhlbarg will appear in Monday’s first preview of the Broadway play “Patriots,” in which he stars as a Russian oligarch who helped facilitate Vladimir V. Putin’s rise.Stuhlbarg, best known for his role as a gangster in the series “Boardwalk Empire,” was walking in Central Park on Sunday evening when a man threw a rock, hitting him in the back of the neck, the police said.Stuhlbarg chased the man, Xavier Israel, 27, out of the park, where he was taken into custody and charged with assault. The location where the man was arrested on East 91st Street is the address for the Russian consulate.The police said Stuhlbarg declined medical attention.Stuhlbarg “feels fine” and will appear onstage on Monday for his debut in “Patriots,” the show said in a news release. He plays Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who reigned in post-Soviet Russia and helped install Putin as president, but then had a bitter falling out with the Kremlin and died in exile.The play, written by Peter Morgan, the creator of the British royalty drama “The Crown,” and directed by Rupert Goold, opens on April 22. It was first staged in 2022 in London, where Tom Hollander played Berezovsky.Stuhlbarg, 55, had his breakthrough lead performance in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man,” going on to numerous onscreen roles, including as Dr. Richard Sackler, the prescription opioid magnate, in the limited series “Dopesick,” for which he was nominated for an Emmy.A fixture of New York’s theater scene in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuhlbarg last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” More

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      Barbara Rush, Award-Winning TV and Film Actress, Dies at 97

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      She received a Golden Globe in 1954 as that year’s rising star and appeared in movies alongside Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman.Barbara Rush, the supremely poised actress who rose to fame with supporting roles in 1950s films like “Magnificent Obsession” and “The Young Lions,” died on Sunday at her home in Westlake Village, Calif., in Los Angeles County. She was 97.The death, in a senior care facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Claudia Cowan.If Ms. Rush’s portrayals had one thing in common, it was a gentle, ladylike quality, which she put to use in films of many genres. She was Jane Wyman’s concerned stepdaughter in the 1954 romantic drama “Magnificent Obsession” and Dean Martin’s loyal wartime girlfriend in “The Young Lions” (1958), set during World War II. In 1950s science fiction pictures like “It Came From Outer Space” and “When Worlds Collide,” she was the small-town heroine, the scientist’s daughter, the Earthling most likely to succeed.Ms. Rush with Frank Sinatra in the 1963 film “Come Blow Your Horn,” about a swinging Manhattan bachelor’s life.Paramount Pictures, via Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesIn both “The Young Philadelphians” (1959), with Paul Newman, and “The World in My Corner,” a 1956 boxing film with Audie Murphy, Ms. Rush was the prized rich girl. In “Bigger Than Life” (also 1956), with James Mason, she played a vapid but supportive wife. And in “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963), with Frank Sinatra, she played the only “nice girl” in a swinging Manhattan bachelor’s life.But she did transcend type occasionally, as an Indian agent’s bigoted wife, for instance, in the western “Hombre” (1967), with Paul Newman. She also played Kit Sargent, the Hollywood screenwriter attracted to and repelled by the ruthless title character in the classic 1959 television production of “What Makes Sammy Run?”Ms. Rush in 1966. Her stage work became a second career. John Downing/Express, via Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Madonna and Barbra Are Fans. Broadway, Meet Lempicka.

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      A new musical aims to restore the reputation, in life and art, of the ambitious yet undervalued painter Tamara de Lempicka.The playwright Carson Kreitzer specializes in difficult women, disparaged women, women who should be better known. But 14 years ago, when a friend suggested the painter Tamara de Lempicka as a potential subject, Kreitzer wasn’t initially enthusiastic. The name meant nothing to her.Then in a used bookstore, a cover with Lempicka’s name caught her eye. Flipping through the monograph, image after glossy image, Kreitzer realized that she already knew Lempicka’s brash, gleaming work. She had seen it reproduced in Madonna videos and in Van Cleef & Arpels ads. There in that bookstore she felt compelled to write something as big, bold and richly colored as the paintings.“Tamara made me a musical writer,” Kreitzer, who had never written a musical before, said in a recent phone interview. “She demanded it.”After years of development, “Lempicka,” a biomusical by Kreitzer (book and lyrics) and Matt Gould (book and music), opens on April 14 at Broadway’s Longacre Theater. It is a work of recuperation, aiming to restore the reputation, in life and art, of a queer woman and an ambitious painter, who has often been undervalued, in the art market and beyond.“She wanted everything,” Rachel Chavkin, the musical’s director, said of her heroine. “She wanted more from life and ultimately life lost interest in her.”When it comes to reclaiming Lempicka, the musical is not alone. A concurrent selling exhibition at Sotheby’s, “The World of Tamara: A Celebration of Lempicka and Art Deco,” features several of Lempicka’s paintings, including “L’Éclat,” a portrait of a woman, her hair coiled like strips of film, and “Nu aux Buildings,” a sensuous nude backed by skyscrapers. This fall, San Francisco’s de Young museum will host the artist’s first major museum retrospective in the United States.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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      ‘Bathhouse.pptx’ Review: A Fever Dream, Both Poetic and Mystifying

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      Jesús I. Valles’s prizewinning play gets a stage at the Flea, but the ambitious work about queer history proves too difficult to wrangle.In “Bathhouse.pptx,” Jesús I. Valles investigates the fading history of gay bathhouses, bringing to life both the marginalized people who reveled in them and the forgotten people who cleaned them. The play — selected as the winner of the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize by Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) — laces historical fantasy with melodic prose, loosely stringing together Valles’s ramblings like an epic fever dream. But if, like most such dreams, it’s far more captivating to the storyteller than to the audience, the work offers enough lyrical beauty to keep viewers listening, if not fully understanding, and yearning for more.The story begins with an anxious 10th-grader whom Valles has called “Presenter” (Sam Gonzalez), a queer Latino student who is delivering a PowerPoint lecture (hence the title’s “.pptx”) about the history of bathing. Cleanliness, we are told, has dirty beginnings: It didn’t take long for humans to weaponize filth as a tool of shame against the poor and foreign. Presenter then tries to connect this to the topic he actually cares about: the commercialized bathhouse.To do so, he elicits help from fellow students, but their presentation is derailed by unlikely apparitions: a conquistador, a small child, Laura Linney. To manage this unruliness in the play’s first half, the director, Chay Yew, over-relies on the same gimmick: Interlopers scurry out from the right or left side of the audience in a continuous loop. The act mirrors Valles’s spiraling language, but it’s repeated so often that we begin to anticipate the disruptions, rendering them less impactful.Still, certain characters manage to stand out, including Chela (Claudia Acosta), an overworked cleaner at the North Hollywood spa that is the play’s other primary setting. Here, Chela has witnessed enemas, orgies and more — some of which we also witness. (The play acknowledges its theatricality by having the actors confess they aren’t teenagers performing these acts, but adults of consenting age.) But for Valles, Chela is more than just the help; she’s the winner in a daily “war of dirt and bleach and sickness and steam,” a paradox of service and control.Like the rest of the dexterous six-person ensemble, Acosta plays several roles. But as Chela, she finds the tiny pockets of vulnerability, longing and humor that poke through this woman’s calloused personality. While the male strangers in the spa stumble into one another, sharing brief stories, desires and memories, Chela stands out as a fully realized character, embodying a depth that resonates beyond the surface. That Valles chose to honor the fullness of a Latina sanitation worker in a play so focused on Latino gay men does not seem incidental, but rather like a nod to those that even queer history overlooks.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 Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

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      Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.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 the Gory Sex Scenes in ‘Teeth’ Came Together

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      Creating the sex scenes for the horror musical required close attention to detail, extra communication and some strategically placed silicone.Song, dance and deadly genitalia: It’s all on full, gory display in “Teeth,” Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s campy musical adaptation of the 2007 cult horror film. The story follows Dawn O’Keefe, a God-fearing good girl — surrounded by shame-lobbing, not-so-good men — whose body has a sharp sense of justice.In a show in which violence begets vengeance — Dawn has a curious case of vagina dentata — it’s a lot to endure, for both biter and bitee. (As Jesse Green cheekily put it in his New York Times review of the Playwrights Horizons production: “If you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?”)Campy or not, choreographing the many scenes of intimacy and assault required extraordinary sensitivity. Violations vary: In one scene, Dawn seeks relief for her condition, only to be repeatedly ogled and groped by a creepy gynecologist. As she protests, her body takes revenge. The director, Sarah Benson, wanted someone dedicated to creating a space for the actors to feel safe, and free to set boundaries.“There’s so much sex and intimacy and sexual violence and everything in between that I just knew immediately that intimacy direction was going to be a massive part of the work of the show,” Benson said. “It was so important to me to have someone who was really creating a container in which we could be vulnerable and raw and make this very intense story.”“I am still able to go home feeling like I didn’t give every single part of myself and my body to the work,” said Alyse Alan Louis, who plays Dawn. Here she’s in an early scene with Jason Gotay, who plays her boyfriend.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat someone was Crista Marie Jackson.Intimacy directors, or intimacy choreographers as they are also known, help actors simulate sex by laying out the specifications of consent and organizing the logistics of bodily contact.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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      Rebecca Frecknall Is Bringing ‘Cabaret’ Back to Broadway

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      When Rebecca Frecknall was a child, one of her favorite things to watch was a televised 1993 London revival of “Cabaret,” which her father had recorded on VHS tape. As the British theater director grew up, she hoped that one day she would stage a version of the musical, in which a writer falls in love with an exuberant and wayward cabaret performer in Weimar-era Germany.In early March, in a Midtown rehearsal room, Frecknall, 38, was preparing to do just that. Her “Cabaret,” which opens in previews at the August Wilson Theater on April 1, is a transfer from London’s West End, where it opened in 2021 to critical acclaim. The show won seven Olivier Awards, the British equivalent to the Tonys.“I always wanted to direct ‘Cabaret’,” Frecknall said later in an interview. “I just never thought I’d get the rights to it.” Her opportunity came when Eddie Redmayne — a producer on the show who played the Emcee in London, and will reprise the part on Broadway — asked her in 2019 to be part of a bid for a revival.At first it seemed like “a pipe dream,” Redmayne said, but after years of wrangling, they pulled it off. For the London show, the Playhouse Theater was reconfigured to reflect the musical’s debauched setting, transforming it into the Kit Kat Club, with cabaret tables and scantily clad dancers and musicians roaming the foyer and auditorium. The August Wilson Theater is getting a similar treatment, Frecknall said. To honor the playhouse’s namesake, the production designer Tom Scutt commissioned Black artists to paint murals in the reconfigured lobby, with theatergoers now entering via an alleyway off 52nd Street.Eddie Redmayne, who stars as the Emcee in “Cabaret,” during rehearsals for the show in New York this month.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAto Blankson-Wood, left, and Henry Gottfried.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesShortly before the show opened in London, Frecknall’s father died. That recorded revival, directed by Sam Mendes, was one of his favorites, and Frecknall loved it so much that, as she grew up and studied theater, she chose never to see the show onstage.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