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      ‘Opening Night’ Review: Ivo van Hove Makes a Stylish Movie Into a Sludgy Travesty

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      Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.In a London auditorium, a work of art is being desecrated. “Opening Night,” John Cassavetes’s understatedly stylish 1977 movie about an actress struggling with midlife ennui, has been reimagined as a musical by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and the result is a travesty.Its antiheroine, the Broadway superstar Myrtle Gordon (Sheridan Smith), has landed the lead role in a play about a middle-aged woman. But she isn’t feeling it: Though she is about 40, she insists she can’t relate. She stumbles through rehearsals, clashing with the director, Manny (Hadley Fraser), and the playwright, Sarah (Nicola Hughes), then goes rogue during previews, taking liberties with the script.To compound matters, the actress develops a neurotic fixation on Nancy (Shira Haas), a 17-year-old fan killed in a car crash moments after getting Myrtle’s autograph. Convinced that Nancy is a cipher for her own lost youth, Myrtle intermittently hallucinates the dead girl’s ghost, and even converses with it. Myrtle is unraveling, but the show — somehow — must go on.Smith with Shira Haas, who plays Nancy, a fan of Myrtle’s who was killed in a car crash after getting Myrtle’s autograph.Jan VersweyveldIt’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness.Benjamin Walker is wooden as Maurice, Myrtle’s stage co-star and ex-partner, who Cassavetes himself played charmingly in the film. The estranged couple’s brittle onstage chemistry is an essential ingredient in the drama; here, they seem like actual strangers. Haas’s spectral Nancy is a disconcertingly cutesy symbol of youthful feminine vitality, a sprite-like figure who scurries around the stage in a short skirt, knee-high socks and platform boots — suggesting not so much a young woman as a pubescent child.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 British Scandal Intrigued J.T. Rogers, Then He Went Down the Rabbit Hole

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      The playwright thought News International’s phone-hacking scandal could make for a sweeping thriller. Twelve years later, here it is.A now-faded note card taped above my desk reads: “Art, like light, needs distance.” Years ago, I wrote down that line from William Gass’s “On Being Blue,” and over the last few months it was a comforting reminder as I finished my new play “Corruption.” What was to be a history play about a media scandal in Britain has become a political thriller about some of the forces that seem to be upending our own country right now.The inspiration came in 2012, while reading “Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain,” a book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Watson, a former member of the British Parliament, and Hickman, a former reporter for The Independent, had written of how Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers and tabloids, including News of the World, were illegally hacking the phones of thousands of citizens — from celebrities to former prime ministers and even a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found dead — all to get sensational stories that would sell newspapers. As the book made clear, more papers sold meant more profit; more profit meant more power to influence the levers of government.The further I read, I realized that this could be a remarkable play. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” “Dial M” told a riveting story in granular detail about the use and abuse of power as a small group of vivid characters seeks to expose crimes that threaten their very democracy. Onstage it could become a sweeping tale in which the main characters take huge risks for their beliefs.In an effort to adapt the book, I sent the authors two of my plays — “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts” — that are also about politics and power. Then I flew to London, and went down the rabbit hole.Most of the key players would talk to me off the record only if they were certain that the Murdoch machine was unaware of our meeting. Even though News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s media empire, was under investigation and Rupert and James Murdoch had apologized for their company’s actions in testimony before Parliament, people were afraid of speaking out because of the fear of retribution.Many public figures and politicians who spoke out against Murdoch’s papers have revealed that those same papers tried to destroy their careers and ruin their lives. One such case involved a member of Parliament named Chris Bryant. During a parliamentary hearing, he got Rebekah Brooks, then the chief executive of News International, to acknowledge that News International had made payments to the police for information. Soon after, a rival paper published a photograph of him in his underwear that he had posted on a dating site, and then the Murdoch press ran with the story.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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      Review: In ‘American Rot,’ the Painful Legacy of the Dred Scott Case

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      Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.In a greasy spoon just off the New Jersey Turnpike, two men sit down for coffee. One, Walter Scott (Count Stovall), is a descendant of Dred Scott, and the other, Jim Taney (John L. Payne), is a great-great nephew of Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who, in 1857, wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people could never be citizens.Jim requested this meeting with Walter in hopes of apologizing for “arguably the worst decision in Supreme Court history.” As a premise for a story, one could scarcely ask for richer material. But something was lost in the execution of “American Rot,” a flat-footed play by Kate Taney Billingsley, who is an actual descendant of the former chief justice.That this La MaMa production, directed by Estelle Parsons, is based on Billingsley’s fleet audio play, starring Sam Waterston and John Douglas Thompson, is especially puzzling. In just 30 minutes, that audio production, titled “A Man of His Time,” effectively dramatized two descendants of historic figures locking horns, interrogating their own biases and seeking middle ground.In expanding the story for the version now running at the Ellen Stewart Theater, Billingsley added 12 supporting characters, most of whom make up Black and white choruses, representing the woke commentariat and unreconstructed racists. Stationed in segregated sections of Christina Weppner’s barely-there diner, the two factions are served by an insufferable waitress (Suzanne DiDonna), who has placed a feather in her hair after snatching it from a Native American man in the opening sequence. She then proceeds to toss off white nationalist comments with alarming frequency, and is eager for something called “the Appropriation Festival,” which promises “feathers, fringe, fentanyl!”Run, Walter, run! Yet Walter and Jim stay put, seemingly unbothered — unlikely for a Black customer or a white man who “preaches equal rights.”“American Rot” is tonally dissonant in other ways, too. Though the historic forefathers sit onstage — Dred Scott (Leland Gantt) is upstage on a stool and a cadaverous Roger Taney (Timothy Doyle) is situated downstage — they are mostly quiet throughout the show. Occasionally they break the space-time continuum — theater’s fifth wall — to menace their descendants or buffalo them into honoring their legacies. Yet the moral seriousness of the descendants’ conversations with each other and their ancestors is too often undercut by silliness, including burlesque skits. At one point, the white chorus sings a peppy number called “The Land of the Oblivious,” with lyrics like “We like to deny what’s really going on/Throughout this country and way beyond!/Social media is where we belong!”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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      On London Stages, Uplifting Tales of Black Masculinity

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      “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” and “Red Pitch” offer generous portrayals of male bonding.If you believe the Op-Eds, men are in a bad way these days: perpetually beleaguered and isolated, if not irredeemably toxic. But two lively new plays in London suggest an alternative, sanguine vision of 21st-century masculinity, foregrounding generous portrayals of male bonding and togetherness.In “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy,” six Black British men participate in a group-therapy session punctuated by bursts of song. The show, written and directed by Ryan Calais Cameron, is a male-centric spin on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 work, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” in which women of color recount their experiences of racism and gendered violence through performance poetry, music and dance.“For Black Boys” runs at the Garrick Theater in the West End through June 1. On a stage decked out in bright, blocky primary colors like a pop music video, the men — called Onyx, Pitch, Jet, Sable, Obsidian and Midnight, each a shade of black — bare their souls one by one. Every so often they morph into a ’90-style boy band, delivering neatly choreographed, crowd-pleasing renditions of R&B classics like Backstreet’s “No Diggity” and India.Arie’s “Brown Skin.” (The set design is by Anna Reid, the choreography by Theophilus O. Bailey.)Banter is their love language. Jet (an engagingly plaintive Fela Lufadeju) is joshed for wearing chinos — a “white” affectation — prompting a spiky discussion on the vexed subject of “acting Black.” Gradually, deflection and bravado give way to introspection and insight as the men unpack the perniciousness of machismo in their lives: Jet recalls how his father refused to seek cancer treatment for fear of appearing unmanly; Sable, a self-styled Casanova (Albert Magashi, suitably strutting) concedes that insecurity might be driving his philandering ways; a flashback scene depicts Obsidian (Mohammed Mansaray) reluctantly engaging in senseless violence for street cred, with life-changing consequences.The play ends with an upbeat mantra about keeping your chin up in the face of adversity. Its core message is about collective solidarity: By embracing emotional vulnerability and opening up to one another, young men can build support systems that will help them overcome life’s hardships. And the audience’s enthusiasm at the curtain call suggested to a sense of recognition: These sentiments rang true, and it meant something to see them conveyed from a West End stage.But that easy accessibility comes at a price. The six characters feel like stock types, their respective travails a little too generic to be truly compelling — each existing, rather like pictures in a high-school textbook, to illustrate a trope. This is echoed in dialogue that relies heavily on melodramatic cliché (one character tells us his father was “destructive like a wrecking ball and I was the collateral damage”) and lingo taken from social sciences (“We’re not monoliths!”). Despite its exuberant energy, “For Black Boys” is ultimately somewhat two-dimensional.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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      Nicole Scherzinger to Star in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ on Broadway in the Fall

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      The revival, birthed in London, is a radically reimagined version of the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on a 1950 Billy Wilder film.Jamie Lloyd’s radically reimagined revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Nicole Scherzinger plays the faded film star Norma Desmond, will come to Broadway this fall after a rapturously received run in London.Earlier this month, the revival was nominated for 11 Olivier Awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Lloyd. The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 28 and then open on Oct. 20 at the St. James Theater.The musical, a dark thriller based on a 1950 film by Billy Wilder, features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; Glenn Close starred in both previous Broadway productions, in 1994 and 2017. (The stage role was originated by Patti LuPone in London; the film starred Gloria Swanson.)Lloyd, a British theatermaker, has carved out a distinctive niche by staging starkly spare productions of classics with a focus on psychological drama. The new production, which ended its London run in January, is stripped down in many ways — two songs have been cut, there is no grand staircase or turban and Scherzinger doesn’t even wear shoes.“It’s much more about the psychological and emotional journey as opposed to huge, elaborate sets,” Lloyd said in an interview. “It’s very much a kind of psychological chamber piece.”The show, set in midcentury Los Angeles, is about a forgotten star of the silent film era who latches onto an aspiring young screenwriter in the hopes of rebooting her career.Scherzinger, 45, has had a varied entertainment path — as a musician, an actress and a television talent show judge. The critic Matt Wolf, reviewing the London production for The New York Times, called this “a career-defining performance” for Scherzinger; the New York production will be her Broadway debut.“I guess I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Scherzinger, who studied theater in high school and college, said in an interview. “I can’t believe that it’s finally about to happen.”Scherzinger, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Kentucky, said she was eager to have another go at the role in the United States. She said she will set aside the script for a few months — she just spent three weeks visiting with her grandparents in Hawaii — before reimmersing herself in the character.“I’ll be back in America, my home, and I’m going to want to try and up my game even more,” she said. “There’s certain places I can make stronger choices, and I’m excited to play around with that to see where it can go — it’s great to be able to explore even more and go deeper.”Scherzinger, who said she has committed to nine months in the role, will be joined on Broadway by her three Olivier-nominated co-stars, Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett-Young and David Thaxton. More

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      Cynthia Nixon Knows What Poem She Wants Read at Her Funeral

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      “I love ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,’” said the actress, currently performing Off Broadway in “The Seven Year Disappear.” “That one gets me every time.”Cynthia Nixon hadn’t been onstage since 2017, when she and Laura Linney alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie in “The Little Foxes.”She wasn’t expecting her comeback to be “The Seven Year Disappear,” playing an artist who also re-emerges after seven years.“It was really startling to me and a weird, uncanny echo of the play,” Nixon said. The Jordan Seavey production runs through March 31 at the New Group, and four performances, from March 29 to 31, will be live-streamed.Nixon is a two-time Tony Award winner, including one for “The Little Foxes,” but she is widely known for her work in television, including as Miranda Hobbes in “Sex and the City” and in “And Just Like That …” and as Ada Brook in “The Gilded Age.” This summer, she plans to begin shooting the third seasons of those latter two series, volleying from one to the other.“I can see in some ways it being fun,” she said. After all, she’s pulled off something like it before.“I did this thing when I was 18 where I was in two Broadway plays at the same time,” said Nixon, who ran back and forth between “The Real Thing” and “Hurlyburly,” both directed by Mike Nichols, and even made the curtain calls.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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      With ‘Tommy’ Revival, Pete Townshend Is Talking to a New Generation

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      He’s also still working through his childhood trauma. Considering his musical’s legacy, he sees a story about how “we prevail ultimately, by turning toward the light.”As he entered a suite at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, Pete Townshend mentioned that an afternoon meeting had been canceled. “So,” he added, “we have lots of time to talk.”Townshend is one of rock’s great singers, songwriters and guitarists, and he’s also among music’s pre-eminent talkers. Since the Who first took the stage 60 years ago, he has considered interviews to be an adjunct to his music, a parallel way for him to clarify or interrogate the ideas he pours into songs.In 1969, the Who released “Tommy,” a rock opera written mostly by Townshend, although the bassist John Entwistle contributed the songs “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” and the drummer Keith Moon suggested the premise of “Tommy’s Holiday Camp.” Townshend expected the double album to fade quickly, in the way of most records. Instead, it took root in pop culture, and in short succession was adapted by a ballet group in Montreal, the Seattle Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra. Then, most memorably, it was a delirious 1975 film directed by Ken Russell.The “Tommy” hoopla had faded before it was adapted for Broadway in 1993, with a book by Townshend and the show’s director, Des McAnuff. In a review in The New York Times, Frank Rich called it “stunning” and “the authentic rock musical that has eluded Broadway for two generations.” It ran for two years, and garnered Tony Awards for McAnuff’s direction and Townshend’s score.Ali Louis Bourzgui, center standing at a pinball machine, as Tommy in the Broadway revival of “The Who’s Tommy” at the Nederlander Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLast year, the pair revived “Tommy” in a reimagined version at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where it drew candescent reviews, and on March 28, it opens at the Nederlander Theater, with Ali Louis Bourzgui making his Broadway debut in the title role.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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      Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher to Star in Broadway Play

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      The duo will lead the cast of “Left on Tenth,” a stage adaptation of Delia Ephron’s best-selling memoir.The actors Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher are set to star in a stage adaptation of “Left on Tenth,” Delia Ephron’s memoir about a late-in-life romance.The producer Daryl Roth said Friday that she intended to bring the play, adapted by Ephron and directed by Susan Stroman, to Broadway next fall. She did not specify a theater or an opening date.“Left on Tenth,” published in 2022, is about how Ephron simultaneously battled cancer and found love in the years after the death of her husband and sister (the essayist and filmmaker Nora Ephron).Ephron is a novelist and screenwriter, best known for “You’ve Got Mail,” which she wrote with her sister. She and her sister also collaborated on an earlier play, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.”The “Left on Tenth” team has a long list of credentials. Roth has produced 13 Tony-winning shows and seven Pulitzer-winning plays; Stroman has won five Tony Awards as a director and choreographer.Margulies, currently starring in “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, has appeared on Broadway once before, in the 2006 play “Festen.” Gallagher is a Broadway veteran who last starred in a 2015 revival of “On the Twentieth Century”; he has also worked extensively in film and television.Also Friday, the producers of the new musical “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, said their show, which they announced last fall, would begin previews Oct. 19 and open Nov. 14 at the Palace Theater. The Broadway production is to star Katie Brayben as the title character, and Andrew Rannells as her husband, Jim Bakker; the two performers previously played those roles in a production of the musical at the Almeida Theater in London in 2022. “Tammy Faye” features music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, and a book by James Graham; the show is directed by Rupert Goold. More