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      How Ingrid Michaelson Made ‘The Notebook’ Into a Musical

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      Family history is “wrapped up in these songs,” said the singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who is making the leap to Broadway with an adaptation of the popular romance novel.The stage manager’s office on the second floor of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in Times Square is about the size of a half bathroom and has the charm of a utility closet. It’s crowded and overlit, thanks to a high-wattage vanity mirror situated near a 1970s-era mini sink.Ingrid Michaelson surveyed the room where we were to begin our interview, and sighed. “It’s not glamorous at all — but it is,” she said. “There’s just a small, lucky group that gets to see these little rooms.”With the opening of “The Notebook” on Thursday, Michaelson will make the turn from a successful mid-list singer-songwriter to Broadway composer. Though other pop writers have made the same foray into musical theater — including Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, and Michaelson’s friend Sara Bareilles — Michaelson was an unlikely choice, because “The Notebook” is a huge franchise and she isn’t a hitmaker. “Quirky” is a word that turns up in articles about her, and quirky is rarely a mass-market trait.Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 romance novel was a publishing phenomenon that has sold 14 million copies worldwide. In 2004, it was adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and its feverishly passionate dialogue (“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!” Gosling shouts, in the middle of a rainstorm.) made it as beloved by fans as it was scorned by critics. Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”“I remember watching the movie with my friend — we rented it from Blockbuster,” Michaelson, 44, recalled. “I cried and cried and cried at the end.” She was dressed casually, in a gray knit cap, baggy flannel shirt and torn jeans. In conversation, she gravitated toward self-deprecation and the spilling-over candor of a lifelong New Yorker. She was droll and funny, but cried several times during our interview. At one point, on the topic of losing our parents, we both cried at the same time.“The Notebook” begins in an old age home, where Allie, who has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize her husband, Noah. He reads to her from a notebook, which tells the story of how they met and fell in love in their late teens, only to be separated by a conniving parent. They meet again 10 years later, when Allie is engaged to someone else. Will her marital pledge hold firm in the face of true love? We know the answer, but the reward of their reunion is offset by the pain of seeing them both in distress.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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      Dominique Blanc, at 67, Is in Her Prime

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      In 2003, three decades into her career, Dominique Blanc experienced every actor’s worst nightmare: The phone stopped ringing.Approaching 50, she was one of France’s most celebrated performers, fresh off an acclaimed stage run in a classic tragedy, Jean Racine’s “Phèdre.” But the subsequent, yearslong lack of offers “deeply unsettled me,” Blanc said in a recent interview. “I found myself in extreme solitude. I really believed I would never be able to set foot on a stage again.”“La Douleur,” a searing, award-winning one-woman show that will have its American premiere at the FIAF Florence Gould Hall in New York on March 13, became a way to process the hurt and take charge. Blanc’s character, lifted from a book by the French author Marguerite Duras, awaits her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, uncertain whether he is even alive.The show grew out of a series of readings she did from the book with the director Patrice Chéreau, a longtime collaborator. In 2008, Blanc pitched him a light stage version, requiring only a table, chairs and old costumes from Blanc’s closet. While Duras’s book was translated into English as “The War: A Memoir,” its original title simply means “Pain,” and in her show, Blanc starkly recreates women’s anguish as their partners return from untold horrors.“It was the first time I was completely alone onstage, with this extraordinary yet difficult text. I had so much fear,” Blanc said. “But it saved me.”For several years, Blanc reclaimed her artistic agency by performing “La Douleur” in theaters, school gymnasiums and prisons, both in France and abroad. In 2022, as the theater world prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of Chéreau’s death, the production was revived.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: Welcome to ‘Illinoise,’ Land of Love, Grief and Zombies

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      Sufjan Stevens’s 2005 concept album has become an unlikely and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid, directed and choreographed by Justin Peck.When emotions get too big for speech, you sing; when too big even for song, you dance.Or so goes the standard theatrical formula. But what if the emotions are huge from the get-go?That’s the challenge and, it turns out, the glory of “Illinoise,” a mysterious and deeply moving dance-musical hybrid based on Sufjan Stevens’s similarly named 2005 concept album. (The title has acquired an extra “e.”) Exploring the hot zone between childhood and adulthood, when emotions can be at their most overwhelming, the show dispenses with dialogue completely and leaps directly to movement and song.But not together: Among a thousand other smart choices, Justin Peck (who directed and choreographed) and Jackie Sibblies Drury (who, with Peck, wrote the story) have delaminated the songs from the characters, thus avoiding the jukebox trap that diminishes both.Instead, in the show, which opened on Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, Stevens’s wistful and sometimes enigmatic numbers, set in various Illinois locations, are performed by three vocalists on platforms high above the action, wearing butterfly wings as if to stay aloft. Below, the 12 acting dancers (or are they dancing actors?) perform a parallel story without being forced into overliteral connections.Or rather, they perform an anthology of stories, a kind of exquisite corpse of late adolescence. As they collect around a clump of lanterns that suggest an urban campfire — the poetic set, including upside-down trees, is by Adam Rigg — they engage in what seems to be a rite of passage: the sharing of deep truths with sympathetic friends. The truths are often traumas, of course: first love, first loss, first disillusionment, first death. They are “read” (that is, danced) from notebooks decorated, again, with butterflies, suggesting the privacy of cocoons and the fragility of emergence.Twelve acting dancers (or are they dancing actors?) perform a story that’s parallel to the one told in Sufjan Stevens’s wistful songs set in various Illinois locations.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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      Review: In ‘Doubt,’ What He Knows, She Knows, God Knows

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      Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.Here are a few things Sister Aloysius cannot abide: ballpoint pens, “Frosty the Snowman,” long fingernails like Father Flynn’s, Father Flynn himself.She is what you’d call a forbidding nun, a Sister of Charity without much of it. (Her name means something like “warrior.”) The principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, she defines a good teacher as one who is a discomfort to her students, a “fierce moral guardian,” not a friend.“If you are vigilant,” she tells young Sister James, “they will not need to be.”But Father Flynn, following the spirit of the recent Second Vatican Council, and presumably his own inclinations, does not lead with fear. In ministering to his mostly Italian and Irish congregation, he seeks to give the church “a more familiar face.” His sermons are warm, told with jokes and accents. He coaches the boys’ basketball team. Add to Sister Aloysius’s catalog of unholy tendencies his suggestion that they occasionally take the students for ice cream.Even if nothing else set these two forces in opposition, there would be enough here for a fine play about varieties of faith. But John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable,” first seen on Broadway in 2005, is much more than that. It is a sturdy melodrama, an infallible crowd-pleaser, a detective yarn, a character study and an inquest into the unknowable.It is also, in the handsome revival that opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, something I hadn’t really noticed before: a battle of the sexes. For in the church of that day, as perhaps in our own, mutual distrust often arose between the men who had all the power and the women who saw how they used it.Why, after all, should Aloysius (Amy Ryan) already dislike the popular Flynn (Liev Schreiber) when the action begins? Why should she suspect that behind his “more familiar face” lies overfamiliarity? Is it his ballpoint pen? Those detestable fingernails?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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      Paper Bag Players Celebrate 65 Years of Making Magic Out of the Ordinary

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      The children’s theater company will bring its latest production, “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!,” to stages in New York this spring.What fun can you have with plain brown grocery sacks and empty cardboard cartons?Preschoolers know how to derive joy from these objects (as does any curious cat). But perhaps the best way to appreciate their magical potential is to watch the Paper Bag Players, a New York City children’s theater company that thrives on turning the ordinary into the unexpected.Families can experience that transformative power on Sunday, when the nonprofit troupe presents “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!” at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan. (They will also perform in April at the Jewish Museum and SUNY Orange in Middletown, N.Y.) The production consists of 13 musical skits tailored for audiences ages 3 to 9, and it celebrates a milestone that any performing-arts organization would envy: the company’s 65th season, making it one of the longest-operating children’s theater troupes in the nation.“At the heart of our theater is making imaginative use of materials,” John Stone, the players’ executive director, composer and music director, said during a group interview with the company’s principals.The troupe’s devotion to paper and cardboard, from which it has devised sets, props and towering characters, dates to its earliest days. In 1958, its founders, who included the dancers Judith Martin and Remy Charlip, began to experiment with simple objects. Over the years, the raw materials have expanded to include foam board, Tyvek and household tools like mop heads.Clockwise from bottom left, Brenda Cummings, Jan Maxwell, James Lally and, in the bed, Judith Martin, in “Cookies” (1984).Ken HowardThe new production, “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!,” includes the 1991 skit “Lost in the Mall,” starring actors wrapped in cardboard.Martha Swope via The Paper Bag Players“We take our inspiration from them,” Stone said of children. “Then we’re making our own sorts of things with them in mind, or with their kind of play in mind. And that gives it back to the kids. And it’s an upward spiral of inspiration.”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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      ‘Bérénice’ Review: Crushed by Isabelle Huppert’s Star Power

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      Romeo Castellucci’s production of the classic play by Jean Racine is all about the lead performer — and that’s it.The Isabelle Huppert vehicle is a curious subgenre of French theater. At this point, its ingredients have grown predictable: They include a high-profile male director, like Robert Wilson or Ivo van Hove; a prestigious playhouse; and a central role that casts Huppert as a woman teetering on the edge of reason.Huppert, 70, has adhered to this formula in a diverse set of plays in recent years, from Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” to Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” and, in New York, Florian Zeller’s “The Mother.” She was the focal point in all of these, but this season’s entry, a “Bérénice” directed by Romeo Castellucci at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, goes much further.The production does away with any pretense that it is about more than its star. Castellucci and Huppert have equal billing in all publicity material, down to the ticket stubs, and Huppert’s name is literally embroidered into the curtains that frame the stage. Some of the sentences that adorn them are barely legible because of the fabric’s creases, but one of them, a quote from a playbill interview with Castellucci, describes Huppert as “the synecdoche of theater.”Under the circumstances, don’t expect to actually hear much of “Bérénice,” a 1670 tragedy by Jean Racine that is widely considered one of the greatest plays in French. For starters, most of the characters have fallen by the wayside. Huppert is the only performer who speaks, delivering Racine’s alexandrine verse to an empty stage — or, in one scene, to a washing machine.Racine’s play offers a classic choice between love and duty: Titus, who is about to become the emperor of Rome, lives with Bérénice, the queen of Judaea. Custom dictates that a foreigner cannot become empress, however, and Titus renounces their love, leaving Bérénice shattered.Here, a silent, model-like Titus, played by Cheikh Kébé, hardly crosses paths with Bérénice. (Imagine being cast as Huppert’s love interest and only looking her in the eyes during the curtain calls.) Kébé only materializes for a few wordless scenes, along with Giovanni Manzo as Antiochus, a close friend of Titus’s who is also in love with Bérénice.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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      Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal to Lead Broadway ‘Othello’

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      Kenny Leon will direct a starry revival of Shakespeare’s tragedy in the spring of 2025.Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal will star in a Broadway production of “Othello” next year, setting up what is sure to be one of the hottest tickets of the 2024-2025 theater season.Kenny Leon, who won a Tony Award in 2014 for directing a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” that starred Washington, will direct the production — the 22nd Broadway staging of “Othello” since 1751, according to the Internet Broadway Database. Leon also directed Washington’s Tony-winning performance in a 2010 production of “Fences.”Washington, an enormously successful film actor with two Academy Awards, for “Glory” and “Training Day,” has starred in five previous Broadway plays, most recently a 2018 revival of “The Iceman Cometh.”Gyllenhaal, also best known for his film career (“Brokeback Mountain,” the upcoming “Road House” remake), has starred in three previous Broadway shows, most recently a 2019 monologue called “A Life,” which was paired with “Sea Wall” for an evening of one-acts.In “Othello,” one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Washington, 69, will play the title character, a general driven mad by jealousy. Gyllenhaal, 43, will play Iago, the story’s villain, who persuades Othello to question his wife’s fidelity. The role of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, has not yet been cast.The revival will be produced by Brian Anthony Moreland (“The Wiz”); the show is scheduled to open in the spring of 2025 at an unspecified Shubert Theater.The last Broadway production of “Othello” was in 1982, and starred James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago. More

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      Review: For ‘Jack Tucker,’ Failure Is the Only Option

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      Zach Zucker delivers a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic at SoHo Playhouse.In one of his most quotable lyrics, Bob Dylan sang about a woman who knows “there’s no success like failure/ And that failure’s no success at all.” She clearly never saw the comedy of Jack Tucker.With sweaty insecurity, Tucker steps on his punchlines and clanks the setups. His tech malfunctions. When he sketches the familiar hourglass shape in the air to draw attention to a woman’s figure, he ends up looking like a chicken. His crowd work ends in despair. On the rare occasion when he lands a joke, he celebrates by having a co-worker take a photo, but something always destroys the shot.As played by Zach Zucker, in a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic, Tucker fails in bunches, in quantity and quality, flopping so fast you might miss some errors. Just when you think he can’t stumble again, he does. And it’s a triumph.Not since “The Play That Goes Wrong” have I seen mistakes this meticulous. Zucker, who trained with the French guru Philippe Gaulier, doesn’t just pratfall and malaprop. He finds new ways to get laughs from spilled beer, a series of variations on a splash that lead to a drunkenly fun call back.“Jack Tucker: Comedy’s Standup Hour,” written by Zucker and directed with a firm attention to detail by Jonny Woolley, is the latest solo show to emerge out of the burgeoning scene that features comics like Natalie Palamides, Courtney Pauroso, Alexandra Tatarsky and Bill O’Neill. (O’Neill’s acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe show “The Amazing Banana Brothers” is onstage at SoHo Playhouse tonight and Wednesday.) As the host of Stamptown, a bicoastal showcase for many of these artists, Zucker has been at the center of this movement. It’s a younger generation than the new vaudevillians like Bill Irwin and David Shiner, but this group has the same inventiveness, ambition and dedication to breathing new life into old shtick. But their work is more visceral and topical. (If anyone’s moonlighting at Cirque du Soleil, I’d be surprised.)Clowns and stand-ups tend to operate in different circles, so this show could be seen as a shot from one camp to the other. And in the voice of Tucker, Zucker does float countless hack stand-up premises — some swaggering, others oblivious, like “I guess men and women are different after all.” As satire, this show is toothless. It’s far too stylized to mount a stinging critique, and its one-disaster-after-another structure risks becoming repetitious. But the surprises are in the form, not the content.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