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    The Tony Nominee Starring in Alicia Keys’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ on Broadway

    Maleah Joi Moon almost gave up on theater. Now, in her first professional role, the “Hell’s Kitchen” star is a Tony nominee.Maleah Joi Moon has come a long way in a short time.Just a few years ago, she was a theater kid in suburban New Jersey, listening to her dad’s Alicia Keys records, starring in a high school production of “Rent,” waiting outside a Broadway stage door hoping to meet the cast of “Waitress.”Now, at 21, she’s a Tony nominee for her Broadway debut as the star of the new Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which opened last month. That means she is working alongside the people she had just been fangirling — getting vocal advice and the occasional breakfast with Keys; honing her acting instincts with the show’s director, Michael Greif, who directed “Rent” 28 years ago; and learning to manage an eight-show week from Shoshana Bean, the actress she stage-doored in “Waitress,” who has taken Moon under her wing while portraying her mother.Moon’s confident performance — smoky voice, headstrong attitude, gestural dance moves — has caught the attention of critics. “Sensational,” Elisabeth Vincentelli declared in The New York Times. For Vulture, Jackson McHenry called her both “a great discovery” and “a virtuoso.” And Adam Feldman of Time Out went for wordplay: “With apologies to astronomers: Moon is a star.”“It’s surreal and it’s ridiculous and crazy and insane and all the things,” Moon told me as we stood in Shubert Alley, just under a digital marquee featuring her atop a piano, not far from the stage door where she now signs autographs for her own fans. “But my inner child — the one that wanted to be Nala on Broadway — is like, this is aligned. It’s divine alignment. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t meant.”Moon is dancing a delicate dance in “Hell’s Kitchen,” sort of playing Alicia Keys and sort of not. The show is about a few formative months in the life of Ali, a 17-year-old girl chafing under her mother’s vigilance, hooking up with a street musician and discovering a gift for piano. It is a fictionalized remix of Keys’s own childhood chapters, but it is partly Moon too — she has been with the show through developmental workshops and an Off Broadway production, and her personality and physicality, as well as her very recent adolescence, inform those of her character.“Hell’s Kitchen,” a semi-autobiographical Alicia Keys musical, was nominated for 13 Tony Awards.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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    Robert Downey Jr. to Make Broadway Debut in Ayad Akhtar Play

    The Oscar-winning actor will star as an A.I.-curious author in “McNeal,” starting performances in September at Lincoln Center Theater.Robert Downey Jr., who earlier this year won an Academy Award, will make his Broadway debut this fall in “McNeal,” a new drama by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.The play is about a gifted novelist with a difficult family life and a potentially problematic interest in artificial intelligence. Downey will play the writer.The production is being staged by Lincoln Center Theater, one of four nonprofits with Broadway houses, at its Vivian Beaumont Theater. Previews are to begin Sept. 5, and the opening is scheduled for Sept. 30.“McNeal” will be directed by Bartlett Sher, a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater and a Tony winner for “South Pacific.”Downey, 59, has been a prolific and enormously successful film actor, overcoming significant challenges (he had a long battle with substance abuse and served time in prison on drug charges). He has built a career that has been lucrative (he starred as Iron Man in multiple Marvel movies) and acclaimed (he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for a widely praised performance as Lewis Strauss, a government official, in “Oppenheimer”).His stage experience is limited — his one Off Broadway credit, “American Passion,” opened and closed on the same date in 1983 — and he said in a statement, “It’s been 40 years since I was last on ‘the boards,’ but hopefully I’ll knock the dust off quick.”Akhtar is a playwright and a novelist with an appetite for complex and thorny subjects whose previous plays have explored finance and Islam. He has had a long relationship with Lincoln Center Theater, which first produced his Pulitzer-winning play, “Disgraced,” on its Off Off Broadway stage, and also presented his plays “The Who & The What” Off Off Broadway and “Junk” on Broadway.Akhtar is also working on a musical: He is one of the book writers for a stage adaptation of the film “La La Land” that is now in development. More

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    Eboni Booth on Winning the Drama Pulitzer for ‘Primary Trust’

    This play about a lonely, emotionally damaged man resonated with audiences returning to the theater after the pandemic.Eboni Booth dreamed up the story that became “Primary Trust” for a school assignment. She was a playwriting fellow at Juilliard, and she decided to write about a guy who works at a bank. At the time, she drank mai tais, and soon, so did her protagonist.That play, which she drafted in 2019 and which was first staged last year, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama on Monday. The judges praised it as “a simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.”The play, set in a fictional small town outside Rochester, N.Y., and starring William Jackson Harper (“The Good Place”), was staged Off Broadway by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company. The first West Coast production is scheduled for this fall at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.“I wrote about being hungry for connection, and then I got so much connection through the production, and that was very meaningful,” Eboni Booth said of the response to her work.Booth, 43, grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Queens; she had a previous play, “Paris,” staged in New York in 2020, and she has also worked as an actress. She talked about “Primary Trust” on Monday afternoon, shortly after learning that she had won the prestigious award.These are edited excerpts from the interview.For those of our readers who didn’t get to see it, what is “Primary Trust” about?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 Keep Going Songs’ Review: Vexed by Grief and Worried About the Planet

    Abigail and Shaun Bengson muse on death in their latest work, but its looseness makes it hard to get a handle on.Not a lot of Lincoln Center Theater shows call for setting the preperformance mood with the Grateful Dead, but when “Uncle John’s Band” came over the speakers the other evening before the Bengsons took the stage, it was such an ideal match for their crunchy, mellow, kindhearted, folk-rock vibe that I had to smile.In Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s “The Keep Going Songs,” though, it’s the dead with a lowercase “d” who are integral. This married couple of music-makers, known for shaggy, melodic, autobiographically inspired theater, wanted to create what they call “a concert. That’s also a wake.”Directed by Caitlin Sullivan for LCT3, the show is a musing on death: of human beings, and of our planet. The pairing doesn’t entirely work organically. Still, the seeming intent is a processing of grief.“If you’re in this room,” Abigail tells the audience at the Claire Tow Theater, “we assume you are going through something terrible.”Shaun adds: “And if you’re not, then we don’t want to hear about it.” (Is he joking? He’s very dry. Hard to tell.)As Abigail notes, the show is front-loaded with grief. She mentions almost immediately that her brother died the day she and Shaun were asked to do this Lincoln Center run. The hurt of that loss is in fact threaded throughout “The Keep Going Songs,” which, by the way, is a new piece. Despite the title and the shared motif of perseverance, it is unrelated to the Bengsons’ pandemic-inspired show “The Keep Going Song,” with its upbeat, earworm title tune.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 Miser’ Review: Updating Molière, but Missing a Key Ingredient

    This Molière in the Park production doesn’t have the sharp satirical bite of the original.The support beam of theater in France, Molière is nowhere near as famous in the United States. Yet the comic high jinks, star-crossed lovers and long-lost relatives that pop up in his play “The Miser,” first produced in 1668, will be instantly familiar to anybody who has ever seen a Shakespeare comedy.Where Molière stands out, however, is as a sharp social satirist whose denouncing of the vain, the hypocritical and the simply deluded have not aged — once timely, they are now timeless. Unfortunately it is precisely that element that is missing from the Molière in the Park production of “The Miser” at the LeFrak Center in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.The title character, Harpagon (Francesca Faridany), is a curdled, choleric, elderly man consumed by greed. It’s not even that he wants money to live in luxury: Harpagon just wants to possess it.The play relentlessly ridicules Harpagon and his pathological greed, along with his tyrannical ways at home, where he lords it over his two daughters, the flighty Elise (Ismenia Mendes) and the flashy Cleante (Alana Raquel Bowers). Complicating matters, Elise is in love with her father’s steward, Valere (Calvin Leon Smith, fresh from a terrific turn as the closeted Larry in “Fat Ham”), while Harpagon and Cleante both covet the fetching Marianne (MaYaa Boateng, from “Fairview”).That women are playing Cleante (a man in the original) and Harpagon indicates that the director Lucie Tiberghien, who is also the artistic director of Molière in the Park, is not stuck in tradition. Although it doesn’t gum up the works, why keep Harpagon as a male character, for example, and make Cleante a female one? This is where Molière’s relative obscurity in the United States becomes an asset since many audience members would not even be aware of the difference, as everything is played matter-of-factly.Trickier is Faridany as Harpagon. An essential part of the play is that the character covets the same woman as his son (OK, daughter), so his being an elderly man adds an element of discomfort. This does not hit as hard when he is played by a woman who is far from “over 70,” Harpagon’s intended age.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 Cherry Orchard’ Review: Chekhov in the Fun Zone

    Benedict Andrews’s production in London offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy.When Anton Chekhov wrote “The Cherry Orchard,” his 1904 play about a financially beleaguered aristocratic household in turn-of-the-century Russia, he thought of it as a comedy. Generations of theater directors — starting with Konstantin Stanislavsky in its original Moscow run — had other ideas, preferring to render it as a somber tragedy. In London, a new production sets out to do justice to the playwright’s vision by leaning in to the play’s comedic elements.Directed by Benedict Andrews, an Australian based in Iceland who had London hits with “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the show runs at the Donmar Warehouse through June 22. It is a funny and, at times, raucous take which, despite some flaws, breathes new life into this old classic.The German actress Nina Hoss gives a controlled performance as Ranevskaya, who returns to her family estate after a grief-stricken exile to find its residents depressed and broke. She is a poignant picture of frayed dignity, her aristocratic self-possession increasingly brittle as the story progresses toward it sad denouement. But the real star of the show is Adeel Akhtar (“Murder Mystery”) as Lopakhin, the rapacious self-made magnate who persuades Ranevskaya to put the estate’s prize jewel, her beloved cherry orchard, up for auction.Hoss with Adeel Akhtar, who plays Lopakhin, the businessman who convinces Ranevskaya to put her orchard up for auction.Johan PerssonAkhtar renders Lopakhin as a cockney wheeler-dealer, by turns chummy and aggressive, whose brazen acquisitiveness is tempered by a raffish charm — he is fond of corny catchphrases like “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” — and moments of humanity. A peasant’s son, he has transcended his origins but remains acutely conscious of them. (He tells us he is ashamed of his handwriting because it gives him away.) Despite Lopakhin’s almost cartoonish cynicism, we can’t help but like him, even when he buys up the orchard himself, intending to tear it down and turn it into a lucrative tourist resort.Michael Gould (“A View from the Bridge”) is outstanding as Ranevskaya’s brother, Gaev, the epitome of aristocratic dissipation as he pads about the stage in baggy sweatpants, sucking on a lollipop while delivering eccentric disquisitions. There are some eye-catching performances among the minor characters, too. June Watson is delightful as the octogenarian servant Firs, who is forever mumbling away to herself, semi-audibly, in irritable tones. And Eanna Hardwicke makes a brilliantly funny stage debut as the bookkeeper Epikhodov, whose clownishly squeaky shoes undermine the authority of his every utterance (most notably when he declares “I’m, quote-unquote, intellectually insatiable”).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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    ‘Lempicka’ to End Broadway Run a Month After Opening

    The first show to fall in the wake of the Tony nominations on Tuesday, this musical about an art world individualist was years in the making.“Lempicka,” a new musical about an artistically and sexually adventurous painter, announced Thursday evening that it would close on May 19, just a month after opening.This is the first show to fall after this year’s Tony nominations were announced on Tuesday. “Lempicka” scored three nods — for the actresses Eden Espinosa and Amber Iman, as well as for scenic design — but was shut out of the best musical category. It really needed a boost, because its grosses have been anemic — last week it grossed $288,102, which is unsustainably low for a Broadway musical.The musical, which has been in development for years, had productions at the Williamstown Theater Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego before arriving on Broadway during a crush of openings this spring; it began previews March 19 and opened April 14.The show, which explores the life of the 20th-century painter Tamara de Lempicka, was written by Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould and directed by Rachel Chavkin. Reviews were mixed to negative.The show, produced by Seaview and Jenny Niederhoffer, was capitalized for up to $19.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money will be lost. In a statement, the producers said, “We are so proud of our production and the family of artists and artisans who’ve shaped it. Few knew better than Tamara de Lempicka that art isn’t easy but always worth the effort.”Broadway is packed with shows right now — there are 35 running, 12 of which opened in the nine days before the April 25 deadline to qualify for the Tony Awards. They are facing significant challenges, because production costs have risen and attendance has fallen since the pandemic. Many industry leaders believe that most of the new musicals will not succeed financially. More

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    A Challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s New Leaders

    The Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic directors have put together a challenging debut season. But many visitors come to Stratford-upon-Avon seeking something more traditional.Outside peak tourist season, there’s something a little uncanny about Stratford-upon-Avon, the English market town famous as William Shakespeare’s birthplace and home. On a visit last week, with only a trickle of foreign sightseers and a few locals around, the town’s cobbled streets, mock-Tudor pubs and quaint tearooms were eerily quiet. The occasional flock of schoolchildren on a field trip provided the closest thing to bustle.And yet this tranquil place is home to one of the most venerable institutions of British cultural life: the Royal Shakespeare Company. Founded in 1961, with a mission to bring Shakespeare’s work to a contemporary audience, the company is renowned for its diverse and forward-thinking repertoire: It presents modern spins on Shakespeare’s plays alongside works by other playwrights, with a strong, craft-centric ethos geared toward nurturing emerging talent. With a roster of alumni that includes Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, the company’s global prestige transcends its modest environs.But when summer comes, the tourists will, too — and this presents a perennial challenge for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leaders.A lot of those visitors will want to see classical, period-dress productions that transport them to a picture-postcard England of yore, in keeping with Stratford’s kitschy trappings. But contemporary treatments of Shakespeare’s texts — eschewing naturalism, foregrounding psychological elements and topical resonances — are more in vogue. This is the conundrum facing Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the troupe’s new co-artistic directors, as they embark on their first season in charge.For the first few decades of its existence, the company had one foot in Stratford and the other in London. It abandoned its London base in 2001, when the artistic director at the time, Adrian Noble, dismantled its permanent acting troupe in favor of a flexible model, with performers on short-term contracts.This made it easier to sign up big-name stars, but it upset actors’ unions and some theater purists, like the theater historian Simon Trowbridge. In his pointedly titled 2021 book “The Rise and Fall of the Royal Shakespeare Company,” Trowbridge argued that the company should have ditched Stratford, and instead made its primary home in London, where Britain’s largest theater audience is, only deploying the Stratford theaters during the busy summer season and perhaps at Christmas.But the symbolic allure of Shakespeare’s hometown was too tempting to give up. When I met Evans and Harvey for an interview, they made a persuasive case for the merits of keeping a base in Stratford. Harvey previously spent seven years as the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, an arts center in Wales; Evans, a former actor with two Olivier Awards to his name, enjoyed fruitful spells at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1990s and 2000s, and was the artistic director of the Chichester Theater Festival before taking his current job.From left: Brandon Bassir, Luke Thompson, Abiola Owokoniran and Eric Stroud in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”Johan PerssonThrough a window in one of the Stratford rehearsal rooms, Evans said, “you can see the church where Shakespeare was baptized and is now buried, and through another window you can see the school he went to, and through another you can see the house he bought for his wife and family later in life.”“Having rehearsed myself as a young actor in that space,” he added, there was something to “relish and savor about coming to make theater in the place where you can see and experience those things — not in a way that is touristic, but in a way that brings you closer to the source.”Harvey said that there was a “thing that happens when you are in a place that is not your everyday existence — the focus that comes from that, and the sense of company. Which is something that we can offer that London theaters can’t. It’s a very American model in some ways: America has an extraordinary network of theaters outside of major metropolises.”There has always been a strong U.S. connection to the theater at Stratford. In the Victorian era, the town’s burgeoning tourist industry was sustained by a constant flow of trans-Atlantic Shakespeare pilgrims.“It was actually Americans who first got it,” Harvey said. In the 19th century, when two local brewery magnates, Edward Fordham Flower and Charles Flower, proposed building a theater in Stratford, “the British public and the British theater world essentially said ‘that idea’s nonsense,’” Harvey said. The duo then “went across the Atlantic, and it was American philanthropists and supporters who got the idea, and came on board, and made it possible,” she added. The result was the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, built in 1879 and later renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theater.Today, that playhouse is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s flagship. Elsewhere in Stratford, the company also runs the 400-seat Swan Theater and a small studio theater called the Other Place. A new outdoor auditorium, the Holloway Garden Theater, will begin hosting outdoor performances from June.The program for Evans and Harvey’s debut season includes a Ukrainian production of “King Lear” and an abridged, 80-minute outdoor “As You Like It.” A period-dress “Othello” in the fall will cater to more conservative tastes. The non-Shakespeare offerings include a retelling of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 aristocratic comedy, “The School for Scandal,” and new plays on themes such as environmental politics (“Kyoto”) and language lessons (“English”). The key, Evans said, was “balance and variety.”The season began in April with a spirited take on Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” In this early comedy, regarded as something of an anomaly because of its bathetic, unresolved ending, Ferdinand, the king of Navarre (Abiola Owokoniran) and his three favorite noblemen (Luke Thompson, Eric Stroud and Brandon Bassir) undertake a vow of abstinence — “to fast, to study, to see no woman.”From left: Ankur Bahl, Bettrys Jones and Dee Ahluwalia in “The Buddha of Suburbia.”Steve TannerThat is promptly derailed by the arrival of a princess (Melanie-Joyce Bermudez) and her retinue (Ioanna Kimbook, Amy Griffith and Sarita Gabony). In contravention of their oath, the men make advances on the sly and the wary women prank them to test their mettle. Cue a medley of exquisite tomfoolery, featuring bawdy badinage, dubious love-poems, mistaken identity, visual gags, a chaotic play-within-a-play and lots of linguistic whimsy.In this production, directed by Emily Burns and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater through May 18, the principal characters are reimagined as 21st-century tech mogul types, and the setting is a Hawaiian island retreat. It’s a clever update, not least because the men’s masochistic undertaking — to forego pleasure for the sake of an obscurely defined idea of personal advancement — prefigures the self-optimization fetish that today’s social media gurus are hustling.But the production doesn’t strain too hard for relevance, and needn’t jar with more traditionally minded audiences. (And the nuts and bolts of seduction haven’t changed all that much in 500 years.) Ultimately, it’s the script, ably brought to life by a talented group of actors, that does the work. Thompson (of “Bridgerton” fame) is the pick of the bunch as Berowne, one of the king’s noblemen, delivering his lines with satirical brio and a wonderful range of complacent smirks. He has one of those faces that suggest mischief, even when at rest.The Royal Shakespeare Theater, which seats over 1,000 people, was built in the 19th century. It reopened after a major revamp in 2010.Mary Turner for The New York TimesYouthful yearning is also on the menu at the Swan Theater, in a new adaptation of the British writer Hanif Kureshi’s coming-of-age novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia,” directed and adapted by Emma Rice with input from Kureshi himself. Set in late-1970s London, against a backdrop of political turbulence and racial strife, it follows a young British Pakistani man, Karim, as he grapples with the emotional fallout of his parents’ failing marriage while negotiating his passage to manhood — through music, drugs and heartbreak — before he finds his calling in the theater. (The show plays in repertoire through June 1.)Rachana Jadhav’s set is a cross-section of a ’70s suburban dwelling, featuring an orange-red sofa, a floral-patterned stair tread and several mirror balls. When we first meet Karim’s yogi father, Haroun (Ankur Bahl), he is wearing nothing but a pair of Y-fronts. His very first action, removing a piece of fluff from his bellybutton, sets the tone for this playful and irreverent romp. The sexual content — of which there is plenty — is rendered with disarming, pantomimic silliness: bananas to suggest erections; party poppers let off to signify the moment of climax.Dee Ahluwalia is well cast as Karim, with just the right blend of pretty-boy looks and callow impudence. When he periodically breaks off into first-person, audience-facing narration, he has the winking, conspiratorial aspect of an experienced crooner working the crowd between songs. Ewan Wardrop is outstanding as the creepy theater director who takes him under his wing, and Bettrys Jones excels in two very different roles: affectingly poignant as Karim’s long-suffering mother, Margaret, and riotously eccentric as his mercurial love interest, Eleanor.Though the play touches on somber topics — racist violence, the fragmented lives of the migrant diaspora — it is anything but earnest, with a jaunty, naïve quality that echoes the reckless esprit of early adulthood. “The Buddha of Suburbia” doesn’t have the sentence-level brilliance of the Bard — it’s more Ealing Comedy than Shakespeare — but there is something of his spirit in its ribald energy, and it doesn’t feel out to of place in Stratford. There was lots of laughter, and the mood was buzzing as people filed out.Both of these shows revolved around youth, and both went down well with a predominantly senior audience. Their freshness and exuberance augured well for the coming season. The hope must be that the more traditional audiences will move with the times, and come around to new visions. You can’t please all of the people all of the time — but you can do your best to take them with you. And if not, there are always the tearooms. More