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      John Patrick Shanley on ‘Doubt’ Revival and ‘Brooklyn Laundry’

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      The playwright discusses the Broadway revival of “Doubt” and his latest, “Brooklyn Laundry.” “People are disagreeing violently with themselves,” he says.In a life of feeling things incredibly deeply, John Patrick Shanley has experienced some thrilling highs: the rapturous audience response in 1984 to “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” his first success as a playwright; accepting an Academy Award in 1988 for best screenplay for “Moonstruck.”Add to that list the thrill of discovering the luxury of drop-off laundry. “I was like 35 years old, and I was in Poughkeepsie,” Shanley said in a phone interview during a rehearsal break last month. “I went in to do my laundry, and after a couple of questions, I realized that they would do it for me, fold it and give it back to me. And I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened in my life.’”Shanley’s latest play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” is about sacrifice and everyday heroism that begins with a character placing her “bag of rags” on the scale at a laundromat. Opening on Wednesday at New York City Center, it is the 13th play the playwright has premiered with the Manhattan Theater Club. “There’s an incredible flair, intelligence, grace and humor to his work,” said Lynne Meadow, the theater company’s artistic director. Most of all, she added, “he writes with such humanity, and so personally.”“Brooklyn Laundry,” whose cast includes Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is also part of an unofficial triptych of Shanley plays this season. In January, an Off Broadway revival of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” starring Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott, concluded a successful run at the Lucille Lortel Theater. On March 7, the first Broadway revival of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play, “Doubt,” about a priest who may or may not have molested a child, opens in a Roundabout Theater Company production led by Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan.David Zayas and Cecily Strong in “Brooklyn Laundry,” Shanley’s latest play. It opens Wednesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a conversation that touched on all three plays, Shanley revealed that the accidental retrospective isn’t the only reason his life has been flashing before his eyes recently. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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 Hunt’ Review: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

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      This modern-day fable, directed by Rupert Goold and starring Tobias Menzies, is styled with horror.“Each town has its witch/Each parish its troll,” a character sings ominously while sharpening hedge shears. “We will with pleasure/Take the life from their veins.”Let it be known that the British import “The Hunt” — about a man ostracized, and worse, for a crime he didn’t commit — does not really err toward subtlety.The simple premise can be summed up in a sentence: Lucas (Tobias Menzies, from “The Crown” and “Outlander”), a small-town kindergarten teacher, is falsely accused of molesting several of his students, and his life falls apart. The Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg told the story in an understated manner in his movie “The Hunt” (2013), which is simultaneously detached and veined with warm, if subtly expressed, empathy.Now a tragedy that feels ripped from the headlines is deployed with fable-like horror stylings in a stage adaptation by David Farr directed by Rupert Goold, which just opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Ritualistic dancing and chanting, sacrifices, jump scares, blinding white lights, quasi-supernatural apparitions: At times it feels as if we are watching a spinoff from the cult 1973 film “The Wicker Man,” in which an island community following pagan practices drenched in sex and violence turns against an outsider.When Vinterberg made “The Hunt” (which he wrote with Tobias Lindholm), he pulled back from the Dogme 95 precepts he followed at the beginning of his career, and which emphasize an almost Puritanical minimalism. “I wanted this film to be as naked and truthful as possible, because this was a film about truth and lies, but I had to find a new way of doing it,” he said a decade ago.From left: Jonathan Savage, Danny Kirrane, Menzies, MyAnna Buring, DeBoer and Alex Hassell in the play, in a structure that can protect secrets and reveal them, offer shelter and harbor violence.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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      ‘Water for Elephants’ Brings the Circus to Broadway

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      At the sound of a gunshot, a performer, wreathed in white silks, tumbles from the ceiling. His body somersaults, over and over, faster and faster, until it hangs suspended, just above the stage floor. This scene, in the first act of “Water for Elephants,” a new musical that begins previews Feb. 24 at the Imperial Theater, portrays the death of an injured horse. And it captures the singular methods of the show — a synthesis of theater and circus, bedazzled for a Broadway audience.“In musicals, you talk until you have to sing and you sing until you have to dance,” Jessica Stone, the director of “Water for Elephants,” explained. “And in our case, you dance until you have to leap into the air.”With a book by Rick Elice, and music and lyrics by PigPen Theater Co., the musical is based on Sara Gruen’s 2006 novel, which also inspired a 2011 film. Set in the 1930s and in the very early 2000s, it centers on the memories of Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin, playing the younger version, and Gregg Edelman as the elder), a veterinarian who recalls the long-ago days when he hopped a train and fell in with the members of the Benzini Brothers circus, a ragtag outfit that crisscrossed the country delivering low-rent, high-excitement marvels.“You wanna feel something/You know is real, something/beyond the paler things,” the chorus sings in the opening number, describing the promise of the big top.Antoine Boissereau’s aerial silk performance in which he portrays the death of a horse during the song “Easy.”That promise is kept by the ensemble’s seven dedicated circus performers, as well as two swings, many of them veterans of the 7 Fingers circus company. Shana Carroll, a founding director of that company, was tasked with circus design. (With Jesse Robb, she is also the show’s co-choreographer.) In their initial meetings before the show’s premiere last summer in Atlanta, Carroll and Stone agreed that the circus stunts should never appear without cause. They had to tell the story (as in a scene set during a Benzini show) or enhance moments of high emotion (as in the case of the horse).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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      Reviving ‘The Wiz’ Through ‘the Blackest of Black Lenses’

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      Schele Williams first saw “The Wiz” when a tour of the original Broadway production came through Dayton, Ohio. She was 7 years old, and recalled it being the most “beautiful reflection of Blackness that I had never seen.”Years later, she was cast as Dorothy in a high school production of “The Wiz,” and the thrill of that experience led Williams to pursue a career in musical theater. She even used the show’s soaring finale, “Home,” as one of her audition songs.Now, after working on Broadway as an actor (“Aida”) and an associate director (“Motown”), she is directing the first Broadway revival of “The Wiz” in almost 40 years. It’s a chance, Williams said, to celebrate what “The Wiz” has meant to her and to pass the story along to her daughters.Since becoming a Broadway hit in 1975, “The Wiz,” a gospel, soul and R&B take on Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, largely composed by Charlie Smalls, with a book by William F. Brown, has been a vibrant cornerstone of Black culture. The show blends Afrofuturism with classic Americana to enact a sort of creative reparation, reframing an allegory about perseverance and self-determination to feature Black characters who, in the ’70s, had rarely appeared in popular children’s stories.The 1978 Motown film adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, was a critical and box-office flop. But the movie has been a trippy favorite of family living rooms for multiple generations, and the musical has remained a staple on local stages around the country.“The weight of that is not lost on me,” said Williams.The new production of “The Wiz,” beginning previews on March 29 at the Marquis Theater, arrives in New York after a 13-city national tour that began in September. The creative team said its goal is to celebrate both the property’s legacy and the richness of Black American history and culture.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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      Second Stage to Leave Its Rem Koolhaas-Designed Off Broadway Theater

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      The company said that it was leaving its space in a former bank in Times Square after 25 years because the rent was too high and the lease had unfavorable terms.Second Stage Theater, a leading nonprofit that presents work by living American writers both on and off Broadway, is giving up its Rem Koolhaas-designed Off Broadway home in a former bank near Times Square, saying its rent was too high and its lease had unfavorable terms.The theater company, which has nurtured multiple Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning shows over the years, until recently operated three theaters: the Hayes Theater on Broadway, an Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side and an Off Broadway theater, the Tony Kiser Theater, in a former bank building at the corner of West 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue.Last year, Second Stage gave up the lease on its Off Off Broadway space. Now it is also relinquishing the Kiser Theater, a 296-seat theater space where it has been presenting plays and musicals since 1999. The Broadway house has been unaffected by the changes. The company said it was committed to continuing to produce work Off Broadway, and was searching for a new place in which to do so.Second Stage is letting go of the Kiser at a time of significant strain on nonprofit theaters everywhere, and at a time of transition for the organization. Carole Rothman, one of the company’s founders and now its president and artistic director, is leaving the organization this summer after a 45-year tenure; the board is conducting a search for her successor.The Second Stage board had agreed to an 8-year lease renewal for the West 43rd Street building in 2021, but decided late last year to exercise a one-time option that allowed it out of the lease at the end of this year.Lisa Lawer Post, the company’s executive director, cited financial concerns in explaining the decision by the organization’s board to terminate the lease for the West 43rd Street building, which is where the company presented early productions of shows including “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Next to Normal” and “Between Riverside and Crazy.”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 Sign of the Times’ Review: A Confused 1960s New York

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      A jukebox musical about a Midwesterner’s big dreams is heavy on the Petula Clark.For a jukebox musical set in 1965 New York City — that tackles feminism, civil rights activism and the Vietnam War — “A Sign of the Times” sure includes a lot of songs by the British singer Petula Clark. When the lead characters turn up at a party hosted by Randy Forthwall, an artsy type in a silver-white fright wig (would Andy Schmarhol have been too on the nose?), he even complains that Clark is a no-show.She may not have made it to Randy’s shindig, but her hits are all over this show, including “Downtown,” “Color My World,” “I Know a Place,” “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” “Round Every Corner” and the title track.This is a head-scratching choice because the story — which revolves around a nice Midwesterner, Cindy (Chilina Kennedy), who dreams of being a photographer in the big city — is physically, tonally and culturally remote from Clark’s light-pop universe.It all starts making sense as you realize that when “A Sign of the Times” premiered at Goodspeed Opera House in 2016, with a book by Bruce Vilanch, Clark’s name was put forward in all the descriptions. The current iteration, which is at New World Stages with a book credited to Lindsey Hope Pearlman, wisely realized a Petula Clark show might not draw huge crowds. It advertises itself more generically, and there are plenty of non-Clark songs, mostly of the very, very familiar kind: “Rescue Me,” “Gimme Some Lovin’,” “Last Train to Clarksville” and so on. (The show is based on an idea by Richard J. Robin, who is also presenting this production in partnership with the York Theater Company.)Sadly, the graft did not take. “A Sign of the Times” pulls every which way, clumsily trumpeting inclusivity and empowerment while shoehorning in hits that can feel chosen randomly, and with little regard for the action’s date stamp since several songs came out after 1965. Keeping us awake are some comically distracting details — by all means, look up what a yellow bandanna in the right back pocket of a man’s jeans meant in gay cruising circles — and choreography, by JoAnn M. Hunter, that essentially recycles a handful of the most basic moves from the “Hullabaloo” variety show.Chilina Kennedy, center, with the rest of the cast. Set in 1965 New York City, the show tries to tackle issues around feminism, civil rights activism and the Vietnam War.Jeremy DanielWe 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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      ‘Jelly’s Last Jam’ Review: A Musical Paradise, Even in Purgatory

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      Did Jelly Roll Morton “invent” jazz, as he claimed? A sensational Encores! revival offers a postmortem prosecution of one of the form’s founding fathers.That painful history can be alchemized into thrilling entertainment is both the central idea and the takeaway experience of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the jaw-dropping Encores! revival that opened on Wednesday at City Center. Especially in its first act, as it tells the intertwined stories of Jelly Roll Morton and the early years of jazz, it offers up wonder after wonder, in songs and dances so neatly conceived and ferociously performed that in the process of blowing the roof off the building they also make your hair stand on end.It might not be immediately apparent from its strange framework that the musical could produce such an effect. The book, by George C. Wolfe, who also directed the 1992 Broadway original, introduces us to Morton (Nicholas Christopher) at the moment of his death. That’s when he is greeted, in a kind of nightclub limbo, by Chimney Man — so called because this forbidding psychopomp, played by the fascinatingly strict Billy Porter, sweeps souls to their destination. Accompanied by a trio of louche, bespangled “Hunnies,” he first puts Morton through a recap of his life, with an emphasis on his lies, betrayals and musicological self-aggrandizement.Tiffany Mann as Miss Mamie, a local blues singer. One of her powerhouse numbers points Morton on the road north.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow many of those lies and betrayals really happened is unclear; most of the musical’s specific situations and supporting characters seem to be inventions or conflations. But the self-aggrandizement is all too real. Morton, not content to be merely a great pianist and composer in the early years of jazz, repeatedly claimed to have “invented” the genre. It is for this sin — a sin against history but also against Blackness — that the show seeks to prosecute him.If only real trials were as entertaining. Morton’s privileged but stifling youth in a wealthy, light-skinned New Orleans family is sketched in a series of numbers that efficiently establish the expectations of the Creole class and his rebellions against it. Like most rebellions, his involve exposure to different kinds of people; when the boy (beautifully played by Alaman Diadhiou) sneaks into the dives and brothels on the Blacker side of town, the sounds of tinkers, ragpickers, beignet men and voodoo vendors, layered and compressed and powerfully polyrhythmic, open his ears to a new kind of music.As presented here, that music is sensationally catchy. (Though mostly Morton’s, it also includes material written by Luther Henderson for the 1992 production.) Somewhat miraculously considering its knottiness, it has been set with lyrics, by Susan Birkenhead, that spark and sparkle. In numbers like “The Whole World’s Waitin’ to Sing Your Song,” she weaves scat and slang and classic Broadway wordsmithery (“Slide that sound/Roll that rhythm/Syncopate the street-beat with ’em”) into a multipurpose dramatic net.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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      Robert Macbeth, Founder of Harlem’s New Lafayette Theater, Dies at 89

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      He created a vibrant space for actors and playwrights that became a seedbed for the emerging Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s.Robert Macbeth, a rising Black actor in the New York theater scene, was sitting in a Greenwich Village bar in September 1963, getting a drink before going onstage for an Off Broadway improv show. The evening news played in the background.“I happened to look up and there was a flash, and the flash was about the four little girls getting killed in Birmingham,” he said in a 1967 interview, recalling the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. “And there I was, sitting in a Village bar, with a Scotch in my hand.”He went onstage that night, and, rather than following the show’s loose routine, he began shouting, walking up and down the aisles, getting in the faces of the mostly white crowd.“I must have scared the audience half to death,” he recalled in the interview. But rather than absorb his message, they seemed to take it as entertainment: “They loved it, but that wasn’t the idea.”Mr. Macbeth, distraught over his inability to convey his anger and sadness, stopped acting after that night in 1963 and, in his words, went into “exile” from the stage. He worked in a bookstore, taught acting classes and tried to process the violent changes rippling through Black America in the 1960s.Slowly, an idea took form: Black actors and playwrights could never be fully effective in white-dominated spaces. They needed their own. So, in 1967, he gathered together a troupe of more than 30 actors and artists to open the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem.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