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      Mary Todd Lincoln, Thwarted Cabaret Star? That’s Cole Escola’s Take.

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      “Oh, Mary!,” which follows a boozing, romance-starved first lady, is the latest entertainment about the Lincolns, illustrating their staying power as irreverent genre figures.It’s hard to pin down the moment in “Oh, Mary!,” a comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln, that will send Lincoln scholars and purists into apoplexy. It could be when the first lady disastrously auditions for a role in “Our American Cousin,” the play at which John Wilkes Booth would later shoot her husband on April 14, 1865. Or when the deeply closeted Lincoln is orally pleasured at his desk. Maybe the puke-drinking scene?There have been walkouts.“I’ve seen people at the box office who seem to think this is really a play about Abraham Lincoln, and I feel a little bad, but it’s also funny,” Cole Escola, the show’s writer and star, said in a recent phone interview.“Oh, Mary!”: It sounds like a catty dramedy set at a pre-Stonewall gay bar, or maybe an alt-cabaret tribute to Jackée Harry and her chirpy signature greeting on the 1980s sitcom “227.”“Oh, Mary!,” of course, is not about gay bars or Jackée Harry, but it is just as camp: The former first lady is presented as a bubbleheaded alcoholic, and she is the latest put-upon woman to enchant Escola. (The show opens on Thursday and continues through March 24 at Off Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theater.)Far from being a student of the Lincolns, Escola, who is nonbinary, said they only started reading “a few cursory” things about Mary Todd Lincoln about three weeks ago.“I wish I had done any research,” they said. “But I wanted to write the show for an audience who had the same third-grade understanding that I do.” (“I just wanted to wear the costume,” Escola deadpan confesses in an Instagram video.)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 Vocal Coach Who Keeps Broadway (and Patti LuPone) in Tune

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      “She saved my career,” Patti LuPone said of this indispensable vocal therapist and coach whose clients include Madonna and Billy Porter.For 41 years, Joan Lader has rented a slender studio apartment just west of Union Square in Manhattan. Through its door, a narrow entryway leads to a doll-size bathroom and an efficiency kitchen. In the main space, where a visitor might expect to find a bed, Lader has arranged the instruments of her trade — a piano, a keyboard, balance balls, straws, a box of tissues, a skeleton in a jaunty hat.Lader has never advertised, never solicited clients. But for two generations of Broadway stars, as well as dozens of opera singers and pop and rock luminaries, she remains an indispensable vocal therapist and vocal coach. She even received a Tony Award in 2016 for excellence in theater.And while proper breathing is fundamental to her practice, she has scarcely paused for breath since that award. She continues to work seven hours each day, seven days a week. (“I wish she would take a break,” Patti LuPone, a longtime student, told me.) For Lader, 77, the work is her calling, a synthesis of artistry, science and according to her clients and fans, something akin to magic.“I’ve called her a witch in front of people, many times,” the music director Rob Fisher said. “I’ve never seen anybody else do the hocus-pocus that she sometimes does.”The composer Tom Kitt can nearly always tell when a singer has been working with Lader. “They have opened up in the beautiful way,” he said. “They are empowered, and they feel confident.”I met Lader on a wintry afternoon last month. She had struggled to find time to see me, but a cancellation had opened a narrow window in her schedule. She showed me into her space, noting the eight-inch soundproofing along the wall that borders the apartment next door. “Cats” paid for that, she said.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 Connector’ Review: When Fake News Was All the Rage

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      An Off Broadway musical about the sins of journalistic fabrication might benefit from more make-believe.If you’re even a little sensitive to signs of sociopathy, you’d peg Ethan Dobson right away. Someone at the start of a promising career in journalism who is so aggressively flattering and greasily evasive, with a snap-on, snakelike, aw-shucks smile, has got to have a scheme up his sleeve. Or rather, in Ethan’s case, a dangerous bunch of lies in his pocket.To ask why the editors of such an obvious fabulist don’t catch him until they’ve published at least six of his articles, each one a long, lurid and uncheckable fantasy, is to ask why the editors of The New Republic took so long to catch Stephen Glass doing much the same thing. Or why the editors of Rolling Stone took so long to catch Sabrina Erdely; USA Today, Jack Kelley; The Washington Post, Janet Cooke; and The New York Times, Jayson Blair.They didn’t want to.That’s the most intriguing idea to emerge from “The Connector,” a murky new musical about journalistic fabrication that opened on Tuesday at MCC Theater. It sees Ethan (Ben Levi Ross) as the beneficiary of a long history of male editorial vanity that sentimentalizes its past and falls for the excesses of New Journalism over old facts. That makes Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula) — the head of a prestigious monthly called The Connector — an easy mark; when he takes Ethan under his handsomely graying wing, he thinks he’s securing his glorious legacy when actually he’s destroying it.But that animating idea is also a problem because aside from Jason Robert Brown’s typically propulsive songs, which excite even the most absurd moments of Jonathan Marc Sherman’s book, the engine of the story, set in the 1990s, depends on uncertainty about Ethan’s veracity. That’s a nonstarter. After just one meeting at the magazine, a young copy editor and frustrated writer named Robin (Hannah Cruz) is already suspicious: “I’m watching you map the boundaries,” she sings, in a number that also serves as a vaguely romantic red herring. And the magazine’s “fact-checking legend,” Muriel, played by Jessica Molaskey, sees right through him even faster.So do we, and we quickly lose interest.That’s not the fault of the beamish, resourceful Ross, who, as a recent Evan Hansen, has experience portraying liars. Here, though, he has little to play; not pinning Ethan down is how “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Daisy Prince, keeps itself moving forward. This leaves the show devoid of psychology — the most important thing a musical might have added to the already well-covered histories of journalists who make stuff up. It helped, if you believed him, that Jayson Blair, after his deceptions were discovered, explained that he suffered from bipolar disorder.But Ethan? We have no idea. The worst impediment we learn about him, in a song called “So I Came to New York,” is that he’s from a place where “everyone’s a scumbag”: New Jersey.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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      Tyne Daly Withdraws From ‘Doubt’ on Broadway, Citing Health

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      Amy Ryan will replace her in the show, which also stars Liev Schreiber and began previews on Saturday.Tyne Daly, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress, is withdrawing from a starring role in the first Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable,” citing health issues.Daly was set to star in the production of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play about a sexual assault accusation against a Catholic priest. She will be replaced by Amy Ryan, who will begin performances Feb. 13.Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit producing the revival, announced the cast change on Tuesday, saying in a news release, “Ms. Daly was unexpectedly hospitalized on Friday and unfortunately needs to withdraw from the production while she receives medical care; she is thankfully expected to make a full recovery.” The organization did not provide further details.The “Doubt” revival, also starring Liev Schreiber, was to begin previews last Friday, but that first performance was canceled by Roundabout. The production then began performances on Saturday, with the understudy Isabel Keating going on in Daly’s stead; Keating has been performing the lead role since then, and will continue to do so through Sunday.Daly was to play Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun who serves as the principal at a Catholic school and who suspects the parish priest, Father Brendan Flynn, of misconduct. Schreiber is playing the priest. In 2008, the play was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; it was also adapted into an opera.Daly, 77, has worked steadily onstage and screen. She has performed in seven previous Broadway shows, winning a Tony Award in 1990 for starring in a revival of “Gypsy,” and earning two more nominations since. She has also won six Emmy Awards, for the television shows “Cagney & Lacey,” “Christy” and “Judging Amy.”Ryan, 55, has performed in five previous Broadway shows, and was nominated twice for Tony Awards in Roundabout revivals. Her last appearance on Broadway was nearly two decades ago, when she was featured in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Since that time she has worked primarily on film and television, earning an Oscar nomination for her work in “Gone Baby Gone.”The “Doubt” revival, directed by Scott Ellis, will now open March 7, one week later than initially planned. The production, which is scheduled to run until April 14, also features Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Zoe Kazan. More

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      ‘Hors Pistes’ Is an Arts Festival About Sports, for People Who Don’t Like Sports

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      A series of events in preparation for the Paris Olympics explores a paradox, since arts and sports rarely mix in France.When it comes to the biggest sports show on earth, many Parisians have reached the stage of begrudging acceptance. The level of disruption — and metro price hikes — to get the city ready for this summer’s Olympic Games hasn’t exactly endeared the event to locals, especially those who favor culture over sports.“The Olympics are coming — whether we like it or not,” a curator from the Pompidou Center, Linus Gratte, said as he introduced a performance there this past weekend as part of the “Hors Pistes” festival. The audience chuckled.“Hors Pistes” (meaning “Off-Piste”), a festival the Pompidou Center says is devoted to “moving images,” came with an Olympic-ready theme this year: “The Rules of Sport.” It is part of the Cultural Olympiad, the program of arts events that is now a part of the Olympic experience in every host city.For the Paris Cultural Olympiad — spearheaded by Dominique Hervieu, an experienced performing arts curator — the city has opted to go big. Any cultural institution could apply for the “Olympiad” label, leading to a sprawling lineup of sports-related exhibitions and performances, which started back in 2022. This has led to a degree of confusion over what, exactly, the Olympiad stands for: Its official website currently lists no fewer than 984 upcoming events.And quite a few of them end up exploring a paradox, because art and sports rarely mix in France. As a rule, the country’s artistic output leans toward intellectualism rather than the virtuosity embodied by high-level athletes. The Pompidou Center, a flagship venue for contemporary art, telegraphs as much in its “Hors Pistes” publicity material, which says the festival’s goal is “to question and subvert the rules of sport, and to imagine new interpretations of them.”While the Pompidou is primarily an art museum, and “Hors Pistes” comes with a small exhibition, the festival features a significant number of performances, onstage in the center’s theater, or in its galleries. Some of these struggled to find coherent common ground with sports, however, like Anna Chirescu and Grégoire Schaller’s “Dirty Dancers,” an hourlong dance performance staged in the exhibition space, with sports-style bleachers for the audience.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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      Inger McCabe Elliott, Who Famously Became Con Man’s Victim, Dies at 90

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      She was a successful designer. But she was probably best known for being duped in a scheme that inspired the play “Six Degrees of Separation.”Inger McCabe Elliott, a photographer and designer who, with her husband, was conned at her home in Manhattan by a slick-talking 19-year-old purporting to be Sidney Poitier’s son — an incident that helped inspire John Guare to write his celebrated play “Six Degrees of Separation” — died on Jan. 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.Her son, Alec McCabe, confirmed the death.It was a bizarre New York tale.In early October 1983, Mrs. Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, a former top editor of Newsweek who at the time was the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, got a call from a young man who introduced himself as David Poitier.He said that he was a friend of Mrs. Elliott’s daughter Kari McCabe, and that muggers had stolen his money and a term paper he had written about the criminal justice system. He needed a place to stay, he said, until his father arrived in Manhattan the next day to direct scenes for the film version of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls.” (Mr. Poitier had six daughters but no sons, and he had no involvement in “Dreamgirls.”)Charmed, the Elliotts invited the young man — his real name was David Hampton, they later learned — to spend the night at their East Side apartment and gave him $50 and some clothes. He asked Mrs. Elliott to wake him early the next morning so that he could go jogging.David Hampton, the man who had masqueraded as Sidney Poitier’s son, in 1990 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center after the opening of the John Guare play based on his impersonation. William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe Elliotts were unable to reach Kari McCabe that night to confirm Mr. Hampton’s claim that they were friends. (She had no idea who he was, they later found out.)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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      Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67

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      He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”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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      ‘Some Like It Hot’ Wins Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album

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      “Some Like It Hot,” a new jazz age musical adaptation of the classic 1959 Billy Wilder film, won a Grammy Award on Sunday for best musical theater album.It was adapted from the classic movie comedy in which Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play two musicians who dress as women to escape the mob.The show, a big and lush production, had a hard time on Broadway and closed in December at a loss after a one-year run. But the score was praised, with the New York Times theater critic Jesse Green writing that the first-act songs “are pretty much all knockouts.”The award was given to the show’s principal vocalists, Christian Borle, J. Harrison Ghee, Adrianna Hicks and NaTasha Yvette Williams; the songwriting team of Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman; and five album producers. Wittman and Shaiman also won a musical show album Grammy in 2003 for “Hairspray.”This year’s five Grammy-nominated cast albums were all for musicals that opened on Broadway during the 2022-23 season.The other nominees were “Kimberly Akimbo,” a poignant comedy about a high school student with a genetic disorder and a criminally dysfunctional family; “Parade,” a revival of a 1998 musical exploring the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager who was lynched in early 20th-century Georgia; “Shucked,” a romantic comedy with a country sound and a lot of corn-based puns; and “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” a revival of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim musical about a wronged barber who conspires with an amoral baker on a giddily gruesome vengeance spree.“Kimberly Akimbo” won last year’s Tony Award for best musical, and “Parade” won the Tony for best musical revival.Only “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Sweeney Todd” are still running on Broadway, and if you want to see them in New York, now’s the time: “Kimberly Akimbo” has announced plans to close on April 28 and “Sweeney Todd” is expected to end its run on May 5.“Kimberly Akimbo” is planning a national tour that is scheduled to start in Denver in September. A “Shucked” tour is to begin in Nashville in November, and a “Parade” tour is to begin in January in Schenectady, N.Y., and then Minneapolis. “Some Like It Hot” had announced an intention to tour starting this fall but has not announced any venues. More