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      A Retelling of the Mahabharata, Set to Modern-Day Struggles

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      At Lincoln Center, the Toronto-based theater company Why Not strives to balance the old and new in its production of the Sanskrit epic.The Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata has been adapted many times over in oral retellings, plays, movies, comic books and more. Consisting of over 100,000 verses, the poem has so many stories that picking which ones to tell is a statement in itself.And making that decision can pose its own challenges as Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes, co-artistic directors of the Toronto-based theater company Why Not, learned when they went about adapting it. Now they are bringing their expansive two-part contemporary staging, which premiered in 2023 at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, to Lincoln Center, where it will run from Tuesday through June 29.Their adaptation is based on the poet Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the epic, which, at its core, is the story of two warring sets of cousins — the Kauravas and the Pandavas — trying to control a kingdom. The poem is part myth, part guide to upholding moral values and duty — or dharma. Some of the epic incorporates the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical text on Hindu morality, which is framed as a discussion between Prince Arjuna, a Pandava and a skilled archer, and Lord Krishna, a Hindu God who acts as Arjuna’s teacher.Jain, 45, began developing the piece in 2016 after receiving a $375,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the country’s public arts funder. Fernandes, 36, joined him on the project two years later after finishing graduate school in France. Jain described an early version of the script in an interview as “feminist” and “self-referential.” But the pandemic made them rethink which stories could best drive home the point of dharma — a central tenet of the text.Meher Pavri as an opera singer in the section drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. In the background, Neil D’Souza as the Hindu god Krishna and Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu as Prince Arjuna, Krishna’s pupil. David Cooper“To build a civilization, those with the most power must take care of those with the least,” Jain said, referring to the epic’s message. “In the animal kingdom, the strong eat the weak. There’s no problem with that. But humans have empathy, and we can build a civilization where we’re not just those who eat and those who are eaten, but rather those who feed and those who are fed.”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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      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Musical to Close After Disappointing Run on Broadway

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      The show was shut out at the Tonys after being nominated for seven awards, including best musical.“Dead Outlaw,” a hard-driving musical about a bandit whose mummified body became a curiosity, announced Friday evening that it would close June 29 after a disappointingly brief run on Broadway.The show announced the closing just 12 days after the Tony Awards. It was nominated for seven prizes, including best musical, but won none. It is the third new musical to post a closing notice since the awards ceremony, following “Smash” and “Real Women Have Curves.”The show began previews April 12 and opened April 27 at the Longacre Theater in Manhattan. The show’s running costs are modest, but so are its box office revenues; it grossed $449,666 during the week that ended June 15. At the time of its closing, it will have played 14 preview and 73 regular performances.The musical is based on the true story of Elmer McCurdy, a turn-of-the-century figure who robbed trains and banks — often ineptly — and died in a shootout with law enforcement. His unclaimed body was preserved and then exhibited for years before being stashed in a California amusement park, where it was rediscovered in the 1970s.The show was first staged Off Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater, which is operated by Audible; it is the first Audible show to transfer to Broadway. The reviews were quite strong, both downtown and uptown; in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called it “the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you.”The musical was capitalized for up to $10 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show’s development — has not been recouped.“Dead Outlaw” features a score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses; it is directed by David Cromer. The lead producers are Lia Vollack and Sonia Friedman. In a statement they said, “Despite glowing reviews and a loyal following, the commercial momentum just wasn’t fast enough in a crowded season. As the show reminds us, sometimes the most incredible lives are cut short.” More

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      6 Months After the Pelicot Trial, a Staging Brings Insight and Despair

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      The stripped-back performance, based on the rape trial that shocked France and the world, ran all night at a church in Vienna.It was a case that shook France. Last December, the husband of Gisèle Pelicot was convicted of drugging and assaulting her for over a decade, and for inviting dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious.Now, just six months later, the trial has already inspired a work of theater — in Vienna, as part of the city’s prestigious Festwochen festival. On Wednesday, the Swiss director Milo Rau, who has led the event since 2023, and the French dramaturg Servane Dècle presented “The Pelicot Trial,” a seven-hour reading of excerpts from the French legal proceedings and of interviews and commentary related to the case.It was a long night at the Church of St. Elisabeth, a red brick Roman Catholic church in a southern district of Vienna. The sun was setting when the audience went in at 9 p.m., filling the pews to capacity. When the final words were spoken, at around 4:15 a.m., sunrise was near, and only around 30 people remained.In a joint interview before the performance, Rau and Dècle said the wide range of material involved, with sections delving into history, philosophy and biology, was intended to dispel any notion that Pelicot’s story was an isolated event. “It’s an example of patriarchal violence,” Rau said. “The more we dive into it, the more we see that it’s the tip of the iceberg.”Rau has a long history of bringing trials to the stage. In “The Last Days of the Ceausescus,” Rau reenacted the 1989 legal proceedings against the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. In “The Congo Tribunal” and “The Moscow Trials,” he created mock criminal courts to analyze real political events.Gisèle Pelicot at the courthouse in Avignon, France, last December, when her husband was convicted of drugging and assaulting her for over a decade.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe 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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      ‘Viola’s Room’: A Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter

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      “Viola’s Room,” a transporting gothic mystery at the Shed, is the latest immersive work from Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: “Viola’s Room.”Didn’t see “Viola’s Room”? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of “Viola’s Room,” then called “The Moon Slave,” at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators.“It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,” Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has.A reconceived “Viola’s Room” began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas (“Sleep No More,” which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater.The show is extremely tech heavy, involving more than 2,000 light cues. There are also bespoke scents, like one called “Burnt Witch.” George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s all about trying to do things that our audiences aren’t expecting,” Barrett said. “Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.”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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      How Do You Adapt James Baldwin? Very Carefully.

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      His works have been slow to come to stage and screen. But a new production of the novel “Giovanni’s Room” shows how rewarding it can be when done right.Few writers turn out their career-defining work on the first try. But that was James Baldwin with his 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The semi-autobiographical book, about a day in the life of a Black teen whose stepfather is a minister of a Harlem Pentecostal church, was received by critics with glowing praise. Today it remains lauded as one of the great novels of modern American literature.Baldwin’s second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was quite a different story — literally and figuratively. A thematic departure from its predecessor, the novel was about two gay white men: David, a closeted American man, who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, in Paris. In the book Baldwin unpacks motifs related to masculinity and queerness, classism and American exceptionalism all through sparkling dialogue and robust, deeply ruminative prose.Though now considered a significant work of the 20th-century queer literary canon, “Giovanni’s Room” didn’t share the immediate adoration and popularity of its predecessor. In fact, it was rejected by his publisher, Knopf, when first submitted. “We think that publishing this book, not because of its subject but because of its failure, will set the wrong kind of cachet on your writing and estrange many of your readers,” the editor Henry Carlisle wrote in a letter to Baldwin in 1955. But Dial Press published the book in 1958, and almost immediately Baldwin had further plans for it.First there was the stage. In 1958 he produced a dramatization of “Giovanni’s Room” for the Actors Studio starring the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar as Giovanni. The play didn’t make it to Broadway, but Baldwin intended to return “Giovanni’s Room” to the stage, or even adapt it to film. He insisted on creative control, which hindered some potential efforts from other artists.James Baldwin in 1973.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the late ’70s he collaborated with the South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn on a screenplay, with hopes of big names like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando taking part. The project never got off the ground, though; Baldwin’s literary agent requested $100,000 for the book option, which the writer couldn’t afford.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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      ‘Fight Back’ Recreates an Act Up Meeting From 1989

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      This immersive theater experiment enlists attendees to help recreate an AIDS activist meeting from 1989 as an exercise in empathy.On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989.Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise’s immersive theater experiment “Fight Back” seeks to recreate.Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency.Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life.That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which “Fight Back” means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn’t expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989.“But I do think that there’s something about inhabiting with your body,” he said, “and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.”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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      Michelle Williams to Star in Off Broadway Revival of ‘Anna Christie’ With Mike Faist

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      The actress will lead a revival of “Anna Christie” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by her husband, Thomas Kail, and co-starring Mike Faist.A big star is coming to the small stage: Michelle Williams, the Emmy-winning, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress, will return to New York theater this fall to lead an Off Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 drama “Anna Christie.”Williams, who was last on Broadway in 2016, will play the main character, a former prostitute who falls in love with a seaman. The seaman will be played by Mike Faist, who was nominated for a Tony Award for originating the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” and who then had a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of “West Side Story.”The production is scheduled to run from Nov. 25 to Feb. 1, with a two-week break during the winter holidays, in a 450-seat theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” who is married to Williams. The two previously collaborated on the 2019 streaming series “Fosse/Verdon.”“We met making TV about theater, and we always thought it would be fun to make theater together,” Kail said in an interview. He said he had long been interested in O’Neill — he wrote his college thesis on the playwright — and that Williams had long been interested in the role, which was originated on Broadway a century ago by Pauline Lord, and has been played since on Broadway by Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann and Natasha Richardson, and on film by Greta Garbo.“Taking something that has existed in various forms, with multiple terrific productions over the years, and having the chance to be part of a lineage is something that I love about the theater,” Kail said, “and that’s certainly something that sparked when I started having conversations with Michelle about it.”Williams has had a varied career since her breakout role in the television series “Dawson’s Creek.” She won the Emmy for “Fosse/Verdon,” was nominated for a Tony for the play “Blackbird,” and has been nominated five times for Academy Awards, for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Fabelmans.”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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      Billy Porter to Star in ‘Cabaret’ on Broadway

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      The show’s producers said they plan to end the New York run at the end of the actor’s run, on Oct. 19.Billy Porter, who won a Tony Award for the musical “Kinky Boots” and starred in the television series “Pose,” will return to Broadway as the Emcee in the revival of “Cabaret.”And then, that revival is planning to close.Earlier this year, Porter portrayed the Emcee in the London production of “Cabaret,” opposite Marisha Wallace as Sally Bowles. On Wednesday, the revival’s producers announced that Porter and Wallace would reprise their performances in New York, starting July 22 and running until Oct. 19.The show’s producers said they plan to end the New York run at that point, though it will continue in London. The New York production opened in the spring of 2024, starring Eddie Redmayne; it was nominated for nine Tony Awards, and won one, for its scenic design. (The August Wilson Theater was converted into a club-like setting with preshow performances in the lobby spaces and rings of seats, some with small cafe tables, around the stage.)The show is a hit in London, and it swept the Olivier Awards there. But the initial reception was much cooler in New York. Reviews were mixed — in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the director Rebecca Frecknall’s staging “misguided.” Although it sold well with Redmayne in the lead role, it has struggled since — its weekly grosses peaked at $2 million in May 2024, but last week they were $763,000.Set in Berlin in 1929 and 1930, it depicts a group of people linked by a nightclub whose livelihoods and lives are threatened by the rise of Naziism. The show has had a succession of performers in the lead roles, starting with Redmayne and Gayle Rankin, followed by Adam Lambert and Auli’i Cravalho; and now Orville Peck and Eva Noblezada.The show is expensive to stage — it cost up to $26 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — and has been expensive to run as well. It has not recouped its capitalization costs.With music by John Kander, a book by Joe Masteroff, and lyrics by Fred Ebb, the show is a classic, first staged on Broadway in 1966 and revived three times previously. It was adapted into a Hollywood film in 1972; both the film and the first two Broadway productions starred Joel Grey as the Emcee. More