Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares142 Views

      in Theater

      Madonna and Barbra Are Fans. Broadway, Meet Lempicka.

      by

      A new musical aims to restore the reputation, in life and art, of the ambitious yet undervalued painter Tamara de Lempicka.The playwright Carson Kreitzer specializes in difficult women, disparaged women, women who should be better known. But 14 years ago, when a friend suggested the painter Tamara de Lempicka as a potential subject, Kreitzer wasn’t initially enthusiastic. The name meant nothing to her.Then in a used bookstore, a cover with Lempicka’s name caught her eye. Flipping through the monograph, image after glossy image, Kreitzer realized that she already knew Lempicka’s brash, gleaming work. She had seen it reproduced in Madonna videos and in Van Cleef & Arpels ads. There in that bookstore she felt compelled to write something as big, bold and richly colored as the paintings.“Tamara made me a musical writer,” Kreitzer, who had never written a musical before, said in a recent phone interview. “She demanded it.”After years of development, “Lempicka,” a biomusical by Kreitzer (book and lyrics) and Matt Gould (book and music), opens on April 14 at Broadway’s Longacre Theater. It is a work of recuperation, aiming to restore the reputation, in life and art, of a queer woman and an ambitious painter, who has often been undervalued, in the art market and beyond.“She wanted everything,” Rachel Chavkin, the musical’s director, said of her heroine. “She wanted more from life and ultimately life lost interest in her.”When it comes to reclaiming Lempicka, the musical is not alone. A concurrent selling exhibition at Sotheby’s, “The World of Tamara: A Celebration of Lempicka and Art Deco,” features several of Lempicka’s paintings, including “L’Éclat,” a portrait of a woman, her hair coiled like strips of film, and “Nu aux Buildings,” a sensuous nude backed by skyscrapers. This fall, San Francisco’s de Young museum will host the artist’s first major museum retrospective in the United States.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

    • 113 Shares98 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Bathhouse.pptx’ Review: A Fever Dream, Both Poetic and Mystifying

      by

      Jesús I. Valles’s prizewinning play gets a stage at the Flea, but the ambitious work about queer history proves too difficult to wrangle.In “Bathhouse.pptx,” Jesús I. Valles investigates the fading history of gay bathhouses, bringing to life both the marginalized people who reveled in them and the forgotten people who cleaned them. The play — selected as the winner of the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize by Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”) — laces historical fantasy with melodic prose, loosely stringing together Valles’s ramblings like an epic fever dream. But if, like most such dreams, it’s far more captivating to the storyteller than to the audience, the work offers enough lyrical beauty to keep viewers listening, if not fully understanding, and yearning for more.The story begins with an anxious 10th-grader whom Valles has called “Presenter” (Sam Gonzalez), a queer Latino student who is delivering a PowerPoint lecture (hence the title’s “.pptx”) about the history of bathing. Cleanliness, we are told, has dirty beginnings: It didn’t take long for humans to weaponize filth as a tool of shame against the poor and foreign. Presenter then tries to connect this to the topic he actually cares about: the commercialized bathhouse.To do so, he elicits help from fellow students, but their presentation is derailed by unlikely apparitions: a conquistador, a small child, Laura Linney. To manage this unruliness in the play’s first half, the director, Chay Yew, over-relies on the same gimmick: Interlopers scurry out from the right or left side of the audience in a continuous loop. The act mirrors Valles’s spiraling language, but it’s repeated so often that we begin to anticipate the disruptions, rendering them less impactful.Still, certain characters manage to stand out, including Chela (Claudia Acosta), an overworked cleaner at the North Hollywood spa that is the play’s other primary setting. Here, Chela has witnessed enemas, orgies and more — some of which we also witness. (The play acknowledges its theatricality by having the actors confess they aren’t teenagers performing these acts, but adults of consenting age.) But for Valles, Chela is more than just the help; she’s the winner in a daily “war of dirt and bleach and sickness and steam,” a paradox of service and control.Like the rest of the dexterous six-person ensemble, Acosta plays several roles. But as Chela, she finds the tiny pockets of vulnerability, longing and humor that poke through this woman’s calloused personality. While the male strangers in the spa stumble into one another, sharing brief stories, desires and memories, Chela stands out as a fully realized character, embodying a depth that resonates beyond the surface. That Valles chose to honor the fullness of a Latina sanitation worker in a play so focused on Latino gay men does not seem incidental, but rather like a nod to those that even queer history overlooks.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

    • 88 Shares148 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

      by

      Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.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

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      How the Gory Sex Scenes in ‘Teeth’ Came Together

      by

      Creating the sex scenes for the horror musical required close attention to detail, extra communication and some strategically placed silicone.Song, dance and deadly genitalia: It’s all on full, gory display in “Teeth,” Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s campy musical adaptation of the 2007 cult horror film. The story follows Dawn O’Keefe, a God-fearing good girl — surrounded by shame-lobbing, not-so-good men — whose body has a sharp sense of justice.In a show in which violence begets vengeance — Dawn has a curious case of vagina dentata — it’s a lot to endure, for both biter and bitee. (As Jesse Green cheekily put it in his New York Times review of the Playwrights Horizons production: “If you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?”)Campy or not, choreographing the many scenes of intimacy and assault required extraordinary sensitivity. Violations vary: In one scene, Dawn seeks relief for her condition, only to be repeatedly ogled and groped by a creepy gynecologist. As she protests, her body takes revenge. The director, Sarah Benson, wanted someone dedicated to creating a space for the actors to feel safe, and free to set boundaries.“There’s so much sex and intimacy and sexual violence and everything in between that I just knew immediately that intimacy direction was going to be a massive part of the work of the show,” Benson said. “It was so important to me to have someone who was really creating a container in which we could be vulnerable and raw and make this very intense story.”“I am still able to go home feeling like I didn’t give every single part of myself and my body to the work,” said Alyse Alan Louis, who plays Dawn. Here she’s in an early scene with Jason Gotay, who plays her boyfriend.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat someone was Crista Marie Jackson.Intimacy directors, or intimacy choreographers as they are also known, help actors simulate sex by laying out the specifications of consent and organizing the logistics of bodily contact.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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Rebecca Frecknall Is Bringing ‘Cabaret’ Back to Broadway

      by

      When Rebecca Frecknall was a child, one of her favorite things to watch was a televised 1993 London revival of “Cabaret,” which her father had recorded on VHS tape. As the British theater director grew up, she hoped that one day she would stage a version of the musical, in which a writer falls in love with an exuberant and wayward cabaret performer in Weimar-era Germany.In early March, in a Midtown rehearsal room, Frecknall, 38, was preparing to do just that. Her “Cabaret,” which opens in previews at the August Wilson Theater on April 1, is a transfer from London’s West End, where it opened in 2021 to critical acclaim. The show won seven Olivier Awards, the British equivalent to the Tonys.“I always wanted to direct ‘Cabaret’,” Frecknall said later in an interview. “I just never thought I’d get the rights to it.” Her opportunity came when Eddie Redmayne — a producer on the show who played the Emcee in London, and will reprise the part on Broadway — asked her in 2019 to be part of a bid for a revival.At first it seemed like “a pipe dream,” Redmayne said, but after years of wrangling, they pulled it off. For the London show, the Playhouse Theater was reconfigured to reflect the musical’s debauched setting, transforming it into the Kit Kat Club, with cabaret tables and scantily clad dancers and musicians roaming the foyer and auditorium. The August Wilson Theater is getting a similar treatment, Frecknall said. To honor the playhouse’s namesake, the production designer Tom Scutt commissioned Black artists to paint murals in the reconfigured lobby, with theatergoers now entering via an alleyway off 52nd Street.Eddie Redmayne, who stars as the Emcee in “Cabaret,” during rehearsals for the show in New York this month.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAto Blankson-Wood, left, and Henry Gottfried.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesShortly before the show opened in London, Frecknall’s father died. That recorded revival, directed by Sam Mendes, was one of his favorites, and Frecknall loved it so much that, as she grew up and studied theater, she chose never to see the show onstage.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

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Opening Night’ Review: Ivo van Hove Makes a Stylish Movie Into a Sludgy Travesty

      by

      Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama.In a London auditorium, a work of art is being desecrated. “Opening Night,” John Cassavetes’s understatedly stylish 1977 movie about an actress struggling with midlife ennui, has been reimagined as a musical by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and the result is a travesty.Its antiheroine, the Broadway superstar Myrtle Gordon (Sheridan Smith), has landed the lead role in a play about a middle-aged woman. But she isn’t feeling it: Though she is about 40, she insists she can’t relate. She stumbles through rehearsals, clashing with the director, Manny (Hadley Fraser), and the playwright, Sarah (Nicola Hughes), then goes rogue during previews, taking liberties with the script.To compound matters, the actress develops a neurotic fixation on Nancy (Shira Haas), a 17-year-old fan killed in a car crash moments after getting Myrtle’s autograph. Convinced that Nancy is a cipher for her own lost youth, Myrtle intermittently hallucinates the dead girl’s ghost, and even converses with it. Myrtle is unraveling, but the show — somehow — must go on.Smith with Shira Haas, who plays Nancy, a fan of Myrtle’s who was killed in a car crash after getting Myrtle’s autograph.Jan VersweyveldIt’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness.Benjamin Walker is wooden as Maurice, Myrtle’s stage co-star and ex-partner, who Cassavetes himself played charmingly in the film. The estranged couple’s brittle onstage chemistry is an essential ingredient in the drama; here, they seem like actual strangers. Haas’s spectral Nancy is a disconcertingly cutesy symbol of youthful feminine vitality, a sprite-like figure who scurries around the stage in a short skirt, knee-high socks and platform boots — suggesting not so much a young woman as a pubescent child.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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      A British Scandal Intrigued J.T. Rogers, Then He Went Down the Rabbit Hole

      by

      The playwright thought News International’s phone-hacking scandal could make for a sweeping thriller. Twelve years later, here it is.A now-faded note card taped above my desk reads: “Art, like light, needs distance.” Years ago, I wrote down that line from William Gass’s “On Being Blue,” and over the last few months it was a comforting reminder as I finished my new play “Corruption.” What was to be a history play about a media scandal in Britain has become a political thriller about some of the forces that seem to be upending our own country right now.The inspiration came in 2012, while reading “Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain,” a book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Watson, a former member of the British Parliament, and Hickman, a former reporter for The Independent, had written of how Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers and tabloids, including News of the World, were illegally hacking the phones of thousands of citizens — from celebrities to former prime ministers and even a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found dead — all to get sensational stories that would sell newspapers. As the book made clear, more papers sold meant more profit; more profit meant more power to influence the levers of government.The further I read, I realized that this could be a remarkable play. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” “Dial M” told a riveting story in granular detail about the use and abuse of power as a small group of vivid characters seeks to expose crimes that threaten their very democracy. Onstage it could become a sweeping tale in which the main characters take huge risks for their beliefs.In an effort to adapt the book, I sent the authors two of my plays — “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts” — that are also about politics and power. Then I flew to London, and went down the rabbit hole.Most of the key players would talk to me off the record only if they were certain that the Murdoch machine was unaware of our meeting. Even though News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s media empire, was under investigation and Rupert and James Murdoch had apologized for their company’s actions in testimony before Parliament, people were afraid of speaking out because of the fear of retribution.Many public figures and politicians who spoke out against Murdoch’s papers have revealed that those same papers tried to destroy their careers and ruin their lives. One such case involved a member of Parliament named Chris Bryant. During a parliamentary hearing, he got Rebekah Brooks, then the chief executive of News International, to acknowledge that News International had made payments to the police for information. Soon after, a rival paper published a photograph of him in his underwear that he had posted on a dating site, and then the Murdoch press ran with the story.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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘American Rot,’ the Painful Legacy of the Dred Scott Case

      by

      Kate Taney Billingsley’s play starts with a fictional apology, but then segregated choirs and a racist waitress create tonal dissonance.In a greasy spoon just off the New Jersey Turnpike, two men sit down for coffee. One, Walter Scott (Count Stovall), is a descendant of Dred Scott, and the other, Jim Taney (John L. Payne), is a great-great nephew of Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who, in 1857, wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people could never be citizens.Jim requested this meeting with Walter in hopes of apologizing for “arguably the worst decision in Supreme Court history.” As a premise for a story, one could scarcely ask for richer material. But something was lost in the execution of “American Rot,” a flat-footed play by Kate Taney Billingsley, who is an actual descendant of the former chief justice.That this La MaMa production, directed by Estelle Parsons, is based on Billingsley’s fleet audio play, starring Sam Waterston and John Douglas Thompson, is especially puzzling. In just 30 minutes, that audio production, titled “A Man of His Time,” effectively dramatized two descendants of historic figures locking horns, interrogating their own biases and seeking middle ground.In expanding the story for the version now running at the Ellen Stewart Theater, Billingsley added 12 supporting characters, most of whom make up Black and white choruses, representing the woke commentariat and unreconstructed racists. Stationed in segregated sections of Christina Weppner’s barely-there diner, the two factions are served by an insufferable waitress (Suzanne DiDonna), who has placed a feather in her hair after snatching it from a Native American man in the opening sequence. She then proceeds to toss off white nationalist comments with alarming frequency, and is eager for something called “the Appropriation Festival,” which promises “feathers, fringe, fentanyl!”Run, Walter, run! Yet Walter and Jim stay put, seemingly unbothered — unlikely for a Black customer or a white man who “preaches equal rights.”“American Rot” is tonally dissonant in other ways, too. Though the historic forefathers sit onstage — Dred Scott (Leland Gantt) is upstage on a stool and a cadaverous Roger Taney (Timothy Doyle) is situated downstage — they are mostly quiet throughout the show. Occasionally they break the space-time continuum — theater’s fifth wall — to menace their descendants or buffalo them into honoring their legacies. Yet the moral seriousness of the descendants’ conversations with each other and their ancestors is too often undercut by silliness, including burlesque skits. At one point, the white chorus sings a peppy number called “The Land of the Oblivious,” with lyrics like “We like to deny what’s really going on/Throughout this country and way beyond!/Social media is where we belong!”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