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      Andre Braugher: Captain Holt on ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and More Defining Roles

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      The versatile actor was most known for vastly different portrayals of TV cops, but also shone in roles across film and stage.Andre Braugher, an Emmy-winning actor who, for over 30 years, adapted his no-nonsense, unflappable persona to great success across genres on television, in film and onstage, died at 61 years old on Monday night after a brief illness. Most famous for his roles as police officers — early in his career in the procedural “Homicide: Life on the Street” and later in the sitcom “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” — Braugher fell in love with acting while attending Stanford University, where he first performed in a student production of “Hamlet.” He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Juilliard School. “When I graduated from school, I felt like I had the tiger by the tail; I could do almost anything,” Braugher told Variety in 2020.Here’s a look back at some of the moments that would go on to define Braugher’s career.1988“Glory”Braugher made his film debut in “Glory” in 1998.TriStar Pictures, via Getty ImagesBraugher’s father was reluctant to support his acting career — Braugher remembered him saying, “Show me Black actors who are earning a living. What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?” — but landing a supporting role in “Glory” was a crucial early breakthrough. He played the studious, timid union Corporal Thomas Searles in the Civil War drama alongside Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman.1990Making His Mark in TheaterBraugher won an Obie for his turn as “Henry V” in 1996.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?  More

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      With ‘The Gilded Age,’ Louisa Jacobson Cuts Her Own Path

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      Exposed to the complexities of fame at a young age, she sought paths outside of acting in early adulthood. Now she is the lead of a prestige HBO drama.This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of “The Gilded Age.”“I’m sorry I’m late,” the actress Louisa Jacobson said, a little breathless, as she entered a vintage clothing boutique, in Manhattan’s East Village earlier this month. “It’s been such a crazy day.” It was a weekday afternoon, and traffic from her home in Brooklyn had been bad. The smells of the damp autumn day clung to her coat as she swept through the door, face lightly flush from the chill and manic hustle outside.She eyed a vanilla-bean-and-cedar candle and rifled through a rack of long blazers.“I like to buy pre-owned or vintage because it’s better for the planet and my wallet,” she said, adding that “I buy all my jeans here.” On the day we met, those jeans were medium-wash and boot-cut, matched with black boots and a black leather trench coat over a brown leather vest and a white button-down blouse for an overall steampunk vibe — a sartorial hint, maybe, at the Victorian fashion of the HBO drama “The Gilded Age,” if not quite the studied sensibilities of her character in the series, Marian Brook.Marian’s wardrobe, by contrast, consists entirely of long, bustled dresses and ribcage-crushing corsets. In the high society of 1880s New York, even plucky, forward-thinking heroines were expected to lace up tight for potential suitors.“Ouch,” Jacobson simply said.And yet Marian’s big decision in Episode 6 was perhaps even more constraining. Earlier in the show’s ongoing second season, her story took a dramatic turn as she went toe to toe with her formidable old-money aunt Agnes (Christine Baranski) and became a confidante of her other aunt, Ada (Cynthia Nixon). Marian also had to manage a suitor of dubious appeal, the handsome, if dull, widower Dashiell Montgomery (David Furr). Then suddenly, he proposed.“Can you imagine jumping into being the leading lady on ‘The Gilded Age’?” asked Christine Baranski, left (with Jacobson), in a scene from the series. “What a daunting task.”Barbara Nitke/HBOBowing to the conventions of her day, Marian accepted, in defiance of her own instincts. Fans, in turn, have questions — and consternation — heading into the season finale on Sunday. (“Uh-oh, “The Gilded Age’s” Marian Has Me Screaming at My TV Again,” reads one recent headline.)“There’s a lot of financial pressure on the union,” Jacobson said, referring to the engagement. “But,” she added, “she would be settling. Dashiell doesn’t take her career as a teacher or an artist seriously, and he’s like, ‘Well you can stop all of that once we’re married.’ She doesn’t vibe with that.”Jacobson, 32, has faced her own pressures — not least as the youngest daughter of perhaps Hollywood’s most celebrated screen actress, Meryl Streep. (She uses Jacobson, her middle name, as her professional surname.) And her star is ascending fast. When she was tapped to lead “The Gilded Age,” in 2019, it was her first television role. The drama was created by Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”), a writer whom she had long admired.Then there was the cast, stacked with theater royalty including Baranski, Nathan Lane, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy and Cynthia Nixon. Jacobson had only just graduated from drama school.“Can you imagine jumping into being the leading lady on ‘The Gilded Age’?” Baranski, a two-time Tony Award winner, said in a recent phone conversation. “What a daunting task.”Judging by her success thus far, Jacobson has remained mostly undaunted. But whatever advantages have come with her upbringing, it also showed her at a young age the pitfalls of fame and favor, enough that she spent much of her early adulthood pursuing other paths. Now that she is committed to acting — and if her stage name and hustle are any indication — she seems determined to build a career on her own terms and merits as much as possible.If Jacobson ultimately found the creative life irresistible, she came by it honestly: Her father, Don Gummer, is a sculptor; her two older sisters, Mamie and Grace Gummer, are also actors; and her older brother, Henry Wolfe, is a musician. The family lived in Salisbury, Conn., a small town near the Berkshires, until she was 9, when they moved to New York. She often performed spontaneously with her siblings at home.“I think I always knew that I wanted to act,” Jacobson said as we walked from the vintage store to a nearby flower shop on an afternoon of errands. She lifted her coat over her head as the rain picked up. “But I didn’t always know that I wanted to be an actor.”Jacobson, right, with Alison Dillulio, an old friend and the director of Chapter NY, a Manhattan art gallery. Before them is the drawing “City” (2023), by Christopher Culver.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe acted throughout middle school and high school, but when it came time for college, she opted to study psychology at Vassar, in upstate New York. She wanted to become a therapist, which she viewed as a more practical career path.“Because of the way I grew up, there are parts of the business that I know are difficult,” she added. “And growing up with fame in my household, it provided us with a lot of privileges, but it also came with a lot of anxiety.”But the pull of acting didn’t relent, and she continued to do student theater. After graduation, she worked a retail job selling handbags in New York for about a year, dabbled in modeling and worked as an account coordinator at an advertising agency. She continued to rush to auditions on her lunch breaks.Finally, that pull was too strong to resist: She applied for the master’s program in acting at Yale, the same school her mother had graduated from around 40 years earlier.“I knew that if I just went into it without studying it, I would feel, I already feel, in some ways like I don’t deserve —”She trailed off.“I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing,” she said, “and that I had a tool kit of professionalism that I was walking into the room with.”Months after graduating in 2019, she booked her big break, as Marian in “The Gilded Age.” For Fellowes, who created the series, the combination of Jacobson’s “charm and strong personality” immediately stood out.“I knew I wanted Marian Brook to be someone who seemed quite the perfect young woman from that period — mild, demure, rather easy to deal with,” Fellowes said in a recent phone conversation from London. “But, as the story unfurled, it would become clearer and clearer that she had, in fact, got an extremely strong will of her own.”Initially, Jacobson said, the learning curve was steep: She was intimidated by the veteran talent around her, Baranski in particular.“I’m the one who gave her a really hard time,” Baranski acknowledged. “I tend to stay in character between shots, and I think it was quite terrifying. I felt bad because I thought, ‘Oh, does she really think this is me?’”Also, Jacobson’s corset was too tight.“I finally said, ‘Can you breathe in that?’” Baranski said. “And she said, ‘No, I go home and I’m wracked in pain, and I’m having trouble sitting and I’m having trouble speaking.’“And I said, ‘Are you kidding? You loosen that corset.’” (Midway through the first season, Baranski said, she did.)At first, Jacobson said, she was also becoming trapped in her own head, overthinking things. That’s when Nixon, a veteran actress and director, stepped in with some advice.“Drama school really does a number on people,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “It takes a while to get that out of your system.”“So it was mostly like, ‘Try to stop worrying about getting there,’” she added, “‘and know that you’re there already.’”Jacobson has ambitions to do more theater and to direct, regardless of medium. “I just want to be happy and fulfilled,” she said. Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesJacobson readily acknowledges that her upbringing has been “totally privileged in a lot of ways,” yet she still has to audition for every role, she said. At 5-foot-7, with dark brown hair (her character’s blond tresses are a wig) and her mother’s stunning cheekbones, she cuts a striking figure even on the streets of New York, but she is generally able to walk them unrecognized. During auditions, she wonders whether casting directors know whose daughter she is, but she tries to keep those thoughts in the back of her mind.“I try to stay focused on the work,” she said.Our final stop that afternoon was a Christopher Culver exhibition at a TriBeCa gallery, Chapter NY, directed by a childhood friend, Alison Dillulio, whom she has known since the fifth grade. As we examined the charcoal and pastel drawings, talk naturally turned to her sculptor father.“I got my love of art from my dad,” she said. “He would set up a still life on our kitchen table and we’d each draw it.”“Though,” she added, “His were always better than mine.”As pedigrees go, having such celebrated parents seems rather intimidating, but like her character Marian, Jacobson balances her ambitions with an independent spirit. She wants to do more stage work. (She recently acted with all three of her siblings for the first time in a reading of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” at the Williamstown Theater Festival.) She also aims to direct, in whatever medium. (This summer she was the assistant director of a play by Maia Novi, “Invasive Species,” at the Tank, in Midtown.)But Jacobson also wants to follow another piece of Baranski’s advice: Live in the moment.“That’s always been the goal,” she said, after hugging Dillulio goodbye. The rain was pouring down, and she opened the door to the Uber that would whisk her back to Brooklyn.“I just want to be happy and fulfilled.” More

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      Michael Blakemore, a Single-Season Double Tony Winner for Directing, Dies at 95

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      Acclaimed in Britain, he had the unique distinction of winning awards for best musical and best play in 2000, for his Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” and “Copenhagen.”Michael Blakemore, an acclaimed stage director in Britain and the only one in Broadway history to win Tony Awards for both best play and best musical in the same season, died on Sunday. He was 95.His death was announced by his agents on Tuesday. It did not say where he died.Mr. Blakemore was nominated seven times for Tonys, notably for his productions of Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” in 1968 and Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off” in 1983.But it was the flair and care he brought to a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” the Cole Porter show about a troupe of players presenting a musical version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” and to a later Frayn play, “Copenhagen,” that won him the unique double of best direction of a musical and best direction of a play in 2000. (“Kiss Me, Kate” garnered five Tonys altogether, including for best revival of a musical and for best actor in a musical, given to Brian Stokes Mitchell.)Mr. Blakemore was born in Sydney, Australia, but built his career in Britain, first as an actor and later as one of Laurence Olivier’s associate directors at the National Theater in London.A scene from Mr. Blakemore’s 2009 Broadway production of Noël Coward’s comedy “Blithe Spirit.” From left were Deborah Rush, Rupert Everett, Angela Lansbury, Jayne Atkinson and Simon Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere, he staged some highly successful productions: “The National Health,” Mr. Nichols’s sardonic portrayal of British hospitals, and revivals of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s satire of newspaper journalism, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in which he directed Olivier.It had been widely thought that Mr. Blakemore would succeed Olivier, who stepped down as the National’s artistic director in 1973. Instead, the theater appointed Peter Hall, who had directed Mr. Blakemore in Stratford-upon-Avon during his acting years and with whom he had an intense rivalry. Their relationship soured, and Mr. Blakemore resigned in 1976.But he went on to prosper as a freelance director. He staged Mr. Nichols’s “Privates on Parade,” a burlesque musical comedy set in post-World War II Malaysia, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he began a long association with Mr. Frayn in 1980 when he directed his drama “Make and Break,” about a businessman who loses his soul.Then came Mr. Frayn’s “Noises Off,” an inventive farce about second-rate provincial stage actors performing a slapstick sex farce of their own. It transferred from London to Broadway in 1983 and ran for 553 performances there.“‘Noises Off’ couldn’t have arrived in New York a moment too soon,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times. The show, he said, was “as cleverly conceived and adroitly performed a farce as Broadway has seen in an age.”It was a triumph that, Mr. Blakemore later said, left him feeling that he had at long last ended “the bad dream the National had become.”Mr. Blakemore in London in 1983 during a production of Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off,” which transferred to Broadway that year.Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesMichael Howell Blakemore was born on June 18, 1928, in Sydney to Conrad Howell Blakemore, an eminent eye surgeon, and Una Mary (Litchfield) Blakemore. He said he was a descendant of John Quincy Adams through his American grandmother, who supported Michael’s artistic leanings while his father discouraged them. In the first of two memoirs, “Arguments With England” (2004), Mr. Blakemore described his father as an “unpredictable adversary” who disliked “scruffy bohemians and longhaired intellectuals.”Mr. Blakemore survived what he remembered as the “martinet discipline” of a boarding school, but not a course of study in medicine that his father had persuaded him to take at the University of Sydney. “I solved the problem of how not to be a doctor by failing all my third-year examinations,” he said.He was more fascinated with theater and film, especially American movies of the 1930s and ’40s, but it was seeing Olivier as Richard III in Sydney that inspired him to go to London to become an actor. He achieved that ambition thanks to another touring British actor, Robert Morley, who befriended the stage-struck Mr. Blakemore, employed him as his publicist and arranged for him to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1950.After graduating in 1952, Mr. Blakemore was cast in a series of regional repertory productions. Before long he was touring Europe as a Roman captain in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a revival starring Oliver and staged by the British director Peter Brook, who became an inspiration to Mr. Blakemore. Mr. Brook, he wrote, “had that concentration, in which empathy and detachment are somehow combined, that I was beginning to recognize as the mark of the good director.”By 1959 he was in Stratford performing more Shakespeare — as the First Lord in “All’s Well That Ends Well,” in small parts in an Olivier-led “Coriolanus,” and alongside Charles Laughton in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by the fast-rising Mr. Hall.A scene in 2000 from Mr. Blakemore’s Tony-winning Broadway production of Mr. Frayne’s drama “Copenhagen.” Michael Cumpsty, center, played the physicist Werner Heisenberg; Philip Bosco played his fellow physicist Niels Bohr; and Blair Brown, left, played Bohr’s wife, Margrethe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore had a difficult relationship from the start with Mr. Hall, who he felt had an overly intellectual approach to directing. He also vied with Mr. Hall for the affections of a company member, Vanessa Redgrave: “Vanessa’s lover was my enemy,” he later wrote. “I would gladly have killed him.” He found himself unwanted when Mr. Hall began to transform Stratford’s summer repertory into the Royal Shakespeare Company.But by then Mr. Blakemore was determined to become a director, and after playing major roles in the Open Air Theater in London’s Regents Park, he was asked to perform and direct at the prestigious Citizens Theater in Glasgow. It was there that he had his first major success, in 1967, with “Joe Egg,” a darkly comic tale of parents coping with a severely disabled child. Mr. Blakemore had helped his friend Mr. Nichols rework the script, which had been rejected elsewhere. The play transferred to London and then to Broadway (with Albert Finney and Zena Walker) to great acclaim.Olivier invited Mr. Blakemore to the National in 1969, and he was appointed an associate director in 1971. When Mr. Hall arrived in 1973, he retained Mr. Blakemore in his position, but trouble soon followed.In his second memoir, “Stage Blood” (2013), Mr. Blakemore gave his version of a conflict that peaked at Mr. Hall’s London apartment, after he had presented a paper to his National colleagues accusing Mr. Hall of failing to consult with his subordinates and taking too much paid work outside the National. He failed to win his colleagues’ support, however, and, after telling Mr. Hall that he was “an extremely greedy man,” Mr. Blakemore resigned. (He later published, in the newspaper The Observer, what he called “The Claudius Diaries,” a satire that cast Olivier as the murdered king in “Hamlet” and Mr. Hall as his killer.)Mr. Blakemore accepting one of the two Tony Awards he won in 2000. He defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMr. Blakemore was back at the National in 1997 and 2003 (Mr. Hall had stepped down in 1988), staging “Copenhagen” (which opened on Broadway in 2000) and “Democracy” (which transferred in 2004), productions that demonstrated his ability to bring clarity to extremely complex works. “Copenhagen” is centered on a discursive, argumentative conversation that the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had in 1941, in part about the building of an atomic bomb. “Democracy” centers on the West German chancellor Willy Brandt and an East German spy who falls in love with him.Wrestling with complexity was a strength that Mr. Blakemore also brought to “City of Angels,” an intricate Broadway musical with music by Cy Coleman, book by Larry Gelbart and lyrics by David Zippel, in 1989, earning a Tony nomination for his direction.Known for his calmness in the rehearsal room and, in his words, for “getting my way without anyone particularly noticing,” Mr. Blakemore defined directing as “the imposition of harmony on a gathering of divergent talents.”It was an ideal he strove to attain, usually successfully, in other Broadway productions, including the Coleman musical “The Life” in 1997, a belated world premiere for Mark Twain’s “Is He Dead?” in 2007 and, in 2009, a revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” with Angela Lansbury at her funniest as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati.Mr. Blakemore was married twice: in 1960 to Shirley Bush, with whom he had a son, and, after their divorce in 1986, to Tanya McCallin, with whom he had two daughters. He and Ms. McCallin later separated, according to the news release that announced Mr. Blakemore’s death. He is survived by Ms. McCallin; his children, Conrad, Beatrice and Clemmie; and three grandchildren.Alex Marshall More

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      Britain’s Friendliest Bear to Hit the Stage in ‘Paddington: The Musical’

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      The star of a long-running book series and two films will hit the stage in a show currently being developed in Britain, producers said.Paddington, the well-traveled bear known for his floppy red hat and love for orange marmalade sandwiches, is taking on yet another venture in 2025: the theater.A stage musical about the friendly bear is in development and is set to open in Britain in 2025, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday. It will be adapted from the book series that made him famous, as well as the two live-action films, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.”The working title is “Paddington: The Musical,” and it “is currently undergoing a period of development and workshops,” according to a news release.Paddington was first introduced in a book series by Michael Bond that follows the good-natured bear who emigrates from Peru to England and is taken in by the Brown family. Paddington is sweet, curious and prone to mishaps.The first book in the series, “A Bear Called Paddington,” was published in October 1958. More than 35 million copies of Paddington books have been sold worldwide.The live-action feature films, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington, premiered in Britain in 2014 and 2017. The first film depicts Paddington’s arrival in London and the early stages of his relationship with the Brown family. In the second film, Paddington attempts to get his Aunt Lucy a gift and ends up in prison, where, eventually, there is music, cake and dancing.A third film, “Paddington in Peru,” is set to be released in Britain on Nov. 8, 2024. Its U.S. release date is Jan. 17, 2025.The stage show’s music and lyrics will be written by Tom Fletcher, a founding member of the popular British band McFly and a well-known children’s author. The musical’s book will be by Jessica Swale, whose play “Nell Gwynn” won an Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2016.The musical’s director will be Luke Sheppard, who has worked on “Just for One Day,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Rent.”The musical is being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Studiocanal and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK. The producers did not provide details on the plot and said the cast would be announced later.“The magic of Paddington is that, through his wide-eyed innocence, he sees the very best in humanity,” Ms. Friedman and Ms. Lumley said in a joint statement, “reminding us that love and kindness can triumph if we open our hearts and minds to one another.” More

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      National Theater, Source of Broadway Hits, Gets Its First Female Leader

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      Indhu Rubasingham will lead the venerable London institution where plays including “War Horse” and “The Lehman Trilogy” originated.Since the National Theater opened in London in 1963, its artistic directors have been among the greats of British theater: Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Rufus Norris. They also had two other things in common. All six are white men.On Wednesday, the theater brought that era to an end when it announced the appointment of Indhu Rubasingham to the top position. She will be the first woman and person of color to lead the National Theater.Rubasingham, 53, will join next spring, the theater said in a news release. She will work for a year alongside Norris, who is departing, before taking sole charge in spring 2025, when she will also share the role of chief executive with Kate Varah, the theater’s current executive director. That sharing of responsibilities is a change for the theater, where Norris currently holds both roles.With three theaters in its building alongside the River Thames, the National, as it is known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year, and has almost 900 full-time employees. Critics and theatergoers expect it to produce the best new shows and revivals in London, while also staging work that comments on the state of the nation. On top of that, it is tasked with incubating new talent, mounting touring productions across Britain and running an extensive education program.Rubasingham will have to do all of that in the face of a shrinking budget and soaring inflation. Many theaters in Britain, including the National, receive annual government grants meant to cover about a fifth of their operating costs, but the amount of those subsidies is declining. Last year, Arts Council England, the funding body, slashed the National’s subsidy by 5 percent, to 16.1 million pounds (about $20 million), as part of a drive to reallocate grants to institutions outside London.Beginning in fall 2024, the National will face further budgetary pressure when it has to start repaying a loan worth about $25 million. Britain’s government lent the theater the money during the coronavirus pandemic to help the shuttered institution shore up its finances.Rubasingham will be expected to produce money-spinning transfers to both the West End and Broadway. Over the past decade or so, the National’s transfers to New York have included “War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” Next year, it is sending “The Effect,” a recent hit, to The Shed.The National, as it is often known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt the much smaller London playhouse that she currently leads, the Kiln, Rubasingham has directed several hits that have found their way to New York, including “Red Velvet,” about the experiences of an African American actor in 19th-century London, which played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2014, and Zadie Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her programming at the theater, which changed its name from the Tricycle to the Kiln under her leadership, included acclaimed shows like “The Father,” “The Mother” and “The Son” from Florian Zeller’s trilogy, and works by emerging playwrights.Her time at that theater has not been without controversy.When Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, Rubasingham announced that the theater would no longer host some screenings for the U.K. Jewish Film Festival if it continued to accept funding from the Israeli government. The ultimatum caused a minor furor, and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle called the Tricycle “officially antisemitic” on social media. (The screenings went ahead at other venues.)A spokeswoman for the National Theater said that Rubasingham was unavailable for an interview, and the theater had no comment about the incident.The rebranding of the Tricycle in 2018, so that it became the Kiln, also caused a fuss, and many critics were mystified by the name change.Born in the northern English city of Sheffield to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, Rubasingham has said in interviews that as a teenager she expected to become a doctor until she accepted a work experience placement at the Nottingham Playhouse, a regional theater. She studied drama at Hull University and then worked as a trainee director at the Theater Royal Stratford East in London, where she worked with Mike Leigh, the movie director.Even with a lengthy track record at the Kiln, the National appointment is a huge step up. Clint Dyer, the National Theater’s deputy artistic director, outlined the challenges of running the organization in a recent interview with the Times of London. Whoever got the top job, he said, needed to have the “experience, understanding, empathy, desire” and “forward thinking” required to run any major arts institution, but also “the knowledge of the canon, of new playwriting and the ability to speak to donors, to government, to people like me.”“It’s a herculean task,” Dyer said. More

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      Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme Make the Holidays a Drag

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      It was half past 3 the day after the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting, and a pair of America’s most famous drag queens strode up to the spruce’s formidable footprint, chatting about abundance.“I don’t like being inundated with anything,” Jinkx Monsoon announced as holiday music jingled loudly nearby.“She has this conversation about Christianity,” BenDeLaCreme started to explain, before Jinkx resumed her gripe: “Christianity, the Kardashians and ‘Star Wars,’” she chimed back in. “All things that I have never asked to know about, but I know everything about.”The reason for their visit, however, was indeed the season. For the fifth year, the duo — both alums of the TV competition “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — are presenting a live Christmas show filled with dancing candy canes, glittery gowns and songs about trauma. (In 2020, Covid forced them off the road, so they made a movie.) What began in small standing-room-only clubs has grown into a 30-city theater tour that kicked off mid-November in Glasgow and wraps in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Dec. 30. The day after the queens’ stroll, on Dec. 1, their show hit Kings Theater in Brooklyn, a former movie palace that seats 3,000.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?  More

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      Review: ‘Madwomen of the West’ Is Comedy as Comfort Food

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      In Sandra Tsing Loh’s zany play, the stage is star-studded but familiarity alone can’t sustain this story about a group of old college friends.There comes a moment when a show tells you exactly who its audience is. In “Madwomen of the West,” a nostalgic new comedy by Sandra Tsing Loh with a cast of baby boomer screen stars, that moment is a singalong.The song is “Love Is All Around,” the theme from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” When Marilu Henner led the crowd in singing it mid-scene on a Saturday afternoon at the Actors Temple Theater, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, there was no hesitation. Practically the whole room joined in, the lyrics lodged in people’s heads since the 1970s.If only “Madwomen” as a whole worked so seamlessly. But the shaggy script is in desperate need of trimming and shaping, while Thomas Caruso’s production is so stiff that a reading might have succeeded better than a full staging.None of that cancels out the comfort-food appeal of a play about a group of women who have been friends since college, portrayed by actors in their 70s who have been familiar for decades on TV and in film: Caroline Aaron (recently Shirley Maisel on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”); Brooke Adams (“Days of Heaven”); Melanie Mayron (“Thirtysomething”); and Henner (“Taxi,” of course).The setting is “the birthday brunch from hell” that the acerbic Marilyn (Aaron) hosts at the Los Angeles home of the wealthy Jules (Adams) for the bummed-out Claudia (Mayron). Long out of contact, Zoey (Henner), their actress turned wellness-guru pal, unexpectedly joins the party, too.Each is liberal, feminist and struggling somehow: money, marriage, parenthood, career. All are grappling with the ways that the world, and the gender binary that shaped so much of their experience, have changed.Zanily meta-theatrical, “Madwomen” does much breaking of the fourth wall and blurring of the line between actor and character. And Loh, known for her 2014 memoir, “The Madwoman in the Volvo,” makes room for each of her stars to have some drama — most rewardingly Aaron (a veteran of Loh’s stage adaptation of the memoir) in a verbal symphony of a confession, and Adams in a kinetic outburst of rage.Will you believe the characters as friends? No, and you may wish that the actors had had more time to settle into their roles. Will you regret having to sit through some of the staler bits of political dialogue? Yes, unless you can’t get enough of Gloria Steinem quotations and Hillary versus Bernie partisanship.Will you laugh anyway? I did, three times: at Marilyn’s sharp line about the electoral college; Jules’s appreciation of her own drunken math; and Marilyn’s mortified reaction to Zoey’s evocative use of an anatomical term.“Madwomen” isn’t nearly as convivial as it wants to be. But it does have one virtue that shouldn’t be remarkable, yet is. It never condescends to older women — characters, actors or audience members.Madwomen of the WestThrough Dec. 31 at the Actors Temple Theater, Manhattan; actorstempletheatre.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Translations,’ What’s Lost When Language Is Looted

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      An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.A drunken philosopher alights on what may be his pinnacle argument: That we are shaped not by the facts of history, but by our imagination of it. “We must never cease renewing those images,” he says, or we’ll stop living.That thirsty scholar is Hugh (Seán McGinley), who runs one of Ireland’s clandestine (and illegal) hedge-schools, teaching a rustic assembly of adult pupils out of his dilapidated shanty. “Translations,” from 1980, is the first play in the Friel Project, a season of three works at the Irish Repertory Theater. A modest yet exquisite revival directed by Doug Hughes, it makes a rigorous case not only for Brian Friel’s pre-eminence as an interpreter of Irish national identity, but for the vitality of art in deciphering life.It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage. A rebellion in 1798 led not to independence but to forced union with Britain in the United Kingdom. And now, British soldiers, including the listless romantic Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), are mapping the countryside and anglicizing Irish place-names. One of Hugh’s two sons, Owen (Seth Numrich), has become not just a translator, but a champion for the “King’s good English,” more enthused about the endeavor than even Yolland. The actors lend the fraternity between these young men an energy and curiosity that emphasizes the consequences of what they’re doing: renaming a homeland out from under its inhabitants’ feet.Yolland is the one who hesitates, though not on moral grounds: A hapless son of empire, he fetishizes feeling like an outsider, growing sweet on the sound of Irish vowels and even sweeter on Maire (Mary Wiseman), a milkmaid with her sights set on America. Their giddy, headlong infatuation is fueled by mutual incomprehension, before a sharp turn whose potentially tragic fallout Wiseman plays with affecting transparency.Friel’s shrewd spin on the pastoral drama is grounded in the convictions of these carefully drawn characters. But the play also confronts soaring questions about the nature of language — how it connects people to their homes (the trodden-earth set is by Charlie Corcoran) and to one another, and what happens when a native tongue is erased.Owen Campbell delivers a quieter register of heartbreak as Hugh’s humbler son, Manus, whose dream of preserving homegrown education, with Maire at his side, becomes another colonial casualty. Embodying extreme ends of the communicative spectrum are Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi), a presumed mute who struggles to articulate her name, and Jimmy Jack (John Keating), a disheveled bookworm who waxes at length in Greek and Latin about his crush on Athene, the goddess of wisdom.Dressed in clay-colored peasant garb by Alejo Vietti, and tenderly lit by Michael Gottlieb, each of these characters is illustrated with a Rembrandt-like specificity. As their portraits make clear, it’s essential to keep reimagining the plight of those consumed by imperial appetites. Doing so may lead to deeper understanding among us.TranslationsThrough Dec. 31 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More