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      ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ Review: Sutton Foster as a Perfectly Goofy Princess

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      The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)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: In ‘Aristocrats,’ an Irish Dynasty Confronts Reality

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      A once-powerful clan gathers for a family wedding and muddles through the facts and fiction of their past and present.On a summer lawn outside Ballybeg Hall, the O’Donnell siblings loll under lemony sunlight perfect for a family reunion. A wedding has lured back two of the émigrés among them, but Claire, the bride-to-be, has always lived at home.Her intended is a local man, decades older, whom she does not love. A widower with young children he wants her to raise, he has promised her a car for Christmas, and days full of nothing to do. None of which matches the dreams she once had of channeling her musical talent into a performing career.“He’s buying a piano so that I can teach the children to play,” Claire says, the flatness of her voice the barest camouflage for her anguish. “Maybe one of them will become a concert pianist?”This is what the wan remnants of an Irish Catholic dynasty look like in Brian Friel’s play “Aristocrats,” set in the mid-1970s amid the tumbledown glamour of the O’Donnells’ grand old homestead, in the hills above Ballybeg, County Donegal.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: Ivo van Hove Takes on ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

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      The Belgian director’s revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar” showcases some of his signature aesthetic techniques. But it’s an odd pairing.On a dark, featureless stage in Amsterdam, a soon-to-be-crucified Jesus Christ laments his predicament while sporting a shimmery tank-top and gray New Balance sneakers. His followers, gathered around him, look like they have raided an Urban Outfitters store sometime around 2012.By stark contrast, his persecutors, led by King Herod and Pontius Pilate, wear severe white, floor-length robes and black coats. In an earsplitting falsetto, Jesus reproaches his father, God, for having put him in this position. As well he might.This revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s kitschy 1971 musical about the last few days of Jesus’s life, is directed by the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove. It’s an odd match.Van Hove has built his reputation on aesthetically striking, often psychologically intense re-imaginings of well-known works — including canonical plays (“Hedda Gabler” and a riveting “A View from the Bridge”); golden-age Hollywood movies (“All About Eve”); and contemporary fiction (“Who Killed My Father” and “A Little Life”). And though his range is wide, there has always been intellectual ambition in his choice of subject matter: a serious interest in the poetics of human tragedy.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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      ‘The Chevalier’ Review: A Music-Theater Portrait of Joseph Boulogne

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      “The Chevalier,” an intriguing music-theater hybrid, unwraps the still little-known life and work of this 18th-century composer.Now, the composer Joseph Boulogne would be hailed as a Renaissance man: artist, athlete, intellectual, soldier. Born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a white French plantation owner and an enslaved mother of Senegalese origin, Boulogne became a virtuoso violinist, prodigious composer, champion fencer, the general of Europe’s first Black regiment and an avid abolitionist.But Boulogne, a.k.a. the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (and whose last name is sometimes spelled “Bologne”), was a biracial man in a time and place that held little space for him, which means his remarkable life has largely been erased from the historical narrative, though that is beginning to change.“The Chevalier,” a trim hybrid of theater and music, seeks to revive his reputation. The show was written and directed by Bill Barclay, the artistic director of Music Before 1800. (Barclay also plays Choderlos de Laclos, a Boulogne collaborator and author of the novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”) A single performance at the eye-poppingly opulent United Palace theater in Washington Heights on Sunday served as its New York City premiere; it will be available to stream next month.“The Chevalier” starts rather unpromisingly. Barclay takes as his point of imaginative departure the few weeks that Boulogne and Mozart were housemates in Paris. Mozart, 11 years younger, grills Boulogne about his life story, and he responds with long, expository answers that hit on major biographical points — more school lecture than beguiling drama.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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      ‘Patriots,’ About Putin’s Falling Out With an Oligarch, Is Broadway Bound

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      The play, by Peter Morgan of “The Crown,” will star Michael Stuhlbarg and is scheduled to open in April.“Patriots,” a well-received British play about a Russian oligarch’s ill-fated role in the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, will transfer to Broadway in April, adding a dose of international intrigue to a packed spring season.The drama, which the critic Matt Wolf called “gripping” and “coolly unnerving” in a 2022 review of a London production for The New York Times, was written by Peter Morgan, the creator and primary writer of “The Crown,” the Emmy-winning six-season Netflix show. Morgan has written two other plays that made it to Broadway, “The Audience,” about Queen Elizabeth II, and “Frost/Nixon,” about the journalist David Frost’s famous interviews of former President Richard M. Nixon.The Broadway production of “Patriots” will star Michael Stuhlbarg, who last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” Stuhlbarg has numerous stage credits, but most recently has worked in film (“A Serious Man”) and television (“Boardwalk Empire”). Stuhlbarg will play Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who helped Putin rise to power but then fell out with him and later died in exile. The role was played in London by Tom Hollander.Stuhlbarg will star alongside Will Keen, who will play Putin, now the president of Russia; Keen also played that role in London, and for that performance won last year’s Olivier Award for best supporting actor in a play. Luke Thallon will also reprise the role he played in London, as another Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich.The production is scheduled to begin previews April 1 and to open April 22 at the Barrymore Theater.The play is directed by Rupert Goold, a British director who has twice been nominated for Tony Awards, for “Ink” and “King Charles III,” and who will also be directing “The Hunt” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn early this year. “Patriots” was staged in 2022 at the nonprofit Almeida Theater in London, where Goold is the artistic director, and last year it had a profitable commercial run in London’s West End.The lead producer of the Broadway production will be Sonia Friedman, who is a major force in both the West End and on Broadway.The play will open in the final days of a Broadway season that is proving to be quite challenging for producers and investors because production costs are higher and ticket sales are lower than they were before the coronavirus pandemic. The economics have been especially hard for musicals. On Sunday evening, the producers of “How to Dance in Ohio,” a musical about a group of young autistic adults, announced that show would close on Feb. 11, after 99 performances. And last week, the producers of “Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group that ran afoul of the Nazis, announced that show would close on Feb. 4. More

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      How ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Became Their Passion Project

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brain d’Arcy James didn’t let the door close on their new Broadway musical about a couple undone by addiction.As origin stories go, the transformation of “Days of Wine and Roses” from a movie into a musical is a straight shot, with a twist. Kelli O’Hara and Adam Guettel had the inkling more than 20 years ago, when she was a Broadway ingénue, working on what became her breakthrough Tony-nominated role in “Light in the Piazza.” Guettel had written the music and lyrics for that musical, which went on to earn him a Tony Award for best score. They talked through their coordinating vision for evolving “Wine and Roses,” the midcentury classic of a romance ruined by addiction. “I think I used the words ‘a weird dark opera,’” O’Hara recalled.She already had a co-star in mind: Brian d’Arcy James, debonair and wry, like Jack Lemmon was in the 1962 movie, opposite the O’Hara look-alike Lee Remick. The film memorably traced the stuttery arc of alcoholism and recovery, a trajectory now familiar — onscreen and off — but rarely put to song.Guettel was not only game to try, he eventually brought in the playwright Craig Lucas, the Tony-nominated book writer for “Light in the Piazza.” Both had, separately, been facing their own addictions, in ways that informed, and sometimes overlapped with, the show’s development.The twist, then, is that, two decades on, the musical about a whiskey-soaked couple has actually arrived on Broadway — it opens on Sunday — starring O’Hara and James, now in the prime of their careers, with gorgeously matched vocals. The production takes pains to show the love that propels their characters’ relationship — however misguided it turns out to be.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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      Leave the Poor Princess Alone

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      There she is in her pink suit, pearl earrings and feathered shag.There she is with her upcast eyes, unknowable sorrow and perfect sympathy.There she is, that candle in the wind someone keeps relighting.Though killed in a car crash in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, turns up everywhere today, in plays, on television, in movies and even musicals. She’s entertainment gold: the perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.Which makes her, like a Dickens novel, public domain.In the last two years alone, I’ve spent more time with her than I did in the 36 she was alive. I saw her in a play called “Casey and Diana,” produced by the Stratford Festival in Ontario and now available to stream on Stratfest@Home. She was a spectral presence Off Broadway in “Dodi & Diana,” a marital drama that hijacked her story to lend oomph to its own.The 2021 film “Spencer,” which I rewatched on Hulu over New Year’s, did much the same thing, trying to wring some ichor of glamour out of her corpse. On television, “The Crown” hung the breathless first half of its final season on the buildup to the crash, blithely making stuff up where the record is thin. (Netflix justified it as “fictional dramatization.”) And what can one say about “Diana, the Musical,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 2021 (but an ongoing one on Netflix), except that it, too, died in a disaster?Reader, I cried at them all. (The musical because it was so bad.) I am thus part of the problem of her exploitation, seeking out more Diana content when there’s little left to say. Doing so establishes a kind of contract with the culture: In return for feeding my “feelings” about a celebrity, the culture has my proxy to do so however it pleases.But what right do I or any of us have to feelings about Diana in the first place? Quite profoundly we did not know her, any more than most of us knew pop-biography grab bags like Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, all of them falsified, fudged or “interpreted” in recent movies. History is not the point in such efforts, it is the impediment.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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      ‘Heartstopper’ Star Joe Locke Has a Soft Spot for ‘The Goonies’

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      “It’s the peak coming-of-age adventure film,” said the actor, who is set to make his Broadway debut in “Sweeney Todd.”Joe Locke was so moved when he saw “Next to Normal” at the Donmar Warehouse in London last fall that he called his agent with a request.“I was like, ‘I want to do a musical so bad,’” said Locke, 20, who for two seasons has played the sensitive teenager Charlie Spring in Netflix’s L.G.B.T.Q. coming-of-age drama “Heartstopper.”Soon after, his agent said he’d gotten an email from the casting team of Broadway’s “Sweeney Todd,” and the show was looking for a new Tobias Ragg, an urchin taken in by the scheming pie-maker, Mrs. Lovett.“The easiest way to play him is that he’s a bit simple — he’s not a full egg, as the Irish would say,” Locke said in a phone conversation in early January from his Manhattan apartment, before one of his first rehearsals. “But I think he’s a very street-smart character who’s survived in a world where people like him shouldn’t survive.”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