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      Betty Lynn, Thelma Lou on ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ Dies at 95

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      She played Deputy Barney Fife’s girlfriend on the long-running sitcom and was remembered by fans with fondness more than 50 years later.Betty Lynn, who portrayed Thelma Lou, the patient girlfriend of Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff of the homespun town of Mayberry in the long-running 1960s sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show,” died on Saturday in Mount Airy, N.C. She was 95.The death was announced by the Andy Griffith Museum in Mount Airy, Mr. Griffith’s hometown and the inspiration for fictional Mayberry.Ms. Lynn joined the cast of the show in 1961, late in the first season, for an episode in which Sheriff Andy Taylor (Mr. Griffith) plays matchmaker between Barney and Thelma Lou.Thelma Lou’s occupation through 26 episodes remained a mystery, as did her surname. Although Barney (Don Knotts) had an occasional telephone flirtation with Juanita, a diner waitress who was never seen, it was clear that Thelma Lou was Barney’s steady girl. But in a 1966 episode, after Mr. Knotts departed as a series regular, Barney returned for a high school reunion to learn that Thelma Lou had gotten married.Still, all was not lost for him. When much of the cast reunited in 1986 for a two-hour television movie, “Return to Mayberry,” Thelma Lou had gotten divorced. She and Barney married in the film.Ms. Lynn moved from West Hollywood to a retirement community in Mount Airy in 2007. In addition to the Griffith museum, the town offers recreations of familiar Mayberry haunts like Floyd’s barber shop. Ms. Lynn became a nostalgic lure to tourists, who would stand in line once a month to get her autograph, to give her a kiss or to chat about the series.“I think God’s blessed me,” she told The Associated Press in 2015. “He brought me to a sweet town, wonderful people, and just said, ‘Now, that’s for you, Betty.’”Elizabeth Ann Theresa Lynn was born on Aug. 29, 1926, in Kansas City, Mo. Her mother, Elizabeth, was a singer, organist and church choir director who raised Betty with her parents. By 14, Betty was singing in local supper clubs and at 18 began performing in U.S.O. shows. After the war, she had small roles in the Broadway musicals “Park Avenue” and “Oklahoma!”She appeared in films like “Sitting Pretty” and “June Bride” in 1948 and “Cheaper by the Dozen” in 1950. On television, she acted in anthology series, westerns and sitcoms, including “Family Affair and “My Three Sons.” In 1986, she played Mr. Griffith’s secretary on four episodes of his dramatic series, “Matlock,” in which he played a lawyer.Ms. Lynn never married and did not leave any immediate survivors. Among regular cast members of “The Andy Griffith Show,” only the director Ron Howard, who played Opie, Sheriff Taylor’s son, is still alive.Ms. Lynn said that she could have stayed with the series, which ended in 1968, had she accepted the producers’ offer to make her the owner of a hairdressing salon. But Mr. Knotts was gone, having moved on to a film career.Without Barney, she told The A.P. in 2007, “I didn’t think Thelma Lou made much sense.” More

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      On London Stages, Brevity Reigns Supreme

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      A new work by Caryl Churchill, the final installment in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell saga and a Larry Kramer play deploy their running times with varied success.LONDON — Theatrical convention has never mattered to Caryl Churchill, the questing English playwright who at 83 continues to display a maverick intelligence. “What If If Only,” her new play for her longtime home, the Royal Court, runs only 20 minutes — which is six minutes longer than was widely reported when the three-performer drama was first announced.But Churchill manages to communicate so much about love and loss and the possibility — just maybe — of a brighter tomorrow that the play, on view through Oct. 23, seems utterly complete. Theatergoers could add value by combining this premiere with the British debut of the American writer Aleshea Harris’s blistering (and 90-minute) “Is God Is,” also playing on the Court’s main stage.The text of Churchill’s play gives its characters names like “Someone” and “Future,” but the director James Macdonald’s ever-spry production cuts through any potential opacity. You understand in an instant the inconsolable despondency of John Heffernan, playing (superbly) a man in a one-sided conversation with someone dear to him who has died; a reference at the outset to painting an apple calls to mind Magritte, whose surrealism Churchill echoes.Jasmine Nyenya, left, and John Heffernan in Caryl Churchill’s “What If If Only,” directed by James Macdonald, at the Royal Court Theater.Johan PerssonHeffernan is visited in his bereavement by a beaming Linda Bassett, a mainstay of Churchill’s work here playing one of several versions of the future in a hypothetical multiverse that evokes the recently revived “Constellations,” a play that was first seen at the Court. Bassett reappears later, this time known only as “Present” and promising a reality that, “of course,” contains war — what reality doesn’t, she asks — alongside “nice things” like “movies and trees and people who love each other.” Are those verities enough in themselves to provide comfort? “What If If Only” isn’t sure, preferring not to traffic in certainty but in the mystery of existence that Churchill has once again marked out as her magisterially realized terrain.Events, by contrast, couldn’t be more linear in “The Mirror and the Light,” the third and final installment in the saga of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, as filtered through the beady eye of the novelist Hilary Mantel. The first two books in her trilogy were adapted into a pair of plays that ran in the U.K. and on Broadway, and this third play, at the Gielgud Theater through Jan. 23, presumably has Broadway in its sights as well. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.Whereas “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” were adapted for the stage by a seasoned playwright, Mike Poulton, the completion of the triptych has been whittled down for theatrical consumption by Mantel herself, in collaboration with her leading man, Ben Miles, reprising the role of Cromwell. Both are first-time playwrights working with a skilled director, Jeremy Herrin, who has staged all three plays.The result is a lot of filleting for a book in excess of 700 pages, and you often feel as if you’ve boarded a speeding train that is racing through its narrative stops. Keen-eyed playgoers might want to supplement this show with a visit to the popular musical “Six,” which chronicles Henry VIII’s much-married life from the ladies’ perspectives: Equal time seems only fair.This non-singing account of the story begins at the end, which is to say with Cromwell not far from his beheading in 1540. We then rewind to allow for a speedy recap illustrating how Henry VIII’s once crucial aide-de-camp reached this baleful state. No doubt in an effort to avert musty history’s cramping the theatrical mood, characters’ relationships to one another are neatly laid out, leavened where possible with jokey repartee. Dream sequences bring in such ghostly personages as Cardinal Wolsey (a droll Tony Turner) and Cromwell’s father, Walter (Liam Smith).The aim is presumably a modern-day equivalent of the history play cycle of which Shakespeare was the master, as makes sense for a drama presented on the West End in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The problem is a narrative compression so extreme that the story barely has time to breathe, paired with an ensemble overly prone to shouting: Nicholas Boulton’s blustery Duke of Suffolk is on particular overdrive throughout.Things improve with Nathaniel Parker’s increasingly irascible Henry VIII, who is seen changing wives — scarcely has he married the ill-fated Jane Seymour (Olivia Marcus) before he’s on to Anna of Cleves (a cool-seeming Rosanna Adams) — while Miles’s Cromwell watches from the sidelines, too often this time a supporting player in his own story. Christopher Oram won a Tony in 2015 for his costumes for the two-part “Wolf Hall,” and his work here similarly suggests a Holbein portrait or two come to life.For sheer illumination, however, it’s left to Jessica Hung Han Yun’s elegant lighting to sear the stage, lending intrigue and import even when the hurtlingly superficial play has careered off course.Ben Daniels, left, and Dino Fetscher in Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart,” directed by Dominic Cooke at the National Theater.Helen MaybanksA grievous chapter from our own recent history is on view through Nov. 6 on the Olivier stage of the National Theater, where the protean director Dominic Cooke (“Follies,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) has revived the AIDS-era drama “The Normal Heart.” This is the first major production of Larry Kramer’s momentous 1985 play since its pioneering author died last year.Kramer’s crusading spirit lives on in the impassioned Ned Weeks (the English actor Ben Daniels, in fiery, wiry form), the author’s obvious alter ego, who is seen galvanizing a reluctant New York community (The New York Times included) about the peril posed by AIDS in the early years of that pandemic. The production employs a peculiar Brechtian device that has each scene introduced by the actors in their own accents before they morph into their characters: All that does is illustrate the difficulty some of the cast has with the American sounds required.Still, there’s no denying the roiling fury of a wordy play running close to three hours that now as then works as both a call to arms and a requiem: a testament to the durability of people under siege as well as to their fragility. “There’s so much death around,” says Ned, a remark that Churchill’s “Someone” would himself surely recognize, even as both characters find themselves in plays that pulsate with life.Liz Carr in “The Normal Heart.” The production is the first major presentation of the momentous 1985 play since Kramer died last year.Helen MaybanksWhat If If Only. Directed by James Macdonald. Royal Court Theater, through Oct. 23.The Mirror and the Light. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. Gielgud Theater, through Jan. 23.The Normal Heart. Directed by Dominic Cooke. National Theater, through Nov. 6. More

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      Former ‘Hamilton’ Cast Member Files Discrimination Complaint Against Show

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      In the E.E.O.C. filing, the actor, who is nonbinary, describes being retaliated against after requesting a gender-neutral dressing room, among other claims. The show denies the allegations.A former “Hamilton” cast member filed a federal workplace complaint against the show on Wednesday, alleging that the show had retaliated and refused to renew a contract after the actor had requested a gender-neutral dressing room.In the complaint, filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, lawyers for the former cast member, Suni Reid (who prefers the pronouns they/them), said they were sidelined and eventually let go in September after requesting a gender-neutral space at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles where “Hamilton” was playing.In the 28-page complaint, Reid, a Black, nonbinary performer who has performed with the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles productions of “Hamilton” since 2017, outlined several other instances of discrimination and harassment by cast members and management over the years, including episodes in which Reid said they were physically threatened or intentionally and repeatedly misgendered.The complaint said Reid eventually intends to pursue legal claims in federal court. Filing a charge of discrimination and retaliation with the E.E.O.C. is a precursor to filing such a lawsuit.“Publicly, ‘Hamilton’ is a beacon of diversity and appears committed to causes seeking social justice and harmony,” Reid’s lawyers, Lawrence M. Pearson and Lindsay M. Goldbrum, said in a statement. “Behind the curtain, however, the Company’s management will force out a Black, transgender cast member simply because they stood up for themselves and advocated for a more equitable workplace, and therefore called that public image into question.”“We look forward to upholding Reid’s rights and hope this is a wake-up call for the theater industry about the systemic inequities that persist even at its greatest heights,” the statement continued.In its own statement, “Hamilton” said Wednesday that Reid had been “a valued cast member” for years and said the show had “offered them a contract to return to ‘Hamilton’ with terms responsive to their requests.”“We deny the allegations in the Charge,” the show said. “We have not discriminated or retaliated against Suni.” During the shutdown, it added, “we have given Suni direct financial support, paid for their health insurance, and paid for their housing. We wish Suni well in their future endeavors.”Reid has performed in the ensemble as well as in roles such as Aaron Burr, George Washington, Hercules Mulligan/James Madison, and Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, according to the complaint.It comes as Broadway and touring shows are working to find their footing following a lengthy pandemic-related shutdown. Earlier this summer, as several shows like “Hamilton” were preparing to restart, some of the most powerful players on Broadway signed a pact pledging to strengthen the industry’s diversity practices.But Reid’s complaint paints a picture of a toxic workplace environment at “Hamilton” that stretched from coast to coast.Reid was cast in the Broadway production of the show in 2017 and met hostility from the start, according to the complaint. Reid eventually requested a transfer from the Broadway production and started with the Chicago company of “Hamilton” in March 2019, according to the complaint, and came out publicly as transgender and gender-nonconforming. They were constantly misgendered by co-workers, “at times in a pointedly hostile or callous manner,” according to the complaint.By 2020, Reid had begun rehearsals for the Los Angeles company, but never was able to to join the Los Angeles cast in performance because of the shutdown, the complaint said.In May, Reid was presented with a contract renewal for “Hamilton.” Around that time, they asked their agent, Michele Largé, to request a gender-neutral dressing room at Pantages that Reid and others could use. “Hamilton” officials then raised concerns about posts Reid had published on social media describing racial equity issues on the show, according to the complaint.The show would eventually agree to set up gender-neutral dressing spaces in every “Hamilton” theater. But in the fall, after Reid’s lawyers informed the show that they had legal claims of discrimination, the show told Reid’s lawyers that it was “no longer open” to having Reid perform in “Hamilton,” and that “renewal of their contract was no longer an option,” the complaint said. More

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      How to Play Drunk

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      It’s one of the hardest feats of performance. Find the right balance between subtlety and audience expectations.“Acting drunk convincingly is about the hardest thing you can do,” says D.W. Brown, 60, an acting coach based in Santa Monica, Calif., who has worked with both film and stage actors. There are famous film scenes for which actors are said to have drunk alcohol, but getting intoxicated for real is ill advised, especially for stage actors, who perform the same scene day after day. Figure out how to fake it instead, which will require practiced motor-skill impairment and discernible psychological shifts.Alcohol relaxes the body. “Shake it out, get very loose,” Brown says. Sometimes it helps to start by spinning yourself into dizziness and noting what it feels like to stand or walk when your balance is off-kilter. When he’s working with actors on a scene, Brown will often have them start by acting more drunk than what’s required and then dialing it back and trying to conceal it, just as tipsy people do. “You’re trying to fight off that disequilibrium,” Brown says. Be particularly deliberate about actions a sober person would do with ease, like buttoning a shirt or counting out money.Find the right level of intoxication. “Subtlety is a tremendous mark of virtuosity,” Brown says. Still, you have to meet what Brown calls “audience expectation.” If drunkenness is written into a scene, the audience wants to see you sufficiently soused. On an inebriation scale of one to 10, Brown says most scenes call for a seven or eight. In order for the audience to register you as drunk, he says, “you need to slur more than most drunk people would in the wild.” Consider the type of drinker your character is. Brown helps actors choose from his taxonomy of archetypes: aloof drunk, happy drunk, maudlin drunk and angry drunk. Usually, you’ll want to stick to one type unless something in the scene triggers a switch — like, say, a kiss, or the mention of someone’s name. Note that alcohol blunts reactions, creating a kind of emotional sogginess. “For an angry drunk, you want a generalized foulness and misanthropy, as opposed to a pointed rage,” Brown says.A drunken scene might be comical, but that humor should not come from an actor mocking his or her character. Your job is to embody a character, not judge it. “Never think you’re better than anybody you’re playing,” Brown says. More

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      Shannen Doherty Reveals Ravages of Breast Cancer in Candid Photos

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      The actress, 50, who has Stage 4 cancer, said she posted the photos to help raise awareness about breast cancer prevention.One picture shows the actress Shannen Doherty completely bald, a bloody cotton ball in her nose as she stares straight at the camera, looking almost confrontational.Another is more playful — Ms. Doherty, 50, is in bed wearing Cookie Monster pajamas and a Cookie Monster eye mask. She confesses to how exhausted she is, how the chemotherapy she has had to undergo for Stage 4 breast cancer has left her plagued by bloody noses.“Is it all pretty? NO but it’s truthful and my hope in sharing is that we all become more educated, more familiar with what cancer looks like,” Ms. Doherty wrote on Instagram this week.The images are unsettling to any member of Generation X who remembers her as Brenda Walsh, the feisty, polarizing teenager she played for four years on the hit 1990s show “Beverly Hills, 90210,” which brought her international fame and infamy.Ms. Doherty said she was posting the images as part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the hopes that they will jar people into getting mammograms and regular breast exams and help people cut through “the fear and face whatever might be in front of you.”The unvarnished photos align with the frank nature of an actress who never seemed interested in being universally liked and are likely to resonate with a public that is reconsidering how female celebrities were treated in the 1990s and early 2000s, said Kearston Wesner, an associate professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University who teaches celebrity culture.“The photos aren’t touched up,” Professor Wesner said. “They’re not presented in any way than the reality she’s going through. There is some feeling that when she is communicating with you, she is coming from an authentic place.”Ms. Doherty said she learned she had breast cancer in 2015. Since then, she said she has had a mastectomy, as well as radiation and chemotherapy treatment.The photos, which have been viewed about 280,000 times, have elicited comments of sympathy, admiration and praise on her Instagram account, which has more than 1.8 million followers.“Love you Shan,” wrote Ian Ziering, one of her former co-stars on “Beverly Hills, 90210.”“You are a force, Sister!” wrote Kelly Hu, an actress.Ms. Doherty did not often get such adulation when she was younger.In the early 1990s, Ms. Doherty, who was only 19 when she started acting on “90210,” was eviscerated by the press and many in the public who criticized her for smoking in clubs, her tumultuous love life and reports that she was difficult on set.Her character was an outspoken, headstrong and temperamental teenager who had sex with her boyfriend, fought with her friends and rebelled against her father.Brenda Walsh was “relatable in an uncomfortable way,” said Kat Spada, a host of “The Blaze,” a podcast devoted to discussing “90210.”In hindsight, the backlash from fans against the character of Brenda Walsh, and by extension Ms. Doherty, may have been a result of seeing themselves in both women, said Lizzie Leader, the other host of the podcast.“We always ask guests about their ‘90210’ journey and we ask which character they most relate to or identify with,” Ms. Leader said. “Everyone is almost always a Brenda.”But back when the show was airing, some fans became so consumed with vitriol for the character that they began calling for Ms. Doherty to be fired.They formed an “I Hate Brenda” club. MTV News dedicated a three-plus-minute segment to the sentiment, quoting people who mocked her looks and her decision to attend the Republican National Convention in 1992. One clip in the MTV segment showed a group of partygoers hitting a “Brenda piñata.”She left “Beverly Hills, 90210” in 1994, then went on to appear in the 1995 movie “Mallrats” and several television movies and shows. In 2019, she appeared in a brief reboot of the original “90210” called “BH90210.”In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, Ms. Doherty said that the bad publicity around her was often based on exaggerations or “completely false” stories.“I really could care less about it anymore,” she said in the interview. “I have nothing to apologize for. Whatever I did was my growing-up process that I needed to go through, that anybody my age goes through. And however other people may have reacted to that is their issue.”If you were a fan of Ms. Doherty, the headlines hurt, said Professor Wesner, 45, who watched Ms. Doherty grow from a child actor in “Little House on the Prairie” into roles like Heather Duke in the 1988 movie “Heathers,” and Brenda Walsh.“She meant a lot to me,” said Professor Wesner. “I myself was an outspoken girl and I’ve gotten slammed for it, too. For me, seeing someone who was also outspoken and also a ‘difficult woman’ was satisfying.”The coverage of Ms. Doherty was reflective of a time “when publications would attack, would fat shame, would ugly shame, would anorexia shame,” said Stephen Galloway, the dean of the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “There was no line between taste and vulgarity. It was anything goes.”And it severely damaged Ms. Doherty’s career, he said.Her decision to document the effects of cancer is “a great step toward redemption and meaningfulness” that could help people, said Mr. Galloway, who said he learned about a week ago that he was in the early stages of cancer.He said Ms. Doherty’s openness had made him feel more comfortable talking about his own diagnosis.“I looked at her and I thought, ‘what courage,’” Mr. Galloway said. More

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      Cynthia Harris, the Mother on ‘Mad About You,’ Dies at 87

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      She was a familiar, sometimes meddling, presence on a hit ’90s sitcom about a pair of newlyweds. Earlier she won acclaim as Wallis Simpson, who inspired a king to abdicate.Cynthia Harris, a versatile actress who played Paul Reiser’s assertive mother in the hit 1990s sitcom “Mad About You” and won acclaim in the British TV mini-series “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.Her death was confirmed by her nephew Dan Harris.The Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning “Mad About You” aired on NBC from 1992 to 1999 and was revived in 2019 by Spectrum Originals, a streaming site. It starred Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt as newlyweds (in the roles of Paul Buchman, a documentary filmmaker, and Jamie Stemple Buchman, a public relations specialist) who, living in Greenwich Village, must cope with both frivolous and eventful barriers to marital bliss, including Paul’s overbearing mother, Sylvia.Miss Harris’s Sylvia was a recurring character on “Mad About You” for four seasons and became a regular in 1997, often butting heads with Ms. Hunt’s Jamie but also sharing warmer moments. She reprised the role in the revival. All told, Miss Harris (who preferred that honorific) appeared in 73 episodes of the sitcom.In “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” a seven-part dramatization broadcast in Britain in 1978 and in the United States in 1979, Miss Harris played Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American for whom King Edward VIII, played by Edward Fox, abdicated the British throne. For her performance she was nominated for best actress by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.She made her Broadway debut in 1963, and appeared in dozens of television shows and movies. For 21 years she was also the artistic director and a founding member of the Actors Company Theater, an off-Broadway collaboration founded in 1992 that calls itself “a company of theater artists that reveals, reclaims, and reimagines great plays of literary merit.”Miss Harris in Hyde Park, London, in 1979. She was nominated for a BAFTA award for her performance in “Edward and Mrs. Simpson,” a 1978 British TV mini-series in which she played the twice-divorced American for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne.Monti Spry/Central Press and Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesCynthia Lee Harris was born on Aug. 9, 1934, in Manhattan to Saul and Deborah Harris. Her father was a haberdasher, her mother a homemaker.After graduating from Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1951, she earned a degree in theater and literature from Smith College in Massachusetts. Afterward she worked as an assistant stage manager.Miss Harris made her New York City acting debut with an improvisational group called The Premise and then acted for eight years as a resident member of The Open Theater, an avant-garde ensemble. Her first film role was as Mary Desti in “Isadora” (1968), based on the life of Isadora Duncan and starring Vanessa Redgrave. She also had roles in the movies “Reuben, Reuben” (1983) and “Three Men and a Baby” (1987), among others.Playing Wallis Simpson may have been the closest Miss Harris came to stardom, but she had no shortage of roles on television, in theater and in film.She appeared on Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical “Company” in 1971 and in episodes of television shows including “Archie Bunker’s Place,” “All My Children,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “L.A. Law,” “Three’s Company” and “Sirota’s Court.”Miss Harris was familiar to radio listeners and TV viewers in the 1970s and ’80s as “Mrs. B” in commercials for the now defunct Bradlees discount department store chain.She married the theater manager and producer Eugene V. Wolsk in 1961; they divorced in 1972. She is survived by her brother, Dr. Matthew Harris; and her partner, Nathan Silverstein. More

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      For Sutton Foster, Crochet Is a Survival Tactic

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      Sutton Foster is finishing up a 15-week run at the Barbican as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” a role for which she won a Tony a decade ago, and she is preparing to return to Broadway later this year to co-star with Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man.”But before we got into all that, she wanted to show off a washcloth.“They didn’t have any washcloths here in the flat,” Foster said during a video interview from London last month, “so I was like, ‘Well, I’ll make some!’” She plans to give them as Christmas presents.When she isn’t performing onstage or onscreen (recently as one of the stars of the television series “Younger”), there is a decent chance that Foster is crocheting, cross-stitching, baking, drawing or gardening, hobbies she explores in her new essay collection, “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life,” which Grand Central will release on Tuesday.The chapters are craft-themed, but this book is not all about Mod Podge and Jo-Ann Fabrics. Foster, 46, writes about how keeping her hands busy has helped her cope with the stress and pressure of her career and the ups and downs of a life in which she didn’t always get what she needed from her family, loved ones or colleagues.“Hooked” is out on Oct. 12.“Anxiety runs in my family — in me,” she writes. “I am the daughter of an agoraphobic mother. I make a living as a performer. It’s complicated. And yet, if I’m feeling anxious or overwhelmed, I crochet, or collage, or cross-stitch. These hobbies have literally preserved my sanity through some of the darkest periods of my life.”There are light moments, like when we learn that Foster crocheted an octopus toilet-paper-roll cover as a wedding gift for her “Younger” co-star Hilary Duff. But these are balanced with heavier revelations, such as when Foster writes about the baskets she cross-stitched for her mother as a means of escaping toxic cast dynamics early in her career.She opens up about snowman-shaped holiday cookies she baked with the family of her first husband, Christian Borle, and the floral blanket she pieced together, one “granny square” at a time, when that marriage ended. She describes drawing interconnected circles with paint pens while undergoing fertility treatments, and the striped baby blanket she crocheted while waiting for her daughter’s birth mother to go into labor.Foster taught herself how to crochet when she was 19, and estimates that she has eight to 10 projects going at a time. She has a yarn dealer who shipped three boxes of Lion Brand supplies to London, then flew over to see “Anything Goes.” (You know what a big deal this is if you’ve ever been a novice in a certain kind of a yarn store, where customers tend to be sorted into varsity, junior varsity and invisible.) Sometimes Foster works from a book or consults YouTube for assistance, but she also creates her own designs.Foster said she has crafted many evenings of song, so she brought the same approach to writing her book: “You’re taking a reader on a journey, like taking an audience on a journey.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesGrowing up in Georgia and, later, Michigan, Foster got her start, like many thespians of her generation, in a community production of “Annie.” After performing in national tours of “Grease” and “Les Misérables,” she appeared in Broadway productions of both shows, as well as “Annie” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” In 2002, she won her first Tony for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Like her perennially cheerful “Younger” character, Liza Miller, Foster was a bundle of can-do energy and enthusiasm, until our conversation turned to her mother. Then she spoke slowly, eyes closed, choosing each word painstakingly.Helen Foster’s health began to decline when Sutton and her brother, Hunter, were teenagers. She had a fraught relationship with Sutton and stopped speaking to Hunter for close to a decade; the siblings’ connection with their father suffered as a result. Since Helen Foster’s death in 2013, Sutton and Hunter have enjoyed a new chapter with the man known as Papa Bob, and “Hooked” includes his tips for growing the perfect tomato. (No. 9: “Pick the tomatoes when they’re near ripe but not quite ripe, so others can grow.”)“Crafting was the way I could tell my mother’s story that felt most authentic to me,” Foster said. “A way to weave, pun intended, all the facets of my life together in a way that felt true to me today.”In the book, she takes readers inside the squalid house in Florida where her mother spent her final years. “I flipped on the light and gasped,” she writes. “All of her windows had been blacked out with black garbage bags, secured to the walls with duct tape.” Her mother had been bedridden for months, refusing to seek medical treatment: “That explained the bedpan and pee pads on the floor next to her bed.”In “Younger,” Foster plays a 40-year-old empty-nester who lands an entry-level publishing job — and a whole new life — by pretending to be a millennial.Nicole Rivelli/CBS“It was mental illness that was never treated, never dealt with,” Hunter Foster said in a phone interview. After mentioning that he spends as much time as possible outside, he added, “I don’t allow myself to sleep past a certain time because my mom stayed in bed half the day.”His and his sister’s relationship with their mother is likely to surprise some readers, Sutton Foster said. “It’s a part of our story that people don’t know. It’s this underbelly: my mother’s illness and protecting her and being afraid of her. No one talked about it, and there’s this freedom now.”Behind her on the wall was a framed poster that said “Breathe.”Foster wrote “Hooked” with Liz Welch, who has collaborated on best sellers by Malala Yousafzai, Elaine Welteroth and Shaun King. “Sutton is a Broadway musical actress, my mother was a Broadway musical actress. Sutton’s an adoptive mother, I’m an adoptive mother. Honestly, I think we’d be friends anyway,” Welch said. “Crochet was the perfect metaphor for holding oneself together, taking all these different threads of her incredibly interesting, not-what-you’d-expect life.”Suzanne O’Neill, a vice president and executive editor at Grand Central, said: “One thing that’s very hard for people who are writing memoirs to do is to excavate their stories, and Sutton was game for it, even if there were moments that were hard. She wanted the book to be excellent. She dove into it. It was a piece of art for her, and she worked really hard to make it the book it is.”In “Hooked,” Foster recalls being 16, mesmerized as her idol, Patti LuPone, belted out “Being Alive” on TV. “There was something simultaneously terrifying and thrilling about her confidence,” she writes. Her mother, who had recently stopped driving and grocery-shopping, said, “You can do that.”Foster, center, won a Tony for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesShe later met LuPone, who also played Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” and LuPone inspired one of Foster’s favorite collages: a colorful confection of craft paper on plywood, spelling out BADASS.“She’s a beautiful creature,” LuPone said of Foster. “She exudes a very positive light. We’re drawn to tortured souls, just to find out why they’re tortured. And we’re also drawn to the light, and the light is much more nourishing. You see somebody onstage that makes you feel better. That’s Sutton.”Foster is set to open “The Music Man” in December, playing Marian Paroo opposite Jackman as Harold Hill. But before she embarks on more soul-soothing craft projects backstage at the Winter Garden Theater, she will have time to settle into the Orange County farmhouse she moved into last spring with her husband, Ted Griffin, a screenwriter, and their 4-year-old daughter, Emily.She plans to bring at least one piece of her past into this next phase of life: a cross-stitched scene depicting baskets of various shapes and sizes that she made for her mother. For years, the piece hung in the front hallway of her parents’ house and was a stabilizing presence during difficult visits.Foster recently collected the baskets from her father’s basement. “I have them now,” she said. “They’ll go in the new house.” More

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      Adrian Lester Finally Arrives on Broadway, via Wall Street

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      A few years ago, Adrian Lester saw “The Lehman Trilogy” in London. Not only did he love it, but he was also impressed on a purely technical level. He knew how demanding it was for just three actors to portray several different characters and to carry the intricately devised epic, which follows the rise of the Lehman brothers in the 19th century, then the fall of their company in the 2008 financial crisis.“I was happy to watch it, be amazed, and walk away and go ‘phew,’” the British actor said in a recent conversation. “I thought to myself, ‘How are you doing that?’”Now he really knows, because he’s currently testing his endurance on Broadway as one of those three actors.The National Theater’s production of Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes, premiered in 2018, and had a short run at New York’s Park Avenue Armory the next year. The cast — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — reunited once again for a Broadway transfer in March 2020, but the pandemic put an end to it after a handful of previews.Undeterred, “The Lehman Trilogy” is back at the Nederlander Theater, with Lester stepping in for Miles (who left to play Thomas Cromwell in a stage version of Hilary Mantel’s “The Mirror and the Light”). Opening night is scheduled for Oct. 14.Small adjustments have been made to the script, Mendes said, to address the criticism that it had glossed over the Lehmans profiting from slave labor. “We wanted to acknowledge the family’s history in dealing with the slave owners of Alabama, when the three founding brothers first arrived from Germany,” Mendes said in an email.Lester with Adam Godley in “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Nederlander Theater, where it is scheduled to open Oct. 14.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere is no editorializing, however. “We don’t cross that line of going, ‘Hey audience, this is horrible,’” Lester, 53, said. “We simply present it and allow them to make their judgment. I suppose my casting makes that process easier.”He added, “We’ve been very aware of what’s being said in the text, what we may have missed, what things need to be pulled out or put in.”With all due respect to Miles, the casting switcheroo is a special treat for New Yorkers, who have not seen Lester nearly enough over the course of his three-decade career on the stage and screen. It feels incredible that he is just now making his Broadway debut, though he has popped up on smaller local stages: as Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s “As You Like It” back in 1991 and 1994, as that moody Scandi prince in a Peter Brook production of “Hamlet” that transferred from London in 2001, or as the real-life 19th-century actor Ira Aldridge in “Red Velvet” (written by Lolita Chakrabarti, Lester’s wife).No matter how good those productions were, they did not turn him into a New York marquee name. Lester good-naturedly pointed out that when he is recognized here, it’s usually because of a pair of screen performances that go back 20 or so years: as a movie star dating Tracee Ellis Ross’s character in the TV series “Girlfriends” and as a presidential-campaign operative in the Mike Nichols film “Primary Colors.”It’s another story back home, where the Birmingham-born commander of the Order of the British Empire has had lauded turns as Henry V and Othello, and received an Olivier Award in 1996 for his performance as Bobby in “Company,” also directed by Mendes — because, yes, Lester can sing and dance, too.He has also done the requisite television work, spending, for example, seven seasons on the comic caper “Hustle” as Mickey Rocks, the charming leader of a merry band of con artists.That show’s creator, Tony Jordan, was looking for someone along the lines of George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven” to play Mickey. Those are tough designer shoes to fill, but Lester’s ability to embody nonchalant, beguiling poise turned out to a perfect fit for a smooth criminal.“Before creating the show I’d read 20 books on confidence tricks,” Jordan wrote in an email. “I should be the hardest person to con, but I know that if Adrian’s Mickey had tried to sell me shares in a recently discovered gold mine in Arizona, I’d have invested heavily.”For Lester, the part was catnip because it actually was many parts. “The reason why I stayed with this character is that every episode, he pretends to be someone else,” he said. “You knew who he was inside, but you watched him become something else in front of you. And that,” he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis, “was just gold dust for me. I loved it.”But beyond Mickey’s parade of disguises and tricks, Lester also grounded him.“Adrian brought a truth to the role,” Jordan said. “You believed him totally, and more importantly, he made you feel that he wasn’t on the screen, that he was sitting beside you. That he was your best friend.”Sitting in an impersonal conference room in between “Lehman” rehearsals, Lester was thoughtful and soft-spoken — he was barely audible above the HVAC system’s white noise. The immediate result was I leaned forward and focused. This magnetic pull translates to the stage as a mysterious kind of spell: Nicholas Hytner, who directed Lester in “Othello” and “Henry V,” wrote in an email that the actor “always seems to be nursing a secret. It’s what draws you in.”“In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” Lester said, “you have to promote yourself.”Kendall Bessent for The New York TimesPartly, it’s that Lester, who trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, has impeccable chops. But he also knows not to overuse them, which would transfer the attention from the character to the actor. “When I was in rehearsal in drama school, I would speak things in meter and then never do it again,” he said. “If you’re in front of an audience and your voice, your mannerism, your pattern of speech, your intellectual approach to the performance tells the audience that you’re acting, they will switch off. And so I’ve never wanted to do that in anything.”​​For Hytner, this translates into a great classical actor. “He is in total command of the way Shakespeare’s people think and speak,” Hytner said, “in long, perfectly weighted paragraphs that emerge as if spontaneous.”Onstage, Lester has an uncanny way to establish a connection with both his scene partners and the audience by expressing a lot with seemingly little. His Othello, for example, exuded a sense of natural authority without resorting to the usual manly signifiers of military toughness. This made the times when he upped the ante all the more impactful — the scene in which he kills Desdemona was even harder to watch than usual. (The production can be streamed on the National Theater’s website.)Lester’s creative ambitions are naturally leading him to try to wrest more autonomy in his career. He has been dabbling with directing — an episode of “Hustle” here, a couple of episodes of “Riviera” there — and he’s now preparing to step behind the camera for his first feature, with possibly a second one in the works as well.“If you want to be a part of creating these stories onstage, on television, on the film screen, it’s always a struggle,” he said. “If you want to have more of a say on how the story goes, you have to step behind the camera. In this industry, you’re not going to get promoted by just waiting for someone to promote you,” he continued, “you have to promote yourself. And the only way you do that is by saying no to the things you would have said yes to beforehand, and wait for the next thing to come. The only power you have as an actor is to say no.”In his case, it has also been to say yes to roles where his mere casting defied antiquated expectations of who can play what.“Every time I’ve played a role — every time — I’ve been hit by the same response of ‘Oh goodness, that’s interesting,’” he said, pointedly making exceptions for “Six Degrees of Separation” and “Red Velvet,” in which he portrayed Black men. “Every time I’ve played a character, a classical one especially, it’s been somewhat a departure from how people perceive that role to have been.”He paused, smiled. “I have to politely leave those people to their own thoughts.” More