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    Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai Toast Their New Broadway Show ‘Suffs’

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    Dozens of theater, film and media stars turned out on Thursday night for the opening of “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage.“This is thrilling,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, said on a chilly Thursday night outside the Music Box Theater on 45th Street, as women in strapless gowns walked a purple carpet.Ms. Clinton, a noted Broadway superfan, was making her Broadway producing debut with “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage that traces the campaign for the right to vote from 1913 through the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which was celebrating its opening night.The show not only arrives in a presidential election year, as states attempt to tighten voting laws, but also as Broadway is bringing more female-centric stories to the stage. Audience interest in such stories has also been strong — in the previous week, “Suffs” ranked in the top 10 of the 36 shows on Broadway in the percentage of its seats filled.“I’m so excited that audiences are embracing this story,” Ms. Clinton said. “It’s historic and relevant, and it’s emotional, and it shows the relationships among these women who fought so hard to get us the right to vote.”Huma Abedin, at the opening night of “Suffs” at the Music Box Theater on Broadway.Lin-Manuel Miranda, right, with his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr.Anna Wintour, left, the global editorial director of Vogue, with Sara Bareilles, the performer. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can’t Make It to Broadway? Book and Movie Ideas for Theater Lovers.

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      There are plenty of novels, memoirs, documentaries and livestreaming options sure to satiate fans of theater.A trip to the theater isn’t always possible, especially during the busy — and pricey — holiday season. When a craving for stage drama hits, fear not, there are options. In the world of literature, long-awaited memoirs by Barbra Streisand and Chita Rivera arrived this year, as did the first major biography of the playwright August Wilson. Whether you prefer a live capture of a popular Broadway show like “Waitress,” or a film adaptation of, say, “Dicks: The Musical,” an Upright Citizens Brigade sketch, there is an abundance of musical theater films. (And if all else fails, you can listen to our critics discuss two recent musical-theater highlights or hear the story of the success of “Wicked” from our theater reporter.) Here is a small selection of notable works of theater-related memoir, fiction and film.To ReadViking PressHarperOne‘My Name Is Barbra’Barbra Streisand’s memoir spans 970 pages of print and 48 hours via audiobook. But for an icon of her stature, whose personal life — her Brooklyn upbringing, her celeb lovers, her underdog charm, that famous nose — is almost as mythic as her career, a page count exceeding that of “Ulysses” could be considered restraint. While it’s filled with chatty, personable retellings of stories that may be familiar to Streisand fans, there are plenty of fresh anecdotes too. Alexandra Jacobs called it “a banquet of a book” in her review in The New York Times and advised that “you might not have the appetite to linger for the whole thing, but you’ll find something worth a nosh.” Read the review.‘CHITA: A Memoir’The Broadway legend Chita Rivera wants to share the spotlight with her successors, and so, though her book is a memoir, Rivera kept the next generation in mind while writing it with the arts journalist Patrick Pacheco. In a conversation with Juan A. Ramírez in The Times, she said, “It’s not as much of a memoir as it is an opportunity for kids to realize that if they want this, they can have it — but they have to work hard.” That endless striving earned her three Tony Awards and led to her collaborations with the likes of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Her drive shines in this book along with glimpses of snark from her “fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores.”‘August Wilson: A Life’If the seminal American playwright August Wilson were to read his own life story, written by the former Boston Globe theater critic Patti Hartigan, he would most likely do so in the back of a seedy diner, drinking coffee and chain smoking, as he often did. In the first major biography of the playwright, Hartigan chronicles Wilson’s prolific career — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson” — and his immeasurable influence on capturing the experiences of Black Americans in the 20th century.‘The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race’In the scholar Farah Karim-Cooper’s book about Shakespeare and racism, she posits that “love demands that we reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations.” Karim-Cooper, a director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and a professor at King’s College London, applies this philosophy to the great playwright, scrutinizing his relationship with race and interrogating how his works shaped harmful Renaissance ideals — while still professing admiration. Pick it up for an expert perspective on a thorny theater subject, or to share a reading list with the prominent Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson, who reviewed the book for The Times.Tom LakeWe 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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      ‘Waitress: The Musical’ Review: A Big-Screen Helping of a Broadway Hit

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      Sara Bareilles is the heart and soul of this live capture of her musical.The musical “Waitress” is about liberation, empowerment and pie — three things that are easy to wholeheartedly endorse, and have turned it into a Broadway hit. Brett Sullivan’s live capture confirms the show’s biggest asset, nearly 10 years after its premiere: Sara Bareilles’s enduring wonder of a score, which skillfully melds a pop melodicism rooted in the 1970s with the narrative demands of musical theater. Bareilles’s first Broadway effort displays a joyful confidence and an unerring sense of emotional release. Unfortunately, the glare of the cameras also highlights flaws that were easier to overlook onstage, mostly having to do with the way power imbalances are depicted.Shot on Broadway in 2021, this version of Diane Paulus’s production stars Bareilles in the title role of Jenna, who is mired in an abusive relationship with good ol’ boy Earl (Joe Tippett) and finds an escape by baking creative, delicious pies for the diner where she works. After discovering she’s pregnant, Jenna has an affair with her obstetrician, Dr. Pomatter (Drew Gehling) — who is very sweet and very married. This played better at the theater, just like a subplot involving the relationship between Jenna’s colleague Dawn (Caitlin Houlahan) by stalkerish goofball Ogie (Christopher Fitzgerald, excellent in a tricky part).Still, this is Bareilles’s show in every way. While she doesn’t quite match the emotional subtlety of Jessie Mueller, who originated Jenna, she has grown in leaps and bounds as an actress and provides a warm anchor for the movie. Thanks to her, this second helping goes down easy.Waitress: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      For ‘Only Murders’ Season 3, Not the Same Old Song and Dance

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      Meryl Streep joined the cast for a season that moved much of the action to Broadway, enlisting a musical theater supergroup to write the songs.Meryl Streep was looking for levity — she was “in despair of the world for so many reasons,” she said, namely the climate crisis. So she reached out to the funniest people she could think of: Steve Martin and Martin Short, whose late-career resurgence as a double act has included a touring stage show, TV specials and their Emmy-winning Hulu comedy, “Only Murders in the Building.”“I knew they were doing their tour,” Streep said. “So I just basically called them and said, ‘If you ever want to work together, let’s do something.’”They did. Short and Martin suggested a stint on the third season of “Only Murders,” in which they play, along with Selena Gomez, amateur sleuths and podcasters who solve murders in their Upper West Side apartment building. Streep said yes without knowing what exactly would be required of her, but the series’s co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman already had a part in mind.“It really was like the stars were aligned,” Streep said.As it turned out, not only would she play a prominent guest role as Loretta Durkin, a struggling actress cast in a play directed by Short’s Oliver Putnam; she would also have to sing. (Streep and the other cast members interviewed all spoke before the actors’ strike began.)That’s because Season 3 of “Only Murders,” which premiered on Tuesday, moves out of the building — well, mostly. There is still a murder; viewers saw Paul Rudd drop dead on a stage at the end of Season 2. And technically, the murder still happens in the Arconia (it’s complicated), the stately prewar co-op of the series’s title.But rather than risk letting the show’s winning formula become too formulaic, the producers this season took the investigation to Broadway, where Oliver is staging an original musical. And to do it right, they enlisted the aid of a musical theater supergroup led by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, known for their work on “Dear Evan Hansen” and “La La Land.”Given the cast and creative team assembled, it all makes for a very star-studded love letter to Broadway. Streep likened the experience to being a “theater company.” Paul compared it to “theater camp.”“It was just through and through a Broadway experience — there are just cameras filming it,” Paul said. “There was that same sort of ensemble sense, whether it was Meryl or Paul Rudd or Marty or Steve, that everybody was making this show together.”Paul Rudd, left (with, center left, Gerald Caesar; center right, Steve Martin; and Jason Veasey), plays a vainglorious movie star who makes a lot of enemies. Patrick Harbron/Hulu“Only Murders” has always had show-business jokes — Oliver is known for his legendary flops; Steve Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage is a washed-up TV star — but this season leans even further into its jazz hands impulses. In the premiere, a vainglorious movie star played by Rudd, who is starring in a nonmusical production from Oliver titled “Death Rattle,” is mysteriously offed (it turns out he survived that collapse onstage), potentially by another cast member.Desperate for the show to go on, Oliver tries to save his already absurd production by turning it into a musical: “Death Rattle Dazzle!,” an all-singing spectacle about infant triplets who might have committed murder.Hoffman said he could have played it safe, knowing that the coup was just getting the celebrities on board. Instead he decided to get ambitious with the song and dance numbers.“My idiocy is that instead of containing myself and giving them nothing but great, hopefully, dialogue scenes to do, let’s swing for the fences and go for everything we could possibly dream of,” he said.And it was the stuff of Hoffman’s dreams. He had thought Streep would be right for the part of Loretta but figured it would never happen, before learning that Short and Martin had been speaking with her. He also had Pasek and Paul on his wish list of potential composers when he discovered that one of his writers, Sas Goldberg, was an old friend of theirs. Turns out, they had already expressed interest in contributing when they learned she was on staff.“I was like, if they need a ditty, if they ever need anything, we’re obsessed with that show,” Pasek said. When Goldberg texted to take them up on that offer, “it felt like a very serendipitous moment,” Pasek added.Pasek and Paul just had one condition for Hoffman: They wanted to bring in several top Broadway songwriters to help out. Hoffman said yes.From left: Martin, Selena Gomez and Ryan Broussard in a scene from Season 3, which situates much of the action amid the production of a Broadway musical about murder.Patrick Harbron/HuluIn the show, the songs are written by Oliver, a man who survives mostly on dips and once directed a musical called “Newark! Newark!” In reality, the songs were written by accomplished professionals, who thus had to master a tricky tone: The songs needed to work for a patently ridiculous production but also be genuinely entertaining for viewers at home.For a complicated, ear worm of a patter song that Martin’s character sings as the detective in “Death Rattle Dazzle!,” Pasek and Paul brought on Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman of “Hairspray” and “Some Like It Hot.” (“It was a thrill to sing and a thrill to be done with,” Martin said.) The playwright and composer Michael R. Jackson, whose musical “A Strange Loop” won a Pulitzer Prize and two Tonys, contributed a late-season showstopper for Streep.The Tony-nominated and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles was called in to co-write a lullaby titled “Look for the Light,” which Streep’s Loretta, playing a nanny in the musical, delivers to the tiny murder suspects. To prepare, the songwriters listened to Streep’s previous vocal performances to get a sense of her range.“It’s always nice when you know who you’re writing for because you can sort of tailor something to play to someone’s strengths,” Bareilles said. They emerged with a lovely ballad in which Streep croons in harmony with her fellow cast member Ashley Park, another Broadway veteran (“Mean Girls”).Streep, however, said she had been intimidated by the challenging melody. On the day of the recording session, she said, she had a “sort of a mental breakdown” after having to prep in only two days and being faced with new orchestration and a group of about 20 people gathered to hear her sing.“I really felt a responsibility to the music and to the song, which is a beautiful song, and I felt observed,” she said, adding that she “basically pulled a tiny diva move and said, ‘I can’t work like this’ or something.” (She laughed and then noted: “Oh god, that will be horrible unless you put it in all caps in print.”)There’s a burden to the expectation that comes with being Meryl Streep. “I just feel like sometimes the Meryl Streep of it all walks in like this ship, and everybody thinks, ‘Oh we’re going to watch the launch.’ And I think, ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to see the Titanic go down,’” she said.Her collaborators sang her praises.“It’s quite beautiful to witness after all of the laudatory things that have come her way, justifiably so, to watch her be nervous and to watch her be unsure,” Hoffman said.And Streep, of course, nailed it.“There was so much tenderness in her vulnerability,” Bareilles said. “She let that speak through her singing.”Short’s character, Oliver, tries to salvage his Broadway play by turning it into a musical, “Death Rattle Dazzle,” about whether infant triplets could have murdered their mother.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe world of backstage drama was, of course, familiar for the central trio. Short got his start in the 1972 Toronto production of “Godspell.” Martin has written two Broadway productions: the play “Meteor Shower” and the musical “Bright Star.” Gomez is the only one of them without Broadway experience, but she has toured as a pop star.“All three of us know show business and, I’d say, the stage world so well,” Martin said on a video call with Short and Gomez. “We draw upon a lot of memories: You know, the volatile director, the sensitive actor. And we don’t have to exaggerate to do it because we all have been there.”Still, Streep’s presence can be daunting for even the most seasoned performer, including Short.“I’m old and I’ve done this a long time,” he said. “And I’m driving to work the first day to work with Meryl, who I’ve known socially through the years but never worked with, and I found myself for first time in a long while going, Gee, I’m a little bit nervous.” During a pause in filming, Short was surprised to learn she had similar jitters.Selena Gomez was also star struck. “I never in a million years thought I would get to work with Meryl Streep,” she said. Streep’s performance, she added, made her cry. Alas, despite her other career as a pop recording artist, Gomez does not have a song in the onscreen musical.“I’m a terrible singer,” Martin said. “Selena should have a song, but her character is not in show business.” (Gomez does perform a quick Fosse-inspired dance number in a dream sequence.)During filming of the stage performances, which were shot at the United Palace in Washington Heights, Streep took up residence in the audience. Specifically, she wanted to watch Martin do his big tongue-twister number, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”“We had a green room we could go to and sit around and bitch, but nobody went,” Streep said. “Everybody sat up there and watched him over and over and over. It was just divine.”So did the experience cure Streep’s malaise?It did, indeed, she said.“They go into everything on this show with this kind of 1940s cockeyed optimism,” she said. “And it was so lovely to be in that world.” More

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      At Tony Awards, ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Wins Best Musical and ‘Leopoldstadt’ Best Play

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      “Kimberly Akimbo,” a small-scale, big-hearted show about a teenage girl coping with a life-shortening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional family, won the coveted Tony Award for best musical Sunday night.The award came at the close of an unusual Tony Awards ceremony that almost didn’t happen because of the ongoing screenwriters’ strike. Only an intervention by a group of playwrights who also work in film and television saved the show: they persuaded the Writers Guild of America that it would be a mistake to make the struggling theater industry collateral damage in a Hollywood-centered dispute, and in the end the telecast aired without pickets, without scripted banter and without a hitch.“I’m live and unscripted,” the ceremony’s returning host, Ariana DeBose said at the start of the show, after an opening number that began with her backstage, paging through a binder labeled “Script” filled with blank pages, and then dancing wordlessly through the theater and onto the stage. She then pointed out the absence of teleprompters, offered her support for the strikers’ cause, and declared, “To anyone who thought last year was a bit unhinged, to them I say, ‘Darlings, buckle up!’”Ariana DeBose, center, hosted the awards show without a script, relying largely on movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt one point, she looked at words scrawled on her forearm, and said, “I don’t know what these notes stand for, so please welcome whoever walks out onstage next.”The basic elements of the awards show — acceptance speeches by prize winners and songs performed by the casts of Broadway musicals — remained more or less intact. But the introductions to the shows and performances were mostly sleekly shot videos, rather than descriptions by celebrities; presenters kept their comments extremely spare, which left more time for unusually well-filmed production numbers.The ceremony featured a pair of milestone wins: J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell became the first out nonbinary performers to win Tony Awards in acting categories, Ghee as a musician on the lam in “Some Like It Hot,” and Newell as a whiskey distiller in the musical comedy “Shucked.” “For every trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming human, whoever was told you couldn’t be, you couldn’t be seen, this is for you,” said Ghee. Newell expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “Thank you for seeing me, Broadway.”“Theater is the great cure,” said Suzan-Lori Parks, whose “Topdog/Underdog” won the Tony for best play revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLast fall’s production of “Topdog/Underdog,” Suzan-Lori Parks’s 2001 tour de force about two Black brothers weighted down by history and circumstance, won the Tony Award for best play revival. The play had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 but no Tony Awards; Parks, in accepting this year’s Tony, praised actors Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins for “living large in a world that often does not want the likes of us living at all” and added, “Theater is the great cure.”There was star power, too. Jodie Comer, best known for playing an assassin on television’s “Killing Eve,” won the best actress in a play award for her first stage role, a grueling, tour-de-force performance as a defense attorney who becomes a victim of sexual assault in “Prima Facie.” And Sean Hayes, best known for “Will and Grace,” won for playing the depressive raconteur-pianist Oscar Levant in “Good Night, Oscar.”The night served as a reminder of the growing concern about antisemitism in America and around the world, as “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s wrenching drama following a family of Viennese Jews through the first half of the 20th century, won the prize for best play, and a new production of “Parade,” a 1998 show based on the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia, won the prize for best musical revival.Sonia Friedman and Tom Stoppard accepted the Tony for best play for “Leopoldstadt,” which also won several other awards on Sunday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Leopoldstadt,” which bested three Pulitzer-winning dramas to win the Tony, also won several other prizes Sunday night, including for its director, Patrick Marber, and for Brandon Uranowitz, who won as best featured actor in a play, and who noted the personal nature of the production for its predominantly Jewish cast in his speech, saying “my ancestors, many of whom did not make it out of Poland, also thank you.”The win by “Parade” cemented a remarkable rebirth for that show, which was not successful when it first opened on Broadway in 1998, but which is shaping up to be a hit this time, thanks to strong word-of-mouth and the popularity of its leading man, Ben Platt. The success of “Parade” is also a significant milestone for the musical’s composer, Jason Robert Brown, who is widely admired within the theater community but whose Broadway productions have struggled commercially. Brown wrote the music and lyrics for “Parade,” and the book is by Alfred Uhry; both men won Tonys for their work on the show in 1999.Michael Arden, who won a Tony for directing the “Parade” revival, said in his acceptance speech, “we must come together,” adding, “or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history.” Arden went on to recall how he had been called a homophobic slur — “the F-word,” many times as a child, and he drew raucous cheers as he reclaimed the slur. “Keep raising your voices,” he said.Michael Arden, who directed the Tony-winning revival of “Parade,” drew cheers when he reclaimed a homophobic slur in his acceptance speech.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut the night belonged to “Kimberly Akimbo,” the smallest, and lowest-grossing, of the five nominees in the best musical category, but also by far the best reviewed, with virtually unanimous acclaim from critics. (Nodding to the show’s anagram-loving subplot, the New York Times critic Jesse Green presciently suggested one of his own last fall: “sublime cast = best musical.”)The show, set in 1999 in Bergen County, New Jersey, stars the 63-year-old Victoria Clark as Kimberly, a 15-going-on-16-year-old girl who has a rare condition that makes her age prematurely. Kimberly’s home life is a mess — dad’s a drunk, mom’s a hypochondriac, and aunt is a gleeful grifter — and her school life is complicated by her medical condition, but she learns to find joy where she can. Clark won a Tony for her performance as Kimberly, and Bonnie Milligan won a Tony for her performance as the aunt.“Kimberly Akimbo,” which was directed by Jessica Stone, began its life with an Off Broadway production at the nonprofit Atlantic Theater Company in the fall of 2021 and opened at the Booth Theater in November. It was written by the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and the composer Jeanine Tesori, based on a play Lindsay-Abaire had written in 2003. Lindsay-Abaire and Tesori both won Tony Awards for their work Sunday night.The musical, with just nine characters, was capitalized for up to $7 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that’s a low budget for a musical on Broadway these days, when a growing number of shows are costing more than $20 million to stage. The lead producer is David Stone, who, as a lead producer of “Wicked,” is one of Broadway’s most successful figures; this is the first time he has won a Tony Award for best musical, and he was also the lead producer of the Tony-winning “Topdog” revival.The award for best musical is considered the most economically beneficial Tony, generally leading to a boost in ticket sales. In winning the prize, “Kimberly Akimbo” beat out four other nominated shows: “& Juliet,” “New York, New York,” “Shucked” and “Some Like It Hot.” None of the five nominated musicals is a runaway hit, and four, including “Kimberly Akimbo,” have been losing money most weeks.The ceremony featured performances from all nine nominated new musicals and musical revivals, as well as a performance of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” by Lea Michele from “Funny Girl.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 2022-23 season, which ended last month, was a tough one for new musicals: Broadway audiences were still down about 17 percent below prepandemic levels, and those who did buy tickets gravitated toward established titles (like “The Phantom of the Opera,” which sold strongly in the final months of its 35-year-run) and big stars (especially Hugh Jackman in “The Music Man,” Sara Bareilles in “Into the Woods,” Lea Michele in “Funny Girl” and Josh Groban in “Sweeney Todd”). So this year’s Tonys ceremony took on even more importance than usual, with the industry’s leaders hoping that a nationally televised spotlight on theater would boost box office sales.The ceremony featured not only musical performances by all nine nominated new musicals and musical revivals, but also a barn-burning performance of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” by Michele, a “Sweet Caroline” singalong led by the cast of the Neil Diamond musical “A Beautiful Noise,” and, as part of the In Memoriam segment, a song from “The Phantom of the Opera” sung by Joaquina Kalukango to acknowledge the show’s closing in April .The Tonys, presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing and named for Antoinette Perry, gave lifetime achievement awards to two beloved nonagenarians: the actor Joel Grey, 91, who remains best known for playing the master of ceremonies in both the Broadway and film versions of “Cabaret,” and the composer John Kander, 96, who wrote music for “Cabaret” as well as “Chicago” and “New York, New York.” “I’m grateful for music,” Kander said after being introduced by Lin-Manuel Miranda as “the kindest man in show business.” Grey was introduced by his daughter, the actress Jennifer Grey; he sang a few words from the opening number of “Cabaret.”“Oh my God, I love the applause,” he said, to a round of applause.Sarah Bahr More

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      As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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      As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More

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      Tribeca Festival Unveils 2023 Lineup With Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and More

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      Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park, among others, are making their directorial debuts at the annual New York event, set for June.Films directed by performers like Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park will be a focus of the 2023 Tribeca Festival, organizers said Tuesday as they announced the event lineup. Also on the schedule will be the premiere of a Marvel documentary about the iconic comic book writer Stan Lee.This year’s festival, which will run in Lower Manhattan from June 7 to 18, will include 109 feature films from 127 filmmakers across 36 countries. Among those filmmakers will be 43 first-timers.“The Tribeca Festival is a celebratory event that honors artists and uplifts attendees, and this year is no exception,” the festival’s co-founder, Jane Rosenthal, said in a statement, adding that the event will offer “storytelling as a powerful tool of democracy, activism and social awareness.”Peretti, an actor perhaps best known for her work on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” will bring to Tribeca the world premiere of “First Time Female Director,” a comedy she also wrote about a woman filmmaker struggling to fill the shoes of her male predecessor.Shannon went behind the camera for “Eric LaRue,” a world-premiere drama in which parents grappling with the fallout of their son’s shocking crime seek solace in rival religious congregations.And Park, whose acting career took off after he landed a starring role in the television sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” will take “Shortcomings” to Tribeca after it screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.Also in the lineup will be the world premieres of “Maggie Moore(s)” by John Slattery; “Fresh Kills” by Jennifer Esposito; and the North American premiere of “The Listener” by Steve Buscemi.The Marvel documentary “Stan Lee,” from the director David Gelb, will be among the 53 nonfiction features at the festival.The festival is known for its live events and several are scheduled for the 2023 edition. Sara Bareilles will perform after the world premiere of “Waitress, the Musical — Live on Broadway!,” which features her music and lyrics. Gloria Gaynor will perform following the world premiere of the documentary “Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive.” And a conversation with Dan Rather and the director Frank Marshall will take place after the world premiere of the film “Rather.” More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Do You Believe in Magic?

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      The Encores! revival of this fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, arrives on Broadway with its humor, wonder and humanity intact.After the woods and the wolf and the dark and the knife, Little Red Riding Hood has learned a thing or two. In the first act of “Into the Woods,” while modeling a cloak made from the wolf’s pelt, she shares her wisdom. Be prepared, she advises in “I Know Things Now.” Watch out for strangers. Stephen Sondheim’s bone-dry lyrics supply one more maxim: “Nice,” Little Red concludes, “is different than good.”True. But isn’t it splendid when a work of musical theater is absolutely both?Lear deBessonet’s superb production of the Sondheim and James Lapine modern classic “Into the Woods,” which originated at Encores! in May, has made the journey west and south to Broadway. Despite some cast changes, its humor, wonder and humanity have arrived intact. Indeed, they may glimmer even more brightly at the St. James Theater than they did at City Center. So if you saw that recent staging, should you go into the woods again? Unless your budget doesn’t run to Broadway prices, of course you should. To put it another way: Wishes come true, not free.A pastiche of a half-dozen Perrault and Brothers Grimm fairy tales, “Into the Woods” debuted at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego in 1986 and on Broadway the following year. It had a respectful Broadway revival, directed by Lapine, in 2002, and a misbegotten stint at Shakespeare in the Park in 2012. Disney adapted it into a pretty, somewhat empty live action film in 2014. For decades it has remained a favorite among high school drama clubs though many of those clubs stage only the first act, when happily ever after seems possible.As Sondheim and Lapine knew, a happy ending depends on where you stop the story. Turn enough pages and death puts in an appearance, disillusion, too. Perhaps this seems like a grim lesson from a show with Cinderella (Phillipa Soo), Jack the Giant Killer (Cole Thompson) and Little Red Riding Hood (Julia Lester) among its central characters. But if you reread those original tales, they skew pretty dark. Of Sondheim’s work, only “Sweeney Todd” has a comparable body count. Yet somehow its tone is hopeful.The cast of “Into the Woods,” includes, from left: Kennedy Kanagawa (with Milky White), Cole Thompson, Brian d’Arcy James, Joshua Henry, Patina Miller, Phillipa Soo, David Patrick Kelly, Sara Bareilles and Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA work of giddy playfulness and moral seriousness, “Into the Woods” forges a path from innocence into experience. It asks its characters (the surviving ones, anyway) to exchange the narcissism of childhood — the wishing, the wanting — for a more nuanced ethical framework that emphasizes interdependence. This is the message of the show’s heartbreaker ballad, “No One Is Alone,” which Sondheim articulated even more directly in a 1991 PBS interview. “We are all responsible for each other,” he said.The mood at the St. James on a recent evening did not, however, suggest deep moral inquiry. And judging by the hats worn indoors, the masks not worn at all and at least one surreptitious phone camera, everyone was handling responsibility a little differently. So what were the vibes? Pleasure, anticipation, celebration. When the lights came up, the crowd screamed and screamed and screamed. I expected panties — or given the source material, the occasional dancing slipper — to be thrown at the stage.DeBessonet’s staging, refined but little altered from the Encores! outing, uses only a wide set of stairs and a downstage strip in front of them. The set, designed by David Rockwell, with storybook lighting by Tyler Micoleau, sketches a forest in the simplest terms — descending birch trunks, a rising moon. Behind the actors, sit the musicians, conducted by the invaluable Rob Berman. If your eye should stray from the actors — a big if — you can watch them implement the chiming score, magic made visible.If the production’s style is minimal, it is never austere and on this mostly blank canvas, deBessonet, aided by Lorin Latarro’s playful choreography, paints in rich and plentiful tones. Kindness is a watchword of deBessonet’s work, as seen in her many Public Works productions. A recognition of shared humanity, too. Here it seems to extend everywhere, to actors and audience both. I have rarely seen a show in which the cast had this much fun. In the case of Gavin Creel, who went up on the second verse of “Any Moment” and covered — sort of — by kissing his co-star Sara Bareilles, arguably too much fun. Throughout there is a feeling of largess that only occasionally shades into indulgence. And honestly, some of that indulgence (as in “Agony,” sung to pieces by Creel and his co-prince, Joshua Henry) is a joy, too.Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and James as the Baker. “Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBareilles’s performance as the Baker’s Wife has only grown, beanstalk-like, since the Encores! production. Best known as a singer-songwriter and the composer of “Waitress,” she has more recently established herself as a comic actor on “Girls5Eva.” Here, her comedy has both broadened and deepened. While she and Neil Patrick Harris had a wild, nervy chemistry at Encores!, she is now partnered by the mellower Brian d’Arcy James. Together they find some fine rhythms in the roles of a married couple only beginning to know each other.Soo, a shimmering soprano who can make each emotion as legible as skywriting, gracefully replaces Denée Benton. (Benton replaced her in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” when it moved to Broadway; fair’s fair.) And Patina Miller, replacing Heather Headley, renders the Witch with a fierce, dangerous glamour, trading Headley’s initial restraint for more ardent shadings. On this recent evening, the puppeteer Kennedy Kanagawa was out sick, but his understudy, Cameron Johnson, was an able herdsman for Jack’s pal, Milky White. That cow still kills. And the children’s chorus is gone. Thank God.During the second act, I worried — though worry is too strong a word — that maybe this production had become too funny, too lightsome. The devastations of the second act didn’t flatten me the way they had two months ago. But really, who wants flattening right now? Instead this show values resilience, connection.At the end, once Soo had trilled the final ambivalent syllables, the audience leaped to its collective feet. The actors bowed and curtsied and smiled. The rest of us clapped and clapped.No one was alone.Into the WoodsThrough Aug. 21 at the St. James Theater, Manhattan; intothewoodsbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      A Starry ‘Into the Woods’ Will Play Broadway This Summer

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      The fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, will feature Sara Bareilles and a cast of much admired theater performers.A production of “Into the Woods” that garnered ecstatic reviews during a sold-out two-week run at New York City Center this month will transfer to Broadway this summer.The Broadway production, scheduled to run for just eight weeks, will again feature the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and Gavin Creel as a prince, but the other lead roles will be played by newcomers to the production — including Patina Miller, a Tony winner for “Pippin,” as the Witch; Brian d’Arcy James (“Something Rotten!”) as the Baker; Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) as Cinderella; and Joshua Henry (“Carousel”) as the other prince.“When things don’t make sense anymore, this is the show that holds our hand,” Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and the production’s lead producer, said. “That’s why it resonated so profoundly deeply, and why we need to allow more people to have that experience.”“Into the Woods,” which first opened on Broadway in 1987, is one of the great collaborations between the songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who died last fall, and the book writer James Lapine. The show, a cautionary mash-up of various fairy tales, is widely staged, both professionally and at schools, and in 2014 Disney released a film adaptation.This new production, which began as part of the Encores! program at City Center, will start performances June 28 and open July 10 at the St. James Theater. It is again directed by Lear deBessonet, the Encores! artistic director. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Alexis Soloski declared the City Center production “glorious,” and many other critics agreed.The Encores! cast featured several performers who are not joining the Broadway production because of filming commitments, including Heather Headley, who played the Witch; Denée Benton, who played Cinderella; and Neil Patrick Harris, who played the Baker.The Broadway run will be produced by Jujamcyn, Roth, and City Center, as well as Hunter Arnold, Nicole Eisenberg, Michael Cassel Group, Jessica R. Jenen, Daryl Roth, ShowTown Productions, and Armstrong, Gold & Ross.Jordan Roth said that the physical production would be the same as at City Center, with an onstage orchestra and minimal sets and costumes. “The simplicity and poetry of this production delivered this story right to our hearts,” he said.A New York City Center production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” also written by Sondheim and Lapine, followed a similar path to Broadway. That production, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, had a four-performance run at City Center in 2016, followed by a 10-week run on Broadway in 2017. More