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    With ‘Floyd Collins,’ Jeremy Jordan Finds Another Challenge Onstage

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    In “Floyd Collins,” playing a hardscrabble Kentuckian trapped while exploring a cave, the actor finds inspiration in the claustrophobic restrictions.When Jeremy Jordan played a young, naïve cop in the Broadway show “American Son” alongside Kerry Washington, in 2018, he was fresh off several seasons on the “Supergirl” series. And so he tried to apply some of the techniques that worked for him on TV to a taut drama about police violence.“I had been making it work for so long, trying to mine gold from every moment, and I think that had stuck with me,” Jordan said. The director Kenny Leon intervened, with advice that Jordan still carries with him. Literally.“He gave me this note on some old piece of script,” Jordan said, fishing a tiny scrap of paper from his wallet and carefully unfolding it. “It says ‘you are good enough to just say these words.’”Leon’s counsel may be evergreen, but it particularly resonates with Jordan’s new project, where he is often unable to use many physical acting techniques.In “Floyd Collins,” which is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Jordan portrays the title character of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s musical, a hardscrabble Kentuckian who becomes trapped while exploring a cave in 1925. As a media circus forms on the surface, Floyd withers away underground, stuck between rocks. (The musical is based on a true story, which also inspired the Billy Wilder film “Ace in the Hole,” from 1951.)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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      ‘Floyd Collins’ Review: Trapped in a Cave and in a Media Circus

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      One of the wonders of this glorious-sounding new Broadway production is how far from claustrophobic this Kentucky cave saga feels.Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.Jordan, below, and Taylor Trensch.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

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      The “Oppenheimer” star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Cave Explorer Died 99 Years Ago. Now His Story Is Broadway Bound.

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      “Floyd Collins,” a musical about a trapped spelunker and the media circus surrounding his failed rescue, had a brief Off Broadway run in 1996.In 1925, a spelunker named Floyd Collins got trapped in a Kentucky cave and the unsuccessful efforts to rescue him became a media sensation, with print and radio reporters breathlessly tracking the endeavor.Now a musical about the tragedy is heading to Broadway, three decades after it was first performed and a century after Collins’s death.Lincoln Center Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, said on Monday that it would stage a revival of “Floyd Collins” at its Vivian Beaumont Theater next spring, with previews beginning March 27 and an opening on April 21.The musical features a bluegrass score by Adam Guettel and a book, as well as additional lyrics, by Tina Landau, who will direct the production. No cast has been announced.The show debuted in Philadelphia in 1994, and then had a generally well-received Off Broadway production in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons; it won an Obie Award for music, has periodically been staged at theaters in the United States and Britain, and has fans thanks to an Off Broadway cast album.Guettel, a Tony winner for “The Light in the Piazza,” is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. He is a Tony nominee again this year, for “Days of Wine and Roses.” And next spring, in addition to “Floyd Collins,” his new musical “Millions,” adapted from the novel and film of the same name, will have an initial staging at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.“Floyd Collins” will be one of two Broadway shows staged by Lincoln Center Theater this season, which is the final season of its longtime producing artistic director, André Bishop. The nonprofit previously announced that this fall it would stage a Broadway production of “McNeal,” a new play by Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a novelist.The theater also announced on Monday that it would stage Off Broadway productions of “The Blood Quilt,” written by Katori Hall and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” revised by Mark O’Rowe and directed by Jack O’Brien.They join an already announced Off Off Broadway production of “Six Characters,” a new play by Phillip Howze, directed by Dustin Wills. As a fund-raiser in December, the theater is planning a one-night reunion concert of its Tony-winning 2008 revival of “South Pacific.” More

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      A Starry Cast Navigates ‘Uncle Vanya’ and ‘Every Emotion Under the Sun’

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      Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill and Anika Noni Rose discuss the new translation of Chekhov that brought them to the farm.Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison Pill, to support Sonia’s largely absentee father, portrayed by Alfred Molina.William Jackson Harper, best known for “The Good Place,” plays Astrov, the eco-nerd doctor whom Sonia loves. Anika Noni Rose, a Tony Award winner for “Caroline, or Change,” is the glamorous Elena, Sonia’s stepmother, for whom both Vanya and Astrov yearn.In mid-April, a week before the show’s opening on April 24, Schreck, Neugebauer, Carell, Harper, Pill and Rose gathered to talk over their dinner break in a room off the Beaumont lobby. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Along with Harper and Carell, both at left, the play also features Alfred Molina, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak in supporting roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was your relationship to “Uncle Vanya” and Chekhov before this show?HEIDI SCHRECK I lived in Russia right out of college for two years. When I moved back to Seattle, I started this theater company with my husband, and there was this Russian company who would come and perform Russian plays. They invited me to be the translator. Basically I would do live interpretation.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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      Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

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      Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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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      Steve Carell to Make Broadway Debut as Uncle Vanya Next Spring

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      The production, a new translation by Heidi Schreck, will also star Alison Pill, William Jackson Harper, Alfred Molina and Anika Noni Rose.Steve Carell, the screen actor best known for his breakout role as a blundering boss in the NBC comedy “The Office,” will make his Broadway debut in a revival of the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya.”Carell will lead a cast of television, film and stage veterans in the production, which is to begin performances April 2 and to open April 24 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a Broadway house at the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater.“Uncle Vanya” is a dark Russian drama, first performed in 1899, about a rural family whose dreary but stable routine is disrupted when the property’s long-absent owner, a retired professor, comes to visit with his new, and much younger, wife. The play has been staged and adapted many times — this will be the 11th production on Broadway — and this iteration will be based on a new translation by Heidi Schreck, whose previous Broadway venture, an autobiographical show called “What the Constitution Means to Me,” is expected to be the most-staged play at U.S. theaters this season (not counting those by Shakespeare and Dickens).Carell, who played a regional manager in “The Office,” will also play a manager in “Uncle Vanya.” His character is the country estate’s long-suffering administrator (and the brother of the professor’s first wife); he oversees the property with a niece, Sonya, who will be played by Alison Pill, who last appeared on Broadway in a revival of “Three Tall Women” and was a Tony Award nominee for “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” They will be joined by William Jackson Harper, an alumnus of the NBC comedy “The Good Place” who this year wowed Off Broadway audiences with his starring role in “Primary Trust”; he will play Astrov, the local doctor.Alfred Molina (a three-time Tony nominee, for “Red,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Art”) will play the professor, while Anika Noni Rose (a Tony winner for “Caroline, or Change”) will play the professor’s wife. Jayne Houdyshell (a Tony winner for “The Humans”) will play Vanya’s mother, and Mia Katigbak (an Obie winner for “Awake and Sing!”) will portray a household nurse.“Uncle Vanya” is being directed by Lila Neugebauer, who is also directing a Broadway production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play “Appropriate,” which is scheduled to open next month. More

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      Mike Birbiglia Can’t Get ‘Hadestown’ Out of His Head

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      The comedian, 44, discussed his one-man Broadway show that opens this month, his love for Taylor Swift and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A.Mike Birbiglia has found that he can make a living off a personal crisis. Since 2008, Birbiglia, a longtime comedian and more recently an indie film director and star, has performed stand-up comedy shows on and off Broadway about his struggles with sleepwalking, his recovery from bladder cancer and his path toward fatherhood. But his latest, “The Old Man & the Pool,” a monologue about confronting his own mortality, might be among his most candid. (The show opens on Broadway Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.)“I think I’m inclined toward autobiography because so much is based on passion,” Birbiglia, 44, said in a recent call from his home in Brooklyn. “I’m interested in paying tribute to the bizarre litany of things that have almost killed me.”The idea for the new show, which Birbiglia has been developing since 2018, sprang from an annual medical checkup in 2017, when his results on a breathing test were so weak that his doctor thought he might be experiencing a heart attack right there in the examination room. Birbiglia, whose father and grandfather had heart attacks at 56, was pushed to improve his health; the show details trips to the Y.M.C.A. pool as well as an encounter with an unclothed older man in the locker room when he was 7. “I’m in much better shape now,” said Birbiglia, who is also set to appear alongside Tom Hanks in the upcoming comedy-drama “A Man Called Otto,” in theaters Dec. 25. “I do cardio five days a week. I’m experimenting with the idea of riding a bike from my apartment in Brooklyn to Lincoln Center every day for work.”In an interview last month, Birbiglia discussed what turned him on to Taylor Swift, how reading poetry helps his joke writing, and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel” Jerrod is a performer who’s not filtering what he’s saying to please you — he’s not holding back from what his truth is. A lot of art will stick with me a week after, but the things I most cherish stick with me a month after, years after. “Rothaniel” had that effect. It feels like “Hadestown” — I saw it a few years ago and still play the cast album all the time.2. Deep Dives This is something my wife, Jenny, and I like to do together — start from a certain point and then follow where it leads you, through various streaming and YouTube rabbit holes. One of my favorite finds is this three-part British documentary series called “Unknown Chaplin” that shows the outtakes of Charlie Chaplin’s movies. He did hundreds of takes of some of his shots! It’s one of those moments when there’s a massive upside to streaming — I don’t think I’d be able to find stuff like this if it weren’t for all the streaming services.3. “Little Astronaut” by J. Hope Stein This is a gorgeous book of poems by my wife about her experience being pregnant and having a child. Jen’s really gotten me into poetry — she’s introduced me to Paul Muldoon, Ada Limón, Paige Lewis. I learn so much from reading poetry that’s helpful when I’m writing films, standup and solo shows. There’s a real focus on the economy of words.4. “Kitbull” My daughter is 7 and not in the head space of wanting to engage with full-on Pixar feature films yet, but there are all these incredible shorts on Disney+. Some of our favorites are “Forky Asks a Question,” “Purl” and Rosana Sullivan’s “Kitbull,” about a kid and a pit bull becoming friends — if you don’t cry during “Kitbull,” I don’t think you’re a human being.5. Sarah Sherman on “S.N.L.” Sarah is an absolutely original voice in comedy. I worked alongside her at the Comedy Cellar, and even as a live performer she’s astonishingly alive and present and goes where the audience takes her. She has a series of guest segments with Colin Jost on “S.N.L.” that are all just excuses for her to roast him. She basically decontextualizes everything he says, then he’ll defend himself and she’ll put up a fake headline that says like “Hamptons Homeowner Colin Jost Mocks Comedian” with a picture of what’s supposed to be his mansion. They’re phenomenal.6. The Comedy Cellar For my money, the Comedy Cellar is the best club in the world. There’s the Olive Tree upstairs, which has phenomenal Middle Eastern food — great hummus and kebabs, a fantastic bar. Then downstairs is an intimate 150-seat club — the other night I was there, and Ray Romano dropped in. You have to make reservations weeks in advance, but it’s worth it.7. Improv is Life The principles of “Yes, and” apply to everything I do: directing movies, making solo shows and working with a director, collaborating with a designer, working on a family trip to Iceland. That spirit of things is what I find to be on a daily basis the most helpful piece of education I’ve ever had.8. rev’pod I talk a lot about my sleepwalking in my shows — I jumped through a second-story window many years ago — and people always ask what I do about the issue. At first my doctor said to sleep in a sleeping bag, and I did that for a while, but then I found this thing! The idea is for a cozier sleep; it’s kind of like a cocoon cloth experience. They recommend it for flying on an airplane to avoid germs. It’s not foolproof, but I find it to be a pretty good solution.9. No More Art Snobbery In my 40s, I’ve vowed not to be snobby about art that’s popular — there are certain things I’ve just missed out on because they were and I didn’t think they could be good. With early Taylor Swift, I was kind of like, “Oh, that’s pop music, that’s maybe not for me.” But her music is wildly personal and evocative and exciting in a way that even if she weren’t the massive pop star that she was, I think she’d have a massive cult following that she would tour from.10. Y.M.C.A. I make fun of it mercilessly in my show — there’s too much chlorine, a lot of cringey nudity in the locker rooms, the towels are too small. But a bunch of the New York Y.M.C.A. administrators ended up coming to the workshop shows a few years ago at Cherry Lane, and they were fans of it! I do a thing on my podcast called “Working It Out for a Cause,” and I’ve given to the Y.M.C.A. a handful of times. Part of it is because the more I researched the Y.M.C.A., the more I realized not only are they a rec facility, they do an extraordinary amount of community outreach and great nonprofit work. I’m very impressed by them; I make fun because I love. More