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    Review: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Clean Up in ‘The Roommate’

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    A Bronx grifter and an Iowa homebody share a house and eventually learn from each other in this Broadway star vehicle.“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, parroting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robyn.A ditsy 65-year-old divorcée, Sharon is a convert to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which options for growth seemed few.But Robyn, who encouraged the experimentation from the minute she arrived to rent a room in Sharon’s Iowa City home, is alarmed by the change from meek to monster. A plate of pot brownies for the book club ladies is one thing; larceny is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” she warns, “are two different activities.”Because Robyn is played by the surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not especially amusing in itself, gets a big laugh. And because Sharon is played by the preternaturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither evokes a sigh.Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth.But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.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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      ‘The Roommate’ Pairs Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow on Broadway

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      “Sweet and sour?” Patti LuPone suggested, as if considering options on a menu. She looked questioningly at Mia Farrow, who was sitting next to her in a small atelier in a Midtown Manhattan hotel. We were in the heat-soaked throes of early August, and the women had just arrived, depleted, from what they described as an “airless” rehearsal room nearby.“I don’t know,” LuPone said. “It’s kind of negative, the sour …” She hesitated. “SALTY!,” she then exclaimed, in the clarion voice that has resonated from so many stages over the past five decades. “Sweet and salty.”LuPone was trying to define the yin and yang of the most unexpected double act of the new Broadway season. Farrow (she would be the sweet) and LuPone (salty) are the stars and entire cast of Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” which is in previews and opens on Sept. 12 at the Booth Theater, under the direction of Jack O’Brien.They portray women of radically dissimilar backgrounds and temperaments, who come into intimate and potentially combustible contact. These are roles for which Farrow and LuPone, longtime friends who have homes in the same Connecticut county, would seem to be naturals. “We complement each other, because we are so different,” LuPone said.Farrow, whose habitual manner melds openness with wariness, said: “I don’t know if at the core we’re so different. We may superficially appear to exhibit certain things that are ours in different ways. But going deeper than that. …” Her voice trailed into an ellipsis.Within that ellipsis, you have the essence of both Silverman’s play and the tantalizing pairing of its performers. A story of what happens when a meek Iowan homebody (Farrow) takes in a disruptive stranger from the Bronx (LuPone, natch) as a lodger, “The Roommate” ponders the Gordian knot of identity for two women at the crossroads of late middle age and the questions, as Silverman puts it, “of who gets seen and who doesn’t.”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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      Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow to Star in ‘The Roommate’ on Broadway

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      The production is to begin performances Aug. 29 at the Booth Theater.Mia Farrow and Patti LuPone, longtime friends, had no intention of returning to Broadway until a script about two women sharing a house caught their eye.The play, called “The Roommate,” was written by Jen Silverman, and had a 2017 run, with a different cast, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where the New York Times critic Jesse Green called it “a kind of chemistry experiment. Can two women of utterly different temperaments and backgrounds help each other? Can they help each other too much?”Farrow, 79, and LuPone, 75, met in 1979 while working on Broadway — Farrow in “Romantic Comedy” and LuPone in “Evita” — and then they were reconnected via a mutual friendship with Stephen Sondheim. (Farrow and LuPone both have houses in western Connecticut, as did Sondheim.)Farrow, in a telephone interview, said she had been sent the script for “The Roommate” and was intrigued. And she said she wanted to work with LuPone.“I would normally have said no, had I not been swept away,” she said. “This play is very funny, and odd. I’ve never read anything quite like it. It’s about secrets, and there are a lot of surprises in it.”Now a Broadway production is to begin performances Aug. 29 and to open Sept. 12 at the Booth Theater, where “Kimberly Akimbo” closed last weekend. It will be directed by Jack O’Brien, a three-time Tony winner (for “Hairspray,” “Henry IV” and “The Coast of Utopia”), and also a friend of Farrow.Farrow, best known for her work on film, has done occasional stage work over the years, starting at age 18 in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” but it’s been a while. Most recently she spent a month in a 2014 Broadway production of “Love Letters.”She said she was both excited and nervous about returning to the stage. “Unlike some people, I really enjoy my retirement,” she said. “I’m never bored. So this takes a bit of a push for me, but I got on board.”She added, “I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again, but if this is the last thing that I do, then I’m lucky to be involved.”LuPone is a Broadway veteran and three-time Tony winner, for productions of “Evita,” “Gypsy” and “Company.” In 2022 she said she had given up her membership in Actors’ Equity Association, saying, “I knew I wouldn’t be onstage for a very long time.” In a statement announcing “The Roommate,” LuPone said, “I certainly had no intention of being back on Broadway so fast. But when I read the play and heard Mia was attached, it became the easiest decision of my life.”The production said it expected that LuPone would be able to work on Broadway. When asked about LuPone’s ability to do so, Equity said in a statement, “It is Actors’ Equity Association’s policy to not comment on the membership status of individual workers.”“The Roommate” is being produced by Chris Harper, who produced the revival of “Company” in which LuPone starred (that revival had a first preview in early 2020, but then didn’t open until late 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic). More

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      The ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Creative Team on Assembling Their Quirky Puzzle

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      The toilets wouldn’t stop flushing. The playwright David Lindsay-Abaire was trying to talk about his collaboration with the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Jessica Stone on their musical, “Kimberly Akimbo,” and in the background, the janitorial staff members of the Booth Theater were cleaning the bathrooms.“I said to Jeanine,” he said, trying to keep a straight face as another toilet flushed, “I wish we could write a musical the way that I write a play, where there’s not a team of other people involved.”Another flush.Tesori stood up, muttering, “I have to close that door myself.” Which prompted Stone to bend over in laughter.“Thank you,” Stone said, as Tesori returned to her seat in the basement lounge of the Broadway theater.“It is on theme,” Lindsay-Abaire said. “Nothing better.”“Isn’t that enough?” Tesori responded. “Doesn’t that say everything?”For the creative team behind “Kimberly Akimbo,” the chaotic energy of this morning fit the musical itself, whose concept seems — on the page, at least — too off-kilter for a shiny Broadway marquee.Victoria Clark, center, as Kimberly with Alli Mauzey, foreground left, and Steven Boyer, foreground right, who play her parents.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA musical dramedy set in New Jersey, “Kimberly Akimbo” tells the story of a teenager named Kimberly (played by Victoria Clark) who has a disease akin to progeria, which causes her to age at a hyperspeed. At 16, she looks 72.It’s far from a tragedy, though, thanks in part to the quirky characters: Kimberly’s pregnant mother is a hypochondriac; her best friend, Seth, loves anagrams and plays the tuba; and her aunt is trying to persuade her to commit some white-collar crimes. Through it all, even though people with her condition have an average life expectancy of 16 years, Kimberly learns to be young and unafraid after years of taking on adult responsibilities.“I love stories that weave together pain, and hilarity and absurdity. And that, to me, is David and Jeanine, and their work and their sensibility,” said Stone, 52, who has been attached to the musical since 2019. “It’s exhilarating.”When the show premiered Off Broadway last winter at Atlantic Theater Company, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called it a “funny and moving new musical.” Led by the producer David Stone (no relation to the director), the show sold out its run, and a Broadway transfer was quickly announced. (As the producer of musicals like “Next to Normal” and “If/Then,” Stone is no stranger to an out-of-the-box concept.) Now “Kimberly Akimbo” is in previews, and scheduled to open on Nov. 10.Tesori, 60, and Lindsay-Abaire, 52, first worked together on “Shrek the Musical” in 2008, and for the past seven years, transforming Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” into a musical was their passion project. The focus and intimacy of that partnership, he said, made the musical “the easiest thing I’ve ever written.”He compares writing a musical to working on a puzzle. (He loves puzzles and word games; the show’s title is an anagram.) “It is like dumping a bunch of puzzle pieces onto the table,” he said. “It’s hard when you say, ‘Hey, 20 people, come on in and let’s do this puzzle together.’ But if it’s just the two of you — ‘I have this corner’; ‘I’m working on the edges; let’s get to the middle’ — then it comes into focus. And seldom does that happen with a musical.”Stone, Tesori and Lindsay-Abaire gathered to discuss their process on the first day of previews. These are edited excerpts from the discussion.Clark and Justin Cooley, who are reprising their roles on Broadway. “The two of them give each other really beautiful gifts,” the show’s director said of the actors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDavid, what were the instincts that led you to write “Kimberly Akimbo” 20 years ago?DAVID LINDSAY-ABAIRE I was writing what I hoped would be a great part for an actress that I loved and adored: Marylouise Burke [who starred in the play Off Broadway in 2001]. I wrote a part for her because she and now Vicki [Victoria Clark] have such an amazing young spirit about them, even though they’re actresses of a certain age. And so I wanted to write an amazing part for a great actor. But I also wanted to explore mortality and what it means to truly live in the moment. What I probably didn’t know at the time was that I was also writing about my family in many ways, and things that I was afraid of and angry about.How do you mean?LINDSAY-ABAIRE Uh oh …JEANINE TESORI I don’t know if you can open that door.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Look, I love my family very much. And they messed me up just enough for this play to be what it is. [Tesori pats Lindsay-Abaire’s arm, remarking, “Wow.”] I don’t feel messed up by them. But I feel messed up just enough to be the writer and be the person that I am.TESORI That’s what makes you a storyteller. Healthy enough to write, damaged enough to want to write.The play didn’t have monologues for Kimberly, but it did have monologues for her parents. Was creating the musical a way to create more interiority for her?LINDSAY-ABAIRE During “Shrek,” I said to Jeanine, “I would love to write a musical the way that I write a play, where it would just be us figuring it out for as long as we needed to figure it out.” And then Jeanine said, “Well, how about one of your plays? I think ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ could be a musical. It has a really deep, complicated inner life. Those characters want to sing to me, their emotions are deep. And I like how funny it is.”By making it a musical, we had a way into the characters that the play did not have. We could crack open Kimberly’s heart, and let her express all of those feelings and emotions and fears and desires and longings, that are only subtext in the play.TESORI I feel it in my body when something sings, I can’t put it into words. And these characters, they reminded me of people I grew up with, they reminded me of people in my family — and not always people who are center stage, especially in a musical.Jessica, how did you direct Victoria Clark, who is 63, and Justin Cooley, who plays her boyfriend, Seth, who’s now 19? They come across as being the same age.STONE: It actually is thrilling because you have two people on opposite ends of the spectrum. The skill that Vicki brings to the process of exploration can’t be created in Justin. I watch him being elevated by the discipline and skill, and her surgical approach to figuring out Kim and mapping out Kim’s world and behavior. He starts to sort of mimic that work ethic and he starts to explore and basically copy that approach.His complete honesty, tabula rasa, complete truthful, youthful, wide-eyed innocence and sweetness — it’s really hard to create that once you’ve lived, you know, 35 more years. So the fact that she’s in his orbit, this beautiful, innocent, youthful presence also washes over her. So the two of them give each other really beautiful gifts.Speaking of teenagers, there’s a duality to the show. It’s about youthfulness, but it’s also about mortality. As experienced artists, how do you keep that youthful tone intact?TESORI It’s part of being of a certain age, and what we have all experienced at this age. I’m older than these two. We share the same sensibility of humor. But there’s also this sense, like, we’ve been through some [expletive]. And our friends have been through some [expletive], and we’ve lost people. And if you’re lucky, you’re able to bring both of those things to an audience so they can recognize it. Because I think sometimes because musicals have artifice, they can seem artificial. And they’re not. They are the greatest art form.STONE We’re all parents. And we all have been close observers to adolescents. That adds a little bit to the glaze of authenticity, and a little understanding of the behavior, needs and pitfalls.LINDSAY-ABAIRE The first time in, I was really accessing my teenage years and stuff about my parents and my family, but really homing in on the Seth character who is very close to me in very many ways. I’m now the father of teenage boys, and I just had access to the parents in a way that I didn’t have when I wrote it. I understand much more acutely the fear of losing a child. The whole dynamics between parents and teenagers that I was sort of making up 20 years ago, now I know it deeply and personally. And I also got the chance to put all of my high school friends up onstage. Those four kids in the show choir were not in the play.“If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory,” said Lindsay-Abaire, right.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDo you imagine this as the kind of show that parents can take their teens to?STONE ​​My kids, 13 and 15, were here, and they loved it. Because I’m so invested in the parent side of the story, and in the mortality side of the story, and in the how-do-you-choose-to-live-your-remaining-days-on-this-planet side of the story, I forget about the delight, the tremendous luxury of hope and time, that teens have. And that enables so much in terms of imagination and promise. [My sons] think it’s hilarious. They love Deborah [Kimberly’s aunt, played by Bonnie Milligan], because they love a rule breaker. They also thought it was really moving. They were really intrigued by the relationship between Kim and Seth, not because it’s a traditional love story. But they really responded to that deep friendship.LINDSAY-ABAIRE Nothing has made me happier than seeing gaggles of teenagers really love the show. But at the same time, at the end of the Atlantic run, a grumpy old man was walking up the aisle and he looked at me and I thought he’s going to criticize the piece. And he said, “I just want you to know that I’m going to go out and live life more fully tomorrow.” My eyes welled up and then he was gone into the night. If you can have a gaggle of teenagers skipping out of the show, and then this grumpy old man with tears in his eyes — that’s victory.In the musical, Kimberly’s aunt sings an upbeat number about how to commit mail fraud. Jeanine, how did you write a catchy song about white collar crime?TESORI [laughs] It’s exposition, which is generally not great for a song. But then I thought, “Oh, if we make it really sort of furtive, and it’s got a little bit of a muted guitar thing, and it’s sort of like Peggy Lee, but maybe on a very, very off day …” It’s having it be fun, so that she can convince the teens to be part of it.LINDSAY-ABAIRE It’s a teaching song. We were talking about “The Rain in Spain” [from “My Fair Lady”], but it’s about check washing. It’s just messed up enough. More

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      ‘For Colored Girls’ to Close on Broadway, Reflecting Tough Season

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      The revival, directed by Camille A. Brown, received strong reviews but struggled to attract audiences and overcome challenges posed by Covid.A much-praised revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” Ntozake Shange’s classic choreopoem, will close later this month after struggling to find an audience during a tumultuous Broadway season.The show’s producers said Tuesday that the final performance would be May 22, just a month after opening and three months earlier than planned.The closing reflects the challenges of this unusual Broadway season — the first since the pandemic shutdown — when tourism remains down, coronavirus cases are a constant complication, and a large number of shows opened at the same time, making it difficult for any one of them to break out.“For Colored Girls” won strong reviews — in The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes deemed it “thrilling and exuberant” — but it has struggled from the get-go; last week, which was its best yet, it grossed $250,000. The show’s audiences, at the Booth Theater, were just 51 percent full, and the average ticket price was $79.“Our numbers were much lower than those rave reviews would justify,” said Nelle Nugent, one of the play’s lead producers. “There are so many choices this season, which is very exciting, but there’s a lot of inventory, and the shows with major stars are doing better. I think there’s also a confusion in the public’s mind about safety.”“For Colored Girls,” a series of monologues about the experiences of Black women set to dance and song, first arrived on Broadway in 1976, and was a hit, running for 22 months. It has been adapted for film and television, and influenced many theater makers.In 2019, the year after Shange’s death, an Off Broadway revival was staged at the Public Theater, directed by Leah C. Gardiner and choreographed by Camille A. Brown. The success of that project led to the Broadway revival, which Brown directed and choreographed.This production, like many others, has been challenged by the coronavirus pandemic — three of the cast members have been out in recent days. And the pandemic took a toll in other ways, as well. “It affected us an extraordinary amount, including the delay of almost two years coming out of the Public, so the momentum we had had dissipated,” Nugent said.In a joint interview, Nugent and Ron Simons, also a lead producer, attributed the closing to a number of factors, including not only the high volume of shows opening on Broadway this spring and the lingering effects of the pandemic, but also a delay in the announcement of Tony nominations, the presence of scaffolding around their theater, and misunderstandings about what their show is.“There is a slight dampening effect for us because of the title — when you read ‘suicide,’ people think it’s going to be a somber play, and not enjoyable,” Simons said. “But it’s not just a play that deals with dark subjects. The show ends on a high note of celebration.”Nugent and Simons said they were hopeful that, by announcing a closing date, audiences would now flock to the show, and said they were open to extending it if there were a sudden surge of interest. Absent that, they said, it would remain necessary to close the show, which was capitalized for $4.85 million. “The decision ultimately is based on economics,” Simons said.“For Colored Girls” is the second Broadway show to announce an unplanned closing this spring because of weak sales. A stage adaptation of “The Little Prince,” which began previews March 29 and opened April 11, announced last week that it would close May 8. More

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      'For Colored Girls' Broadway Revival Opening March 2022

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      Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem begins performances in March at the Booth Theater, home to the original 1976 production.The previously announced Broadway production of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” directed by Camille A. Brown, now has an opening date. After beginning previews on March 4, 2022, the show will open on March 24 at the Booth Theater, producers announced Monday.Brown, who will be making her Broadway directorial debut, choreographed the director Leah C. Gardiner’s well-received 2019 revival of Shange’s choreopoem for the Public Theater. But this Broadway production, which Brown will also choreograph, will be fully reimagined.“Of all the shows to be given as an opportunity to debut as a first-time Broadway director and choreographer, “for colored girls …” feels like a gift,” Brown said in a news release Monday. “I’m thrilled that I’ve been entrusted to combine all the parts of myself — dance, music and theater arts — to shape and share this timeless story again with the world.”Shange’s landmark work incorporates poetry, song and dance to tell the stories of seven women who are identified only by the hues of the dresses they wear. In his review of the recent Off Broadway revival, Ben Brantley detailed some of the show’s history as it made its way from bars and clubs to become “one of the most unexpected theater hits to emerge from the chaotic 1970s.” He added: “Shange’s free-form text was neither linear nor literal in its depiction of Black women struggling to claim their own voices from a society that had either ignored or actively silenced them.”Shange has inspired many, and her death in 2018 prompted a renewed interest in her work. The playwright Keenan Scott II has credited Shange’s “for colored girls” as an initial inspiration for his debut Broadway production, “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” He recently said that in college, a class screening of the Shange work was his first — and essentially his only — exposure to theater by Black playwrights at the time.Brown is a Tony Award nominee for her choreography in “Choir Boy.” She most recently choreographed and co-directed the Terence Blanchard opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in September. The Times’s dance critic Gia Kourlas said Brown’s step number for the opera “stops the show in its tracks.”Casting will be announced at a later date. More