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    Laura Donnelly, ‘Hills of California’ Star, Is Not Some Delicate Flower

    But she did “burst into tears” reading Jez Butterworth’s rewrite of his new Broadway play, which left her with 10 days “to create an entirely new character.”Most plays that transfer to New York from London arrive in close to their original form. There might be small changes to the text, to make particular lines comprehensible to American ears, but usually not much more than that.Laura Donnelly, the star of Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The Hills of California,” knew that the playwright had been planning rewrites since early in the London run, which stretched from January to June this year. The current Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theater would give Butterworth the chance.“He was really excited about that,” Donnelly, 42, said over coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, her dark hair lightened, permed and cut in a ’70s style for the play. “He kept referring to it as like, ‘little bits here and there,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool. Yep, no problem.’ I think this is also what he told Sam [Mendes], our director, and told our producers. So they scheduled in two weeks of rehearsals.”From left, Leanne Best, Helena Wilson, Donnelly and Ophelia Lovibond as singing sisters in the Broadway production of “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat Butterworth, Donnelly’s partner of nearly a dozen years, had actually ended up doing was a major rewrite of the third act — an overhaul that alters the substance, plot and even meaning of the play.From the start, Donnelly has portrayed two characters in “The Hills of California”: Veronica Webb, a guesthouse owner in Blackpool, England, in 1955, who is rigorously training her four adolescent daughters to become an American-style girl group; and Joan, her estranged and longed-for favorite child, who returns home at last in 1976, in Act III. But the Joan of the West End script was significantly different from the Joan of the Broadway script.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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    Jez Butterworth’s ‘The Hills of California’ to Open on Broadway

    The play, about a group of English sisters who reunite at their mother’s deathbed, plans to open in New York in September. It ends a London run this month.“The Hills of California,” the latest darkly comedic drama from the acclaimed English playwright Jez Butterworth, will transfer to Broadway this fall after a well-received five-month run in London.The play, directed by Sam Mendes, is about a group of singing sisters — well, they sang together as kids — who have gathered at their childhood home in northwestern England because their mother is dying of cancer. The play is set in the 1970s, with flashbacks to the 1950s.The British press gave generally high marks to the play, which garnered five-star reviews in The Financial Times and The Stage, and four-star reviews in The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Observer and TimeOut.The London production is scheduled to end its run June 15. The New York production is to begin previews Sept. 11 and to open Sept. 29 at the Broadhurst Theater. Casting has not yet been announced.Butterworth’s last Broadway venture, “The Ferryman,” was also directed by Mendes, and won the Tony Award for best play in 2019. His first play on Broadway, “Jerusalem” in 2011, is a favorite among theater critics. He also wrote “The River,” which opened on Broadway in 2014.Mendes has worked frequently on Broadway, and won Tony Awards for directing “The Ferryman” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” He is also a film director, and won an Oscar for directing “American Beauty.”The lead producers of the Broadway run of “The Hills of California” include Sonia Friedman, a prolific and enormously successful British producer who also led the producing teams for Butterworth’s three previous plays on Broadway. The play’s other lead producers will be No Guarantees, which is led by Christine Schwarzman; Neal Street Productions, which is Mendes’s production company; Brian Spector; and Sand & Snow Entertainment. More

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    ‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

    Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)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: In ‘Jerusalem,’ a Once-in-a-Lifetime Performance, Again

    Mark Rylance is back in a role that won him a Tony more than a decade ago. But this London production isn’t just coasting on past kudos.LONDON — There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman. That’s as it should be for a play about a larger-than-life character named Johnny Byron, who demands an entirely fearless actor, and has one in Rylance.None of this will surprise those familiar with this play by Jez Butterworth, which premiered with Rylance in the lead role at the Royal Court here in 2009; two years later, it transferred to Broadway and won Rylance the second of three Tony Awards. In a thrilling revival that opened Thursday at the Apollo Theater (running through Aug. 7), everything feels enriched by time.Now 62, Rylance is considerably older than a man described in the text as “about 50.” But such is this actor’s boundless energy and enthusiasm that you can imagine him returning to the role again and again: Johnny defies all conventions, including those of age, and so does a wildly versatile actor who approaches this societal rebel as a kindred spirit.The creative team, headed by Ian Rickson, the most empathic of directors, is the same as it was in 2009. To this run’s credit, it is no museum piece coasting on past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalizing effect. Standing ovations are commonplace here these days, but the one at Wednesday’s final preview possessed a singular fervor that had Rylance jumping up and down with childlike glee at the curtain call.In the show, Johnny, who goes by the nickname Rooster, walks with a halting gait that goes unexplained. Physical impediments, it seems, barely matter to this tattooed, barrel-chested reprobate, who performs a headstand within minutes of his arrival onstage. He then downs a mixture of vodka, milk and a raw egg, whose shell Rylance tosses into the audience. (On Wednesday, someone tossed the shell back, prompting a delicious double take from the star.)Johnny’s outsize gestures are those of a man whose defiantly reckless existence is under serious threat. While the rural community in which he lives is holding its annual spring fete to mark St. George’s Day, Johnny tenaciously stays at the beat-up trailer he has long called home. A magnet for a cross-section of local hangers-on, including a loquacious professor (a beautiful turn from Alan David) and underage female adolescents hungry for spliffs and sex, Johnny’s illegal encampment is soon to be bulldozed. His young son arrives for a visit, only to be whisked away by the child’s disapproving mother (a persuasive Indra Ové).From left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear in “Jerusalem.”Simon AnnandNot only is Johnny faced with a final order from government officials to move on, but he must confront the wrath of Troy Whitworth (a fearsome Barry Sloane), whose 15-year-old stepdaughter, Phaedra, has sought refuge with Johnny. Troy will go to violent lengths to claim her back.It’s Phaedra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who opens the play, singing the English hymn that gives “Jerusalem” its title and whose lyricist, William Blake, is referenced during a game of Trivial Pursuit later on. Worthington-Cox delivers this most stirring of tunes in front of a drop curtain depicting the cross of St. George, England’s flag. But the play itself transcends nationality to speak to any disaffected outsider who won’t be easily silenced and who gathers acolytes like moths to an inextinguishable flame.I’ve now seen “Jerusalem” five times (including on Broadway), and Rickson’s current company — several of them holdovers, with Rylance — are as good as any predecessors, and sometimes better: Worthington-Cox is the most moving Phaedra I have experienced.Mackenzie Crook remains especially heartbreaking as Ginger, Johnny’s friend and ally whose haunted eyes convey a premonition that his buddy’s days are numbered. Jack Riddiford, a company newcomer, brings a boyish appeal to the role of Lee, who dreams of starting afresh in Australia but is thankful for the raucous good times that Johnny has made possible on home soil.You can imagine one or two of these characters as avid supporters of Brexit, though the idea didn’t exist when Butterworth wrote the play: The sweary abattoir-worker Davey (Ed Kear, another cast newcomer) doesn’t “see the point,” he says, of other countries, including neighboring Wales. British newspapers have been busily assessing “Jerusalem” as a defining state-of-the-nation commentary whose legacy and influence are incalculable. Butterworth has stayed out of the discussion, saying only that he revived the play so his young daughter, Bel, could see it.But such considerations are academic next to the visceral immediacy of a play that soars as high as the designer Ultz’s ravishing tree-filled set, which seems to sweep up beyond the theater’s roof. That vast reach is of a piece with a performance you might describe as once-in-a-lifetime, if it weren’t so evident that Rylance’s passion for this part, thank goodness, seems far from over yet.JerusalemThrough Aug. 7 at the Apollo Theater, London; jerusalemtheplay.co.uk. More