Ephron, Delia

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares99 Views

    Review: Delia Ephron’s ‘Left on Tenth’ Treads Lightly

    by

    Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher star in this quasi romantic comedy adapted from Ephron’s memoir, which went deeper into her illness and grief.The website for “Left on Tenth,” Delia Ephron’s new Broadway play, is approximately the last place I would have expected to encounter a content advisory, but there one is. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a sensible move — a tip-off, for anyone expecting pure romantic comedy, that the show also deals with life-threatening illness.What’s strange is that, having warned us, the play doesn’t nearly go for broke. Unlike Ephron’s 2022 memoir, “Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life,” which deals affectingly with her widowhood and leukemia as well as her tripping headlong into new love, the stage adaptation gives the impression of being desperate not to bum anyone out.So an anodyne rom-com is for the most part what we get from this play, which opened on Wednesday night at the James Earl Jones Theater. Julianna Margulies stars as Delia, an anxious, bookish denizen of Greenwich Village, still grieving her husband’s death. Peter Gallagher plays the widowed Peter, the calm Californian psychoanalyst for whom Delia falls by email, so suddenly that it feels fated.Shades of “You’ve Got Mail,” the 1998 classic rom-com that Ephron wrote with her older sister, Nora, but what can you do? That’s how their romance sparked in real life.It all started with an essay that Ephron wrote for The New York Times in 2016, the year after her husband Jerry’s death, about the particular circle of phone-tree hell she entered when she asked Verizon to disconnect his landline. In response, she heard from a lot of readers, one of whom was Peter, noting in an email that Nora once set them up when they were college students.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

    More stories

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      Julianna Margulies on ‘Left on Tenth’: ‘This Is the Play I’ve Been Waiting For’

      by

      It was a meet-cute right out of a New York City rom-com.The actress Julianna Margulies was walking her dog near Fifth Avenue and 10th Street when a woman with her own dog stopped to ask if she was who she thought she was.“I love your book,” she said of Margulies’s 2021 memoir, “Sunshine Girl,” which follows her rather strange childhood and beyond, up through her time on “ER” and “The Good Wife.”The woman pulled down her face mask: “I’m Delia Ephron.” She, too, had written a memoir, “Left on Tenth,” about life, death and taking a chance on love for a second time, and it was coming out soon. Could she drop off an advance copy?“I plotzed because I’ve just always loved her writing,” Margulies said.While taking refuge from the heat last month, Margulies recounted this scene with Ephron, which happened a few years ago, over an iced cappuccino in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village.Then in January, Margulies went on, she received an email out of the blue from Ephron, saying she had turned “Left on Tenth” into a play — and she wanted Margulies for the lead.“So she emailed it,” Margulies said, “and I sat down, read it cover-to-cover within an hour, just raced through it, sobbed, laughed, emailed her right back, and I said, ‘This is the play I’ve been waiting for.’”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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher to Star in Broadway Play

      by

      The duo will lead the cast of “Left on Tenth,” a stage adaptation of Delia Ephron’s best-selling memoir.The actors Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher are set to star in a stage adaptation of “Left on Tenth,” Delia Ephron’s memoir about a late-in-life romance.The producer Daryl Roth said Friday that she intended to bring the play, adapted by Ephron and directed by Susan Stroman, to Broadway next fall. She did not specify a theater or an opening date.“Left on Tenth,” published in 2022, is about how Ephron simultaneously battled cancer and found love in the years after the death of her husband and sister (the essayist and filmmaker Nora Ephron).Ephron is a novelist and screenwriter, best known for “You’ve Got Mail,” which she wrote with her sister. She and her sister also collaborated on an earlier play, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.”The “Left on Tenth” team has a long list of credentials. Roth has produced 13 Tony-winning shows and seven Pulitzer-winning plays; Stroman has won five Tony Awards as a director and choreographer.Margulies, currently starring in “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, has appeared on Broadway once before, in the 2006 play “Festen.” Gallagher is a Broadway veteran who last starred in a 2015 revival of “On the Twentieth Century”; he has also worked extensively in film and television.Also Friday, the producers of the new musical “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, said their show, which they announced last fall, would begin previews Oct. 19 and open Nov. 14 at the Palace Theater. The Broadway production is to star Katie Brayben as the title character, and Andrew Rannells as her husband, Jim Bakker; the two performers previously played those roles in a production of the musical at the Almeida Theater in London in 2022. “Tammy Faye” features music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, and a book by James Graham; the show is directed by Rupert Goold. More