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    Review: Tammy Faye Was Over-the-Top. This Musical Makes Her Small.

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    “Tammy Faye,” a bland, tonal mishmash of a show opening on Broadway, seems afraid to lean into what made the televangelist so distinctive.“Tammy Faye,” the new Broadway musical about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, kicks off with a projection of a set of eyes in close-up, mascara running down in a dramatic streak.It’s a visually arresting reference to the real-life Bakker, whose electrifyingly made-up eyes, encased in clumped lashes, gave her a look of perpetually startled innocence. Not for nothing, there have been two films titled “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” — a documentary narrated by RuPaul in 2000 and a 2021 feature for which Jessica Chastain won an Academy Award for best actress. Together, they represent what Tammy Faye, who died in 2007, is now famous for: camp iconification and performance of the self.But after that teasing introduction, Tammy Faye’s signature Kabuki facade barely figures in the disjointed, strangely bland musical that opened on Thursday at the newly renovated Palace Theater. It is laudable that the show’s composer, Elton John; lyricist, Jake Shears (of Scissor Sisters); book writer, James Graham; and director, Rupert Goold, tried to go behind the mask of this complicated, outsize woman, whose public persona was shaped by and for television. The problem is that they ended up making her smaller than life.Brayben won an Olivier Award for her performance in the original production in London.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show, which originated two years ago at the Almeida Theater in London, is a straightforward look at the rise and fall of Tammy Faye (Katie Brayben, who won an Olivier Award for her performance in the original production). The climb begins when she encounters Jim Bakker (Christian Borle, leaning hard on his comic skills) in the 1960s. The couple share a sunny vision of proselytizing Christianity, delivering their message through playful puppets rather than fiery sermons. We follow them as they take to the airwaves and pioneer the use of television to spread the gospel and raise a lot of cash. By the 1970s, they have their own satellite network, PTL, on which they host a popular program.And then the wheels fall off the wagon, as the Bakkers are swayed by money, sex and, in Tammy Faye’s case, pills.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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      Atri Banerjee, a Nice Young Man, Stages an Angry Old Play

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      Atri Banerjee has channeled his own experiences into a new production of John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 work “Look Back in Anger.”The night before the theater director Atri Banerjee was due to leave London for Manchester to start rehearsals for a new show, burglars broke into his house. First he was assailed with racist abuse, then physically assaulted.It was May 2019, and the Manchester job, directing an adaptation of “Hobson’s Choice,” at the prestigious Royal Exchange Theater, was a big break for Banerjee, who was stepping up after another director withdrew.“It was a landmark moment for me,” said Banerjee, 30, whose parents are Indian and who grew up in Italy and the Britain. “I had never felt victimized or oppressed because of my brownness,” he said. “Suddenly you realize it’s very easy to be put into a box. It sharpened my political awareness about why theater, so good at celebrating the multiplicity of identity, is important.”Banerjee was speaking in an interview at the Almeida Theater, in London, where he was rehearsing John Osborne’s groundbreaking 1956 play, “Look Back in Anger,” which opens at the playhouse on Friday. Part of a repertory season called “Angry and Young,” it will run in tandem with Arnold Wesker’s 1958 “Roots,” directed by Diyan Zora.“Look Back in Anger,” teeming with fury and frustration at the hidebound British class system, sparked the Angry Young Men movement in literature and theater in the 1950s. (The writers Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Alan Sillitoe were also associated with it.) “A watershed in the history of modern drama,” Martin Esslin wrote in The New York Times on the tenth anniversary of the play’s West End premiere, which was followed the next year by a Broadway run.From left: Morfydd Clark, Ellora Torchia and Billy Howle rehearsing a scene from “Look Back in Anger.”Marc BrennerWe 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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      ‘Patriots’ Review: What Happened to the Man Who Made Putin?

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      Michael Stuhlbarg and Will Keen shine as a kingmaker and his creature. But in Peter Morgan’s cheesy-fun play, it’s not always clear which is which.“In the West you have no idea.”So begins Peter Morgan’s play “Patriots,” which opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The line is spoken by the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, referring to the foods, sights and music that supposedly feed the great Russian soul. These are represented, in Rupert Goold’s entertaining if overcaffeinated production, by boozy singing and balalaikas, sometimes even fur hats.But “Patriots” also sets out to demonstrate how little the West knows about the real world of realpolitik: the grudges, enmities and insulted dignities that in the post-Soviet 1990s, with casino capitalism rampant in Russia, created Vladimir Putin.If you could ask Berezovsky, though, he’d tell you it was he who created Putin, a tenth-rate provincial nobody he eased into power, first as prime minister and later as president. Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) calls himself Putin’s “krysha” — literally his roof, figuratively his protector or, as he explains, the “bully on your side.”Spoken in the weirdly accented English of this production, which originated in London and has been remounted for Broadway with key cast changes and Netflix as a producer, “krysha” sounds confusingly like “creature.” It turns out to be a useful confusion. “Patriots” is a wild story of makers switching places with the made, of Pinocchios devouring Geppettos.Putin (Will Keen) was and is both: a liar and a manipulator. Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) was at least the latter — but, well, in the West we have no idea. We meet him in “Patriots” as a 9-year-old math prodigy, an obnoxious “golden child” fixated on winning a Nobel Prize. (That there is no Nobel in mathematics is one of Morgan’s many shortcuts.) The boy’s interests, at least as selected for ironic reference later, are in the predictability of decision making, under rational and even irrational circumstances.Keen, left, as Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky bring physical, gestural and emotional life to characters who might seem to have no insides worth exploring, our critic writes.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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      Peter Morgan Turns His Pen From ‘The Crown’ to the Kremlin

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      His new play “Patriots,” now on Broadway, follows Putin’s rise to power and the Russian oligarchs who mistakenly thought he’d be their puppet.Going from Princess Diana, a lovely icon who generated waves of sympathy, to Vladimir Putin, an icy villain who generates waves of disdain, might be difficult for some writers.Not Peter Morgan.After pulling back the curtain on the British royal family for six seasons of “The Crown,” Morgan was keen to move on. He had an idea for a play about the oligarchs who, in the 1990s, helped propel an obscure Putin to power and then had to watch as their Frankenstein changed the course of Russian history in a disastrous way.The resulting drama, “Patriots,” which opens on Broadway on April 22, offered Morgan a different way to approach recent history, and a new challenge: switching from the royals, who are household names but not ultimately very powerful, to oligarchs, who are super powerful but not generally household names.Morgan enjoys writing about the vilified, giving them a fighting chance. In “Patriots,” he creates a jigsaw of four Russian men, their fates intertwining in the post-Soviet era, who represent a Byzantine spectrum of moral values.“It’s just a delicious combination of characters,” Morgan, 60, told me, in an interview at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Times Square. “There’s a sort of violence, whereas in ‘The Crown,’ there’s this politeness and there’s repression, and it’s very female. There’s something very male, very violent about this play. It felt like a natural thing to do, having spent so much time in the one world to go into another world just to relax a little.”Will Keen, left, as Vladimir Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots,” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.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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      Rebecca Frecknall Is Bringing ‘Cabaret’ Back to Broadway

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      When Rebecca Frecknall was a child, one of her favorite things to watch was a televised 1993 London revival of “Cabaret,” which her father had recorded on VHS tape. As the British theater director grew up, she hoped that one day she would stage a version of the musical, in which a writer falls in love with an exuberant and wayward cabaret performer in Weimar-era Germany.In early March, in a Midtown rehearsal room, Frecknall, 38, was preparing to do just that. Her “Cabaret,” which opens in previews at the August Wilson Theater on April 1, is a transfer from London’s West End, where it opened in 2021 to critical acclaim. The show won seven Olivier Awards, the British equivalent to the Tonys.“I always wanted to direct ‘Cabaret’,” Frecknall said later in an interview. “I just never thought I’d get the rights to it.” Her opportunity came when Eddie Redmayne — a producer on the show who played the Emcee in London, and will reprise the part on Broadway — asked her in 2019 to be part of a bid for a revival.At first it seemed like “a pipe dream,” Redmayne said, but after years of wrangling, they pulled it off. For the London show, the Playhouse Theater was reconfigured to reflect the musical’s debauched setting, transforming it into the Kit Kat Club, with cabaret tables and scantily clad dancers and musicians roaming the foyer and auditorium. The August Wilson Theater is getting a similar treatment, Frecknall said. To honor the playhouse’s namesake, the production designer Tom Scutt commissioned Black artists to paint murals in the reconfigured lobby, with theatergoers now entering via an alleyway off 52nd Street.Eddie Redmayne, who stars as the Emcee in “Cabaret,” during rehearsals for the show in New York this month.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAto Blankson-Wood, left, and Henry Gottfried.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesShortly before the show opened in London, Frecknall’s father died. That recorded revival, directed by Sam Mendes, was one of his favorites, and Frecknall loved it so much that, as she grew up and studied theater, she chose never to see the show onstage.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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      A Broadway-Bound ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Leads Olivier Award Nominations

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      The musical, starring Nicole Scherzinger, secured 11 nominations at Britain’s equivalent of the Tony Awards.A revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as a former screen idol descending into madness, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Savoy Theater in London and will transfer to Broadway this year, is in the running for 11 awards — two more than any other play or musical — including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Jamie Lloyd.When the production opened last fall, it impressed London’s often demanding theater critics. Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the production was, like its lead character, “a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.”“I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season,” Wolf added.Lloyd’s maverick production features hand-held cameras that are used to spotlight characters’ emotions at pivotal moments. Although critics appreciated the technique, Lloyd faces stiff competition in the best director category. The other nominees include Sam Mendes for “The Motive and the Cue,” which debuted last spring at the National Theater. The play, by Jack Thorne, dramatizes a fraught backstage relationship between Richard Burton and John Gielgud as they rehearse a Broadway production.Justin Martin, who directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” also received an Olivier nomination.Manuel HarlanRupert Goold is also nominated for best director, for “Dear England,” a play about the English national soccer team that also ran at the National Theater and transferred to the West End. That show secured nine nominations.Despite receiving mixed reviews, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a theatrical prequel to the Netflix show that is running at the Phoenix Theater, secured five nominations, including best new entertainment or comedy play. Houman Barekat, reviewing the production in The New York Times, said it was “exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.”This year’s nominations include a hint of TV glamour in many categories. Among the nominees for best actress in a play are Sarah Jessica Parker for “Plaza Suite,” which runs through April 13 at the Savoy Theater, and Sarah Snook (of “Succession”) for a one-woman “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at the Theater Royal Haymarket, through May 11.They will compete for that title against Laura Donnelly for “The Hills of California” at the Harold Pinter Theater, Sheridan Smith for “Shirley Valentine” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and Sophie Okonedo for “Medea” at @sohoplace.The best actor nominees include Andrew Scott for a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and James Norton for his performance in “A Little Life” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The other nominees are Joseph Fiennes for “Dear England,” Mark Gatiss for “The Motive and the Cue,” and David Tennant for “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse.The winners of this year’s awards are scheduled to be announced April 14 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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      ‘The Hunt’ Review: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

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      This modern-day fable, directed by Rupert Goold and starring Tobias Menzies, is styled with horror.“Each town has its witch/Each parish its troll,” a character sings ominously while sharpening hedge shears. “We will with pleasure/Take the life from their veins.”Let it be known that the British import “The Hunt” — about a man ostracized, and worse, for a crime he didn’t commit — does not really err toward subtlety.The simple premise can be summed up in a sentence: Lucas (Tobias Menzies, from “The Crown” and “Outlander”), a small-town kindergarten teacher, is falsely accused of molesting several of his students, and his life falls apart. The Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg told the story in an understated manner in his movie “The Hunt” (2013), which is simultaneously detached and veined with warm, if subtly expressed, empathy.Now a tragedy that feels ripped from the headlines is deployed with fable-like horror stylings in a stage adaptation by David Farr directed by Rupert Goold, which just opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Ritualistic dancing and chanting, sacrifices, jump scares, blinding white lights, quasi-supernatural apparitions: At times it feels as if we are watching a spinoff from the cult 1973 film “The Wicker Man,” in which an island community following pagan practices drenched in sex and violence turns against an outsider.When Vinterberg made “The Hunt” (which he wrote with Tobias Lindholm), he pulled back from the Dogme 95 precepts he followed at the beginning of his career, and which emphasize an almost Puritanical minimalism. “I wanted this film to be as naked and truthful as possible, because this was a film about truth and lies, but I had to find a new way of doing it,” he said a decade ago.From left: Jonathan Savage, Danny Kirrane, Menzies, MyAnna Buring, DeBoer and Alex Hassell in the play, in a structure that can protect secrets and reveal them, offer shelter and harbor violence.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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      ‘Patriots,’ About Putin’s Falling Out With an Oligarch, Is Broadway Bound

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      The play, by Peter Morgan of “The Crown,” will star Michael Stuhlbarg and is scheduled to open in April.“Patriots,” a well-received British play about a Russian oligarch’s ill-fated role in the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, will transfer to Broadway in April, adding a dose of international intrigue to a packed spring season.The drama, which the critic Matt Wolf called “gripping” and “coolly unnerving” in a 2022 review of a London production for The New York Times, was written by Peter Morgan, the creator and primary writer of “The Crown,” the Emmy-winning six-season Netflix show. Morgan has written two other plays that made it to Broadway, “The Audience,” about Queen Elizabeth II, and “Frost/Nixon,” about the journalist David Frost’s famous interviews of former President Richard M. Nixon.The Broadway production of “Patriots” will star Michael Stuhlbarg, who last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” Stuhlbarg has numerous stage credits, but most recently has worked in film (“A Serious Man”) and television (“Boardwalk Empire”). Stuhlbarg will play Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who helped Putin rise to power but then fell out with him and later died in exile. The role was played in London by Tom Hollander.Stuhlbarg will star alongside Will Keen, who will play Putin, now the president of Russia; Keen also played that role in London, and for that performance won last year’s Olivier Award for best supporting actor in a play. Luke Thallon will also reprise the role he played in London, as another Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich.The production is scheduled to begin previews April 1 and to open April 22 at the Barrymore Theater.The play is directed by Rupert Goold, a British director who has twice been nominated for Tony Awards, for “Ink” and “King Charles III,” and who will also be directing “The Hunt” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn early this year. “Patriots” was staged in 2022 at the nonprofit Almeida Theater in London, where Goold is the artistic director, and last year it had a profitable commercial run in London’s West End.The lead producer of the Broadway production will be Sonia Friedman, who is a major force in both the West End and on Broadway.The play will open in the final days of a Broadway season that is proving to be quite challenging for producers and investors because production costs are higher and ticket sales are lower than they were before the coronavirus pandemic. The economics have been especially hard for musicals. On Sunday evening, the producers of “How to Dance in Ohio,” a musical about a group of young autistic adults, announced that show would close on Feb. 11, after 99 performances. And last week, the producers of “Harmony,” a musical about a German singing group that ran afoul of the Nazis, announced that show would close on Feb. 4. More

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      ‘Dear England’ Review: When Soccer Success Becomes a Moral Victory

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      A new James Graham play about the soccer coach Gareth Southgate is a lively romp, but its core message about embracing male vulnerability feels soppy.What makes a good leader? When the unassuming and softly spoken Gareth Southgate was appointed head coach of the England men’s soccer team in 2016, many fans and commentators felt he lacked the kahunas for the role, that he was simply too nice. But in the past seven years he has overseen a remarkable transformation in the England team’s fortunes, making it stronger and more exciting to watch than at any time in recent history.The ups and downs of Southgate’s tenure are portrayed with a blend of playfulness and moral seriousness in “Dear England,” directed by Rupert Goold, which runs at the National Theater, in London, through Aug. 11. It’s a lively, feel-good romp with plenty of irreverent humor, though the narrative borders on hagiography, and its core message about embracing male vulnerability is labored to the point of soppiness.The play chronicles the team’s involvement in three recent major tournaments, starting with its surprise run to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia; then comes an agonizing defeat by Italy in the Euro 2020 final, followed by an impressive showing, culminating in an unlucky quarterfinal exit, at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.The on-field action is evoked through dynamic set pieces choreographed by Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, in which the players enact key moments in elaborate simulations, complete with slow-motion sequences and freeze-framed goal celebrations. These are kitsch, but mercifully brief, as the bulk of the activity takes place off the pitch: in locker rooms, team meetings and news conferences whose settings are rendered with smart simplicity by the designer Es Devlin.Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s soccer team.Marc BrennerJoseph Fiennes is outstanding as Southgate, who is portrayed as self-effacing but assertive, an approachable father figure to his young charges. Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric. Adam Hugill is similarly amusing as the defender Harry Maguire, who is portrayed as a lovable simpleton — not the sharpest tool in the box, but solid and dependable. Kel Matsena delivers a spirited performance as Raheem Sterling, who, along with Bukayo Saka (Ebenezer Gyau), speaks out defiantly against racism after England’s Black players are the targets of abuse.The principal female character in this necessarily male-dominated lineup is the sports psychologist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee), hired by Southgate to help the players open up about their feelings and overcome self-doubt. When one unreconstructed member of the coaching staff questions the need for her services, she reminds him that psychology has been at the root of England’s past failures: “This is men, dealing, or not dealing, with fear,” she says.The play’s author, James Graham, is known for political theater, with hits including “Ink” and “Best of Enemies,” and “Dear England” has distinctly activist overtones. Southgate’s mild-mannered disposition, emotional intelligence and leftish politics — he has been supportive of Black Lives Matter and outspoken on mental health issues — are kryptonite to a certain type of reactionary sports jock. So it’s tempting to view his story as a culture-war allegory, pitting touchy-feely liberalism against old-school machismo.From left: Will Close as Harry Kane, Ebenezer Gyau as Bukayo Saka and Kel Matsena as Raheem Sterling.Marc BrennerUnfortunately the play leans into this a little too heavily, with pantomimic cameos from several of Britain’s recent Conservative prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — pandering to the assumed prejudices of cosmopolitan London theatregoers in a way that comes off as ingratiating and smug. This is ramped up in the second half, which is considerably less funny, and feels rushed: The 2020 and 2022 tournaments are rattled through at speed, in contrast to the more leisurely pacing before the intermission.Southgate’s playing career is best remembered for a decisive miss in a penalty shootout against Germany in the semifinal of the 1996 European Championship, played in London, which resulted in England’s elimination from that tournament. A personal redemption narrative forms a compelling subplot the main story, and it’s a cruel irony that Southgate’s England side also lost the final of Euro 2020 in a penalty shootout on home soil. That Southgate has yet to bag a trophy — the England men’s team still hasn’t won a major tournament since 1966 — remains a powerful trump card for his doubters. And so the play’s celebratory tenor feels a little misplaced.Yet “Dear England” is not so much about sports as it is about culture. The technical and tactical foundations of the England team’s revival are conspicuously underplayed in this telling: The team’s on-field improvement is straightforwardly tethered to a shift in moral values, and we are given to understand that correlation equals causation. You can be fully on board with everything Southgate stands for and still find this cloyingly simplistic.Dear EnglandThrough Aug. 11 at the National Theater, in London; nationaltheatre.org.uk More