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    George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Sets Broadway Box Office Record

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    “Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $3.3 million last week, breaking a record that was set earlier this month by Denzel Washington’s “Othello.”Broadway box office records are falling like dominoes this season as a handful of starry plays entice fans to pay sky-high ticket prices to see their favorite movie stars up close and emoting.“Good Night, and Good Luck,” a new play starring George Clooney, grossed $3.3 million last week, the most money a nonmusical play has ever made during a single week on Broadway, according to data released Tuesday by the Broadway League. And it did so with just a seven-performance week: It is still in previews, and not yet doing Broadway’s typical eight.It shattered the previous record, which was set just two weeks earlier by a new production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $2.8 million in the week that ended March 9. (Before that, the record had been held by “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which grossed $2.7 million during a holiday week in late 2023.)“Othello” still has higher ticket prices — its top seats were being sold on its website for $921, compared to $799 for “Good Night, and Good Luck” — but “Good Night, and Good Luck” is playing in a larger theater, so it is taking in more money overall.The average ticket price for “Othello” was $303.15 last week — down from previous weeks because of free seats for journalists attending press performances and guests attending opening night. The average price for “Good Night, and Good Luck” was $302.07. But “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is adapted from the 2005 movie about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, is playing in the 1,545-seat Winter Garden Theater, while “Othello” is in the 1,043-seat Ethel Barrymore.Broadway’s box office has traditionally been dominated by musicals, which tend to be more popular, to play longer, and to run in larger theaters than plays. The record for the most money made by a Broadway musical was set late last year, when “Wicked” grossed $5 million during a Christmas week when there were nine performances.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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      In ‘Othello,’ Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal Are Prey and Predator

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      Shakespeare’s leanest tragedy gets a starry, headlong production that embraces the action but misses the mystery.Just moments earlier, he was an infatuated new husband, and she his “gentle love.” Now, in Act III, Scene 3 of “Othello,” he vows to kill her.What has happened? Why does Othello, the great Black general, the savior of Venice in a war with the Ottomans, resolve to murder Desdemona, the pearl of the white aristocracy he has won at great risk?The scene in which this strange alteration occurs is one of the most gripping, baffling episodes in Shakespeare, and it remains so in the starry Broadway revival of “Othello” that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.We can be grateful for that — and yet, in Denzel Washington’s commanding performance, what’s especially gripping is perhaps too baffling. As in his many movies, he leads with action, giving us a general whose psychology is as obscure to us as it is to him. Speaking very fast, with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, and stiffened by his ramrod military bearing, he betrays little evidence of the sorrows and injuries that moved Desdemona when he wooed her. Speed and decisiveness (“to be once in doubt is once to be resolved”) seem to matter more than emotion.Usually the obscure one is Othello’s ensign, Iago. Though Shakespeare provides many possible reasons he might have wanted to poison his commander with lies about Desdemona, awakening the famous green-eyed monster of jealousy, we are typically still in the dark at the end, when the cur is sent to his punishment. “I am not what I am” is his paradoxical, irreducible credo. Then what is he?Yet in a fascinating reversal, this “Othello” offers an Iago far more legible than his master. Jake Gyllenhaal’s eely take, with a physical wiggle to match his moral one, is a little bit mad scientist, a little bit Travis Bickle. His blue eyes pierce the atmospheric murk as he tracks all possible routes to his goal, like a rat in a maze, in the process allowing us to see how a twisted man thinks. He is a calculator of grievance; havoc is the carefully tabulated result. He adds up.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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      With $921 Seats, Denzel Washington’s ‘Othello’ Breaks a Box Office Record

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      Demand to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal play Shakespeare has set a record in a year when big stars have been driving up the prices of Broadway plays.The hottest play on Broadway was written more than 400 years ago. Demand to see Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal face off in Shakespeare’s “Othello” is so strong that many center orchestra seats are selling for $921, helping the show break box office records.During its first week of previews, its average ticket price was $361.90, more than double that at the next highest-average-price show (“The Outsiders,” at $155.02). And last week “Othello” grossed $2.8 million, more than any nonmusical has ever made in a single week on Broadway.The huge numbers, for a show that has not yet been reviewed and that was selling briskly long before anyone had seen it, come at a time when the prices for the most sought-after pop concerts and sporting events are also quite high.And theater prices — at least for the most sought-after shows — are no exception.At its peak, “Hamilton” charged $998 for the very best seats during holiday weeks, and at one point a revival of “Hello, Dolly!” charged $998 for front row seats, which allowed fans of Bette Midler the possibility of being brushed by her glove as she strolled along a passerelle.Washington, seen leaving after a performance, is both highly acclaimed and enormously popular.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesBut “Othello” is distinguished by the large number of seats being sold at the highest prices, which is driving up its average ticket price. At many upcoming performances, the show is asking $921 for the first 14 rows in the center orchestra, and for much of the first two rows in the front mezzanine.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 Interview’: Denzel Washington Has Finally Found His Purpose

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      So many of Denzel Washington’s greatest performances — from the majestic title role in “Malcolm X” to the unrepentantly corrupt cop Alonzo Harris in “Training Day” — have been defined by a riveting sense of authority, an absolute absence of pandering or the need to be liked. There’s an inner reserve deep down inside his characters that is unassailable, a little enigmatic, and that belongs to them alone.The commanding qualities that have helped Washington become a cinematic legend are also, as I learned firsthand, the same ones that make him an unusual — and unusually complicated — conversationalist. The first of our two discussions was done remotely. He was at a photo studio in Los Angeles as the fires were still burning there, and I was at home in New Jersey. Even putting our physical distance aside, the discussion felt, well, distant. Or let me put it this way: We never quite figured out how to connect.The second time we talked, it was different. I met Washington in person, at a spare, drafty room in a Midtown Manhattan building where he was rehearsing for an upcoming Broadway appearance. He’s playing the lead in a new production of “Othello” that goes into previews on Feb. 24; it co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago and is directed by the Tony Award winner Kenny Leon. I can’t with any certainty really say why, but things just felt easier on the second go-round. What I do know, though, is that the entire interview experience was, for me, as indelible as one of his performances.Listen to the Conversation With Denzel WashingtonThe legendary actor discusses the prophecy that changed his life, his Oscar snub and his upcoming role starring alongside a “complicated” Jake Gyllenhaal in “Othello” on Broadway.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppI saw that at the end of last year you were baptized and earned your minister’s license. I got baptized, and I have to now take courses to obtain a license. I’m not an ordained minister.Can you tell me about the decision to go through that process at this point in your life? I went for a ride one day. I decided to get in my car and drive up to Harlem. I stopped in front of the church that my mother grew up in. The door was cracked, so I went in. They were celebrating young students, members of the church, that were going to college. And I got involved in that, and one thing led to another, and weeks later, months later I got baptized. More

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      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.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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      ‘Presumed Innocent’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal Steps In for Harrison Ford

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      Jake Gyllenhaal steps in for Harrison Ford in a new, highly strung adaptation of Scott Turow’s legal thriller for Apple TV+.Scott Turow’s first novel, the 1987 best seller “Presumed Innocent,” is a clever murder mystery and courtroom drama with an 11th-hour twist. Before that denouement, it throws out red herrings to distract us, paralleling the strategy of its protagonist, Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor accused of killing the female colleague with whom he was having an affair. The 1990 film adaptation starring Harrison Ford necessarily condensed Turow’s plot but stayed true to its outlines and to the identity of the killer, a closely guarded secret through most of the story.It’s possible that the new “Presumed Innocent,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+ and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Sabich, ends up at the same place, with the same killer. But after watching seven of its eight episodes, I didn’t really care. The claustrophobic atmosphere, the emphasis on psychology and trite family drama over well-made mystery and, especially, the crescendoing melodrama that makes a mockery of Turow’s courtroom credibility (even though he is credited as a co-executive producer) had done me in.The book is narrated in the first person by Sabich, and its most striking stylistic feature is his continual, detailed analyses of his professional and personal lives. Those passages are not there just for their own sake — Turow uses them to ground us in the milieus and the motivations of the courtroom and the prosecutors’ office. He cares about the inner life of Sabich, but he cares just as much about providing the framework for a page-turning mystery.Onscreen, the emphases have been different. Alan J. Pakula’s film was a chilly affair, elegantly assembled (with cinematography by the great Gordon Willis) but lacking the juice of a real thriller. It was more interested in the ethical and philosophical ramifications of Sabich’s situation, favoring judgment over action. (It was fun to watch once the case got into the courtroom, though, thanks to the performances of Raul Julia and Paul Winfield as defense lawyer and judge.)David E. Kelley, the veteran television writer who created the “Presumed Innocent” series, has the opposite temperament from Pakula — he’s all about the juice. He’s a master of taking material with a lurid or sensational edge and slickly packaging it for a mainstream TV audience. When he’s in his relaxed mode, on “The Lincoln Lawyer” for Netflix or the risibly pulpy “Big Sky” for ABC, the results can be entertaining, summoning distant memories of his days as chief writer on “L.A. Law.”When he takes things more seriously, though, he gets in trouble (though it doesn’t necessarily affect his success, as “Big Little Lies” demonstrated). Like Pakula, he makes “Presumed Innocent” more about Sabich than about the presumably less interesting question of whether Sabich is guilty of murder. But all he has to offer are tortured psychology and transgression, presented slickly and repetitively, with head-scratching surprises in place of new ideas. Meant to be provocative, it’s just wearying.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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      ‘Saturday Night Live’ Signs Off for the Season With Jake Gyllenhaal as Host

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      Jake Gyllenhaal hosted the final episode of the show’s 49th season. Sabrina Carpenter was the musical guest.In its final episode of the season, just before its cast members pack up their fright wigs and false teeth to head out on their summer vacations, “Saturday Night Live” gave its viewers what they presumably wanted: an opening sketch featuring James Austin Johnson as former President Donald J. Trump.This weekend’s broadcast, which was hosted by Jake Gyllenhaal and featured the musical guest Sabrina Carpenter, began with Johnson recreating one of the many public statements that Trump has made during his criminal hush-money trial.“I don’t like being in court because they say very mean things about me while I am trying to sleep,” Johnson said. “But I love being out here, in the hallway outside court, daring judge to imprison me. He gave me a gag order. I said, ‘That sounds like a challenge on RuPaul.’”Describing the trial as “very eye-closening,” Johnson said it would likely end with him “being sent to a horrible place I do not want to go to — the White House.”He added, “For me, much better to not win and say it was rigged and then get very rich raising money to stop the steal, and you never have to do president again. I like that a lot.”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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      Directing ‘Monkey Man,’ Dev Patel Makes Himself an Action Hero

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      With his feature filmmaking debut, “Monkey Man,” Dev Patel joins a list of performers known for dramas taking on unlikely parts.Ten years ago, when Dev Patel started thinking about making the film that would eventually become his feature directing debut, “Monkey Man,” he was not getting offered roles that, in his words, had “any sort of ass kickery involved or coolness.”“I think if I was to feature in an action film back then, the roles I was getting were more akin to the comedic relief, sidekick, the guy that can hack the mainframe,” he said in a phone interview. (Indeed in 2014, he was playing a tech-savvy character on the TV series “The Newsroom” and was about to reprise his role as the sweet but goofy romantic hero in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”)In “Monkey Man,” however, Patel is not relegated to the sidelines. He plays Kid, a young man who slashes, punches and shoots his way through elite circles in a fictional Indian city. He seeks revenge on behalf of his mother, who was brutalized by a police chief now working for a corrupt politician, who is in turn supported by an evil guru. Inspired by the tales of the half-monkey Hindu god Hanuman, Kid takes on those in power who are abusing members of lower castes. The film, which was released Friday, is both Patel’s homage to the action genre, an obsession that started when he watched Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” (1973) as a child, and an attempt to remake it in his own image, wanting to tell a politically charged story with a hero who looks like him.Patel in “Monkey Man.” His character arc goes from underground wrestling to besuited action.Universal Pictures“Monkey Man” also marks Patel, 33, best known for his turn in the Oscar best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), as the latest actor to transform himself into an action star. Gone are the days when the genre belonged to the Sylvester Stallones, Jason Stathams and Jackie Chans of the world. Especially, in a post-“John Wick” era, actors who made their names in serious dramatic work (and sometimes comedy) have decided to make the leap to action.The “Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk, after playing a retired assassin in “Nobody” (2021), is now set to reunite with that film’s screenwriter, Derek Kolstad, for an action flick called “Normal.” In 2022, David Harbour, from “Stranger Things,” turned into a terrorist-pummeling Santa for “Violent Night.” And this year, Jake Gyllenhaal is throwing punches in “Road House,” while Ryan Gosling is getting his stunt man on in “The Fall Guy.” (Both of those men have flirted with action before, it is worth noting.)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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      ‘Road House’ Review: This Remake Amps Up the Action

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      Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a pro fighter turned bouncer at a juke joint in the Florida Keys, taking on Patrick Swayze’s role in the original.The 1989 blockbuster “Road House,” was something of a pastiche. It delivered disreputable B-picture thrills with big-picture production value. The lead actor Patrick Swayze, playing a philosophizing roughneck, smirked with unshakable confidence while breaking arms and jaws, as cars and buildings blew up real good around him. The action was served up with glossy studio polish.Hence, a remake of the film, some might argue, is destined to be a pastiche of a pastiche. But as we move further into the 21st century, we find the notion of authenticity ever more devalued. And who needs it when you’ve got Doug Liman directing the whole thing? He is, after all, the J. Robert Oppenheimer of lunatic action set pieces (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Edge of Tomorrow” to name a few).Taking on Swayze’s role, Jake Gyllenhaal plays the pro fighter turned bouncer Elwood Dalton, here protecting a juke joint that sits on a valuable piece of real estate in the Florida Keys. At his most winning despite his character’s lethal nature, Gyllenhaal keeps up the one-liners and drollery. In lieu of Swayze’s Zenlike musings, he gives us dry inquiries about whether his challengers have medical insurance before pummeling and delivering them to a hospital.This movie delivers a lot of the same kicks as the first, but with contemporary tuneups like a villain played by Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship star who’s first seen stark naked, except for shoes and socks (so he can carry his phone). Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.All this and a pretty funny “The Third Man” reference too.Road HouseRated R for violence and language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Prime Video. More