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    Steve Carell to Make Broadway Debut as Uncle Vanya Next Spring

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    The production, a new translation by Heidi Schreck, will also star Alison Pill, William Jackson Harper, Alfred Molina and Anika Noni Rose.Steve Carell, the screen actor best known for his breakout role as a blundering boss in the NBC comedy “The Office,” will make his Broadway debut in a revival of the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya.”Carell will lead a cast of television, film and stage veterans in the production, which is to begin performances April 2 and to open April 24 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a Broadway house at the nonprofit Lincoln Center Theater.“Uncle Vanya” is a dark Russian drama, first performed in 1899, about a rural family whose dreary but stable routine is disrupted when the property’s long-absent owner, a retired professor, comes to visit with his new, and much younger, wife. The play has been staged and adapted many times — this will be the 11th production on Broadway — and this iteration will be based on a new translation by Heidi Schreck, whose previous Broadway venture, an autobiographical show called “What the Constitution Means to Me,” is expected to be the most-staged play at U.S. theaters this season (not counting those by Shakespeare and Dickens).Carell, who played a regional manager in “The Office,” will also play a manager in “Uncle Vanya.” His character is the country estate’s long-suffering administrator (and the brother of the professor’s first wife); he oversees the property with a niece, Sonya, who will be played by Alison Pill, who last appeared on Broadway in a revival of “Three Tall Women” and was a Tony Award nominee for “The Lieutenant of Inishmore.” They will be joined by William Jackson Harper, an alumnus of the NBC comedy “The Good Place” who this year wowed Off Broadway audiences with his starring role in “Primary Trust”; he will play Astrov, the local doctor.Alfred Molina (a three-time Tony nominee, for “Red,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Art”) will play the professor, while Anika Noni Rose (a Tony winner for “Caroline, or Change”) will play the professor’s wife. Jayne Houdyshell (a Tony winner for “The Humans”) will play Vanya’s mother, and Mia Katigbak (an Obie winner for “Awake and Sing!”) will portray a household nurse.“Uncle Vanya” is being directed by Lila Neugebauer, who is also directing a Broadway production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play “Appropriate,” which is scheduled to open next month. More

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      ‘The Humans’ Review: Reasons (Not) to be Cheerful

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      Stephen Karam’s film adaptation of his powerful play acquires a supernatural sheen as a family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner.“The Humans” — Stephen Karam’s startling film of his 2016 Tony Award-winning play — has seven characters, only six of whom are human. The seventh is a dilapidated Manhattan apartment where three generations of the Blake family have convened for Thanksgiving dinner.The occasion is also a housewarming for Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend, Richard (Steven Yeun), who have just moved in together and seem blithely unfazed by the monstrous disrepair of their new home. Not so Brigid’s father, Erik (Richard Jenkins), whom we meet staring through a filthy window at the uninviting courtyard below. There’s something despairing in the slump of his shoulders and the set of his mouth; but neither his wife, Deirdre (the magnificent Jayne Houdyshell, reprising her stage role), nor his older daughter, Aimee (Amy Schumer), seems to notice. His mother, Momo (June Squibb), her mind confiscated by dementia, is demanding all their attention.“Don’t wait until after dinner,” Deirdre whispers ominously to Erik, teasing at least one uncomfortable revelation. And as the evening wears on and banal pleasantries rub shoulders with more pointed exchanges, secrets spill with almost comical regularity. The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but “The Humans” is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane. To that end, Karam, aided by Skip Lievsay’s marvelous sound design, gives the apartment an eerie, sinister life. Thuds and groans and rumbles disturb the dinner, as if the family’s psychic baggage — Erik’s petrifying nightmares; Momo’s unearthly screaming fit — has stirred something foul in the home’s sludgy depths.Thrusting into every crumbling corner, Lol Crawley’s camera distorts and blurs. A faceted glass doorknob turns the screen into a honeycomb of refracted light. Pustules of water-damaged paint bloom on the walls and exposed pipes flake and gurgle. An oppressive sense of ruin blankets the film, its repeated adoption of Erik’s gaze suggesting the projection of an ongoing mental collapse.“Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?” he bursts out at one point, seemingly at random, as if the decrepitude around him has stirred much larger anxieties. And had I not seen the play, I may not have fully registered how ingeniously Karam has used the freedom of film to open up and underscore his already powerful material. Inside that haunted house, the family members in “The Humans” are all as trapped as Momo is in her illness, shrieking uselessly into the void.The HumansRated R for serious illness and a sex-related secret. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters and on Showtime platforms. More