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    The 2025 Tony Nominees Discuss Their Biggest Tests and Triumphs

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    Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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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      How a Kentucky Man Trapped in a Cave Became a Broadway Musical

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      Floyd Collins was pinned under a rock while exploring a cave in 1925. That history, recounted in song, is now on Broadway.When Roger Brucker heard that the story of a trapped Kentucky cave explorer who slowly starved to death was being turned into a musical, he was doubtful. “Aren’t musicals supposed to be fun?” he thought.Brucker, 95, knows more than most about the doomed explorer Floyd Collins. He co-wrote the book “Trapped!,” which is considered the definitive history of the events that unfolded during the so-called Kentucky Cave Wars, a period of rapid subterranean exploration in the 1920s when the state commercialized its extensive cave systems for tourism opportunities.Collins was an accomplished spelunker in 1925 when he entered Sand Cave alone, only for a 27-pound rock to pin his ankle and trap him underground. Over the course of 14 days, he died of thirst, hunger and exhaustion, compounded by hypothermia.Turning that story into “Floyd Collins,” which made its Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater this week, was an exercise in bringing a bleak history to life through song.Tina Landau, the show’s director, bookwriter and additional lyricist, was an undergraduate student at Yale University — decades before she conceived “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” and “Redwood” — when she came across a blurb about Collins in an anthology on American history. It focused on the media circus around the failed rescue, one of the most prominent national news stories between the two world wars.Landau, 62, said her perspective on the story was different from when she wrote the show, which premiered in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons, in her late 20s. She understands it now as an individual confronting his mortality.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 ‘Floyd Collins,’ Jeremy Jordan Finds Another Challenge Onstage

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      In “Floyd Collins,” playing a hardscrabble Kentuckian trapped while exploring a cave, the actor finds inspiration in the claustrophobic restrictions.When Jeremy Jordan played a young, naïve cop in the Broadway show “American Son” alongside Kerry Washington, in 2018, he was fresh off several seasons on the “Supergirl” series. And so he tried to apply some of the techniques that worked for him on TV to a taut drama about police violence.“I had been making it work for so long, trying to mine gold from every moment, and I think that had stuck with me,” Jordan said. The director Kenny Leon intervened, with advice that Jordan still carries with him. Literally.“He gave me this note on some old piece of script,” Jordan said, fishing a tiny scrap of paper from his wallet and carefully unfolding it. “It says ‘you are good enough to just say these words.’”Leon’s counsel may be evergreen, but it particularly resonates with Jordan’s new project, where he is often unable to use many physical acting techniques.In “Floyd Collins,” which is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Jordan portrays the title character of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s musical, a hardscrabble Kentuckian who becomes trapped while exploring a cave in 1925. As a media circus forms on the surface, Floyd withers away underground, stuck between rocks. (The musical is based on a true story, which also inspired the Billy Wilder film “Ace in the Hole,” from 1951.)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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      ‘Floyd Collins’ Review: Trapped in a Cave and in a Media Circus

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      One of the wonders of this glorious-sounding new Broadway production is how far from claustrophobic this Kentucky cave saga feels.Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.Jordan, below, and Taylor Trensch.Richard Termine for 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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      Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other Broadway Shows Are Turning to Influencers

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      To reach younger and more diverse audiences, Broadway shows are increasingly looking to Instagram and TikTok creators.On a 91-degree day in June, a group of 20- and 30-somethings in sundresses and Bermuda shorts was navigating a dimly lit cocktail lounge whose air-conditioning was on the fritz.It didn’t matter: Cocktails with names like the Ghost Writer were flowing, and patrons were posing in front of a velvet emerald curtain, holding “Team Daisy” and “Team Gatsby” hand fans emblazoned with the faces of Eva Noblezada and Jeremy Jordan, the stars of the Broadway musical “The Great Gatsby.”Flickering candles adorned tables at the side of the room, where people colored in silhouettes of the character Myrtle Wilson, a social climber in the musical, and filled out trivia sheets with questions like “Is Gatsby in East or West Egg?” Silver gift bags filled with miniature bottles of Champagne and “Old Sport” stickers sat on a table by the door.“We are in the Gatsby era,” said Francis Dominic, 31, a lifestyle and travel influencer, alluding to the Broadway musical and “Gatsby,” another high-profile stage adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that last week ended its run at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and is also aiming for Broadway.Dominic was among about 40 TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube creators who had gathered at the Rickey lounge inside the Dream Midtown hotel to celebrate the release of the “Great Gatsby” cast album, which would begin streaming the next day.Molly Kavanaugh recorded content for a live stream.Ye Fan for The New York TimesLexy Vagasy, left, and Kavanaugh at the invite-only event for about 60 people.Ye Fan for 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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      How Does a Dressing Room Get Into Character?

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      As a child, the actor Krysta Rodriguez would mentally rearrange unfamiliar rooms as a way of soothing herself. The fixation followed her everywhere, from friends’ houses to historical sites. She remembers visiting a clothing store in Paris with her family when she was 11 and obsessing over where she would put a bed if she lived there. “As I’m thinking about it, it was probably a control issue,” she says. “I immediately try to figure out what a space wants to be. Is it a midcentury house that got renovated in the ’90s with all this incorrect architecture? I clear it away.”Over the past two decades or so, Rodriguez, 39, has mostly channeled this aesthetic intensity into her character work, for roles on both the stage and screen (including a memorable turn as Liza Minnelli in the 2021 Netflix series “Halston”). In 2022, while appearing as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s fictional girlfriend in the Broadway play “The Collaboration,” she arranged her dressing room to look like a messy artist’s loft, filled with the kind of ratty ’70s furniture that her character would have grabbed from the streets of the East Village in the ’80s. She says the actor Nathan Lane, with whom she co-starred in “The Addams Family” musical in 2010, helped her realize dressing rooms could be taken seriously when he turned his into an extravagant lounge, complete with a full bar. She also credits the actor Michael Cerveris, who painted his walls blood red and brought in a vintage barber’s chair while starring in a 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd.” “I try to use these spaces as a gateway,” Rodriguez says of her own dressing rooms. “I want to have some sense of the character, even if it’s not my personal style.”Nestled among framed photos of Jordan’s friends and family are mementos from previous performances, including a bobblehead doll of his character on the TV series “Supergirl.”Blaine DavisIn 2020, when acting work slowed during the pandemic, she turned her interest in interior design into a full-fledged business, renovating the homes of clients in her native Orange County, Calif., and beyond. But it wasn’t until this spring that Rodriguez decorated a dressing room for another actor. When her friend Jeremy Jordan was preparing for his leading role in the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he asked Rodriguez to lend her design expertise. She took inspiration from the subtle details of the character’s Jazz Age world rather than creating what she calls a “Party City Art Deco theme.” Jordan’s only request was that she make the windowless room, deep within the Broadway Theater, feel cozy. Rodriguez decided to reimagine the space as a sunroom in Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, with a soothing watercolor wallpaper of a Japanese maple tree, to reflect the era’s affinity for Japonisme, and a marine blue love seat whose tropical plant print pillows match a nearby bird of paradise.Jordan’s Jazz Age costumes. Linda Cho won the Tony Award for best costume design for her work on the production.Blaine DavisRodriguez sourced period photographs online to help Jordan get into character. Next to a bottle of Buchanan’s whisky — a reference to Gatsby’s love interest in the story, Daisy Buchanan — is a framed image of a champagne tower similar to one featured in the production.Blaine DavisWe 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: A New ‘Great Gatsby’ Leads With Comedy and Romance

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      This musical adaptation, now on Broadway, is a lot of Jazz Age fun. But it forgot that Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel endures because it is a tragedy.Jay Gatsby — self-made enigma, party host extraordinaire and talk of the summer season in West Egg, Long Island — doesn’t carry his insecurities lightly. The facade of his wealth-drenched life is a grand and precarious creation, and propping it up requires constant vigilance.His is new money, so he has to prove his worth to the snobberati. Thus his pathetic habit of showing that photo of himself in his Oxford days to people he has barely met. Or, more endearingly, his over-the-top insistence on glamming up the humble cottage of his neighbor, Nick Carraway, when the lost love of Gatsby’s life, the fabled Daisy Fay Buchanan, is coming over for tea.In the new musical “The Great Gatsby,” which opened on Thursday night at the Broadway Theater, the grass outside the cottage is groomed, flowers are everywhere, and a fleet of servants is ferrying food. And Jeremy Jordan’s Gatsby is an adorably panicked basket case, second-guessing in charming comic song his plan to ambush Eva Noblezada’s Daisy with a reunion.“She is late, so I’m off to go scream in a jar,” he sings, but Daisy arrives before he can flee. Unsuavely, he topples into some greenery.It’s a perfectly winsome scene, and a highlight of this ultimately underwhelming new adaptation, which has a book by Kait Kerrigan (making her Broadway debut), music by Jason Howland (“Paradise Square”) and lyrics by Nathan Tysen (also “Paradise Square”). Comedy and romance are strong suits of this production by Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”), which ran in the fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.There are plenty of big dance numbers, too (by Dominique Kelley), with some standout tap. The 1920s costumes (by Linda Cho) are fun to look at, Daisy’s in particular: all those handkerchief hemlines, wafting on air. Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce and Tom’s blue coupe drive onstage, extravagantly. And while the fireworks we see in the distance are projections, other sparkling pyrotechnics are delightfully real.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 ‘Great Gatsby’ Musical Is Coming to Broadway in March

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      The latest adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel will feature Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies”) as Jay Gatsby and Eva Noblezada (“Hadestown”) as Daisy Buchanan.“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of garish glamour and dashed dreams, is coming to Broadway as a musical this spring.The show — the latest in a long string of adaptations of this widely read story — had a pre-Broadway run last fall at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., where it opened to mixed reviews. (As it happens, the book also arrived to mixed reviews, and is now widely considered a great classic of American literature.)The lavish production will join a spring Broadway season packed with new musicals at a moment when many industry leaders are concerned that there do not seem to be enough patrons to keep most of the shows afloat.This new “Gatsby” musical is backed by Chunsoo Shin, a Korean producer hungering for a Broadway hit after a spate of unsuccessful ventures here. He most recently was part of the producing team for “Once Upon a One More Time,” the short-lived show featuring Britney Spears songs; previous endeavors included a stage adaptation of “Doctor Zhivago” and a Tupac Shakur musical, “Holler if Ya Hear Me.”The “Great Gatsby” musical features songs by Nathan Tysen and Jason Howland, who collaborated on the 2022 musical “Paradise Square,” and a book by the playwright Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”). (Tysen and Kerrigan are married to each other.) The director is Marc Bruni, whose previous Broadway outing, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in 2014, was a significant hit.The musical will star two Broadway fan favorites. Jeremy Jordan, a Tony nominee for “Newsies,” will play the nouveau riche title character, Jay Gatsby, while Eva Noblezada, a two-time Tony nominee, for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown,” will play Daisy Buchanan, the young woman with old money whom Gatsby has long desired.“The Great Gatsby” is scheduled to begin previews March 29 and to open April 25 at the Broadway Theater, one of Broadway’s largest houses.The novel has been explored in other media many times, including in a glitzy 2013 Hollywood film directed by Baz Luhrmann that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. On Broadway, there was a “Great Gatsby” play staged in 1926, the year after the novel’s publication; Off Broadway there was a highly acclaimed seven-hour version, called “Gatz,” developed by Elevator Repair Service and staged at the Public Theater in 2010.The novel entered the public domain in 2021, opening the door to any number of adaptations. Most significantly, at least for theater audiences, is another musical adaptation in development. It’s called “Gatsby” and is scheduled to start performances in May at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.That production, which also has Broadway aspirations, has a book by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Martyna Majok (“Cost of Living”), songs by the rock star Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (also known as Doveman), and direction by Rachel Chavkin (a Tony winner for “Hadestown”). More

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      ‘The Great Gatsby’ Review: A Musical Take on Tragic Desire

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      This new version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic remains largely faithful to the novel, but it trades subtle prose for a straightforward production.F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” requires no critical endorsement. His slim 1925 novel still takes up permanent residence in the book bags of students across the nation. Often it is crushed under tomes of greater size, but what “Gatsby,” lacks in length it makes up for in heart, opulence and tragedy. A new musical adaptation trades Fitzgerald’s subtle blend for a blunter approach.“The Great Gatsby,” now playing at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., replicates its literary prototype. Jay Gatsby (Jeremy Jordan) is the elusive seigneur of a mansion in West Egg, a fictional Long Island town. His newfound wealth fronts lavish parties that brim with bubbly and gossip. He is satisfied by none of it.What Gatsby most craves is Daisy (Eva Noblezada), a product of old money who lives across Manhasset Bay with her adulterer of a husband, Tom Buchanan (John Zdrojeski). Gatsby hatches a plan to have Daisy’s new-to-New York cousin Nick Carraway (Noah J. Ricketts) move in next door to him, with the intent to lure Daisy. But the scheme results in calamity.Though the musical remains largely faithful to that plot, Kait Kerrigan, the book writer, takes liberties with the point of view. Her Nick is no neutral narrator ransacking his memories, but a morally upright man who condemns both Gatsby’s initial pursuit of Daisy and the flagrant behavior of other characters. While others indulge in whiskey and sex, Nick sings desperately about wanting to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Under the direction of Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”), all the characters get a moment like this to divulge their desires. The result is a more democratic story freed from Nick’s control, but also one stripped of compelling subtext and Fitzgerald’s enviable prose.Jason Howland’s swanky score follows suit. There are traces of contemporary influence (groovy rock refrains, pop music rhythms), yet the overall sound, particularly in the ensemble numbers (with rousing choreography by Dominique Kelley) conjures 1920s percussive swing. What Howland does best is compose solo songs that showcase his leading actors. When speaking, Jordan’s Gatsby is grounded and debonair, which makes it all the more thrilling when his voice scurries up to a delicious falsetto. Noblezada (“Miss Saigon”) captures Daisy’s longing with an emotive and powerful voice.Company members provide great support, particularly Samantha Pauly as the rambunctious Jordan Baker, Daisy’s unmarried best friend. Pauly taps into the skills she previously displayed in “Six,” carrying pop belts with a modern-day spunk that counter Noblezada’s ballads in a meeker tenor. It makes for two characters that effectively foil one another, but oddly belong to different decades.The design team’s choices do not suffer this confusion. Art Deco abounds in Paul Tate DePoo III’s scenery and projection, whether the geometric décor in Gatsby’s home to the haunting projections of the hazy Long Island Sound. Cory Pattak, the lighting designer, intricately balances darker emerald tones and bouncy bright ones. The overall effect, further complemented by Linda Cho’s dazzling costumes, is bewitching. More than once I wished I were sitting farther back in the audience because a production this lush, however unadventurous in narrative direction, deserves, like the novel, the long view.The Great GatsbyThrough Nov. 12 at Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More