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    ‘A Strange Loop’ Nominated for 11 Tonys as Broadway Lauds Comeback

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    “The Lehman Trilogy,” as well as revivals of “Company” and “For Colored Girls,” led in their respective categories as the industry tries to recover from the long pandemic shutdown.A musical about making art and a play about making money dominated the Tony Awards nominations Monday, as Broadway sought to celebrate its best work and revive its fortunes after the lengthy and damaging coronavirus shutdown.The race for best musical — traditionally the most financially beneficial prize — turned into an unexpectedly broad six-way contest because the nominators were so closely divided they had to expand the number of nominees.Out of the gate, the front-runner is “A Strange Loop,” a meta-musical in which a composer who is Black and gay battles demons and doubts while trying to write a show. Even before arriving on Broadway, the show, written by Michael R. Jackson, had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama after an Off Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons; it opened on Broadway late last month to some of the strongest reviews for any new musical this season, and on Monday it picked up 11 Tony nominations, the most for any show.“I feel really grateful, and I feel validated for putting in all the years and all the hours,” Jackson said after learning the news. “It feels amazing to know better things are possible.”“MJ,” a jukebox musical about Michael Jackson, was nominated for 10 Tonys. Myles Frost, center, was nominated for best actor in a musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesScoring the most nominations is not always predictive of winning the prize, and “A Strange Loop,” which is adventurous in form and content, will face tough competition from “MJ,” a biographical jukebox musical about Michael Jackson; “Six,” a fan favorite about the wives of Henry VIII; “Girl From the North Country,” which combines the songs of Bob Dylan with a fictional story about a boardinghouse in the Minnesota city where Dylan was born; “Mr. Saturday Night,” about a washed-up comedian hungering for a comeback; and “Paradise Square,” about a turning point in race relations in 19th-century New York.Both “Paradise Square,” which picked up 10 nominations, and “Girl From the North Country,” with seven, have struggled at the box office, and will now hope that their multiple Tony nominations will help reverse their financial fortunes. For “MJ,” its 10 nods are a form of vindication after several influential reviewers criticized the show for sidestepping sexual abuse allegations against the pop star.“The Lehman Trilogy,” which arrived on Broadway with an enormous — albeit pandemic-delayed — head of steam following rapturously reviewed productions in London and Off Broadway, picked up eight nominations to dominate the best play category. The play, which follows the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, was written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, and featured a dazzling production centered on a rotating glass box designed by Es Devlin. All three of its leads — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor.“The Lehman Trilogy” was nominated for 8 Tonys, including best play. All three of its leads — from left, Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale and Adrian Lester — were nominated for best actor in a play.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The Lehman Trilogy” vies with four other dramas for best play. Among them are two dark comedies — “Clyde’s,” by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner who was also nominated for writing the book for “MJ,” and “Hangmen,” by Martin McDonagh, an acclaimed British-Irish playwright who has now been nominated five times but has yet to win. The other contenders are “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s play about factory workers at an automotive plant facing shutdown, and “The Minutes,” Tracy Letts’s look at the unsettling secrets of a small-town governing body.The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, are an annual celebration for American theater, but they are particularly important now as a potential marketing tool for an industry that is still grossing less, and selling fewer tickets, than it was before the pandemic forced theaters to close for a year and a half. The awards are presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing.“This Tony Awards will mean so much more than honoring the performances and the artistic work that’s been done this season — it’s also celebrating the resilience of the community, and that this much work is being done and being seen,” said Rob McClure, an actor who scored a Tony nomination (his second) for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role of “Mrs. Doubtfire.”Billy Crystal was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance in “Mr. Saturday Night,” based on his 1992 film. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWell known performers scoring nominations included Uzo Aduba, Billy Crystal, Rachel Dratch, Hugh Jackman, Ruth Negga, Mary-Louise Parker, Patti LuPone, Phylicia Rashad and Sam Rockwell. But several other big stars now working on Broadway were overlooked by nominators, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Laurence Fishburne and Daniel Craig, as well as Beanie Feldstein, starring in “Funny Girl” but unable to escape the long shadow of Barbra Streisand.This season saw an unusually large number of works by Black writers, and that created more opportunity for Black performers, directors, and designers, some of whom were nominated for Tonys. Among them are two performers new to Broadway, Jaquel Spivey, the star of “A Strange Loop,” and Myles Frost, the star of “MJ,” now facing off against Crystal, Jackman and McClure in the leading actor in a musical category.“Black playwrights have had an amazing presence this season, and I hope that continues,” said Camille A. Brown, who scored two nominations Monday, for directing and choreographing the revival of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Reflecting on her own show, she said, “Having seven Black women on a Broadway stage has a lot of meaning, and speaks to the importance of sisterhood and love and Black women holding space for one another.”“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf” was nominated for seven Tonys, including for best revival of a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe seven Tony nominations for “For Colored Girls” are a bittersweet triumph for a production that has been languishing at the box office and had already announced an early closing date. The revival picked up more nominations than any other show in the race for best play revival, a strong category in which many eligible shows won positive reviews.It will now face off against four others: “American Buffalo,” David Mamet’s drama about a trio of scheming junk-shop denizens and “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s look at homophobia in baseball, as well as two plays that had never previously made it to Broadway despite being considered important parts of the playwriting canon, “Trouble in Mind,” Alice Childress’s look at racism in theater; and “How I Learned to Drive,” Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning drama about child sexual abuse.The competition for best musical revival is small, but strong. There were four eligible shows, and only three scored nods: “Company,” “Caroline, or Change,” and “The Music Man.” Excluded was the revival of “Funny Girl” which fared poorly with critics, but has been doing fine at the box office.“Company,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, was nominated for 9 Tony awards, including best revival of a musical. Patti LuPone, a nominee at left, performed with Katrina Lenk. Matthew Murphy/O & M Co./DKC, via Associated PressThe nine nods for “Company” pack an especially emotional punch because its composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died soon after attending the first post-shutdown preview. “The longer he’s not with us, the more I miss him,” said LuPone, who picked up her eighth Tony nomination — she’s won twice — for her work in the production.The nominations were chosen by a group of 29 people, most of whom work in the theater industry but are not financially connected to any of the eligible productions, who saw all eligible shows and voted last Friday. There were 34 eligible shows, 29 of which scored nominations; the five left out were all new plays.Up next: a group of 650 voters, including producers and performers and many others with an interest in the nominated productions, have until June 10 to vote for their favorites, and the winners will be announced at a ceremony on June 12. The ceremony, at Radio City Music Hall, is to be hosted by Ariana DeBose; the first hour will be streamed on Paramount+, followed by three hours broadcast by CBS.Broadway’s grosses are down in part because tourism remains down in New York City, and in part because of ongoing concerns about the coronavirus. Many of the nominees interviewed Monday said they hoped the spotlight of the Tony Awards would lure more patrons back to Broadway.“Anyone that’s doing theater right now has been hit really hard by the pandemic,” said Marianne Elliott, a two-time Tony-winning director who scored another nomination for “Company.” “It’s gratifying to see that Broadway is coming back. To have the Tony nominations for all of these shows is just a celebration of what we do, and it’s lovely to be here.” More

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      Review: Tracy Letts Brings Out the Long Knives in Short Plays

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      It takes 15 minutes or less in each segment of “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts” for the bard of male moral decrepitude to skewer his subjects.Tracy Letts, though always funny, has never been jolly.You wouldn’t, after all, expect bonhomie from a writer whose earliest plays were called “Killer Joe” and “Bug.” Even now, in dark memory, those Off Broadway hits feel somehow infested, buzzing with sociopathy.Nor did “August: Osage County,” his 2007 Broadway breakthrough, do much to advertise the charms of humanity, featuring as it did a hellish family that by the final curtain made the opening suicide seem inevitable.Since then, despite the increased restraint of middle age, he has periodically released his swarms of psychic cicadas; “Linda Vista,” his 2019 Broadway outing, basically pinned American maleness to a museum wall, letting it writhe there, and us with it.Now welcome to Letts 2021, the streaming edition, as Steppenwolf Theater Company, his longtime Chicago home, unveils a virtual Letts sampler. In three heartbreaking, brutally short plays — an anthology if not of horror then of angst — the fury may be fully internalized, but it is nevertheless poisonous, and seeps.I at first thought the pandemic might be a factor in the tone of the triptych, which carries the omnibus title “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts,” but as it happens all three were written in the Before Times. They first appeared, live, at the Gift Theater, another Chicago institution, during annual evenings of original short works by various writers. I can only imagine that on those occasions, they came off like the creepy guy at the corner of a party.That’s a compliment, by the way, or at least a job description for Rainn Wilson. In “Night Safari,” first performed in January 2018, Wilson plays Gary, the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever. Certainly it’s the most unusual, containing only animals whose characteristics mirror those of their guide. Take, for instance, the Panamanian night monkey, monogamous in captivity but not, Gary emphasizes, in the wild.Rainn Wilson, as the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever, in “Night Safari.”Liberace Cruzuee“There’s a lesson there somewhere,” he says, “but you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”Between stops at the aardwolf (“physically unattractive, and what is with this attitude?”); the boreal owl (“unsociable”); and the reverse-growing paradoxical frog (“Imagine that, if you can … dwindling as you mature”), Gary can’t help but display his own problems, too. These mostly involve Rhonda, who works in the gift shop and has so far responded unfavorably to his khaki plumage.Wilson is terrific in the 12-minute monologue, managing (much as he did as Dwight Schrute on “The Office”) to make boorishness and hostility human if not sympathetic. In the director Patrick Zakem’s merciless close-ups, he looks as if he’s actively curdling. Even so, “Night Safari,” with its slightly over-clever conceit, is not much more than a lark — perhaps a foxy lark, characterized (I read) by its quick, high-pitched song.“The Old Country,” written in 2015, is no less foxy; what seems at first like a simple lunchtime conversation between two codgers embodied by papier-mâché puppets moves quickly but without comment into another realm as you realize the men are talking at cross-purposes. Ted (voiced by William Petersen) is the spryer of the pair, and basically compos mentis; he praises the diner’s sandwiches, recalls the Russian waitresses who used to work there and waxes sexist on the topic of past conquests.But Landy (the great Mike Nussbaum, who is 97) seems to have let go of his moorings, drifting on a sea of random and often inappropriate thoughts. When Ted says of a previous visit, “We sat in a booth right there,” Landy responds: “You sawed a lady in half.”As his non sequiturs (or at least I hope they’re non sequiturs) get ever more so, you realize that he is not in fact responding; rather, he is making pronouncements, as perhaps we all do, from a locked-down world of his own.That impression is deepened by the choice (the director, again, is Zakem) to stage the piece, written for humans, with the puppets, which as rendered by Grace Needlman seem to generalize human experience instead of specifying it the way live actors do. Their sad gorgeousness and apt materiality — Ted’s stringy white hair looks like Scotch tape, as if it alone were holding him together — give “The Old Country” the weight of universal tragedy, in just eight minutes.Or perhaps I mean the lightness of universal tragedy. There’s no shrieking or bellowing in these plays; the theatrical format does all the dramatic work, and only by implication. The gap between what’s being said and what’s being shown is where the pain lies.Letts in “The Stretch,” which at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers.Anna D. ShapiroIn that sense “Night Safari” and “The Old Country” are warm-ups for “The Stretch,” a 15-minute monologue, performed by Letts himself, that at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers. You barely have time to laugh as the names of the horses flying by get weirder: Architect, Daddys Lil Dumplin, My Enormous Ego, Scrod.Perhaps the most telling name is A Horse Called Man, which gives away the game. In the guise of “calling” the 108th running of the (fictional) El Dorado Stakes, “The Stretch” is actually calling the uncountable zillionth — and yet always roughly the same — running of a man’s life. I say “man” because it is from a man’s perspective that the story unfolds, at least as written; in the script, from 2015, the announcer’s monologue is “illustrated” onstage by human dioramas of a boy’s birth, then maturation, marriage, fatherhood, infidelity and decline.But the version now streaming — directed by Anna D. Shapiro, who stepped down as Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August — does away with the illustrations, which strike me in any case as banal. Instead, Shapiro trusts the words (abetted by Allen Cordell’s thundering hooves soundscape) to score the play’s points in passing, and in Letts’s imperturbably dense performance they do. You don’t need to see a man getting married stage right to feel the punch of a line like “My Enormous Ego has stumbled badly and taken a terrific fall!”Nor do you have to be a man, though Letts now seems to be our leading contender for bard of male moral decrepitude. He was always in the running, of course; check out the revival of “Bug” at Steppenwolf in November. For new Letts, there’s also “The Minutes,” scheduled to open on Broadway in April, two years after the pandemic shut it down in previews.But now, taking on smaller slices of humankind, and leaving the big bad themes to speak for themselves, his vision seems funnier, deeper, bigger. Call him the paradoxical frog of playwriting: He’s growing as he shrinks.Three Short Plays by Tracy LettsThrough Oct. 24; steppenwolf.org. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Woman in the Window’ Review: Don’t You Be My Neighbor

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      Amy Adams plays a reclusive psychologist who witnesses a crime in a glossy new Netflix thriller.“The Woman in the Window” evokes two emotional states widely associated with the Covid-19 pandemic: real estate envy and the condition of melancholy drift that some psychologists call languishing. The resonance is purely accidental, since this adaptation of a 2018 novel by J.A. Finn, directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), was originally slated for theatrical release in 2019. To make a long story short, it fell through the cracks of the Fox-Disney merger and landed at Netflix, where it feels curiously at home. More