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      ‘The Keep Going Songs’ Review: Vexed by Grief and Worried About the Planet

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      Abigail and Shaun Bengson muse on death in their latest work, but its looseness makes it hard to get a handle on.Not a lot of Lincoln Center Theater shows call for setting the preperformance mood with the Grateful Dead, but when “Uncle John’s Band” came over the speakers the other evening before the Bengsons took the stage, it was such an ideal match for their crunchy, mellow, kindhearted, folk-rock vibe that I had to smile.In Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s “The Keep Going Songs,” though, it’s the dead with a lowercase “d” who are integral. This married couple of music-makers, known for shaggy, melodic, autobiographically inspired theater, wanted to create what they call “a concert. That’s also a wake.”Directed by Caitlin Sullivan for LCT3, the show is a musing on death: of human beings, and of our planet. The pairing doesn’t entirely work organically. Still, the seeming intent is a processing of grief.“If you’re in this room,” Abigail tells the audience at the Claire Tow Theater, “we assume you are going through something terrible.”Shaun adds: “And if you’re not, then we don’t want to hear about it.” (Is he joking? He’s very dry. Hard to tell.)As Abigail notes, the show is front-loaded with grief. She mentions almost immediately that her brother died the day she and Shaun were asked to do this Lincoln Center run. The hurt of that loss is in fact threaded throughout “The Keep Going Songs,” which, by the way, is a new piece. Despite the title and the shared motif of perseverance, it is unrelated to the Bengsons’ pandemic-inspired show “The Keep Going Song,” with its upbeat, earworm title tune.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 Starry Cast Navigates ‘Uncle Vanya’ and ‘Every Emotion Under the Sun’

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      Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill and Anika Noni Rose discuss the new translation of Chekhov that brought them to the farm.Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison Pill, to support Sonia’s largely absentee father, portrayed by Alfred Molina.William Jackson Harper, best known for “The Good Place,” plays Astrov, the eco-nerd doctor whom Sonia loves. Anika Noni Rose, a Tony Award winner for “Caroline, or Change,” is the glamorous Elena, Sonia’s stepmother, for whom both Vanya and Astrov yearn.In mid-April, a week before the show’s opening on April 24, Schreck, Neugebauer, Carell, Harper, Pill and Rose gathered to talk over their dinner break in a room off the Beaumont lobby. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Along with Harper and Carell, both at left, the play also features Alfred Molina, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak in supporting roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was your relationship to “Uncle Vanya” and Chekhov before this show?HEIDI SCHRECK I lived in Russia right out of college for two years. When I moved back to Seattle, I started this theater company with my husband, and there was this Russian company who would come and perform Russian plays. They invited me to be the translator. Basically I would do live interpretation.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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      Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

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      Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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 British Scandal Intrigued J.T. Rogers, Then He Went Down the Rabbit Hole

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      The playwright thought News International’s phone-hacking scandal could make for a sweeping thriller. Twelve years later, here it is.A now-faded note card taped above my desk reads: “Art, like light, needs distance.” Years ago, I wrote down that line from William Gass’s “On Being Blue,” and over the last few months it was a comforting reminder as I finished my new play “Corruption.” What was to be a history play about a media scandal in Britain has become a political thriller about some of the forces that seem to be upending our own country right now.The inspiration came in 2012, while reading “Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain,” a book by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Watson, a former member of the British Parliament, and Hickman, a former reporter for The Independent, had written of how Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers and tabloids, including News of the World, were illegally hacking the phones of thousands of citizens — from celebrities to former prime ministers and even a missing 13-year-old girl, who was later found dead — all to get sensational stories that would sell newspapers. As the book made clear, more papers sold meant more profit; more profit meant more power to influence the levers of government.The further I read, I realized that this could be a remarkable play. Like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” “Dial M” told a riveting story in granular detail about the use and abuse of power as a small group of vivid characters seeks to expose crimes that threaten their very democracy. Onstage it could become a sweeping tale in which the main characters take huge risks for their beliefs.In an effort to adapt the book, I sent the authors two of my plays — “The Overwhelming” and “Blood and Gifts” — that are also about politics and power. Then I flew to London, and went down the rabbit hole.Most of the key players would talk to me off the record only if they were certain that the Murdoch machine was unaware of our meeting. Even though News International, the British newspaper division of Murdoch’s media empire, was under investigation and Rupert and James Murdoch had apologized for their company’s actions in testimony before Parliament, people were afraid of speaking out because of the fear of retribution.Many public figures and politicians who spoke out against Murdoch’s papers have revealed that those same papers tried to destroy their careers and ruin their lives. One such case involved a member of Parliament named Chris Bryant. During a parliamentary hearing, he got Rebekah Brooks, then the chief executive of News International, to acknowledge that News International had made payments to the police for information. Soon after, a rival paper published a photograph of him in his underwear that he had posted on a dating site, and then the Murdoch press ran with the story.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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      ‘Corruption’ Review: Onstage, a Scandal’s Human Drama Is Muffled

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      A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.“Corruption,” J.T. Rogers’s tantalizing new phone-hacking play, starts on Rebekah Brooks’s wedding weekend. In a village in the English countryside, the flame-haired power broker, one of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite tabloid editors, has drawn the cream of Britain’s political class to her celebration.Prime Minister Gordon Brown is there, and so is David Cameron, the Tory who will succeed him. But Brooks (Saffron Burrows) is sequestered in conversation with her charmless boss, Rupert’s son James (Seth Numrich). He informs her that television and new media are the company’s focus now.“Newspapers are a relic,” James says. So his contempt is already evident when he tells her that she is the new chief executive of News International, the Murdoch-owned British newspaper group. Congratulations?It will be on Brooks’s watch, anyway, that a many-tentacled scandal erupts, with the revelation that her journalists clandestinely acquired the voice mail messages not only of celebrities and politicians but also of a missing child who was later found dead. Multiple arrests ensue, with accusations of phone hacking, police corruption and perverting the course of justice. Rupert Murdoch shuts down News of the World, his top-selling Sunday tabloids. Through it all, he remains loyal to Brooks.As a news story evolving in real time, the scandal made for jaw-dropping reading. As a play, though, “Corruption” is uncompelling — counterintuitively so, given the inherent drama: the crimes, the coverup, the comeuppance (or not), the clashes of personality. Also the stakes, which include the well-being of a democracy in which one culture-shaping media magnate holds too much sway.Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), a Labour member of Parliament as the scandal brews, is the central figure. (Murdoch, frequently mentioned, is a looming unseen presence.) Rumpled and besieged, Watson is determined to expose the widespread, under-the-radar operation: the surveillance, the intimidation, the gathering of secrets. The police, in the meantime, are oddly incurious about the voluminous records of a private investigator who they know hacked phones for News of the World.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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      ‘Gardens of Anuncia’ Review: The Broadway Star and the Women Who Molded Her

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      Michael John LaChiusa’s beautifully sung tribute to sisterly admiration, starring Priscilla Lopez, was inspired by the early life of the show’s director, Graciela Daniele.At the heart of “The Gardens of Anuncia,” Michael John LaChiusa’s sweet reverie of a musical, is a respect and recognition for the renowned Broadway choreographer Graciela Daniele, a longtime friend and collaborator.The show, which opened on Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, debuted in 2021 at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. It arrives in a Lincoln Center Theater production with its original cast mostly intact, and Daniele back directing and sharing choreography duties with Alex Sanchez. But now the acclaimed stage veteran Priscilla Lopez is the star, and her knowing performance as Anuncia (a present-day version of Daniele) enriches this lovely, slightly repetitive, but beautifully sung tribute to sisterly admiration.While tending to her garden on the day she’s set to receive a lifetime achievement award, Anuncia thinks back to the women who raised her in Buenos Aires during the Perón regime. She’s ambivalent about the prize (“Who needs an award for living so long?”) and jokes that her decades of work in the theater (Daniele has received 10 Tony Award nominations and, yes, one career-spanning award in 2021) simply dominoed from the first English word she ever learned: “OK.”A gifted dancer from an early age, she was hired by a major national dance company before moving on to international success.But she’s passionate when conjuring up her Mami (Eden Espinosa), Tía (Andréa Burns), and Granmama (Mary Testa). In the show we watch this matriarchal triumvirate, which Anuncia credits for her resilience and compassion, interact with her younger self (Kalyn West). Each woman details for Anuncia her particular relationship with men. Granmama is “agreeably separated” from her seafaring husband (Enrique Acevedo), whom she met while working as his housekeeper and still allows to woo her whenever he is in port. Tía, a gal’s gal, entertains lusty advances from the “Moustache Brothers” (Acevedo and Tally Sessions), but also prefers her independence.It’s Mami who presents this work’s richest complexities. Anuncia cannot understand why her mother, after years of sordid abuse from her husband (Acevedo again), tries to steer her daughter away from hating the man. Nor can she reconcile her mother’s distaste for the government even though she works as a gubernatorial secretary.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?  More

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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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      Good Times and Bum Times Made These Theater Veterans Even Stronger

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      It’s challenging enough for an actor to portray someone who is alive and well. But can you imagine the extra scrutiny that comes when your model is sitting in the director’s chair?In the new musical “The Gardens of Anuncia,” Priscilla Lopez plays the title role, which is largely based on the childhood of the show’s director and co-choreographer, Graciela Daniele. Or at least, Daniele pointed out in a recent conversation, it’s “a version of me. A better version.”When the two stage veterans sat together last week, a day after performances began at Lincoln Center Theater, they laughed continuously, and threw themselves into the conversation with the full-bodied gusto of born performers. They mimed pranks they once pulled on castmates, hummed tunes from long-forgotten shows, and punctuated their stories with enough sound effects to make a Foley artist jealous.There might also have been a little bit of tearing up as they reminisced about their decades in the Broadway trenches — Lopez is 75, Daniele is almost a decade older — and reflected on the new project, a memory musical based on Daniele’s childhood in post-World War II Buenos Aires.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More