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      in Music

      Grime Transformed British Music. A New Exhibition Traces How.

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      “Grime Stories: From the Corner to the Mainstream” at the Museum of London highlights the 20-year-old history and far-reaching impact of the British rap genre.LONDON — On a wall-mounted screen at the Museum of London, a low-resolution video showed young people rapping quickly and hungrily over syncopated beats. Every so often, a decidedly 2000s graphic flashed on the screen, reading “Risky Roadz 2.”The video is an early work from Roony “RiskyRoadz” Keefe, who documented the early days of grime, the muscular British rap genre. Keefe first picked up a camera to chronicle the nascent scene in 2004, and made DVDs of the freestyles he recorded.“I’d hear an M.C. and think, ‘You’re good, put them on,’” Keefe said in a telephone interview. The DVD helped propel the rapper in the scene, like he was an A&R talent scout, he added.Almost two decades later, Keefe, 37, is a co-curator of “Grime Stories: From the Corner to the Mainstream,” a small but heartfelt exhibition currently on view at the Museum of London until December that looks back at the early days of grime, and the context from which it emerged.“It’s a big thing, you know,” Keefe said. “You never think you’re going to end up in a museum.”Initially a tight-knit scene formed by young people in East London, grime now occupies a prized position in mainstream British music and culture. The genre’s selling power is so significant, Ikea featured D Double E, an East London M.C., in its 2019 Christmas advertisement. In politics, the 2017 campaign #Grime4Corbyn harnessed rappers’ clout, encouraging young people to back the then-leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.At the 2015 Brit Awards — Britain’s version of the Grammys — Kanye West performed with a host of grime artists. Drake has long embraced the genre, featuring the rappers Skepta and Giggs on his “More Life” mixtape in 2017, getting a tattoo of Skepta’s Boy Better Know crew, and helping to revive the cult TV show “Top Boy,” which stars the grime artist Kano and is set in East London.“Grime Stories” was designed as a “venue to speak about the real lived experience of East Londoners,” said Dhelia Snoussi, a curator at the Museum of London. A way to “tell some of the important stories that are lesser heard.”When it emerged in the early 2000s, grime was an urgent affirmation of identity. It developed as an evolution from and reaction to garage, a popular Black British dance genre that had moved in flashy, pop directions. Other British forms of rap had become overly Americanized, some felt, with slang borrowed from across the Atlantic. The creators of grime wanted instead to speak to life in their corner of London.Jammer’s basement was a key space in grime’s evolution, memorialized by the layers of artists’ tags covering the walls.John Chase/Museum of LondonThe exhibition was built around Keefe, who, as well as running a production company and directing, is a London black cabdriver. His knowledge of the city’s streets was a way to tell the story of the community surrounding the genre, but the curators “immediately realized that a lot of the places we wanted to take the cab to were no longer there,” Snoussi said, and gentrification became a focal point for the exhibition.The show includes short documentaries and memorabilia like Keefe’s first camcorder and a bag from Rhythm Division record shop, a hub in grime’s early days. (It is now a coffee shop.)Particularly for purists, grime is a genre with strict technical parameters, including a tempo of 140 beats per minute. But it’s also a way of thinking about community and identity. “It’s not a BPM, it’s not a sound, it’s everything,” says a video in the exhibition.The scene developed around public housing in East London, and its specificity of place is evident in the exhibition’s partial reconstruction of a basement belonging to the family of Jammer, one of the genre’s pioneering figures. Jammer’s basement hosted early collaborations, freestyles and recordings, memorialized by the layers of artists’ tags covering the walls.DJ Target, who now hosts a show on the BBC’s Radio 1Xtra station, was part of those early days. Grime soon became a culture, which influenced “how people dressed, how they would speak, how they looked, the haircut they would get, the slang words they were using,” he said. “And all of it just felt like it was ours.”That desire to see real experiences reflected in music was also a reaction to the young rappers’ environment. Despite growing up in London with parents who also may have grown up in Britain, early grime artists “were still trying to negotiate and find that sense of belonging,” said Joy White, an academic who has studied the genre since 2007.Success was initially localized, but then came 2003, a year that Dan Hancox, a music journalist, described as a “critical, explosive moment” for grime — similar to what 1977 was for punk. In 2003, the 19-year-old rapper Dizzee Rascal released his debut album, “Boy In Da Corner,” which went on to win Britain’s top music accolade, the Mercury Prize.“That was a seminal moment for everybody to look and see that this is actually possible to do on a much bigger scale,” Target said.In the subsequent near-decade, more artists emerged from the grime scene to become influential figures in British music, despite record labels signing many rappers and then letting them languish.In the 2010s, many grime rappers embraced a more mainstream-friendly sound. Wiley had chart success with dance-focused tracks like “Wearing My Rolex” in 2008 and “Heatwave” in 2012. Artists like Tinchy Stryder, Skepta and Tinie Tempah also started climbing the British charts.The exhibition includes a gray Trinity Korg keyboard owned by Jammer and borrowed by Skepta to produce “That’s Not Me,” a 2014 track that announced a return to grime authenticity.That same year, a young M.C. from south London called Stormzy released his debut EP. Today, Stormzy is grime’s most successful breakout. “Without a brand-new star with the extraordinary, unique charisma and talent that Stormzy has,” Hancox said, “you wouldn’t have grime landing itself in the popular consciousness in the way it has.”Stormzy, now 28 and a household name in Britain, represents both grime’s far-reaching influence and how the genre has changed, with tracks on his albums swinging from more traditional grime to more recent genre innovations in Black British music.The influence of grime is built into the D.N.A. of many of those genres, including Afroswing, U.K. drill and road rap. The inspiration has moved in the other direction, too, and grime has evolved to encompass more fluidity and diversity in the beats and styles M.C.s choose to rap over.Jammer embraces these changes. “What people tend to say is, we want it to sound like the old days,” he said. “It’s not the old days.”“I’m here for the new, I’m here for the exciting,” he added. More

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      in Theater

      On the London Stage, Families in Disarray

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      Two new plays, “The Southbury Child” and “Mad House,” explore domestic discord with contrasting degrees of success.LONDON — Families are having a hard time on the London stage of late, and in one instance, at least, balloons are partly to blame. That’s the unusual starting point of “The Southbury Child,” a lively if uneven new play from Stephen Beresford that has arrived at the Bridge Theater (through Aug. 27) after its premiere south of London last month at the Chichester Festival Theater.A young girl, Taylor Southbury, has died of a fast-spreading illness, and the local vicar, David Highland (Alex Jennings, in a galvanic star turn), is preparing for her funeral. The girl’s bereft mother, Tina (Sarah Twomey), has requested that her daughter’s memory be honored with helium balloons affixed throughout the church, bearing images of the Disney princesses the child so loved.David, though, rebuffs this idea. “This is not just a question of taste — of mere aesthetics,” he tells his wife, Mary (Phoebe Nicholls), as the townspeople in his Dartmouth constituency gather in support of Tina’s wishes. What matters most when it comes to grieving Taylor, the vicar says around the capacious kitchen table that dominates Mark Thompson’s set, is “an experience worthy of God” that looks at death head-on. That means rejecting embellishments like balloons — branded by Disney no less — that aren’t focused on spiritual priorities like salvation.David, we soon discover, is far from flawless and may not be ideally positioned to adjudicate behavior and protocol in others. A philanderer with a fondness for drink, he threatens to rupture his family no less fully than he upends a congregation whose mounting disapproval — “justice for Taylor” becomes their mantra — can be heard during the scene changes. (The exemplary sound design is by George Dennis.)The play wastes no time spelling out the inconsistencies in David’s sentiments: “You’re not exactly the poster boy for unshakable principles,” counters Craig (a likable Jack Greenlees), the gay Scottish curate new in town who, rather too conveniently, has fought his own battle with booze.Josh Finan in “The Southbury Child.”Manuel HarlanAdding to the increasingly vexed crosscurrents are the dead girl’s sweary uncle, Lee (Josh Finan), whose actions in the second act send a genuine shiver through the house, and the Highlands’ grown daughters, Susannah (Jo Herbert) and Naomi (a vivid Racheal Ofori), the first as prim and indrawn a personality as her younger, adopted sibling is a free spirit with a fondness for weed.Beresford wrote one of the defining plays of lockdown in his terrific solo piece, “Three Kings,” as a showcase for Andrew Scott, and here you sense the playwright’s delight at being able to populate a stage anew.Ambitious in its thematic reach, “The Southbury Child” suggests itself as a bustling state-of-the-nation play, which wastes no time referring to societal divisions, unemployment and the reality of Brexit. It also has plenty to say about the climate of cancel culture that threatens to engulf David via mob rule. Nicholas Hytner’s characteristically adroit production is on firmest footing when the play is at its most serious, and when Jennings’s bespectacled David puts his flippancy to one side to make way for genuine anguish.Hytner and Jennings have worked together on and off now for several decades, and their latest collaboration owes an incalculable amount to Jennings’s ability to do wry one minute and to tap the wellsprings of emotion the next.Elsewhere, you slightly tire of the script’s more glib moments: Waitrose, the upmarket British grocery store, is co-opted for a punchline, and there’s a light bulb joke that I could swear I’ve heard before.It seems odd, too, that a disgraced David cedes center stage near the end to the stricken Lee, whom the able Finan plays with a gathering despair that ends the proceedings on an intriguingly open-ended note. For all the breeziness of a play that likes its gags, “The Southbury Child” comes steeped in a degree of pain that even the best sermon might find hard to assuage.As for the calamity-prone clan in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” now in its world premiere at the Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4, what can I say beyond noting that I didn’t believe a single word of the fractiousness on view?From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc BrennerThe synthetic feeling of Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production is especially surprising following reports that Rebeck, the American author of such accomplished Broadway plays as “Seminar” and “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” wrote the play very much with its leading man, the TV star and stage actor David Harbour, in mind — specifically drawing upon mental health issues that Harbour has confronted in the past.It would help if the situation — a dying father (Bill Pullman) facing down his three children, Harbour’s emotionally wayward Michael chief among them — didn’t seem to owe such an obvious debt to plays like “August: Osage County,” albeit with the genders reversed, not to mention earlier studies in familial discord like Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” Pullman’s irascible Daniel roars his way to the grave via a series of standoffs that depend on hoary narrative devices like a revelatory letter and baldfaced pronouncements on the groan-worthy order of “None of us had a childhood.”That particular remark is spoken by the widower’s toxic daughter, Pam (Sinéad Matthews), who is the last of the children to gather at the chaotic family home for a rancorous reckoning that finds room, too, for a hospice nurse played by the wonderful Akiya Henry, an Olivier Award nominee this year for her performance in the Almeida Theater’s “Macbeth.”Henry’s character, patronizingly conceived in saintly terms, gets a breakdown moment that is better acted than the writing deserves, and her dismissal of “this ridiculous country” (meaning the United States) seems calculated to strike a chord with British audiences. It’s always good to see Pullman onstage, and Harbour’s conviction in a part that is presumably close to the knuckle exists beyond any doubt.But I’m still pondering the crucial narrative role of a pencil sharpener, which all too readily happens to be found outside a back door, ready for use. Playgoers, take note: You never know when a writing implement might become a matter of life and death.The Southbury Child. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Aug. 27.Mad House. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Ambassadors Theater, through Sept. 4. More

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      in Music

      How Louis Theroux Became a ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ Sensation at Age 52

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      Decades into his career, the British American journalist has an unlikely TikTok hit that could be the song of the summer. “I am not trying to make it as a rapper,” he says.Four or five times a week these days, some old friend will contact Louis Theroux and tell him, “My daughter keeps going around the house singing your rap,” or, “My wife was exercising to your rap in her Pilates class.” Passing by a primary school, Mr. Theroux has the feeling he is being watched, a sense confirmed when he hears a kid call out behind him: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle.”His agent has been fielding dozens of requests for personal appearances and invitations to perform. Mr. Theroux, a 52-year-old British American documentary filmmaker with a bookish, somewhat anxious demeanor, has turned them all down, not least because, as he put it in a video interview from his London home, “I am not trying to make it as a rapper.”But in a way, he already has: Mr. Theroux is the man behind “Jiggle Jiggle,” a sensation on TikTok and YouTube, where it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. He delivers the rap in an understated voice that bears traces of his Oxford education, giving an amusing lilt to the lines “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds/I’d like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”For Mr. Theroux, a son of the American author Paul Theroux and a cousin of the actor Justin Theroux, the whole episode has been odd and a little unsettling. “I’m pleased that people are enjoying the rap,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a part of me that has a degree of mixed feelings. It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work. But there we are.”The story of how this middle-aged father of three has taken hold of youth culture with a novelty rap is “a baffling 21st century example of just the weirdness of the world that we live in,” Mr. Theroux said.“Jiggle Jiggle” gestated for years before it became all the rage. It started in 2000, when Mr. Theroux was hosting “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” a BBC Two series in which he delved into various subcultures. For an episode in the third and final season, he traveled to the American South, where he met a number of rappers, including Master P. As part of the show, he decided to do a rap himself, but he had only a few meager lines: “Jiggle Jiggle/I love it when you wiggle/It makes me want to dribble/Fancy a fiddle?”Mr. Theroux with the rapper Master P. in a 2000 episode of the BBC Two series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.”BBC TwoHe enlisted Reese & Bigalow, a rap duo in Jackson, Miss., to help him work it into shape. Bigalow cleaned up the opening lines and linked the word “jiggle” with the word “jingle” to suggest the sound of coins in your pocket. Reese asked him what kind of car he drove. His reply — Fiat Tipo — led to the lines, “Riding in my Fiat/You really have to see it/Six-feet-two in a compact/No slack but luckily the seats go back.”“Reese & Bigalow infused the rap with a genuine quality,” Mr. Theroux said. “The elements that make it special, I could never have written on my own. At the risk of overanalyzing it, the genius part of it, in my mind, was saying, ‘My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds.’ There was something very satisfying about the cadence of those words.”He filmed himself performing the song live on the New Orleans hip-hop station Q93, and BBC viewers witnessed his rap debut when the episode aired in the fall of 2000. That might have been the end of “Jiggle Jiggle” — but “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” got new life in 2016, when Netflix licensed the show and started streaming it on Netflix UK. The rap episode became a favorite, and whenever Mr. Theroux made the publicity rounds for a new project, interviewers would inevitably ask him about his hip-hop foray.In February of this year, while promoting a new show, “Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux sat down for an interview on the popular web talk show “Chicken Shop Date,” hosted by the London comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg.“Can you remember any of the rap that you did?” Ms. Dimoldenberg asked, prompting Mr. Theroux to launch into his rhymes in what he described as “my slightly po-faced and dry English delivery.”“What happened subsequently is the most mystifying part,” he added.Mr. Theroux’s February appearance on “Chicken Shop Date,” a popular British web series, kicked off new interest in his 22-year-old rap song.Chicken Shop DateLuke Conibear and Isaac McKelvey, a pair of DJ-producers in Manchester, England, known as Duke & Jones, plucked the audio from “Chicken Shop Date” and set it to a backing track with an easygoing beat. Then they uploaded the song to their YouTube account, where it has 12 million views and counting.But “Jiggle Jiggle” became a phenomenon thanks largely to Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, 21-year-old graduates of Laine Theater Arts, a performing arts college in Surrey, England. In April, the two friends were making pasta at their shared apartment when they heard the song and hastily choreographed moves suited to the track — dribbling a basketball, turning a steering wheel — and the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance was born.Wearing hooded sweatshirts and shades (an outfit chosen because they weren’t wearing makeup, the women said in an interview), Ms. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt made a 27-second video of themselves performing the routine. It blew up shortly after Ms. Qualter posted it on TikTok. Copycat videos soon sprang up from TikTok users around the world.“This was all going on without me knowing about it,” Mr. Theroux said. “I got an email: ‘Hey, a remix of the rap you did on “Chicken Shop Date” is going viral and doing extraordinary things on TikTok.’ I’m, like, ‘Well, that’s funny and weird.’”It bursted out of TikTok and into the mainstream last month, when Shakira performed the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” Snoop Dogg, Megan Thee Stallion and Rita Ora have all posted themselves dancing to it. The cast of Downton Abbey jiggle-jiggled during a red carpet event.“Anthony Hopkins has just done a thing yesterday,” Mr. Theroux said. “It would be too much to call it a dance. It’s more of a twitch. But he’s doing something.”The whole episode has been strange for his three children, especially his 14-year-old son, who is big into TikTok. “‘Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?’” Mr. Theroux said, giving voice to his son’s reaction.“I’ve left my stank all over his timeline,” he continued. “I think it’s made him very confused and slightly resentful.”Mr. Theroux said he doesn’t know what to do with his newfound social media fame. “It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesMs. Qualter and Ms. Blewitt find it equally surreal to see Shakira and others dancing to their moves. “I almost forget that we made that up,” Ms. Qualter said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s happened. It’s got over 60 million views. We see the number on the screen, but I can’t comprehend that there are people behind it.”After the original Duke & Jones remix went viral — that is, the one with the vocal track taken from “Chicken Shop Date” — the DJ-producer duo asked Mr. Theroux to redo his vocal in a recording studio. That way, instead of being just another TikTok ear-worm, “Jiggle Jiggle” could be made available on Spotify, iTunes and other platforms, and its makers could gain some exposure and profit from it.In addition to Mr. Theroux, five composers are credited on the official release: Duke & Jones; Reese & Bigalow; and the 81-year-old hitmaker Neil Diamond. Mr. Diamond became part of the crew when his representatives signed off on “Jiggle Jiggle,” which echoes his 1967 song “Red Red Wine” in the part where Mr. Theroux’s Auto-tuned voice sings the words “red, red wine.” The song hit the Spotify viral charts globally last month.So does this mean real money?“I sincerely hope we can all make some jiggle jiggle out of the phenomenon. Or maybe some fold,” Mr. Theroux said. “So far, it’s been more on the jiggle end.”In his career as a documentary filmmaker, Mr. Theroux has explored the worlds of male porn stars, the Church of Scientology, right-wing militia groups, and opioid addicts. In his new BBC series, “Forbidden America,” Mr. Theroux examines the effects of social media on the entertainment industry and politics. Years before Netflix had a hit show centered on Joseph Maldonado-Passage, who is better known as the Tiger King, Mr. Theroux made a film about him. The American documentarian John Wilson, the creator and star of HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” has cited him as an influence.Now his body of work has been eclipsed, at least temporarily, by “Jiggle Jiggle.” And like many who go viral, Mr. Theroux finds himself trying to understand what just happened and figure out what he’s supposed to do with this newfound cultural capital.“It’s not like I have a catalog and, like, now I can release all of my other novelty rap fragments,” he said. “I’m clearly not going to tour it. ‘Come see Mr. Jiggle himself.’ It would be a 20-second-long gig.” More

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      in Television

      Kevin Spacey, Accused of Sexual Assault, Appears in British Court

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      The proceedings are a rare example of a celebrity #MeToo case leading to criminal charges.LONDON — Kevin Spacey, the Oscar- and Tony Award-winning actor, appeared on Thursday in a London court facing charges of sexual assault.Nearly five years after accusations began to emerge against him, Mr. Spacey, 62, is facing four charges of sexual assault in Britain, as well as one of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent.Appearing in Westminster Magistrates’ Court wearing a blue suit, Mr. Spacey sat alone in a side room, occasionally smiling at the journalists present, but he barely spoke.He confirmed his name and London address (he is appearing as Kevin Spacey Fowler) and was read the charges he is facing. It was the first, mainly procedural stage in what will most likely be a lengthy criminal proceeding.The case will be sent to a crown court, which deals with more serious cases, where Mr. Spacey will make his first appearance next month. An actual trial will probably not occur for some time because of a severe backlog in Britain’s judicial system.The offenses with which Mr. Spacey is charged, which involve three men, are said to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013 — a time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London.The charge of penetrative sexual activity without consent, for an incident “between the first of August 2008 and the 31st of August 2008,” cited “a sexual activity involving the penetration of his mouth” with a penis “and he did not consent and he did not reasonably believe that he was consenting.”Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, told the court that Mr. Spacey denied all of the charges and was determined to “establish his innocence.”Natalie Dawson, the prosecutor, asked the court to prevent Mr. Spacey from leaving Britain, saying there were “substantial grounds” he may not return to face trial. Denying this, Mr. Gibbs said Mr. Spacey had voluntarily traveled to Britain for the hearing and would do so for future court dates.Mr. Spacey also needed to travel for work and to attend auditions, while his life was largely based in the United States, Mr. Gibbs said. That included “his 9-year-old dog,” Mr. Gibbs added.Awarding unconditional bail, Tan Ikram, the judge presiding over the hearing, said he “had not been persuaded” there was any real risk of Mr. Spacey failing to attend future court dates.Since the #MeToo movement gained widespread traction in 2017, Mr. Spacey, who won Academy Awards for his performances in “The Usual Suspects” and “American Beauty,” has been one of the highest-profile celebrities accused of sexual assault.But his appearance in London is, along with the court appearances of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, one of the few cases to reach a court.Celebrity spotters are often seen outside high-profile court cases, hoping to get a glimpse of troubled stars, but on Thursday, the scrum of onlookers appeared to be entirely journalists and photographers. After a little over an hour in court, Mr. Spacey left in a Mercedes without giving a comment to any of them. More

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      in Theater

      In London, a Twist on ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Oklahoma!’

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      The updated musical version of the popular film challenges preconceived notions about the protagonist’s appearance. A take on “Oklahoma!” similarly offers a twist on a classic.LONDON — Some well-known musicals are looking notably different on the London stage these days, and that’s a good thing.It might seem difficult to imagine the theatrical version of “Legally Blonde” featuring anyone but the familiar interpreters of Elle Woods onstage — the likes of Laura Bell Bundy on Broadway, and Sheridan Smith, who won an Olivier Award for her performance when the 2007 Broadway musical later came to the West End.But along comes the ever-adventurous Open Air Theater in Regent’s Park to refashion this popular title anew, in a revival on view through July 2. Directed by Lucy Moss, who won a Tony Award over the weekend with Toby Marlow for writing the hit musical “Six,” this Elle and her stage colleagues are a diverse assemblage who include a transgender nonbinary performer (Isaac Hesketh) in the high-spirited supporting role of Margot.This time, Elle is played by Courtney Bowman, who was Anne Boleyn in the West End production of “Six.” Bowman, who describes herself as Afro-European, has said that she was pleasantly surprised that she was even being considered for the role of the feisty, pink-clad Valley girl portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the 2001 film of the same name.Bowman, as might be expected, has embraced Moss’s willingness to break with preconceived notions of Elle and has responded to the challenge with a sweet and stirring performance that asks the audience to question what it means to be blonde. (Not everyone was so pleased: The show made headlines several times over when a Sunday Times of London review, critical of the casting, incurred the wrath of both the theater and Moss, who responded on the red carpet at the Tonys.)Not that Elle as a character is in any way changed. Here, as before, she is the shrewd and savvy outsider — a ditzy-seeming sorority girl in fact possessed of steel — who ends up making an indelible mark at Harvard Law School. And so what if the person playing her looks different from previous Elles?If anything, the casting of Bowman only amplifies the inclusive, can-do message of this collaboration between Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (music and lyrics) and Heather Hach (book). This isn’t the first time that British theater has taken a less than conventional approach, and those wanting the “blonde” referred to in the title will still find it in Bowman’s braided wig. Laura Hopkins’s tiered set, for its part, includes a curtain that seems intended to complement Elle’s appearance at every turn.Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Courtney Bowman in “Legally Blonde.” Pamela RaithUpdated to the present, Moss’s take on “Legally Blonde” mentions the Kardashians and Timothée Chalamet, and Elle’s résumé is described as “interactive,” in keeping with technology that wasn’t available two decades ago. Sometimes, the tongue of the production is somewhat too firmly in its cheek: The role of Bruiser, Elle’s beloved Chihuahua — given to an actual pooch in previous productions — is played by Liam McEvoy, costumed much like a human “feline” from the film adaptation of “Cats.”Elsewhere, the narrative hasn’t aged well. After #MeToo, it’s difficult to believe that Callahan (Eugene McCoy), Elle’s predatory law professor, would have made it quite as far as he has, but at least the audience didn’t boo McCoy at the curtain call at a recent performance, as tends to happen in London musicals featuring a notable baddie. And at times, the show is too busy for its own good: You yearn for quieter, more reflective moments that put camp to one side and allow for the proper flowering of feeling between Elle and Emmett (the likable Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), the Harvard Law teaching assistant who soon displaces the callow Warner (Alistair Toovey) in Elle’s affections.Among the female supporting cast, Vanessa Fisher is in notably strong voice as Vivienne, Elle’s rival in love (and more) who is revealed to have a heart, and Nadine Higgin would raise the roof with her feisty, crowd-pleasing performance as Paulette, the randy hairdresser of bend-and-snap fame — if this alfresco venue had a roof to raise. (Oddly, her mock “Riverdance” moves don’t really land this time, perhaps because that cultural phenomenon no longer has the same prominence.)The other night, the cast as a whole sounded somewhat tinny, especially at the start, as if perhaps battling the intense amplification needed to counter the noise of helicopters overhead and the like. But an initial feeling of excess subsides as the evening continues toward a second half that gives Ellen Kane, the choreographer, a chance to let rip.“Whipped Into Shape” allows Lauren Drew’s Brooke her moment of stage glory as a murder suspect who turns out to be the fiercest of fitness trainers. And the ensemble number “Gay or European?” — a potentially provocative song that the cast treats with such cheerful absurdity that you can hardly imagine it causing offense — exists alongside a passing reference to Beyoncé, whose singular moves would seem to have inspired the company as a whole.Bowman charms throughout in a casting gamble that pays off. “I had to find my way,” Elle says at the end, and you have to commend a theater culture that has led this performer to this role, even if Bowman, too, has probably had to navigate unpleasantness in the process. As Elle could have told her, determination and talent, happily, can win the day.On another stage in this city, a second, even more time-tested musical is being viewed afresh. “Oklahoma!,” at the Young Vic through June 25, brings to London the startling reappraisal of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic that won a 2019 Tony for best revival. The London iteration is even more impressive than the performance I saw at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein, the production combines several members of the New York company with some welcome newcomers, both American and British, including the Broadway actress Marisha Wallace, who has a riotous time as the libidinous Ado Annie, the good-time gal who famously “cain’t say no.”From left, Greg Hicks, Marisha Wallace and James Davis in “Oklahoma!,” directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein at the Young Vic.Marc BrennerA particular revelation is the English actress-singer Anoushka Lucas as Laurey, the farm girl who catches the eye of both Curly (Arthur Darvill), the swaggering cowboy who opens the show with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” and Jud Fry (a sad-eyed Patrick Vaill), the obsessive, desperately lovesick farmhand. Lucas brings a palpable anxiety to the role that emphasizes an underlying darkness to material we may first think of as buoyant. The story, as ever, relates who will get to take Laurey to the box social, but it exists within a more threatening context than we are used to from so traditionally upbeat a musical theater mainstay. (The jubilant exclamation point of the title isn’t there by accident.)You quickly note the guns in full view on the set, which in turn link up to a climactic act of violence not found in the time-honored plot: The rejiggered ending — not to be revealed here — connects with a United States now as ever in the woeful path of gunfire. The glorious songs are intact (Lucas, in particular, does her numbers proud), but the production is inseparable from the superlative Vaill’s indrawn and wounding presence.If you exit “Legally Blonde” cheered by its giddy finale, this “Oklahoma!,” to its credit, makes you question those worrying recesses of human behavior that are beyond the realm of punctuation.Legally Blonde. Directed by Lucy Moss. Open Air Theater, Regent’s Park, through July 2.Oklahoma! Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein. Young Vic, through June 25. More

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      Kevin Spacey Charged With Sexual Assault in London

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      The actor will appear in a London court on Thursday to start what could be a lengthy trial process over multiple allegations of sexual assault.LONDON — The actor Kevin Spacey was charged with four counts of sexual assault on Monday in London, the city’s police force said in a news release.Mr. Spacey, 62, who was also charged with one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent, is scheduled to appear in court in London on Thursday where he will confirm his identity and that he understands the charges. A date for a full trial has not yet been announced.The offenses, which involve three men, are alleged to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013, the police said in the news release. Mr. Spacey’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The British authorities last month authorized the indictments against Mr. Spacey, which only took effect when Mr. Spacey traveled to England to be formally charged.Mr. Spacey told ABC News’s “Good Morning America” that he denied the charges and would travel to Britain to defend himself. “While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” he said in a statement to the show.The charges detailed in the news release relate to incidents alleged to have taken place in London and in Gloucestershire, England. They date from the time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London, the playhouse he led from 2003 to 2015.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey made unwanted sexual advances toward him at a New York party in 1986, when he was 14 years old.Soon after Mr. Rapp’s allegations appeared in an article published by BuzzFeed, multiple men who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic also accused him of inappropriate behavior. An independent investigation, commissioned by the theater, said that Mr. Spacey’s “stardom and status” might have stopped people from raising accusations when they occurred. The investigators’ report added that they could not independently verify the allegations, and Mr. Spacey did not participate. More

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      Review: Amy Adams in a Too-Fragile ‘Glass Menagerie’

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      In a rare stage outing for the actor, in London, she plays the central character in Tennessee Williams’s play as more of a fusspot than a harridan.LONDON — A treasured figurine isn’t the only thing that gets smashed in “The Glass Menagerie,” the Tennessee Williams play that has brought the film star Amy Adams to London in a rare stage outing. This comparatively muted revival of the 1944 classic opened Tuesday at the Duke of York’s Theater in the British capital and runs through Aug. 27.Williams’s breakout drama chronicles a family’s disintegration. The best productions should leave the audience as shattered as the unicorn that gets toppled from its perch at the play’s devastating climax.And yet my eyes remained pretty much dry, unusually for a play whose most memorable versions pull you into a tortuous family dynamic. This production’s quieter, less urgent approach comes into its own in the second act, but elsewhere, it is too removed from the play’s intensifying sadness.The story is as potent as ever. We look on as the fretful Amanda Wingfield (Adams, speaking in an ace southern accent) runs roughshod over her two children in their cramped St. Louis home. Tom, a budding writer, is trapped in a soul-crushing job at a warehouse, and Laura (Lizzie Annis), his older sister, is an indrawn, self-described “cripple.” The anxious trio are joined for a fateful dinner by Tom’s co-worker, Jim (Victor Alli), the much-anticipated “gentleman caller” who turns out to have been Laura’s longtime schoolgirl crush.Lizzie Annis, as Laura, and Tom Glynn-Carney, as Tom, in “The Glass Menagerie.”Johan PerssonJeremy Herrin, the director, has increased the number of actors to five, casting two men in the role of Tom, Williams’s portrait of himself as a restless young artist.Paul Hilton, a Tony nominee last year for “The Inheritance” on Broadway, plays the older Tom, who looks back remorsefully on the family he could never fully escape. Hilton’s soliloquies bookend the production, and the actor prowls the stage throughout, often peering at his family through a large display case of fragile ornaments that dominates Vicki Mortimer’s bleak set. (Above the action for this “memory play” is a screen on which the video designer Ash J. Woodward projects hazy images that come in and out of focus, as recollections tend to do.)And Tom Glynn-Carney plays the young Tom, forever facing off against the domineering mother who derides her son as a “selfish dreamer.” Worse than that, he commits the cardinal sin of introducing Jim, an outsider who awakens a romantic spark in the lovesick Laura that is quickly dashed: Jim, we learn, has a serious girlfriend in the (unseen) Betty.The sharing of the role, while intriguing in principle, doesn’t add up to much. The two Toms acknowledge one another in passing at the start but seem otherwise to inhabit separate universes: The compact, feisty Glynn-Carney couldn’t be more different, physically and emotively, from the lanky, slightly affected Hilton, who takes a while to settle into his American accent. (Glynn-Carney’s, by contrast, is pitch perfect.)There’s far more power to the candlelit encounter between the shy Laura and the well-meaning Jim, who overreaches in his affections to catastrophic effect. Not long out of drama school, Alli is immediately likable as the “nice, ordinary, young man” — to quote Williams’s description of the character — who exerts an extraordinary hold over Laura. And Annis, who has cerebral palsy and is here making her professional stage debut, prompts a palpable stillness in the theater as Laura seizes up when Jim departs.What of Adams, the name attraction, who last appeared onstage in an alfresco production of the musical “Into the Woods” in New York a decade ago? The six-time Oscar nominee is a far younger Amanda than such recent interpreters of this role as Cherry Jones, Sally Field and Isabelle Huppert, and her softly-spoken demeanor makes for more of a fusspot than the harridan this matriarch can sometimes become.What’s lacking is the gathering sense of fury from Amanda at a lifetime of betrayal and disappointment, though the most frequent projection above the stage is that of the children’s errant father, the “telephone man” who “fell in love with long distances” and quit his family altogether.Adams’s natural appeal makes Amanda’s account of the gentleman callers that once brought her cheer believable, but she, like the production itself, could do with being less subdued. “The Glass Menagerie” may make a plot point of fragility, but the play’s depiction of a family in free fall needs a more robust performance at its center.The Glass MenagerieThrough Aug. 27 at the Duke of York’s Theater, in London. More

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      Kevin Spacey to Face Sexual Assault Charges in Britain

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      The actor said in a statement to “Good Morning America” that he will seek to prove his innocence against the charges.The actor Kevin Spacey said on Tuesday that he will voluntarily travel to Britain to face criminal sexual assault charges, allowing the authorities there to formally charge him without having to pursue extradition proceedings.Last week, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that law enforcement had authorized the charges, of four counts of sexual assault against three men, as well as one charge of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” But Mr. Spacey, 62, cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales.A representative for Mr. Spacey told the ABC News show “Good Morning America” in a statement that he would travel to Britain to defend himself.“While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” the statement said.The charges concern three complainants. The alleged incidents date from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013. During those years, Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment on Tuesday.In his statement, Mr. Spacey also said, “I very much appreciate the Crown Prosecution Service’s statement in which they carefully reminded the media and the public that I am entitled to a fair trial, and innocent until proven otherwise.”The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old. Mr. Spacey is currently defending himself in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Rapp in New York.After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were made public in a BuzzFeed article, 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater, which said last week that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings, commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.” More