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      in Theater

      Is Earlier Better for Theater Start Times?

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      In an effort to entice audiences back after the pandemic, Britain’s National Theater is testing a 6:30 p.m. curtain.At 6:30 p.m. on a recent Thursday, most London theatergoers were still busy at work, or eating a preshow dinner, or maybe waiting at home for a babysitter.Except at the National Theater. There, about 450 theater fans were already in their seats, where the curtain had just gone up on “Till the Stars Come Down,” a dark comedy about a wedding that goes disastrously wrong. That night was the first performance in a six-month trial to see if starting some shows at 6:30 p.m. instead of 7:30 can lure back theatergoers who, since the coronavirus pandemic began, don’t want to stay out late in London anymore.The early performances were “marginally outselling” other midweek shows, said Alex Bayley, the National Theater’s head of marketing. The theater will wait to see the trial results before making the early starts a permanent fixture. In interviews in the bustling foyer before the show, 20 attendees said that they thought the early start was a good idea. Ruth Hendle, 65, an accountant, said that it meant she wouldn’t have to run out at the end to catch the last train home. “I’m too old to be doing that anymore,” she said. Mary Castleden, 68, said that an early finish would mean an easier drive home.The only complaints concerned the lack of time to have dinner first. “I hope they’re not eating food in this play,” said Karim Khan, 29, “otherwise I might get hungry.” (Khan did not get his wish: Soon after the play began, the ensemble cast performed a scene in which they snacked from an overflowing buffet.)In New York, there has been some movement on curtain times, too. Jason Laks, the Broadway League’s general counsel, said that about 10 years ago, an 8 p.m. theater start was sacrosanct. Now, there was “a trend to a 7 p.m. curtain,” he said, although he noted that that shift began before the pandemic.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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      in Theater

      ‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

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      Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)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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      in Television

      ‘The Crown’ Auction Could Help You Live Like a Queen

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      Bonhams is selling hundreds of costumes and props from “The Crown,” including a horse-drawn carriage, robes of state and the queen’s bed.Despite all the scandals and tragedies, the royal lifestyle in “The Crown” looked enviably lavish.During six seasons, Queen Elizabeth II rode around London in a golden carriage, pulled by six horses. Princess Diana gallivanted, and moped, her way across Europe in a succession of designer outfits. For special occasions, the royals donned crowns and ermine robes.For most viewers, watching the show, which ended in December, was the closest they could get to the trappings of royal life.Until now. Sort of.On Feb. 7, the auction house Bonhams is scheduled to offer hundreds of items from “The Crown” in London, including intricate set pieces like a full-size replica of the golden state coach (with an estimated price of up to 50,000 pounds, or $63,000), as well as more affordable props that gave “The Crown” an air of authenticity. Those include two porcelain corgis that appeared on the queen’s writing desk ($380) and the Queen Mother’s drinks tray and champagne swizzle stick ($101).Some items look set to be bargains — relatively speaking. One of Princess Diana’s real dresses sold last year for more than $1 million, and her “revenge dress” — the black evening gown that she wore on the evening that Prince Charles admitted, on national television, to cheating on her — once fetched $74,000. The version of the revenge dress that Elizabeth Debicki wears on “The Crown” has an estimated lot price of $10,000 to $15,000 in the Bonhams sale.In interviews, three members of the show’s costume and set departments discussed some of the auction’s key lots. Below are edited excerpts from the conversations.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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      in Television

      ‘Made in Chelsea’ and the Appeal of Britain’s Posh Young Things

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      For 13 years, the reality show “Made in Chelsea” has taken viewers inside the wealthy London borough. Soon, an Australian spinoff will test if it works elsewhere.In late 2010, on the verge of signing a contract to appear on a new reality TV series about fashionable young people in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, Ollie Locke, then 23, had a moment of hesitation.Locke — with his glossy hair falling past his shoulders, Queen’s English and predilection for wearing designer shirts open to the sternum — worried that he might be depicted as garish, affluent, out of touch with the common man. He voiced his concerns to an executive, Locke recalled in a recent interview, who reassured him by explaining that it was basically out of his control: The show could only make Locke appear that way if he already had those attributes.When “Made in Chelsea” premiered in the spring of 2011, Locke had a starring role among a coterie of chic socialities. The show was a stylized observational documentary in the style of MTV’s “The Hills,” and a consciously upper-class counterpoint to “The Only Way Is Essex.” — “Made in Chelsea” followed Locke and his circle as they navigated the often tumultuous ups and downs of friendships and relationships, all while dining at London’s swankiest restaurants, sipping cocktails at exclusive nightclubs and cheering on polo matches.Ollie Locke, right, in the first series of “Made in Chelsea.” He was initially worried that the show would depict him as garish or out of touch. Channel 4The formula has been an enduring success. “Made in Chelsea” is one of Britain’s longest-running reality TV programs; it has had dozens of seasons over the past 13 years and has ranked among the top unscripted programs on its home channel, E4, every year since its debut, even as it has gently changed with the times.“It’s amazing,” Locke said in a recent video interview from a resort in Barbados, “because we didn’t think it was going to work at the beginning. We thought it would be kind of a funny show that people would laugh at for six months and then move on with their lives.”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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      in Music

      Annie Nightingale, Pathbreaking British D.J., Is Dead at 83

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      She was initially told there was no room for her on BBC Radio 1 because a woman’s voice lacked the authority of a man’s. Once she was on the air, she stayed there for 53 years.Annie Nightingale, who became the first female disc jockey on BBC Radio 1 in 1970 and remained a popular personality there until her final show, late last year, died on Jan. 11 at her home in London. She was 83.Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.“This is the woman who changed the face and sound of British TV and radio broadcasting forever,” Annie Mac, a longtime BBC Radio D.J., wrote on Instagram after Ms. Nightingale’s death.Ms. Nightingale became well known in music circles in the 1960s as a columnist in British newspapers. And she was a familiar face to stars like the Beatles, whom she interviewed at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964.“As Derek Taylor liked her, she was welcome at Apple,” the Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn said in an email, referring to the Beatles’ press officer and the company they founded in 1968.In 1967, she applied to be a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, the pop music outlet that had just been started in reaction to the rise of popular offshore pirate stations.But she found herself up against the station’s sexist hiring policy. She was told that its all-male D.J. lineup represented “husband substitutes” to the housewives who were listening, and that a woman’s voice would lack the authority of a man’s.“It came as a huge shock,” Ms. Nightingale told The Independent in 2015. “I was almost amused. What do you mean, ‘No women’? Why not?”But in October 1969, the BBC offered her an on-air trial. Before her first appearance, she told The Manchester Evening News, “I am sure that a lot of girls would make marvelous D.J.s if given the chance.”Before Ms. Nightingale became a D.J., she had become well known in music circles through her columns in British newspapers.Virginia Turbett/RedfernsShe was hired the next year for a weekday record review program, “What’s New,” and two years later she became a host of an evening progressive-rock show, “Sounds of the 70s.” Later in the decade, she became the host of a Sunday afternoon request show and a music interview program. She hosted a variety of other shows through last year.“From Day One, I chose the records I wanted to play and stuck to it ever since,” she said in her autobiography, “Hey Hi Hello: Five Decades of Pop Culture From Britain’s First Female DJ.” (2020). “I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like lying to me.”Anne Avril Nightingale was born on April 1, 1940, in the Osterley district of London. Her father, Basil, worked in the family’s wallpaper business. Her mother, Celia, was a foot doctor. As a girl, Anne listened to children’s programs on her father’s radio and came to love that it could tune in to distant cities.“I still feel when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know where it’s going and it could be reaching outer space somewhere, and I am still in love with that, completely,” she said in an interview in 2018.After graduating from the Lady Eleanor Holles School, she studied journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London. She began her journalism career soon after, first as a reporter for The Brighton and Hove Gazette and then at The Argus, in Brighton, where she wrote a music column called Spin With Me. She later wrote a music column for a national tabloid, The Daily Sketch.In 1964, she collaborated with the pop group the Hollies on a book, “How to Run a Beat Group.”She found a measure of television fame on BBC’s “Juke Box Jury,” where she was part of a guest panel that reviewed new record releases, and as the host of “That’s For Me,” a record request program on ITV, and the Rediffusion network’s quiz show, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” both in 1965.But she was best known for her time at BBC Radio 1, which began with some rocky moments because of her inexperience — like the time there was eight seconds of dead airtime when she accidentally pressed an “off” switch while a record was playing.“What I found difficult in those early days was being bad technically,” she told The Western Daily Press of Bristol in 1979. “Every time I made a mistake I thought they’d all say, ‘Oh yes, woman driver!’”She remained the only female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 — the “token woman,” she said — for 12 years. In 2010, when she was more than halfway through her 41st year there, Guinness World Records cited her for having had the longest career ever for a female D.J. (That record has since been surpassed twice, by the Peruvian broadcaster Maruja Venegas Salinas and Mary McCoy, a D.J. in Texas.)“It was not until the 1990s and the ‘girlification’ of Radio 1 with the likes of Sara Cox, Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball that Nightingale’s exceptionality became her longevity and impact rather than her gender alone,” Lucy Robinson, a professor at the University of Sussex, and Dr. Jeannine Baker, who at the time was with Macquarie University, wrote on the BBC website.Ms. Nightingale’s success went beyond radio. In 1978, she was named a host of BBC’s live music television show “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” where she focused on new wave music.After John Lennon was killed on Dec. 8, 1980, Ms. Nightingale and members of the “Whistle Test” staff were trying to round up people to talk about him. During the program, a producer appeared in the studio and told Ms. Nightingale, “Paul’s on the phone and he wants to speak to you.”“I had no idea who he meant,” she recalled on the podcast “I Am the Eggpod” in 2018. It was Paul McCartney.Ms. Nightingale in 2015. Throughout her career she championed new music, from progressive rock to acid house and grime.Graham Prentice/Alamy“He wanted to say thank you on behalf of Linda and himself and Yoko and George and Ringo,” she said. “And that’s what really got me.” She added: “I got back in front of the camera and it’s live and I thought right, right, you’re the messenger. And he said, ‘You know how it was.’”Ms. Nightingale’s survivors include a son, Alex, and a daughter, Lucy, whose name was inspired partly by the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Her marriages to Gordon Thomas, a writer, and Binky Baker, an actor, ended in divorce.Throughout her career, Ms. Nightingale championed new music — from progressive rock to acid house to grime.She described her visceral connection to new music when she was interviewed in 2020 on the popular BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”“It’s a thrill, it’s absolutely so exciting,” she said. “I actually get a physical sensation. I get shivers up and down my legs when I hear something that becomes very successful.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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      Christopher Nolan’s movie received 13 nods, and will compete for best picture against the likes of “Killers of The Flower Moon” and “Poor Things,” but not “Barbie.”“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s movie about the development of the atomic bomb, on Thursday received the highest number of nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.The film secured 13 nods for Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including for best film, where it is up against four other titles including “Killers of The Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s sexually-charged take on a Frankenstein story starring Emma Stone. “Poor Things” followed “Oppenheimer” with 11 nominations overall.The other titles nominated for best film are “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner about a woman accused of murdering her husband, and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s tale of a boarding school teacher who has to look after students during the holidays.The nominations for “Oppenheimer” come just days after the movie won three of the major awards at this year’s Golden Globes, and will be seen by many as further boosting its chances at this year’s Oscars; the BAFTA and Oscar voting bodies overlap. This year’s Oscar nominations are scheduled to be announced on Tuesday.Although “Oppenheimer” secured the most nominations, the highest profile categories featured a variety of movies. In the best director category, Nolan, Triet and Payne were nominated alongside Bradley Cooper for “Maestro,” his biopic of Leonard Bernstein; Jonathan Glazer for “The Zone of Interest,” a movie about day-to-day life at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust; and Andrew Haigh for “All of Us Strangers,” an acclaimed British film about a lonely gay writer.Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in “All of Us Strangers,” directed by Andrew Haigh.Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster about the doll going on a journey of self-discovery, was not nominated in the best movie or best director categories, but Margot Robbie, its star, secured a nomination for best lead actress. Robbie will compete for that prize alongside the stars of other high-profile movies including Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), Carey Mulligan (“Maestro”) and Fantasia Barrino (“The Color Purple”). Sandra Hüller was also nominated for “Anatomy of a Fall,” as was Vivian Oparah for her role in the British rom-com “Rye Lane,” set in a diverse part of south London.Lily Gladstone, who earlier this month became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress for her performance in “Killers of The Flower Moon,” was not nominated for a BAFTA.Leonardo DiCaprio, Gladstone’s co-star, was also snubbed in the best actor category. That category’s nominees instead included Cillian Murphy for “Oppenheimer,” Cooper for “Maestro” and Barry Keoghan for “Saltburn.” They will compete against Paul Giamatti for his lead role in “The Holdovers,” Colman Domingo for “Rustin” and Teo Yoo for “Past Lives,” Celine Song’s wistful movie about two childhood friends who keep reuniting in later life.In 2020, the BAFTAs’ organizers overhauled the awards’ nomination processes in an attempt to improve the diversity of nominees. The changes included assigning voters 15 movies to watch each before making their selections. Sara Putt, the chair of BAFTA, said in an interview that the inclusion of Oparah among the leading actress nominees showed that the changes were helping to highlight smaller films, but she added that there was “still more to do” to increase diversity in the industry.The winners of this year’s BAFTAs are scheduled to be announced on Feb. 18 in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London, hosted by David Tennant. The ceremony will be broadcast on BritBox in the United States. More

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      in Music

      Sinead O’Connor Died of Natural Causes, Coroner Says

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      The Irish singer-songwriter, known for her powerful, evocative voice, died at 56 at a residence in London in July.A London coroner’s office said Tuesday that the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor died from natural causes.Ms. O’Connor, 56, was found dead at a residential property in London in July. Shortly afterward, the local coroner announced they would conduct an autopsy of her body. In a brief statement on Tuesday, the coroner said that “Ms. O’Connor died of natural causes.” The coroner said they had “therefore ceased their involvement in her death.” No further details were given about the cause of death.Best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Ms. O’Connor became a global star in the 1990s — not just for her music, but for her political provocations, on- and offstage. Most memorably, Ms. O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II during a 1992 “Saturday Night Live” performance to protest child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.In an appraisal of Ms. O’Connor’s career for The New York Times, the pop critic Jon Caramanica said the singer “was something grander than a simple pop star.”She “was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness,” Mr. Caramanica wrote. “She was also a singer of ferocious gifts,” he added. More

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      in Theater

      National Theater, Source of Broadway Hits, Gets Its First Female Leader

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      Indhu Rubasingham will lead the venerable London institution where plays including “War Horse” and “The Lehman Trilogy” originated.Since the National Theater opened in London in 1963, its artistic directors have been among the greats of British theater: Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Rufus Norris. They also had two other things in common. All six are white men.On Wednesday, the theater brought that era to an end when it announced the appointment of Indhu Rubasingham to the top position. She will be the first woman and person of color to lead the National Theater.Rubasingham, 53, will join next spring, the theater said in a news release. She will work for a year alongside Norris, who is departing, before taking sole charge in spring 2025, when she will also share the role of chief executive with Kate Varah, the theater’s current executive director. That sharing of responsibilities is a change for the theater, where Norris currently holds both roles.With three theaters in its building alongside the River Thames, the National, as it is known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year, and has almost 900 full-time employees. Critics and theatergoers expect it to produce the best new shows and revivals in London, while also staging work that comments on the state of the nation. On top of that, it is tasked with incubating new talent, mounting touring productions across Britain and running an extensive education program.Rubasingham will have to do all of that in the face of a shrinking budget and soaring inflation. Many theaters in Britain, including the National, receive annual government grants meant to cover about a fifth of their operating costs, but the amount of those subsidies is declining. Last year, Arts Council England, the funding body, slashed the National’s subsidy by 5 percent, to 16.1 million pounds (about $20 million), as part of a drive to reallocate grants to institutions outside London.Beginning in fall 2024, the National will face further budgetary pressure when it has to start repaying a loan worth about $25 million. Britain’s government lent the theater the money during the coronavirus pandemic to help the shuttered institution shore up its finances.Rubasingham will be expected to produce money-spinning transfers to both the West End and Broadway. Over the past decade or so, the National’s transfers to New York have included “War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” Next year, it is sending “The Effect,” a recent hit, to The Shed.The National, as it is often known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt the much smaller London playhouse that she currently leads, the Kiln, Rubasingham has directed several hits that have found their way to New York, including “Red Velvet,” about the experiences of an African American actor in 19th-century London, which played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2014, and Zadie Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her programming at the theater, which changed its name from the Tricycle to the Kiln under her leadership, included acclaimed shows like “The Father,” “The Mother” and “The Son” from Florian Zeller’s trilogy, and works by emerging playwrights.Her time at that theater has not been without controversy.When Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, Rubasingham announced that the theater would no longer host some screenings for the U.K. Jewish Film Festival if it continued to accept funding from the Israeli government. The ultimatum caused a minor furor, and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle called the Tricycle “officially antisemitic” on social media. (The screenings went ahead at other venues.)A spokeswoman for the National Theater said that Rubasingham was unavailable for an interview, and the theater had no comment about the incident.The rebranding of the Tricycle in 2018, so that it became the Kiln, also caused a fuss, and many critics were mystified by the name change.Born in the northern English city of Sheffield to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, Rubasingham has said in interviews that as a teenager she expected to become a doctor until she accepted a work experience placement at the Nottingham Playhouse, a regional theater. She studied drama at Hull University and then worked as a trainee director at the Theater Royal Stratford East in London, where she worked with Mike Leigh, the movie director.Even with a lengthy track record at the Kiln, the National appointment is a huge step up. Clint Dyer, the National Theater’s deputy artistic director, outlined the challenges of running the organization in a recent interview with the Times of London. Whoever got the top job, he said, needed to have the “experience, understanding, empathy, desire” and “forward thinking” required to run any major arts institution, but also “the knowledge of the canon, of new playwriting and the ability to speak to donors, to government, to people like me.”“It’s a herculean task,” Dyer said. More