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      Under Pressure, English National Opera Will Move to Manchester

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      Urged to develop a new model by Arts Council England, the opera company will move its base out of London, but it still plans to present opera there.For decades, English National Opera, the acclaimed British opera company, has made its home in London. There, it has drawn audiences, nurtured singers and developed a host of major productions, many of which have traveled the world.But facing financial woes — and pressure from Arts Council England, which cut off its vital government subsidy last year and urged it to develop “a new business model” that might include a move away from London — English National Opera announced on Tuesday that it would move its main base about 200 miles north to Manchester by 2029.The company said in a news release that it would still present a “substantial opera season” at the London Coliseum, its home since 1968, which it owns and operates. But it will now work to develop new audiences and programs in Manchester.Jenny Mollica, interim chief executive of English National Opera, said the company and Manchester shared a vision of working to “open up new possibilities for opera in people’s lives.”“We look forward to embarking on new adventures with partners, artists and audiences across Greater Manchester as we create a range of operatic repertoire at a local, national and international scale,” she said in a statement.English National Opera has been in a state of flux since Arts Council England announced last year that it was shutting off its grant to the company, which was worth 12.4 million pounds a year, or about $15.6 million. The Arts Council instead gave it one-time grant to help it develop a new model, possibly away from London.At the time, English National Opera’s leaders, as well as many artists and audience members, voiced opposition to the idea of relocating the company, which traces its roots to 1931, when Lilian Baylis, a theater owner, established the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company to bring the art form to a wider audience. In 1945 the company gave the premiere of the groundbreaking Benjamin Britten opera “Peter Grimes.” The company found a way to serve audiences, even while competing with the bigger Royal Opera.The move out of London was resisted by many. Stuart Murphy, who served as English National Opera’s chief executive until the end of August, initially described the plan as “absurd” and “insane,” the BBC reported last year.The uproar soured relations with officials in Manchester, which made the short list for the company’s new base, along with Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham. It revived debate about whether smaller cities could support a major opera company.Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said last year that English National Opera was not welcome if the company was having doubts.“If they think we are all heathens here, that nobody would go, I’m afraid it doesn’t understand us and therefore it doesn’t deserve to come here,” Burnham was quoted as saying in a report in The Guardian.But the company and Manchester eventually found a path forward. Burnham on Tuesday described English National Opera as “one of the most exciting cultural institutions in the country.”“We’re immensely proud to be able to bring them to a new home here,” he said in a statement. “Greater Manchester’s world-renowned history of radical art, activism and affecting change, and the cultural renaissance taking place across our towns and cities, makes it the ideal home.”English National Opera has long played an important role in the global opera industry. After the cuts by the Arts Council were announced last year, dozens of leading cultural figures — including Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, and Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera — signed a letter to The Times of London, warning of a wider impact.The company has faced leadership churn in recent years. In October, Martyn Brabbins, English National Opera’s music director since 2016, resigned suddenly. He said that he could not “in all conscience continue to support the board and management’s strategy for the future of the company,” including cuts to the orchestra and chorus. More

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      Joss Ackland, Busy, Versatile Actor on Stage and Screen, Dies at 95

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      He was a villain in “Lethal Weapon 2,” C.S. Lewis on TV in “Shadowlands” and Falstaff onstage in “Henry IV” — and had a cameo in a Pet Shop Boys video.Joss Ackland, a self-described workaholic actor who appeared in more than 130 movies, TV shows and radio programs, most notably — for American audiences, at least — as a villainous South African diplomat in “Lethal Weapon 2,” died on Sunday at his home in Clovelly, a village in southwestern England. He was 95.His agent, Paul Pearson, confirmed the death.He was a renowned character actor onscreen, having held memorable supporting roles in movies like the Cold War thriller “The Hunt for Red October” (1990) and the hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks” (1992). He also earned a British Academy Film Awards nomination for “White Mischief” (1987), a drama set in colonial Kenya. But Mr. Ackland’s true home was the London stage.He was among the actors who provided the firm foundation of English theater during the postwar years, ranking alongside Ian Holm, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. Many in that generation, like Mr. Ackland, later found success in Hollywood.A bear of a man with a gravelly voice and a gregarious, opinionated presence onstage and off, Mr. Ackland was prolific and versatile. He played Falstaff, Shakespeare’s great comic character in “Henry IV, Part 1” and Henry IV, Part 2”; the writer C.S. Lewis in the British TV version of “Shadowlands”; and Juan Perón in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Evita” (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.“I don’t think I’ve made any role my own,” he told The Evening Standard in 2006. “My quality is variation. I’m a hit- and-run actor. I get to do a lot of villains, but that’s because I’m English.”Mr. Ackland was Juan Perón in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Evita” (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.Donald Cooper/AlamyMr. Ackland could be self-disparaging about his willingness to take work wherever it became available, a predilection driven less by money than a need to be constantly on the move.He came to regret many of his nontheatrical roles, like those in the comedy “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991) and a meaty cameo in the video for the song “Always on My Mind” by the English pop band the Pet Shop Boys.“I do an awful lot of crap, but if it’s not immoral, I don’t mind,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “I’m a workaholic. Sometimes it’s a form of masochism.”He was even ambivalent about his role in “Lethal Weapon 2” (1989) as Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover).Rudd, a consul-general dealing drugs on the side, gets away with murder by claiming diplomatic immunity, even at the point where he appears to kill Riggs — just before Murtaugh shoots him in the head.“It’s just been revoked,” Murtaugh says, a punchline that became a catchphrase of the late 1980s, much to Mr. Ackland’s chagrin.“Not a day goes by without someone across the street going ‘diplomatic immunity,’” he said in a BBC interview in 2013. “It drives you up the wall.”Mr. Ackland as the “Lethal Weapon 2” villain Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives.Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamySidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born on Feb. 29, 1928 — a leap day — in the North Kensington neighborhood of London. His father, Sydney Ackland, was a journalist from Ireland whose serial philandering kept him largely out of his son’s life, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Ruth Izod, a maid.He gravitated to acting as a child, inspired, he later said, by the mysterious smoke and fog of Depression-era London.“To be in the fog was to be in an adventure where the imagination could stretch itself, allowing me to be anywhere in the world,” he told The Independent in 1997. “Houses and streets would disappear, and a lamppost would faintly emerge from the gloom and become a pirate ship.”He attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, paying his way by cleaning barracks for U.S. Army troops stationed there during World War II. He graduated in 1945, the same year he started acting professionally.Mr. Ackland spent decades performing in repertory and small-town theater. In 1951, he traveled to Pitlochry, a small town in the Scottish Highlands, to appear in J.M. Barrie’s play “Mary Rose.” Among his fellow actors was Rosemary Kirkcaldy.Though she was engaged at the time, the two fell in love and married later that year.With a growing family — the couple eventually had seven children — Mr. Ackland despaired of making a career in acting. In 1955, he and his wife, with two infants in tow, moved to East Africa, where he spent six months running a tea plantation in Malawi.But the stage beckoned, and they spent two years in South Africa picking up acting work. The country’s intrusive apartheid regime disgusted them; at one point the police raided their home looking for subversive material and left with a copy of the novel “Black Beauty,” the tale of a horse by Anna Sewell, which investigators thought might be anti-apartheid.After returning to Britain, the couple restarted their careers, even as their family was growing rapidly.One evening in 1963, when Mr. Ackland was performing as the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” a fire broke out in their London home. Ms. Kirkcaldy, pregnant with their sixth child, managed to get the other five out of the house but broke her back when she leaped from an upper floor.Doctors said that she would miscarry and never walk again; instead, she delivered a healthy child and was on her feet again within 18 months.Ms. Kirkcaldy was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 1999 and died in 2002. Mr. Ackland is survived by his daughters Sammy Greene, Penny Macdougall, Kirsty Baring, Melanie Ackland and Toni Ackland; his son Toby; 32 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Paul, died in 1982.Mr. Ackland in the role of King George V of Britain in a London stage production of “The King’s Speech” in 2012. Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAfter his wife’s death, Mr. Ackland developed stage fright and stayed away from theater for 12 years, he said. During that time, he edited her diaries, a project she had encouraged him to pursue, and published them in 2009 as “My Better Half and Me: A Love Affair That Lasted Fifty Years.”He returned to the theater in 2012 to play King George V in David Seidler’s play “The King’s Speech” (later adapted as a movie). By then, he had soured on the turns that his profession had taken toward instant stardom and pyrotechnic productions.“They give them all these car chases, the villain dying twice, and they play down to the audience,” Mr. Ackland told Strand magazine in 2002. “But I believe you should never give people what they want. Give them something a little more than what they want and that way they grow up.” More

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      West End Theatergoers Grumble as Prices for the Best Seats Surge

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      Concern is growing that a night at the theater in London is becoming unaffordable, especially when a production has starry names, like Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear.”When hundreds of playgoers lined up outside Wyndham’s Theater in London this week, the mood was excited. They had come to see Kenneth Branagh, the revered Shakespearean actor, directing and playing the title role in “King Lear.”But some were still thinking about the price they’d paid to be there.Alan Hooper, 75, a retired teacher, said that, at the box office that morning, he was offered a seat in the first balcony for 200 pounds, around $240, or a standing place for a fraction of the cost. He chose to stand for the show’s two-hour run time. West End prices, Hooper said, were “out of control.”Another audience member, George Butler, 28, said that he was overjoyed to have secured two tickets for 20 pounds, or about $24, each, even if they were in the nosebleeds. “Theater is becoming very elitist,” Butler said. “The minute there’s a well known person in a play, it’s unaffordable.”London’s theater world is increasingly simmering with complaints over soaring ticket prices, and a perception that they are creeping closer to Broadway levels. Even as producers insist that a fraction of tickets must be sold at steep prices to offset cheap seats for low earners, concern is growing that a night at the theater is becoming an unaffordable luxury.The West End’s own stars are fueling the fuss. In April, Derek Jacobi, the veteran actor, told The Guardian newspaper that potential theatergoers were now having to think “more than twice” about attending shows. A few months later, David Tennant stirred debate when he told a Radio Times podcast that rising prices were “strangling the next generation of an audience coming through.”Leicester Square in London’s West End. British actors have spoken out about soaring ticket costs, noting that the prohibitive expense was limiting theater’s reach.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesThis fall, theater message boards and social media erupted in indignation when tickets for a production of “Plaza Suite,” starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, went on sale with a top price of £395, around $477 — a level rarely heard of in London.Yet it was unclear whether these few high-profile cases reflected a wider problem. Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage, a British theater newspaper, said it was difficult to analyze whether ticket prices were increasing across the board, because producers release so little sales data.To fill the gap, his newspaper annually surveys the cheapest and most expensive tickets across the West End. This year’s results, Smith said, showed that the average price for tickets in the most expensive price group was £141, or about $170 (a decade ago, the figure was a much lower £81). This year’s average was still “a long, long way behind Broadway,” he said, adding that the cost of the priciest tickets had barely changed since 2022, despite soaring household costs.However, Smith added, the average price of the least expensive tickets had risen by more than inflation to £25, or $30. “It would be a concern if that trend continues,” he said.For many West End producers, the perception of a price hike is a source of growing frustration. Patrick Gracey, a producer who sits on the board of the Society of London Theater, said that the news media published articles about high ticket prices because it “gets clicks.” Those stories were “misleading audiences about the availability of affordable tickets,” he said.Last year, Gracey said, theatergoers paid an average £54, or about $66, to see a West End show. (The average price on Broadway last week was double that at $125, according to data from The Broadway League.)Producers were facing soaring costs, Gracey added. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some theaters saw their energy costs spike as much as 500 percent, and there were similar jumps in set-building material prices. Last year, West End actors and technical staff secured a pay deal that saw their wages rise, too.The average West End theater ticket price in 2022 was about $66: high, but considerably less expensive than Broadway tickets.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesEven with those pressures, Gracey said producers were working to keep theater accessible and were offering cheap tickets for those who couldn’t splurge. “It’s only possible to offer those tickets because some people are paying top price,” he said.The producers of “King Lear” said in an emailed statement that they were offering 150 tickets per performance at £20 — equivalent to 19 percent of the house. Those included 17 in the front row, with the rest in the back rows of the theater’s three tiers.The problem was with audience perception, said Nick Hytner, a co-founder of the Bridge Theater. Producers needed to develop “a compelling counternarrative” that theater was affordable or else young people would decide that the art form wasn’t for them. Discounting the worst seats at the back of cramped Victorian theaters didn’t cut it, he said, adding that theaters need to develop more innovative approaches to pricing.Some theatergoers have justified the price of tickets for a once in a lifetime experience of seeing actors like Branagh onstage.Jane Stockdale for The New York TimesOne West End show that is trying something new is “Operation Mincemeat,” a musical set in World War II. At every performance, all the seats in the house cost the same price, but that amount rises gradually throughout the week, from £39.50 on Mondays to £89.50 on weekends. Jon Thoday, the managing director of Avalon, the show’s producer, said that the production lost money on Mondays, but added that the pricing strategy was good for the musical’s long term future because it brought in a younger audience.“There will always be a fuss about ticket prices, unless others change,” Thoday said.At “King Lear” earlier this week, theatergoers weren’t complaining about Branagh’s show, at least. Marshall Shaffer, 31, a movie journalist visiting from New York, said he had paid $403 for two tickets. “I did not think that was necessarily a bargain,” he said, “but Branagh’s probably the premiere Shakespeare interpreter of his time, and I think it’s worthwhile.”Another audience member, Penny Smith, joked that she’d had to “sell a child” to buy her ticket, but said she was happy to pay to see Branagh. Plus, she said with a laugh, the tickets were “a darn sight cheaper than New York. Have you seen the prices there?” More

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      in Movies

      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      ‘Lyonesse,’ With Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, Is a Starry Mess

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      In London, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas do their best in a new play that careers between near-slapstick one minute and speechifying the next.“We dream big,” says a no-nonsense film executive early in “Lyonesse,” the starry, if overstuffed, new play that opened Wednesday night at the Harold Pinter Theater, in London. And so, too, does this West End debut from Penelope Skinner, a British playwright whose works have long enlivened small theaters on both sides of the Atlantic.The themes arrive thick and fast across nearly three hours: #MeToo, cancel culture, the tyranny of men and many others. But not even Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, the production’s commercial draws, can transform the scattershot material into a coherent whole.It takes courage to open a new play in the West End without a previous run somewhere else, but “Lyonesse” whimpers where it should roar. You emerge less enlightened than bewildered at the inability of so much talent — including the show’s usually excellent director, Ian Rickson — to come up with something better.James shoulders the bulk of the narrative, playing Kate, an eager-beaver movie exec whose habit of continually apologizing doesn’t inspire confidence in her judgment.Her boss, Sue (Doon Mackichan), nonetheless has enough faith in Kate to send her on a mission to Cornwall, southern England, where she meets Elaine (Scott Thomas), an actress who has emerged from a decades-long hibernation and wants to tell her story on film.Doon Mackichan plays Sue, Kate’s boss, who sends Kate to Cornwall to work on a film project about a long-forgotten actress.Manuel HarlanThe women’s first encounter isn’t especially auspicious, though Elaine’s entrance certainly catches the eye. Waddling onstage in Wellington boots, a swimming cap and a fur coat worn over a swimsuit, she suggests an English seaside equivalent to Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” She also comes bearing an ax that she’s been using to chop up furniture, and you feel from her bizarre behavior that she could put it to other uses, as well.“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine announces with a flourish, and at first, you think she will send Kate packing, frustrated by this new arrival’s flightiness and her inability to light a fire. Instead, the two bond over a shared desire to take ownership of their lives. Elaine is reckoning with the fallout of a brutal relationship with a now-dead film director, just as Kate, a generation younger, chafes at the control exerted by her own film director husband, Greg (James Corrigan, in the play’s lone male role).Freed from her own difficult relationship, Elaine encourages the impressionable Kate to leave Greg and start afresh. But any hope of a clean break is dashed when Sue suggests that he be hired to direct the film of Elaine’s life.Keeping an eye on these complications, and others, is Elaine’s calm neighbor and friend, Chris (Sara Powell, first-rate), a poet who develops feelings for Kate that aren’t reciprocated.Sara Powell as Chris, Elaine’s neighbor.Manuel HarlanAnd yet the play’s tone is so wayward — near-slapstick one minute, speechifying on societal ills the next — that any focus is lost. Skinner writes tremendous parts for women, as her earlier plays “Linda” and “The Village Bike” have shown. But the principal performers in “Lyonesse” are sufficiently confounded by the gear shifts in the writing that you start to look toward the gentler presence of Chris for respite. The playwright is clearly drawn to this secondary character, too, and Chris ends the play onstage alone.The likable James has an animated stage presence, but it’s hard to believe that a serious company would employ such a flibbertigibbet. Chattiness in both life and art can grate, and so it proves here.Scott Thomas looks fantastic as the willfully daffy Elaine. And as a onetime film star herself, who has enjoyed a renewed career onstage, she may understand Elaine’s desire, however misguided, to put herself in the public eye once more. The role couldn’t be further from the cool, cryptic women Scott Thomas often plays, so is a welcome change of pace.But the fact remains that the character of Elaine never rings true: She’s an amalgamation of eccentricities, most of which feel borrowed from elsewhere. For her big set piece, Scott Thomas careers about the living room of Lyonesse, her decaying house, in a wig, recounting the details of Elaine’s bruised and bruising life.But when she later poses the question, “What if I’m no longer spellbinding?,” it feels like time for the character, and the play, to face facts.LyonesseThrough Dec. 23 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London; lyonesseonstage.com. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger is Captivating in ‘Sunset Boulevard’

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      A stripped-back revival in London, directed by Jamie Lloyd, brings the classic musical into the present day, and gives Scherzinger a career-defining performance.The 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard” is about a former screen star’s descent into madness. So it seems appropriate that its bravura new West End revival should, in creative terms, itself be a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.The production, starring the singer Nicole Scherzinger in a career-defining performance, opened Thursday at the Savoy Theater and runs through Jan. 6, 2024. I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season.For that, credit the maverick director Jamie Lloyd, whose tightly focused, stripped-back aesthetic is on full view here. Purists may balk at a “Sunset Boulevard” without the visual splendor of Norma Desmond’s baroque Hollywood palazzo, as we have previously seen onstage and in the original 1950 feature film.But Lloyd’s streamlined approach has a power of its own. The cast as often as not wear contemporary street clothes — or sometimes not much at all — and rather than Norma preening in a turban and flowing garments, Scherzinger prowls the stage, barefoot and feline in a black slip. (Scherzinger’s sole previous London stage credit was Grizabella in a perfunctory 2014 revival of “Cats.”)Scherzinger finds a predatory allure in the character that is both captivating and chilling, and it is easy to see why the hapless young screenwriter Joe Gillis (an excellent Tom Francis) succumbs to Norma’s entreaties to help craft a screen comeback as Salome.Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) is the young screenwriter wooed by Scherzinger’s Norma.Marc BrennerOnce she has Joe in her grip and resident in her home, Norma can go in for the (literal) kill: a bloodstained finale of which Salome herself would approve. Keeping watchful eye on the pair are Joe’s girlfriend Betty (the sweet-faced Grace Hodgett Young) and Norma’s butler and ex-husband Max, whom the firm-voiced David Thaxton plays with a glowering mien that, you feel, the character learned from his former wife.The vocals throughout are impressive, and the lyrics’ cynical musings on Hollywood (“This stinking town”) are lushly served by the musical director Alan Williams’s orchestra. In keeping with the somber mood, more frivolous songs like “The Lady’s Paying” have been cut.Scherzinger nails Norma’s two showstoppers — one in each act — shedding sunglasses as she lifts the defiant “With One Look” to the rafters and beyond. That number’s second-act equivalent, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” sung during a deluded Norma’s return to Paramount Pictures, begins plaintively, even tenderly, before building to a mighty roar. Scherzinger extends her long, sinuous arms in the direction of the audience like talons toward prey.The musical’s London premiere in 1993, and subsequent runs in Los Angeles and New York, were notable for a parade of Normas (Patti LuPone, Glenn Close and Betty Buckley, among them) and for a levitating set from the designer John Napier that was a remarkable engineering feat. Here, a different technology is at play, one suited to the Instagram era, in which everyone is always on show.Hand-held cameras spotlight characters at key moments, their faces projected on a huge screen that broadcasts every emotion (and facial pore). On Soutra Gilmour’s largely bare set, brilliantly lit by Jack Knowles, Scherzinger’s Norma is already impressive. But her image projected above us amplifies her sense of feral grandeur.The production includes handheld cameras that follow key characters around, and off, the stage.Marc BrennerNorma — who was 50 in Billy Wilder’s classic film — is now said to be 40, and was in her prime at 17. Showbiz discards personalities even earlier now, and Scherzinger, 45, who first came to prominence in the 2000s girl group the Pussycat Dolls, has a shivery command over a part that requires her to plunge headfirst into a psychic abyss.The restless cameras also zoom in on Joe, who is followed backstage and out the theater by a live feed as he sings the show’s sardonic title number before returning center-stage in precisely calibrated time for the resounding final note. Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s video design pulls off a real coup with this sequence, though followers of the Belgian director Ivo van Hove will recognize the technique of folding celluloid into the theater.The prevailing intensity extends to the choreographer Fabian Aloise’s tightly drilled ensemble, which suggests a writhing, restless mass of Hollywood wannabes. And Aloise is gifted, in Scherzinger, with a rare Norma who can really dance, and who joins Joe for some sizzling two-steps — even, at one point, doing the splits.There’s fun to be had amid the show’s atmosphere of fury. As the cameras roam backstage, we briefly glimpse a life-size cutout of Lloyd Webber, and a shot of Gloria Swanson, the film’s Norma, playing on TV. The Noël Coward song title “Mad about the boy” is written in lipstick on a mirror in Scherzinger’s dressing room — which is one way of describing our heroine.But for all its nods to the past, this “Sunset Boulevard” belongs to the here and now. There’s not a whiff of nostalgia to the production, which takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day.Sunset BoulevardThrough Jan. 6 at the Savoy Theater in London; thesavoytheatre.com More

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      in Television

      Russell Brand Denies Accusations of ‘Egregious’ Sexual Assaults

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      Three British media outlets published an investigation in which four women accused him of sexual assault in a series of incidents between 2006 and 2013.The comedian Russell Brand denied “serious criminal allegations” against him in a video he posted shortly before three British news organizations published an investigation Saturday in which four women accused him of sexual assault.The investigation was a collaboration by The Sunday Times and The Times of London newspapers, and Channel 4 Dispatches, a television program that broadcast a documentary about the allegations on Saturday. They reported that the women had accused him of sexual assault in a series of incidents between 2006 and 2013.Mr. Brand, an actor and former TV host who has more recently built a significant following on his YouTube channel, where he often opines on wellness and interviews prominent conservative figures, released a short video on social media on Friday in which he said he had received notes from media organizations listing “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.”“Amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute,” Mr. Brand said in the video, going on to say that while he has spoken previously about a “time of promiscuity” in his life, the encounters during that time were “always consensual.”His literary agency, Tavistock Wood, announced this weekend that it had cut ties with him, saying in a statement that it believed it had been “horribly misled” by him when he denied an allegation in 2020.The allegations were published as the comedian, 48, was on a short stand-up tour. At a show in northwest London on Saturday night, he opened the evening with an oblique reference to the accusations.“I’ve got a lot of things to talk to you about,” he said, according to news media reports. “There are obviously some things that I absolutely cannot talk about and I appreciate that you will understand.”In the investigation, one woman accused Mr. Brand of raping her against a wall in his Los Angeles home in 2012. The news organizations said that the woman had provided medical records confirming that she had been treated at a rape crisis center. Another woman accused him of forcing her to perform oral sex on him when she was 16, despite her pushing him away.In his video, Mr. Brand did not address the specifics of the accusations by the four women, three of whom were not identified in the reports. He said there were “witnesses whose evidence directly contradicts the narratives” that had been put forward to him by the news organizations, but according to the article, a lawyer for Mr. Brand did not respond to an inquiry about providing such evidence. A legal representative The New York Times contacted on Sunday did not respond to a request for comment on the specific allegations in the investigation.Known for raunchy, boundary-pushing humor that has gotten him in trouble at times, Mr. Brand’s fame grew in Britain in the 2000s with a one-man show about his heroin addiction, and then as a BBC radio and Channel 4 reality television host. He broke into American pop culture with a prominent role in the rom-com “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” in 2008 and a remake of “Arthur” in 2011, and was briefly married to the pop star Katy Perry.The investigation reported on Saturday also included complaints about Brand’s workplace behavior, including from unnamed production workers from Channel 4. They said that Brand would ask staff members to approach female audience members so he could arrange to meet them after filming, according to the reports.Channel 4 and BBC have said in statements that they are investigating allegations against Brand from the periods when he worked at their companies.The Metropolitan Police in London released a statement in response to the article saying that the department had been in touch with the journalists behind the story, and it encouraged any victims of sexual assault to report it to them.Brand did not address the workplace complaints in his video.Mr. Brand’s commentary on his YouTube channel, which has 6.6 million followers, tends to revolve around health, spirituality, so-called woke culture and free speech, and his guests have included Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Tucker Carlson and the conservative commentator Candace Owens. In his video on Friday, he accused the “mainstream media” of launching what he called a “coordinated attack” against him. Elon Musk responded to Mr. Brand’s post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, writing: “Of course. They don’t like competition.”Mr. Brand has spoken about and written extensively about battling addictions to drugs, alcohol and sex, writing in his memoir that he was treated for a sex addiction in 2005.Alex Marshall More

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      The Belarus Free Theater Is Also a Support Network for Exiles

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      The leaders of the Belarus Free Theater, who fled the country more than a decade ago, are helping more recent refugees to rebuild their lives while putting on a new show.When the two founders of the renowned Belarus Free Theater claimed political asylum in Britain in 2011, they found themselves homeless, with few possessions and facing a bureaucratic labyrinth before they could work.It was only with help from British theater makers that the pair found places to stay and were able to restart their company from exile, using Skype to conduct rehearsals with actors in Minsk, Belarus’s capital.Twelve years later, the company’s founders, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, are using that experience to help other artists fleeing political repression.Belarus — an East European country of about nine million people that borders both Russia and Ukraine — has been ruled since 1994 by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a dictator and ally to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Belarus Free Theater’s political productions have often criticized Lukashenko’s authoritarian leadership and its troupe was long at risk of arrest. But as repression increased, the company decided it was no longer feasible for its other members to remain in Minsk. In 2021, they also fled to avoid long jail terms. Since then, Kaliada said, she and Khalezin had been helping the actors to find housing, therapy and visas.The company was also running acting classes for other Belarusian and Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw, Kaliada said, that had led to full-scale shows, and was providing help to some Ukrainians singers, too, who could no longer perform full time in their homeland because of the war.“The only thing we wanted was for people to not go through our experiences,” Kaliada said.Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada run the Belarus Free Theater. After their country’s 2020 election, they moved their entire troupe out of the country. Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Warsaw this summer, Kaliada and Khalezin started rehearsals for their latest project, “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera singers and video projections that will premiere at the Barbican Center, in London, on Thursday, running through Sep. 16.In interviews with eight actors, musicians and production staff at those rehearsals, four said they were struggling to adjust to life in Warsaw. The composer Olga Podgaiskaya said it was only with a therapist’s help that she’d come to accept that she wouldn’t be returning to Minsk anytime soon. In Belarus, she said, she had been a fixture on the classical music scene: “Here, I’m a nobody. I need to prove from scratch who I am.”Raman Shytsko, an actor, said he still felt like a guest in Poland — and sometimes an unwelcome one. Once in the city of Wroclaw, he said, he was sworn at in the street for speaking Russian. “A lot of people here hate Belarusians now,” he added, because of the regime’s support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The conductor Vitali Alekseenok and the composer Olga Podgaiskaya rehearsing with musicians from the Five-Storey Ensemble, in preparation for “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.”Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesMany of the exiled artists said that simply working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” had given them a much-needed sense of purpose.In the rehearsals, which took place at Warsaw’s main opera house, the cast helped each other learn lines and dance moves, and larked about between scenes. Yuliya Shauchuk, an actor, said that the studio was the one place where she always felt joyful.This show’s plot, which is drawn from a popular Belarusian novel and involves a group of ghostly huntsmen who terrorize a rural community, also felt analogous to what was happening now in Belarus, Shauchuk said, where every day the police track down and arrest people who have protested the president’s rule.Several Ukrainian opera singers involved in the production said the rehearsals were benefiting them, too. Mykola Hubchuk had driven overnight from Kolomyya, Ukraine, to take part. “This project is very important for me,” he said. “I need emotion and singing in my life.”Sveta Sugako, the Belarus Free Theater’s production manager, said that the company had renewed its sense of purpose in exile. Its members used to mainly “shout about Belarus,” she said. Now, the company was trying to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine, too, and about the political situation in Russia. It had become, she said, “about the whole region.”The troupe’s journey to exile began in 2020 with an election. That year, Belarus looked set for change, after Lukashenko’s landslide victory was widely dismissed as fraudulent. Members of the company took part in the subsequent mass street protests, hoping Lukashenko would be forced to step aside.Instead, he violently cracked down on opposition and in October 2021, Kaliada and Khalezin pulled the remaining members out. They first headed to Ukraine, with some members wading through swamps to cross the border, before some continued to Poland, and others to Britain.Ever since, Kaliada said, the situation in Belarus had gotten worse. Last year, Putin used the country as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine, then said he would move Russian nuclear weapons across the border into Belarus.Helping the troupe members who reached London had proved easier than those in Warsaw, Kaliada said, because of the company’s established connections in London’s theater world. Cate Blanchett and Juliet Stevenson had both provided accommodation for some members in London, Kaliada said.Shauchuk, left, and Kaliada outside the Polish National Opera. The entire company is now in exile, split between Warsaw and London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn Poland, the company had few relationships with similarly generous individuals, Kaliada said, but it had secured cheap rates for some actors at a hotel on the outskirts of Warsaw. The Polish government also helped, letting the troupe rehearse for free at the state-run opera house.The company has been trying to deepen its ties in Warsaw. Whenever it stages a show in the city, including recent productions featuring refugee teenagers, it invites local dignitaries, and adds Polish subtitles.With the company approaching the end of its second year in exile, Kaliada said its members would soon have to do more to support themselves. Around 100 people were working on “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” she said, and the Belarus Free Thater didn’t have the resources to support them all.Many of the actors in Warsaw said they were already making efforts to find their own work. One said he’d taken on dubbing. Another said they were teaching and another was working as a coder.Shauchuk said she knew she needed “to build a life” in Warsaw and was looking to improve her Polish. But, she said, she would not give up hope of returning home. “Even if I build up a family outside Belarus,” she said, “I want the right to go back.”The company will perform “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt,” a piece of experimental theater including opera and video projections, at the Barbican Center in London.Anna Liminowicz for The New York Times More