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    Avett Brothers Musical ‘Swept Away’ to Close on Broadway After Short Run

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    The new musical, about a shipwreck and its aftermath, opened Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.“Swept Away,” a darkly elegiac musical featuring the songs of the Avett Brothers, will end its Broadway run Dec. 15, less than a month after opening.The musical, about a 19th-century shipwreck and its aftermath, explores the lengths to which human beings will go in order to survive. Although set in fictional circumstances, it is based on a real 19th-century tragedy that led to an important legal case in Britain.“Swept Away” began previews Oct. 29 and opened Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater. At the time of its closing it will have played 20 previews and 32 regular performances.The show cost up to $14.5 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that money has not been recouped. The weekly grosses were consistently well below what it cost to run, which is unsustainable.“Swept Away” is the second new musical of this season to close shortly after opening, following “Tammy Faye,” at a time when new musicals face an ever-more-challenging path on Broadway.The Avett Brothers have a devoted fan base, and “Swept Away” was praised by the New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, who described it as “really about the gravest decisions humans can make, the depths of souls that are darker than the sea’s.”But other reviews were mixed, and the musical, like the actual history that inspired it, includes cannibalism, which, although not featured prominently in marketing materials or press coverage, may have been a turnoff for some potential ticket buyers. Broadway is also packed with shows, many of which feature more familiar titles or performers, and “Swept Away” was unable to break through in that crowded marketplace.Many of the show’s songs were featured on the Avett Brothers album “Mignonette,” and a cast recording is scheduled to be released in February. John Logan, the Tony-winning author of “Red,” wrote the musical’s book, and it was directed by Michael Mayer, a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening.”The 90-minute show centers on four men stranded on a lifeboat — the only survivors of the shipwreck. They are played by John Gallagher Jr., a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening,” as well as Stark Sands (“Kinky Boots”), Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall.The lead producers of “Swept Away” are Matthew Masten, Sean Hudock and Madison Wells Live (founded by Gigi Pritzker). Before arriving on Broadway, the musical had runs at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California in 2022 and at Arena Stage in Washington in late 2023 and early 2024. More

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      ‘Swept Away’ Review: Lost at Sea, How Far Would You Sink?

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      If you know the tale of the yacht Mignonette, or the Avett Brothers album of the same name, you’ll guess from the first moments of “Swept Away,” a Broadway musical based on both, where the horrific story is headed. But you may not guess how spectacularly it gets there.The Mignonette was wrecked at sea on July 5, 1884, en route to Sydney from Southampton, England. Its captain, two crewmen and cabin boy survived on a lifeboat for about 20 days until, facing death from starvation, some of them made one of them their unfortunate salvation.Though drawing most of its songs and themes from that 2004 album, the musical, which opened Tuesday at the Longacre Theater, leaves the specifics of the Mignonette behind. Instead of a small pleasure boat, its vessel is a 300-ton triple-masted whaler. It is American, not English, sailing from New Bedford, Mass. Its captain commands a much larger crew: in Michael Mayer’s literally overwhelming production, 15 Broadway-hardy men.Among them, the Mate (John Gallagher Jr.) has the most experience of filthy life below decks and depravity on solid ground. At the opposite end of the scale of innocence, a teenager called Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe) has run away from his family’s farm for excitement and adventure. Hot on his tail, Big Brother (Stark Sands) arrives in New Bedford to drag him home, away from impiety, but gets stuck aboard as the ship heaves off.If it were not already plain from a ghostly prologue that they are all doomed, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) sees portents almost immediately in the sea’s phosphorescence. This is, he says, his last voyage, as both he, the ship and the whaling industry are failing. You can take that theologically too: How will we face our own last voyages? That the characters are identified by titles rather than names suggests the show’s morality-tale ambitions.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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      The Avett Brothers Braved Choppy Waters to Bring ‘Swept Away’ to Broadway

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      The Avett Brothers were all ears a decade ago when a determined crew of theater upstarts and veterans came aboard to adapt their maritime album for “Swept Away.”In the early days of the 21st century, before the Top 5 albums and the three Grammy nominations, the Avett Brothers were a band of three young guys, relentlessly touring their blend of folk-rock-country, sprinting from show to show in their van. Between gigs, Scott Avett’s father gave him a copy of “The Custom of the Sea,” Neil Hanson’s book chronicling the 19th-century wreck of the Mignonette, a British yacht, and its tragic aftermath.On the road, Scott would recap the pages he had read, to his brother Seth and their bandmate Bob Crawford. They eventually decided that the harrowing survival story of these crewmen, stranded off the Cape of Good Hope on the South African coast, would be the foundation for their second studio album. It was released in 2004, and they titled it “Mignonette.”Over the next few years, the Avett Brothers were selling out arenas, their style of Americana, including emotionally probing lyrics, establishing them as stars in the genre. And then, one day about a decade after “Mignonette” came out, they received a curious call: A young theater producer named Matthew Masten asked if they would be interested in having the album adapted for a stage musical.“It sounded like a good idea,” said Scott Avett, who sings and plays guitar and banjo in the group. “But ideas are a dime a dozen, and a very small percentage of them seem to happen.”It took another decade, numerous stops and starts, and several regional productions of this unlikely story, but the new musical “Swept Away” has finally reached Broadway. It opens on Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.The crewmen of “Swept Away”: Adrian Blake Enscoe as the thrill-seeking Little Brother, Stark Sands as the pious Big Brother, John Gallagher Jr. as the Mate, and Wayne Duvall as the stoic Captain. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: It’s No Sunday in the Park With ‘Lempicka’

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      A musical about the groundbreaking Art Deco painter is vocally thrilling but historically a blur.Having dismissed her work as merely decorative, a fierce Italian gives harsh advice to an ambitious young painter: “You need to be a monster,” he brays. “Or a machine.”The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the advice in real life because it was never given. But “Lempicka,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, certainly did, and then some. It’s a monster and a machine.A machine because it argues, with streamlined efficiency, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and ’30s, Lempicka forever changed the representation of women in art, and thus changed women themselves. The volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead breasts that so titillated Jazz Age Paris became, the show suggests, today’s template for glamazonian feminism.As for “monster,” well, efficiency is not always pretty. Among the values compromised in the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historical precision. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, and later a fascist. But the scene in which Lempicka studies art with him is, like many others, made up.Does that matter in a musical that admits it is “inspired” by life, not faithful to it? Are there perhaps greater values than truth in play?Natalie Joy Johnson, left, as Suzy Solidor and Iman as Rafaela in “Lempicka,” directed by Rachel Chavkin.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      ‘Lempicka,’ New Musical About Art Deco Artist, to Open on Broadway

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      Rachel Chavkin of “Hadestown” will direct the show, which had developmental productions in Massachusetts and California.“Lempicka,” a new musical about the painter Tamara de Lempicka, will open on Broadway next spring after a decade in development.The show will join a Broadway season crowded with new musicals — at least a dozen are expected — at a time when the industry is facing smaller audiences, and higher costs, than it had before the coronavirus pandemic.An Art Deco portraitist who was married and had female lovers, Lempicka was born in Poland in 1898 and lived in Russia, which she fled because of the Russian Revolution; France, which she fled because of World War II; and then the United States and Mexico. Though her art and her social life glittered for a period, she later faded from prominence, and died in 1980. In recent years, her art has sold strongly; contemporary collectors of her work include Madonna.The show, scheduled to begin performances March 19 and to open April 14 at the Longacre Theater, features music by Matt Gould and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer, who also collaborated on the book. The director is Rachel Chavkin, the Tony Award-winning director of “Hadestown,” and choreography is by Raja Feather Kelly.“This is a massive epic, in the company of ‘Les Mis’ or ‘Evita,’ about this incredible artist who has been, for a variety of reasons, dismissed from our history books,” Chavkin said. “It’s fierce and queer and traces the first half of the 20th century through the eyes of this very complicated and ambitious and visionary woman.”Eden Espinosa, a onetime Elphaba in “Wicked,” will star in the title role. She is currently appearing in a new musical, “The Gardens of Anuncia,” running Off Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater. The rest of the “Lempicka” cast has not yet been announced.The musical has had two previous productions, at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts in 2018 and last year at La Jolla Playhouse in California, as well as several workshops and presentations over the years. (A previous effort to dramatize Lempicka’s life, a play called “Tamara,” ran in New York in 1987.)“Lempicka” is being produced by Seaview, a production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea, and Jenny Niederhoffer. It is being capitalized for up to $19.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      Review: In Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Memorial to a Lost World

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      The Viennese Jewish family at the heart of this new Broadway production thinks it is too assimilated to be in danger when the Nazis arrive. They are wrong.In November 1938, in Vienna, life chez Merz — the reciting of books, the games of cat’s cradle, the polished renditions of Haydn at the piano — proceeds with only brief interruptions despite the nearby sounds of broken glass. But then comes the rap at the door. The pianist, Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), goes to answer it and hastily returns.“Trouble,” she hisses.With that one word, the hinge of history swings open upon the abyss.It is also the word that turns “Leopoldstadt,” the harrowing new Tom Stoppard play that opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, from a domestic comedy into a Greek drama. What had been until then a loving portrait of Austrian Jewish bourgeois society in the years before the Anschluss — the play begins in 1899 and will follow the family through 1955 — becomes, as the Nazis enter not just the Merzes’ homeland but their home, a portrait of that society’s self-delusion. The cosmopolitan, intermarried and profoundly cultured clan, given less than a day to pack for a future most will not survive, finally understands that, for Jews, history has no hinge; the abyss is always open.Whether complacency is a moral failing, as “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue, is a vexing question. In the play’s first three acts — it has five, each set in a different year and performed without intermission over the course of 2 hours and 10 minutes — Stoppard posits the Merzes, and their relatives-by-marriage, the Jakoboviczes, as golden examples of assimilation. Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), the wealthy businessman in whose apartment near the fashionable Ringstrasse the story unfolds, has even converted to Catholicism as a kind of insurance. One of the always ambient children is confused enough about the distinctions between Jew, gentile and Austrian to top the family’s Christmas tree with a Star of David.Austrian gentiles are not confused, though. Antisemitic slights and violence are frequent enough that even the Merzes take notice. In 1899, the adults are already arguing the merits of Theodor Herzl’s plans for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But all signs, at least the cultural ones valued by the bourgeoisie, point to progress. Brahms has visited their home; Mahler, though “wet from his baptism,” is still “our man.” Klimt is painting Hermann’s wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow). And the playwright Arthur Schnitzler has inscribed a private copy of “La Ronde” to Hermann’s brother-in-law, Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), a mathematician being analyzed by Freud.As Stoppard flips through this Rolodex of Viennese machers, you may recognize his trademark bravura: tossing you into the deep end of his imagination, trusting that you’ll eventually surface. In this case, it’s a very deep end: By my count, 31 characters appear in “Leopoldstadt,” 24 of them members of the extended Merz-Jakobovicz clan. Even if you’ve studied the family tree available on the play’s website, it’s impossible to keep them sorted when they themselves are confused. “She’s my … my sister-in-law’s sister-in-law,” Gretl ventures of Hanna. “I think.”From left: Brandon Uranowitz, Caissie Levy, Faye Castelow and David Krumholtz.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut just when you fear you know too little, you realize you actually know too much. In “Leopoldstadt,” Stoppard takes dramatic irony — the audience’s grasp of what the characters cannot see — to such an extreme that it becomes the subject itself. It applies here not only to tangled relationships and romantic betrayals but to the larger tangles and betrayals of fate; if you’ve heard of Kristallnacht, you will be waiting for that rap on the door and wondering, perhaps unfairly, why the Merzes aren’t. But it’s mostly hindsight that has taught us what happened to Viennese Jews of that vintage.That we remain in suspense anyway is partly the effect of Stoppard’s kaleidoscopic technique, seducing us with manifold pleasures like that boisterous Christmas party in 1899, a polyphonic Passover in 1900, a farcical circumcision in 1924. Much as he has done in earlier plays with the metaphysical juggling acts of poets, revolutionaries and philosophers, he arranges the domestic affairs of these bourgeois characters into highly detailed and glittering patterns, like snowflakes seen under a magnifying glass.But “Leopoldstadt” is not quite as tightly constructed as “Arcadia,” say, or “Jumpers” or “Travesties”; it has too many themes to wrangle, and some dense historical exposition is unconvincingly disguised as small talk. As such, the play leans more than usual on a handsome, foreboding, smartly calibrated production. The acting is excellent across the board, with too many standouts to name. The director Patrick Marber’s deep-focus staging keeps all the stories going at once on a set by Richard Hudson that fairly gleams with honeyed smugness under Neil Austin’s lights. And Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes make you long for the elegance of prewar fashions until you are brought up short by remembering what happened to those who wore them.Even without any overt violence, the Kristallnacht scene, with its shiny blond monster calling the Jewish children a “litter,” is thus brutal, wiping away all the beauty in seconds. But the play’s argument and its likely source in Stoppard’s own life does not really emerge until the scene that follows, set in 1955. It is then, as Vienna prepares to open its new postwar opera house with an ex-Nazi on the podium, that we are explicitly asked to consider the connected problems of historical memory and premonition. Is it a corollary of the warning that we must never forget the Holocaust that we must always expect it again?Uranowitz, right, with Arty Froushan, whose character is ignorant of his Jewish relatives. “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you,” Uranowitz tells him.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, no doubt noting the resurgence of antisemitism today, seems to argue for that, painting complacency as a kind of hubris. In the play’s cosmology, more unforgivable than its shiny blond monsters is a callow 24-year-old Jakobovicz family survivor — he too is blond — we meet in this final act. Born Leopold Rosenbaum, he is now called Leo Chamberlain, having adopted the last name of his English stepfather because his mother, he says, “didn’t want me to have Jewish relatives in case Hitler won.” Leo (Arty Froushan) has written two “funny books” and is so ignorant of those Jewish relatives that one of them, a second cousin who survived the camps, cannot hold his tongue. “You live as if without history,” he spits, “as if you throw no shadow behind you.”This is not autobiography, but it’s close enough. Tom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Czechoslovakia, receiving his new last name just as Leo does, from an English stepfather. He started writing his first funny plays in his early 20s. He came very late to a full understanding of his Jewishness, including the murders of family members in Nazi death camps. You need not equate him exactly with his stand-in to see that in “Leopoldstadt,” by punishing Leo for his belatedness, he is punishing himself for his own.The play begins in 1899 and follows the family through 1955. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe last scene is thus a strange one: powerful, painful and masochistic by implication. But I was left wondering whom its argument was meant for. There are of course people who do not believe the Holocaust happened; I doubt they will see the play.And then there are those in no danger of forgetting, for whom the names of the camps, as intoned in the final moments, are as ingrained as the hypnotic babble of grief we call the Mourner’s Kaddish.That leaves only those who live in the bubble in between, who both know and don’t know. Stoppard seems to place himself there, along with the Merzes, whose refusal to believe the worst led them directly to it.As I would surely have done no better in their circumstances, I cannot bring myself to blame any of them. Not even Tomáš Sträussler. But the uncommonly bitter and personal focus in that final scene makes the play feel a bit unstable, teetering like an upside-down pyramid on its smallest point. “Leopoldstadt” is at its best not in instructing us how we must mourn a lost world but in bringing it lovingly back to life.LeopoldstadtThrough Jan. 29 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; leopoldstadtplay.com. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Ruth Negga Thinks Lady Macbeth Is Misunderstood

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      The actress, nominated for a Tony Award for her magnetic performance in “Macbeth,” is drawn to female characters who challenge the status quo.Ruth Negga dazzles onstage. Not just because, as Lady Macbeth, she briefly wears a gold metallic gown in Sam Gold’s otherwise fairly casual staging of “Macbeth” at the Longacre Theater. But, rather, it’s because she infuses her character, and her marriage to Macbeth (Daniel Craig), with such intensity, urgency and vitality that I found myself missing her when she came to her inevitable end.Negga was nominated for a Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play, which recognizes both her powerful stage presence and the gender parity that Gold’s revival sought to achieve. “Like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size,” Jesse Green wrote of Negga’s performance in a review in The Times.Even if Lady Macbeth appears in substantially fewer scenes than her husband, her cunning mind — and Negga’s command of Shakespeare’s verse — leave an indelible imprint. “Her language is very fertile, it’s very fecund and it’s very sensual,” Negga said last week in a video interview. “I think a lot of people associate that with darkness as well. But that’s another layer that I think this character has been burdened and muddied with.”Negga, left, with Amber Gray in the revival. “She’s not evil,” Negga said of Lady Macbeth. “It’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNegga, who plays the mysterious, seductive, blonde-haired Clare in the movie “Passing,” and the real-life civil rights activist Mildred Loving in “Loving,” is drawn to characters who try to circumvent the social circumstances into which they were born. Negga sees Clare, Loving and now Lady Macbeth as paying a price for such transgressions because they are either running out of time or, in the case of Loving, ahead of hers.Born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother, and raised in Ireland and England, Negga, 40, spoke from her place in New York about the significance of seeing “Macbeth” as a love story, and why she finds the role of Lady to be liberating. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You were playing Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse right before everything shut down in March 2020. How has coming back to the stage, on Broadway with a different Shakespeare play, been for you?Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world?My isolation was book ended by two Shakespeare plays, which is really interesting because I hadn’t actually been onstage for 10 years before that. I didn’t realize how much I missed it. I think those two years of being so separate from people just compounded that feeling of “connect, connect.” It’s such a personal, visceral experience for the person playing onstage and the person receiving that performance. Because it’s so immediate and in the now, and it’s happening live, that kind of energetic exchange can only happen at that moment. It’s so weird — that’s why I love it.How did playing Hamlet prepare you for Lady Macbeth?I was approaching 40, playing this young man who was just entering his exploration of his adulthood and his place in the world, and I was guided by this moment of internal discovery and complete honesty. Hamlet is a truth-teller but he’s also a truth searcher, and for good or bad, and I think to his chagrin sometimes, nothing but the truth will do. That’s a very hard place to be, but it’s also where amazing transformation can happen. [The role] really tests your mettle, your physical and vocal stamina, and also what you’re willing to lay bare. And since everything’s laid bare, you can’t really hide anywhere. To be honest, anything’s a relief after Hamlet.With Lady Macbeth, was it hard to know what motivated her?Even before I started rehearsals I was like, “What’s all this jazz about her being evil?” She’s not evil, it’s this archetype that chases her: the deadly villainess, the villain behind the man. That’s what she’s become known for, and she’s been robbed of any idiosyncrasy or personality. But whereas we rail against [Macbeth] for his procrastination, I think she could have done a bit more thinking things through. But the thing is, time wasn’t on her side. This is what happens when you just have all these ideas and they seem great and you’re really getting things going and you don’t have much time. I mean she makes one bad mistake when you think about it.Which is?Well, I personally don’t think you need to kill people to get ahead! But I don’t come to a character trying to justify them, that’s not my job. I’m not interested in that. But very few people act from a core of badness or evilness. I loved her desire to be alive, to reach for things, to strive, and I was so excited to play someone who has such clear ideas of what they think they deserve, especially a woman. And when you realize that your desires and your ambitions are restricted by the status quo, one has to think quickly on one’s feet. They have to become quick and mercurial. That’s what she has a talent for. There’s a self-awareness there that I think makes her similar to Hamlet.Daniel Craig, left, stars as Macbeth. “There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that,” Negga said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe chemistry between Macbeth and Lady is so palpable onstage. Was that important to you?When I read this script, I thought, “Wow, this dies on whether you believe that they love each other or not. This is key.” Their relationship is the backdrop or the environment of this play; that’s what their action is born out of. But there’s also a love there that is very robust. You feel like they both draw strength from that union in a very equal, balanced way. And that was something that was important for me to not let be put to the side, or laid to waste or watered down in any way. There’s very much an awareness that this is a marriage of equals and respect, and I loved that.Marriage is central to some of your other characters, like Clare in “Passing” and Mildred in “Loving,” whose marriages to white men challenge the status quo.To me race is in the foreground, the background, the present, and it’s not something I have had to chase or I’ve had to ignore. It’s with me, it’s in me, it’s who I am. So stories about race and stories written by people of color, Americans of color, have always piqued my interest. How do people go through the world as a person of color with the structures and limitations that have been imposed by society? And how does the status quo come up against your personal desire and ambition? And how do you live the life that you want as best you can within these structures that are telling you, “No.”In “Macbeth,” the other characters are casually dressed, but at one point, Lady is wearing a gold gown. Why?That was really important to me and to Suttirat [Larlarb], our amazing costume designer. I think we both fell in love with Lady. My heart spills over with joy when I see women, any type of woman, just embrace who they are. And for me, her femininity is important because I was familiar with this idea that she could seem like this sexless, austere, bloodless, lustless sort of shell. That just doesn’t chime with the Lady on the page, so I wanted her to have no shame, be lusty and alive, and really enjoy her sexuality and her femininity, and not be frightened to stand out from the crowd.Is there another Shakespeare character that you long to play?I remember in college I used to do the Queen Margaret speeches [from “Richard III”]. They’re great because they’re deadly, speeches that are powerful and about power. It’s extraordinary that Shakespeare gave them to her. What I love about him, he doesn’t make his women saints. He gives you complexity. He’s not presenting a Lady Macbeth we can hate; he’s presenting a woman that we can see ourselves in, and a woman overwhelmed by grief. She has a great catharsis and a great internal reckoning. And I feel for her deeply. More

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      Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt’ Will Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The play, about a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the 20th Century, will begin previews Sept. 14 and open Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater.“Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s much-heralded and uncharacteristically personal play about an early-20th-century Jewish family in Vienna, is coming to Broadway in September, bringing an unusually large cast and a pointed reminder of the perils of antisemitism to the New York stage.Stoppard, 84, is one of the great dramatists of recent decades; his four best play Tony Awards, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” are the most of any playwright in Tonys history. “Leopoldstadt” will be the 19th production of a Stoppard play on Broadway since 1967.“Leopoldstadt,” which begins in 1899 and continues through, and past, the two World Wars, chronicles 50 years in the life of one family. It is inspired by, but does not depict, Stoppard’s own family history; he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, but fled to Asia with his family when he was a toddler, has spent much of his life in Britain, and only learned some details of his heritage in the 1990s.“It’s two extraordinary hours where you go through this time and this exploration of a family: what they have to face, and how they come out the other side and deal with their past, cope with their present and think about their future,” said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer. “Being Stoppard it’s complex, but also incredibly emotional.”The Broadway production, with a cast of 38, is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 14 and to open Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater. Friedman, who produced the Tony-winning best plays of the last three seasons before the pandemic, is producing “Leopoldstadt” with Roy Furman, another Broadway veteran, and Lorne Michaels, the “Saturday Night Live” creator.“Leopoldstadt” began its life with a production in London’s West End in 2020 directed by Patrick Marber, which won praise from the New York Times critic Ben Brantley; that run, which was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, won the Olivier Award for best new play. The play then returned to the West End last year for a brief but profitable run.In New York it is again being directed by Marber, who also directed the last Broadway production of a Stoppard work, a 2018 revival of “Travesties.” In a phone interview, Marber said that he was looking forward to a third go at the material, following the London runs.“It’s a surprisingly enjoyable play to direct — even though it’s very painful and sad, it’s also full of lightness and laughter,” he said. “It’s fundamentally about memory, and time and love. But it’s also about fascism and immigrants and refugees. It’s about everything — it’s Stoppard.”Marber said that Stoppard has continued revising the play for New York, where he said he expects the play to resonate differently because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. “With any play, what’s happening in the real world affects the way you watch it,” he said. “Different things will pop out.” More

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      ‘Macbeth’ Review: Something Wonky This Way Comes

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      Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s oddly uneasy take on the Scottish play.Macbeth, the character, is full of compunction, as well he should be, having murdered a king to get to his throne.But why should “Macbeth,” the play, be just as uneasy about its authority? Despite the star power of Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, the overthought production that opened on Thursday at the Longacre Theater seems unsure of its welcome, as if a classic that has enjoyed nearly 50 Broadway revivals since 1768 might no longer find an audience willing to meet it halfway.I could understand that attitude if we were talking about the utterly unlovable “Troilus and Cressida.” But “Macbeth” is the most instantly accessible of Shakespeare’s tragedies: violent, elemental, familiar, short. No matter which way the story is bent, it maintains its recognizable human core of ambition and regret. Directors can emphasize its witchy aura, its bloodthirsty politics, its marital drama or critique of masculinity without endangering its essential stageworthiness.But this relentlessly analytical production, directed by Sam Gold, takes even that last quality apart, offering not so much “Macbeth” as a private inquest into it. To signal that, as the audience enters, it begins with the curtain half up, only timidly exposing the play to view. On a nearly empty black stage, the cast of 14 is milling about in what look like street clothes, seeming to make food at a communal table as if this were dinner theater, or not theater at all.Gold then softens the transition from real life to drama by having Michael Patrick Thornton, who otherwise plays Lennox and one of the assassins, deliver an amusingly potted prologue like a Catskills tummler. His largely improvised spiel explains the play’s origins in a time of plague — around 1605 — and under the influence of King James’s obsession with the supernatural.Revisiting the Tragedy of ‘Macbeth’Shakespeare’s tale of a man who, step by step, cedes his soul to his darkest impulses continues to inspire new interpretations. On Stage: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga star in Sam Gold’s take on the play. Despite its star power, the production feels oddly uneasy, our critic writes. Onscreen: In the “Tragedy of Macbeth,” Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand embody a toxic power couple with mastery. Break a Leg: Shakespeare’s play is known for the rituals and superstitions tied to it. How does the supernatural retain its hold on the theater world? Beyond ‘Macbeth’: This spring, there’s an abundance of Shakespearean productions in New York City. Here is a look at some of them. Good information. How did generations of theatergoers get along without it?Craig, center, with Negga, left, and, sliding out from underneath the table, the ghost of Banquo (played by Amber Gray).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf you’ve seen enough of Gold’s Shakespeare — whether excellent (“Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, starring Craig and David Oyelowo) or inexplicable (“King Lear” on Broadway, starring Glenda Jackson) or in between (“Hamlet” at the Public Theater, starring Oscar Isaac) — you’ll know that he does not make idle or showy choices. His experimentation is always purposeful, even if, as here, it’s sometimes hard to know what that purpose is. For at least the first half-hour of “Macbeth” I thought he was trying to demystify the play by placing it in more familiar contexts.That kitchen, for instance. Or the scenes set in what looks like someone’s TV room. (The “thrones” in Christine Jones’s set are raspberry-upholstered chair-and-a-halfs.) At other times it seems we’re at a high-school pep rally; when Scotland’s mortal enemy, Norway, is mentioned, Gold has the cast mutter “Boo!” as if at an opposing basketball team.I’m not sure the play benefits from demystifying, though. Macbeth is no ordinary man, nor Lady Macbeth an ordinary woman. Their ambition and regret are extreme, and both alter extremely during the action. At first, when the witches tell Macbeth he will one day rule Scotland, he is horrified by the thought of what that means for the people in his way. But his wife is electrified; with her courage making up for his qualms, he kills Duncan (Paul Lazar) and takes the crown.That’s supposed to be the end of it but of course is not. As logic and a developing taste for blood demand, Macbeth now kills his comrade Banquo (Amber Gray). Though he goes mad with guilt, seeing ghosts over dinner and retribution in dreams, he nevertheless massacres the family of the suspicious Macduff (Grantham Coleman). It’s the macho Lady Macbeth who eventually quails and collapses; sucking renewed manliness from her death, Macbeth all but dares the world to incite his own.Negga, left, with Gray in the play. Like a feral cat, Negga can seem quicksilver and weightless or menacing and bristly, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCraig, and especially Negga, hit these marks clearly. We see how their characters’ chemistry and symbiosis allow each to fill the gaps of the other, at first for their mutual gain and then to their detriment. Craig is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery and finery on his balloon personality. Had it not been inflated it would never have burst.Negga, unrecognizable both emotionally and bodily as the actor who played Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2020, is wonderfully physical, too; like a feral cat, she can seem quicksilver and weightless or, when enraged, menacing and bristly and twice her size. (The superb costumes by Suttirat Larlarb contribute to the effect, nearly telling the story on their own.) But Negga is also extraordinary with the verse, one of the few cast members who not only makes its meaning clear but also projects that meaning past the conceptual firewall Gold has erected.Though the production too often feels as if it were designed for the company’s own edification — an endless rehearsal rather than a Broadway revival — it is not without its outward-facing qualities, especially after the initial throat-clearing. There are beautiful, quietly observed moments: a glance between Craig and Negga, for instance, that says more about marriage than some entire plays on the subject. There are smaller characters crystallized in a flash: Lazar’s Duncan dainty and handsy, Maria Dizzia’s Lady Macduff heartbreakingly resolute.But the top note here is gore, the more so because most other notes are muted. We see slit throats, amputated legs, huge spouts of blood and, for good measure, a gun. Even that cozy food table from the start of the show turns out to be the witches’ workshop, where they brew their disgusting potions — some involving human body parts pulverized as if by Julia Child with an industrial stick blender.Craig, our critic writes, is at his best in physicalizing Macbeth’s transitions; you can see in his bearing the effects of flattery. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll this is accompanied by effects that put yet another demystifying frame on the action, this one not from life or theater but from movies. The fog at the Longacre is thicker than in “Casablanca.” The foreboding aural effects (sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman) recall slasher flicks; the screeching violins (music by Gaelynn Lea) more specifically reference Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho.”Perhaps to help us, or the cast, come down from all this, Gold concludes the show by having Bobbi MacKenzie, who otherwise plays a witch, sing a song by Lea called “Perfect” as the company slurps at what I hope to God is soup. The moment is lovely and would be fitting if this were, say, the finale of “Pippin.”Still, at the end of an often brutal Broadway season that was rightly concerned with harm and heartlessness — in which many shows, including this one, were bedeviled by illness and delays — I liked Gold’s showing us that in times of distress and violence people should remember to care for one another. If it has nothing to do with “Macbeth,” it has plenty to do with us.MacbethThrough July 10 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; macbethbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More