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    How ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Reimagined a BookTok Sensation

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    The filmmakers didn’t want to disappoint fans of Casey McQuiston’s novel about the romance between a U.S. president’s son and a British prince.On most Fridays, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London closes at 10 p.m. sharp. But one night last summer, after all of the tourists had spilled back onto the streets of South Kensington, two men slow-danced among the Berninis and Rodins until the sun rose the next morning. A cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by the indie-pop singer Perfume Genius echoed through the sculpture hall, soundtracking their tender moment.The nocturnal scene was a scripted one from “Red, White & Royal Blue,” the film adaptation of the 2019 novel by Casey McQuiston. The two men under the dimmed lights were the actors Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine, and they swayed until the director, Matthew López, called “Cut!” around 2 a.m. for a lunch break.“It was just the three of us and our crew,” said López, who’s also the film’s co-writer. “It made for an incredibly intimate, really special night.”The romantic comedy follows Alex Claremont-Diaz, the bisexual son of the first female U.S. president (played by Uma Thurman, with a thick Southern drawl), and Prince Henry, the younger brother of the heir to the British throne who has known since birth that he’s “gay as a maypole.” What starts as a simmering rivalry between the impulsive American (Zakhar Perez) and the buttoned-up Brit (Galitzine) soon develops into a clandestine relationship. Neither is publicly out, and their secret love complicates things, especially for Henry.Amazon Studios and Berlanti Productions secured the film rights to McQuiston’s novel at auction ahead of its May 2019 release, and the book has since spent more than 20 weeks as a New York Times best seller.But best-seller lists don’t fully convey the adoration that “Red, White & Royal Blue” has garnered on BookTok — the literature-loving corner of TikTok — where fans have shared their obsession with the escapist love story en masse, and videos tagged #redwhiteandroyalblue have received more than 500 million views.Jacob Demlow, who frequently posts about “Red, White & Royal Blue” on his “A Very Queer Book Club” account, said he flung his copy across the room in delight when he first encountered it.“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was all these amazing tropes that romance lovers have loved forever, but there was a couple in it who looked like a couple I would be in,” said Demlow, who estimated that he’d read the novel at least a dozen times. “I grew up watching movies about the girl falling in love with the prince, but I’d never seen that through a queer lens before. It was kind of earth-shattering in ways I still don’t fully know if I can comprehend.”The film, premiering on Prime Video on Friday, hopes to recreate that excitement onscreen, and represents the directorial debut of López, a Tony-winning playwright known for penning “The Inheritance,” as well as writing (with Amber Ruffin) the musical adaptation “Some Like It Hot.” López was working on those projects in 2020 when his agent first floated the idea of turning “Red, White & Royal Blue” into a stage musical.“I read it and said, ‘Yeah, sure, maybe. But let’s talk about the movie,’” López recalled. “I knew I wanted to be the person who made this film by, like, Page 50.”The director Matthew López, at right, working with his stars on set. “I knew I wanted to be the person who made this film by, like, Page 50,” he said.Rob Youngson/AmazonAfter pleading his case to the producers Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schechter, López signed on to direct and did a second pass on an original script by Ted Malawer. He cast two lead actors who had cut their teeth on Netflix romances: Zakhar Perez, 31, who starred as Marco in “The Kissing Booth” sequels; and Galitzine, 28, who appeared in the streamer’s military romance “Purple Hearts.” Galitzine also played the prince in Amazon’s Camila Cabello-led “Cinderella.”For both Zakhar Perez and the director, the character Alex’s biracial identity was particularly meaningful. López grew up in Panama City, Fla., with his Puerto Rican father and Polish Russian mother, while Zakhar Perez is of Mexican, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean descent and was raised in northwest Indiana, where he said there was only one other Mexican family.“Matthew and I talked a lot about the mestizo journey,” Zakhar Perez said in a video call before SAG-AFTRA, the actor’s union, went on strike. “Being part Mexican, part lots of other things, I don’t want to say you’re forgotten, but in today’s world, it’s like, you’re either this or you’re that. There’s nothing in between. I’m kind of a cultural chameleon.”“As a young Latiné queer man, I never read something that centered someone like Alex,” López said, echoing his star. “If I had been presented with this character when I was in my late teens, early 20s, it may have changed how I thought about myself.”During the audition process, Zakhar Perez and Galitzine did their chemistry reads via video and did not meet in person until rehearsals began in London. But the nature of the script meant they would need to quickly become comfortable shooting a variety of passionate scenes, which were overseen by the intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt.“Nick and I trusted each other quite quickly,” Zakhar Perez said of Galitzine. “We had to build a sexual tension from dislike to like to love, and we wanted to show that journey through the choreographed, intimate moments.”“I was never going to entirely fulfill the image of this book that the millions of people who love it individually have in their heads,” López said.Jonathan Prime/AmazonIn the book, McQuiston described Alex and Henry’s amorous bedroom — and tack room and hotel room — scenes in great detail, and López said he “never, ever shied away from the sexuality” onscreen.“At times, it’s extremely hungry and at times, it’s really tender,” Galitzine said in a separate prestrike call. “Matthew was always adamant that he wanted to portray gay sex in an accurate way, which he felt maybe hadn’t been the case in other L.G.B.T.Q.+ movies.”While the only lingering sex scene is a carefully cropped, emotional moment, and the only nudity is the flash of a naked buttocks, “Red, White & Royal Blue” received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association.López was surprised: “If we had put six bullets into the prince, we probably would have still gotten PG-13,” he said, and added, “If it had been a man and a woman, I question whether or not it would have gotten an R rating.”(The filmmaker Ira Sachs recently expressed similar confusion over the NC-17 rating for his new film “Passages,” which also features gay sex. The M.P.A. said in a statement to The Associated Press, “The sexual orientation of a character or characters is not considered as part of the rating process.”)In the weeks leading up to the movie’s release, anticipation continued to build among fans, coupled with fears that it might not capture the magic of the book. Some worried about the casting choices, the elimination of several supporting characters or the switch from a fictional queen of England to a fictional king, played in a single scene by Stephen Fry.“I was never going to entirely fulfill the image of this book that the millions of people who love it individually have in their heads,” López said. “I knew from the beginning,” he also emphasized, “that this movie would succeed or fail based in part on the fans’ belief that one of them has made this film. I am one of them.”Broader critiques take issue with the premise of the story itself and the fact that it’s yet another queer romance that involves the distress of coming out. But Demlow of A Very Queer Book Club sees it differently.“There are so many coming-out stories that need to be heard, and we also need more stories that aren’t coming-out stories,” he said. “It’s not that we need less of something. It’s that we need more of everything.” More

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      ‘Red, White & Royal Blue’ Review: Keep Calm and Pine On

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      This film, about an American president’s son who falls for a British prince, starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed.Like a corgi back-flipping over a bathtub of champagne, “Red, White & Royal Blue” starts with a giddy premise and has the derring-do to succeed. The setup is thus: Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the wild child of the White House, is commanded to clean up an international PR disaster by befriending Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), the cloistered British spare. In the film’s first half, the scions secretly fall in love; in the second, they fret that going public might cause another global kerfuffle just as Alex’s mother (a Southern-drawling Uma Thurman) campaigns for re-election.It sounds like fan fiction and looks like it, too, particularly when Galitzine dips his chin bashfully — a tic that Princess Diana passed on to her boys. Yet, as in any screwball romance worth its trans-Atlantic sea-salt, the first-time director Matthew López gets us rooting for the cheeky couple’s transition from rivals to romantic bedfellows, boosted by the cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, who photographs the leads so adoringly that you half-expect them to turn to the camera and hawk a bottle of cologne. Thanks to their playful chemistry, we’re sold.The film is a heavily trimmed adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s zesty 2019 novel, a TikTok smash whose hashtag boasts more than 500 million views. López (best-known as the Tony-winning playwright of “The Inheritance”) wrote the script with Ted Malawer, and the two add theatrical flourishes that feel over-florid: a late-night phone chat visualized by having Galitzine magically appear in a whirl of digital leaves; a museum stroll voice-over that’s so odd, you wonder if it was a postproduction fix for something gone awry; and, most goofily, an across-the-dance-floor stare-down where Alex and Henry lock eyes as the other revelers, grooving to Lil Jon, get so low that they appear to be playing Duck, Duck, Goose.But the story smartly zeros in on the couple’s cultural gap — or, as Alex expresses it, “He grabbed my hair in a way that made me understand the difference between rugby and football.” Henry has borne a heavy crown since birth and wears his privilege matter-of-factly, though he dreams of anonymity. The Yank is, true to stereotype, brash and idealistic. He remembers being an invisible suburban kid who vowed to accomplish goals that were out of reach for his father (Clifton Collins Jr.), a Mexican immigrant. (Perez also seems aware that his angular cheekbones and roguish swagger make him resemble a young Al Pacino.) Their centerpiece sex scene is intimately staged with Galitzine tracing Perez with his fingertips as though his character wants to remember the moment forever.The D.C. sequences are snappy, freshened-up versions of the banter we’ve long seen on TV. (Sarah Shahi as the president’s no-nonsense aide and Aneesh Sheth as a gruff Secret Service officer are standouts.) Though the credits list a royal etiquette adviser, it’s hard to gauge if this depiction of the monarchy is accurate (paisley loungewear, tiny topiaries, gilt-framed everything) or just a gaga fantasy that allows a prince to coo, “I went to an English boarding school. Trust me, you’re in good hands.”Red, White & Royal BlueRated R for swearing and some royal hanky-panky. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Inheritance’ Arrives at a Festival of German Drama

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      A new production of Matthew López’s seven-hour play was among 10 shows chosen for Theatertreffen, a celebration of the best theater from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.Midway through Matthew López’s “The Inheritance,” a character lashes out at E.M. Forster, the British author of “Howards End,” who appears as a spiritual guru to the play’s protagonists.“Why should we listen to you lecture us about fearlessness and honesty? You were never honest about yourself,” the character screams, excoriating Forster for spending his long life in the closet.When “The Inheritance,” a seven-hour intergenerational saga about gay men in New York, opened in London in 2018, it was praised to the heavens. When the production transferred to Broadway a year later, there was far less critical love.This month, a reprise of the first German production of “The Inheritance” kicked off the annual Theatertreffen, a showcase of the best German-language theater, for which organizers selected “10 remarkable productions” from 461 theatrical premieres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that debuted last year. The ethics of storytelling and of responsible representation emerged as unofficial themes of the lineup.López’s skill as a dramatist comes through in Hannes Becker’s translation, but the lyricism of his prose less so. Despite the impressive plotting and memorable characters, “The Inheritance” often fizzles during its generous running time. And the play’s cliché-riddled depiction of New York — an entire scene consists of little other than a lesson in how to order correctly at Peter Luger, the celebrated steakhouse — often had this New Yorker rolling his eyes.In the end, the production, which hails from the Residenztheater in Munich, is redeemed by heroic performances from the company’s ensemble. It’s a tough call, but for my money Vincent zur Linden gives the evening’s most indelible turn: Playing both the aspiring actor Adam and the hustler Leo, zur Linden shifts between coyness, arrogance and twitching brokenness. As Eric Glass, the play’s central character, Thiemo Strutzenberger fills a bland role with emotional complexity. And Michael Goldberg, one of the troupe’s older members, inhabits the play’s two mentor-like figures, Forster and Walter Poole, with avuncular gentleness and secret sorrow.Theatertreffen loves a good theatrical marathon, like Frank Castorf’s seven-hour “Faust,” seen here in 2018, or Christopher Rüping’s even longer “Dionysos Stadt” a year later. Yet sheer length does not an epic make. Compared to those gutsy avant-garde extravaganzas, Philip Stölzl’s sleek, handsome production of “The Inheritance” felt tame.“The Bus to Dachau” considers how the Holocaust is depicted in art and how it will be taught and commemorated when no survivors are left.Isabel Machado RiosWhen I returned to the festival several nights later, it was for a production much more in line with the formally daring, conceptually knotty theater more commonly found at Theatertreffen: “The Bus to Dachau,” a coproduction between the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel and the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany.Subtitled “a 21st century memory play,” this absorbing production takes a singular and idiosyncratic approach to confronting the Holocaust through art, and asks what form commemoration and education will take once all of the survivors are gone.Featuring audience participation and live video — including blue-screen effects and Snapchat filters — the production tackles its weighty themes with an off-kilter mix of irreverence and severity. As the actors feel their way through the material, they explore the moral implications of depicting the Holocaust onscreen and how Germany’s culture of memory can carry a whiff of arrogance and even, perversely, of possessiveness.“The Ego and Its Own” was inspired by an 19th-century paean to radical selfishness by Max Stirner, the German philosopher.Arno DeclairYet while “The Bus to Dachau” found compelling ways to dramatize its risky and sensitive themes, another aesthetically bold production at Theatertreffen was ultimately less successful at bringing unlikely material to the stage.That work, “The Ego and Its Own,” from the Deutsches Theater, was one of two shows on the lineup that originated at Berlin playhouses. (The other was the choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s latest freak-out vaudeville-style revue, “Ophelia’s Got Talent.”)Inspired by an 1844 paean to radical selfishness by the German philosopher Max Stirner, the abstract production finds six actors cavorting on a white spiral ramp that resembles the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The play’s director, Sebastian Hartmann, a festival favorite, and the composer PC Nackt fashion a musical revue from Stirner’s opus that is equally arresting and bewildering.The actors intone and belt out slogans from the 19th-century text while Nackt and a drummer accompany them with a wild, mostly electronic score. Stark lighting, live video, fog and even 3-D projections contribute to the trippy expressionistic atmosphere. But despite the constant multisensory stimulation and energetic performances, it quickly grows tiresome. It’s a trip, to be sure — but I’m not sure how it illuminates Stirner’s influential and contentious ideas.One of the festival’s closing plays, “Zwiegespräch” by the Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke is an emotionally resonant production about intergenerational conflicts.Susanne Hassler-SmithControversy often attends the works Peter Handke, the Austrian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2019. For many, Handke has been tainted by his sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian war criminal. The news of the writer’s Nobel win was met, by some, with disbelief, and his 2020 play “Zdenek Adamec” premiered at the Salzburg Festival under the threat of protest. Still, Handke, now 80, continues to publish and be performed at an impressive clip.His latest text for the stage, “Zwiegespräch,” was published as a book shortly before its world premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The author dedicated the dramatic dialogue to the actors Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, the stars of the Wim Wenders film “Wings of Desire,” which Handke wrote the screenplay for; much of this brief, poetic text is concerned with the essence of acting and storytelling. There is also a sense of fraught struggles between grandfathers, fathers and sons.At Theaterteffen, “Zwiegespräch” will be performed on Saturday and Sunday as one of the festival’s closing productions. Not long ago, it headlined another one of Germany’s main theater festivals, “Radikal Jung,” at the Volkstheater, in Munich, which is where I caught it last month.The dazzling production, overseen by Rieke Süsskow, a young Berlin-born director, heightens the dialogue’s intergenerational conflicts. She sets her production in a nursing home and distributes Handke’s text to a cast of actors playing frail residents and their sinister caregivers, somehow creating a convincing dramaturgy without clearly differentiated characters or a conventional plot.Much credit is due to her stage designer, Mirjam Stängl, and her ingenious set, a succession of folding panels that expand and contract over the width of the stage like a fan, and Marcus Loran for his hallucinatory lighting design. Thanks to the attentive artistry of Süsskow and her team, Handke’s 60-odd page pamphlet comes to life in an emotionally resonant performance about memory, loss, regret and the nature of art.Separating the art from the artist shouldn’t mean giving artists a free pass. In the context of this sensitively paced and finely wrought production, however, there seemed little doubt that Handke is attuned to the moral responsibilities of storytelling.TheatertreffenThrough May 29 at various venues in Berlin; berlinerfestspiele.de. More

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      How ‘Some Like It Hot’ Tunes In to the Jazz Age

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      From the set design to the wig styles, the Broadway musical creates a richly detailed vision of the 1920s and ’30s. Its creators share their inspirations.During the 1920s and well into the next decade, there was an explosion of creativity in artistic expression and popular entertainment.The Chrysler Building stood proud and tall on 42nd Street, with a headdress worthy of a Ziegfeld girl. Bootleggers ensured liquor was flowing in the speakeasies. A fiery new music called jazz hit the airwaves, courtesy of Duke Ellington and his band in Harlem’s Cotton Club. Hemlines were higher, hair was shorter, and new moves were showing up on the dance floor and on the cinema screen.It was the Jazz Age, a period whose energy and excitement was in determined defiance of Prohibition and the Great Depression.The era comes to splendid life in “Some Like It Hot,” a new musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder film, now playing at the Shubert Theater. A lyric in the opening number sets the tone for the show while capturing the mood of 1933: “Let’s keep dancing till the crack of dawn … Tomorrow we may all be gone!”“It’s a world where our lead characters have to keep things hidden and underground,” the show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, said of the setting. “A place where you could be a little bit naughty.”In a series of interviews, members of the creative team detailed how they drew on the Jazz Age for several aspects of the show: the music and lyrics, the book, the choreography, the scenic and costume design, and the looks.A Big, Brassy SoundChristian Borle, foreground left, and J. Harrison Ghee portray jazz musicians and lifelong friends who go on the run to escape from gangsters.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Chicago during Prohibition, “Some Like It Hot” follows Joe (Christian Borle) and Jerry (J. Harrison Ghee), a sax player and a bass player who go on the run after witnessing a mob hit. They disguise themselves as women — now going by Josephine and Daphne — and join up with an all-female band, Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators, traveling with the group aboard a cross-country train.Appropriate for a story crowded with musicians, the show makes full, boisterous use of an onstage band whose 17 players cover many more instruments. The songs, by Marc Shaiman (music and lyrics) and Scott Wittman (lyrics), take their cues from the sounds of Duke Ellington, Louis Jordan, Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford, with their bold melodies, ecstatic performances and dare-you-not-to-dance rhythms.The sound of Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators also nods to the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a racially integrated, all-female jazz band that rose to prominence in the 1940s.The decision was made early on to recreate the “hot, joyous, sexy” sound of the big band era. Shaiman and Witman were ready for it. “We have been researching for this show our entire lives!” Shaiman said. “Those acts have always been top of the list for us.”For the character Sweet Sue (NaTasha Yvette Williams), the Syncopators’ bandleader, Shaiman and Wittman found a model in the sassy blues of the singer and songwriter Victoria Spivey. They explored a moodier palette for the character of Sugar (Adrianna Hicks), the Syncopators’ star performer, originally played by Marilyn Monroe in the film. “As soon as the idea of Sugar being Black came up, thoughts of the legendary women of color who toured with bands came to mind,” Wittman said. Sugar’s sultry ode to the sax, “A Darker Shade of Blue,” was written with the vocal stylings of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald in mind.Dance, With a KickThe show’s director and choreographer, Casey Nicholaw, began with the dance styles of the 1920s and ’30s and adapted them into performances that could still feel fresh to modern viewers.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDancing had gotten wilder and looser after World War I. Naughtier, too — a sensibility that Nicholaw sought to capture throughout, but especially in the flirtatious Charleston dancing in the number “Let’s Be Bad.”But it was the Lindy Hop, another popular dance craze of the time, that Nicholaw was most excited to bring to Broadway. “I jumped into that vocabulary right away,” he said.Originating in 1920s Harlem, and named in honor of the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, the dance features brisk swing outs and lightning footwork. Set to the opening number, “What Are You Thirsty For?,” it’s the perfect dance to welcome the audience into the world of the show. “There’s a veracity and excitement to it,” Nicholaw said, while admitting that some liberties were taken. “Authenticity isn’t always theatrical. I wanted to create dances that had some humor and felt fresh now as well as capturing the authentic style of the period.”“Some Like It Hot” also embraced plenty of tap dancing, which had its heyday on American movie screens in the 1930s, with the films of Bill Robinson (better known as Bojangles) and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.Early on, Joe and Jerry’s tap routine expresses the simpatico nature of their lifelong partnership. And in an Act 2 fantasy sequence, the show uses tap to reveal the budding romance between Joe and Sugar. Here, Nicholaw looked to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for inspiration. (The pair first danced together onscreen in 1933, in “Flying Down to Rio.”) Nicholaw strove for something like Astaire and Rogers’ introductory dance in “Swing Time” (1936), whose kinetic movements convey the thrill of discovering a new dance partner — while providing the firecracker percussion of fancy footwork. “While romantic, it has a more playful feel to it.”Lyrics and LingoLyrical wordplay and Prohibition-era slang give a sense of authenticity without overwhelming the audience with detail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen it came to conjuring the era through the lyrics, the urbane, “playfully bawdy” couplets of Cole Porter were a touchstone for Shaiman and Wittman. In the words to songs like “Let’s Misbehave,” Porter “found a million and one ways to refer to sex without ever using a single actually naughty word,” Shaiman said.In similar fashion, Shaiman and Wittman find endless fun with the title of the show, producing lines like: “Some like it rough, some like it tame/ Bring me a moth who loves the flame,” and “Now on some sultry summer day, some consummate with consommé.”“Some Like It Hot” is also peppered with scat singing, the improvised, syllabic gymnastics (“zee bap zeh bootlee atta feet bam-bam!”) that at times serve as the characters’ secret code. The vocal improvisations of scat singing greats like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway provided inspiration, though here, of course, the effect is precisely scripted.In writing the book, Matthew López and Amber Ruffin wanted to evoke the period without letting things get too cartoonish. Speakeasy slang, like “Cheese it!” and “Move those getaway sticks!” found their way into the dialogue. “I think at first I went full ‘Bugsy Malone,’” Ruffin said. “I love where the show landed. It’s just enough lingo of the era that you’re not distracted by it and you also don’t miss it.”López and Ruffin’s book channels the wit and attitude of such pre-Production Code Hollywood films as “Merrily We Go To Hell,” “The Public Enemy” and “The Gay Divorcee.” Sweet Sue gets some zingers, redolent of a time when women no longer felt as constrained by the pressure to be polite. “I just heard from the doctor,” she says, “and I tested negative for patience.” “Sue always felt to me like a character out of a Jazz Age movie,” López explained, “except in a way she never would have been depicted at the time.”Sets From the Machine AgeSweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators meet Josephine and Daphne aboard a cross-country train.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhile Duke Ellington was jazzing up the airwaves, a new kind of architecture and design sensibility was jazzing things up visually. Art Deco, with its striking geometry and gleaming surfaces, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s — the height of the Machine Age, as the show’s scenic designer, Scott Pask, points out — and was epitomized by the Chrysler Building in New York. For Pask, the decorative metalwork of that building was a jumping-off point for myriad onstage details, including stair rails and light fixtures. The receding parabolic arches in the Chrysler’s crown even inform a wallpaper pattern.The color of the sets throughout is rooted in the metallic palette of the Machine Age: steel, silver, chrome, graphite. Even before the show starts, the audience sees, instead of the traditional scarlet Broadway show curtain, a series of narrow, folded silver vertical planes, framed within a metal proscenium.In one dazzling scene, a train, designed by Pask, rolls into Chicago’s Union Station and traverses the entire width of the stage. It was modeled on the aerodynamic feel of locomotives in the ’30s. “It’s a design element that brings me a lot of joy,” Pask said.For the curtains, tables, chairs and other onstage furnishings at the Hotel del Coronado, Pask took inspiration from the work of the furniture designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, which conveyed luxury through strong shapes and ornamental restraint when it was shown at the International Exhibition of Decorative and Modern Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.Hairdos With PizazzAngie Schworer as Minnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJ. Harrison Ghee as Jerry, as Daphne.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Jazz Age was “really the time when women started cutting their hair short,” Josh Marquette, the show’s hair and wig designer, explained. “In fact, if you had long hair, you were either old or considered old-fashioned. The styles of the day were so elaborate and gorgeous, with finger wave and pin-curled hairstyles. Women went to great lengths to create these styles. But the hair still had to ‘dance’ and not fall apart when out at a jazz club.”Marquette studied footage of Lindy Hoppers, searching for the secret to hairstyles that could withstand a session on the dance floor. “They almost always ended a number with hair intact,” he said, “but most hats and hair ornaments were gone!”Marquette’s lookbook included the likes of Greta Garbo and Bette Davis. Daphne’s wig at the end of the show is directly and admiringly borrowed from Josephine Baker’s sleek “Eton crop” hairstyle, with curls pasted on the forehead and cheeks. “It’s just too good of a hair style to not include,” Marquette said.As for Sugar’s hair, though it was not modeled on anyone specifically, it has both the sculpted quality of Baker’s crop and a hint of Clara Bow’s curls and, he said, “with maybe one ounce of Betty Boop!” More

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      Review: In ‘Some Like It Hot,’ an Invitation to Liberation

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      A Broadway musical version of the Billy Wilder film finds exhilarating new ways to make the gender comedy sing.Not for nothing is the 1959 Billy Wilder film “Some Like It Hot” a classic. A crime caper in which two musicians, having witnessed a mob wipeout, must flee Chicago for their lives, it ingeniously and delicately (though boldly for its time) opens the Pandora’s box of gender ambiguity by having them make their escape in drag. They join a traveling all-girl band.For the sax player Joe, the heels, the wig and the alias Josephine are just exigent props; for Wilder, they’re an opportunity to dress his worldliness in winky men-in-masquerade guffaws. But something unexpected happens when Jerry, the bass player, meaning to present himself as Geraldine, finds the name Daphne popping out of his mouth. What happens is: He likes it.That great moment — quiet, funny, revelatory — also occurs in the obviously-a-hit new musical “Some Like It Hot,” which opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theater on Sunday. As Jerry-cum-Daphne, J. Harrison Ghee plays the moment lightly yet fully, without losing the laugh. But it lands in a world so vastly different from Wilder’s, and in a version of the story so vastly retuned to address that world, that it seems like something much bigger. It’s an invitation, as is the show overall, to a new and intersectional stage of liberation.Not to put too much weight on what is in many ways a standard-issue Broadway musical comedy circa 1959: often silly, sometimes shaggy, but with entertainment always the top note. That’s a pretty high standard, after all, and in its staging (by Casey Nicholaw), its revamped plot (by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin) and especially its songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman), “Some Like It Hot” clears the bar handily. At least in the first act, the show is an unstoppable train, blowing right past local stations where you might have a moment to wonder exactly where you’re headed.Instead, you soak in those songs, which, like the ones Shaiman and Wittman wrote for “Hairspray” and “Smash” and the underloved “Fame Becomes Me,” are pretty much all knockouts. To establish Joe (Christian Borle, inventively funny) and Jerry as “brothers” of different races, bonded by annoyance as much as affection, we get a nifty song-and-dance number called “You Can’t Have Me (if You Don’t Have Him)” in the Roger Edens MGM style. A long and delightful tap sequence midsong lets you know that Nicholaw is going to pummel you with pleasure before massaging you with message.NaTasha Yvette Williams, the leader of the band, introduces the show’s freedom-for-everyone philosophy.Marc J. Franklin/Polk & Co., via Associated PressLikewise Sweet Sue, the leader of the all-girl band, gets a brace of hot jazz numbers that NaTasha Yvette Williams, accompanied by the braying brass and dirty saxes of a fantastic 17-piece orchestra, knocks out of the park while incidentally introducing the show’s freedom-for-everyone philosophy. (The setting has been moved to 1933 from 1929 to coincide with the end of Prohibition.) Her tunestack includes a title song about the various temperatures of love that goes so far past being an earworm that it winds up drilling your amygdala.Best of all, for Sugar Kane, the band’s lead singer and Joe’s wolfish crush, the songwriters offer a clutch of sultry Harold Arlen-style blues. That’s smart for the newly conceived Sugar, who is Black, but also for Adrianna Hicks, who plays her. In dissipating the Marilyn Monroe aura that might otherwise cling to the material from her famous turn in the movie, they give Hicks — last seen as the Beyoncé-like Catherine of Aragon in “Six” — a completely compelling aura of her own.At the same time, López and Ruffin’s book is subtly building an argument that links the original story about gender to an aligned one about race. Jerry, who is Black, is not necessarily welcome in the same places his white “brother” Joe is. The vastly built-up character of Sue must likewise face down the bigotry of locals who try to cheat her, while also educating clueless allies. When one of the band members wonders whether they will be heading south from Chicago, Sue zings, “It’s 1933. Look at me and ask that again.”So instead of Florida, where the movie settles, the show heads to California. There the changes to the story pile up. If you know the bland musical “Sugar,” an earlier, more faithful adaptation of the same material, you may be glad of the liberties, even if they come with some unintended consequences.From left: Raena White on the trumpet, Ghee as Daphne on the bass and Adrianna Hicks as Sugar Kane, the band’s lead singer.Marc J. Franklin/Polk & Co., via Associated PressTake Osgood Fielding III, the millionaire who falls in love with Daphne. Now provided with a substantial back story — he’s Mexican American, justifying a detour to a south-of-the-border cantina — he’s less of a lecher than a case study in laissez-faire sexuality. On the upside, we thus get Kevin Del Aguila’s adorably goofy line readings and eccentric, wiggly dancing. On the downside, the movie’s killer last line, in which Osgood accepts Daphne with the phrase “Nobody’s perfect,” is now tucked into an earlier lyric and lost in the shuffle.And it’s quite a shuffle: Nicholaw has loaded the show to bursting with dance. By the time he delivers a five-minute chase sequence near the end of the second act, with gangsters and bellhops and nonstop tapping, you may feel that trading the darker comedy of the movie — literally darker, with its claustrophobic black-and-white cinematography — for the soufflé textures of Broadway entertainment was a Faustian bargain. Fabulous as the visual production is, with Art Deco sets by Scott Pask, Technicolor lights by Natasha Katz and eye-popping costumes by Gregg Barnes, it keeps squeezing out the story’s quirkier soul.Still, we get the message, mostly from Ghee, a nonbinary performer who carefully traces Jerry’s transformation into Daphne, and then the merging of the two identities into a third that takes us into territory that’s far more complex than jokey drag. All the while, Jerry maintains a sense of wonder about the changes happening within him that makes the journey feel welcoming for those of us watching. “You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather,” a song summing up the character’s epiphanies, is a highlight of the show’s final quarter, which is otherwise somewhat overloaded with competing 11 o’clock numbers.Ultimately, it’s the epiphanies and insights that make it possible to enjoy, without too much guilt, the flat-out entertainment of “Some Like It Hot,” including its groaners, overemphasis and old-school gags. How smart it is, for instance, to have Daphne demonstrate the spectrum of gender by singing, simply, “I crossed a border.” (Smart too, to have it sung in the scene set in Mexico.) And how satisfying it is to have Osgood link his identity issues so succinctly with hers: “The world reacts to what it sees,” he says, “and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight.”Perhaps not, but some of its artists have a damn fine ear.Some Like It HotAt the Shubert Theater, Manhattan; somelikeithotmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Zoey’s Perfect Wedding’ Review: The Bride’s Big Disaster

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      For affluent and educated 30-something New Yorkers, a favored set of the playwright Matthew López, a chain-hotel reception is as tacky as it gets.There isn’t enough food, the D.J. is playing Styx instead of Beyoncé, and a line for the cash bar looks like a humanitarian crisis. The bride’s big day in “Zoey’s Perfect Wedding,” streaming via TheaterWorks Hartford, is predictably a total disaster. (Would we have been invited otherwise?)If rubbernecking the collision of happily ever after with dire disappointment is your kink, buckle up. Though this ill-fated party is likely to be familiar.It’s 2008, Barack Obama has just been elected president, the economy is in the toilet, and Zoey’s college friends have been banished to a far-flung table in a drab ballroom at the Downtown Brooklyn Marriott. Zoey, played by Rachel B. Joyce, is the last of their school chums to get hitched, and this is not how they thought she’d go out. For affluent and educated 30-something New Yorkers, a favored set of the playwright Matthew López, a chain-hotel reception is as tacky as it gets.Charlie (Daniel José Molina) and Sammy (Herdlicka) at the reception.Mike MarquesNot only was Rachel (Blair Lewin) not asked to be a bridesmaid, but staving off a calamity like this one is her job — really. (She’s an in-demand wedding planner.) Sammy (Hunter Ryan Herdlicka), a sports agent impeccably dressed in a three-piece plaid suit, swipes a bottle of liquor from the bar to soothe his offended senses. (“Hey, cutie! Got any Cuervo?” he coos to an unseen male server.) And Rachel’s husband, Charlie (Daniel José Molina), is agog to hear how much more sex Sammy is having than they do (unlike the tequila that flows like water, the couple is on the rocks).Every cliché about bad weddings probably occurs during the first hour of Zoey’s. A cringe-inducing speech from a drunk guest oversharing her personal problems? Check. (Rachel really ought to know better.) A bride who shrieks and sobs and retreats to the bathroom? (Don’t forget that bottle of Cuervo.) Not until it seems as if nothing more could go wrong does the play push deeper into its exploration of relationships, which does not exactly reveal new territory: friendships wane, marriages fall apart, and romance rarely resembles a fairy tale.Unlike his two-part “The Inheritance,” an ambitious epic for which López won a Tony Award in 2021 for best play, “Zoey’s Perfect Wedding” is ready-made and on the nose, like a trifle you might pluck off the dessert table at a function less calamitous than this one. The 90-minute comedy, which premiered in Denver in 2018, predates the playwright’s saga about late-20th century gay Manhattanites, and demonstrates his sustained interest in the dynamics of connection amid the limitations of convention.No union could ever be perfect — and what does perfect even mean? — but López still defers to the value of conformity. Sammy’s open relationship becomes a point of rage for Rachel, who’s in the business of monogamy, and an occasion for Sammy to explain how gay men relate to each other differently than straight people (complete with a tutorial on anal sex). It could be provocative if the lesson weren’t so basic, and if Sammy didn’t eventually capitulate to sharing the emotional needs that are fueling the fiasco.The production, directed by Rob Ruggiero, is playful and polished. A dizzying-print carpet and bland sconces on textured walls are a suitable assault on the eyes (set and lighting design are by Brian Sidney Bembridge). And performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong, committed to the sitcom setup and believably tender as the details of their characters are more fully revealed.“Zoey’s Perfect Wedding” treats the early aughts with a certain nostalgia, a Myspace, post-George W. Bush era of social optimism when Gen X was easing into adulthood — and recognizing the potential disappointments of marriage and material achievement. The retro quality of the play’s perspective can feel almost mournful, rather than enriched with the benefit of hindsight. Letting go of youthful ideals can leave you with one hell of a hangover.Zoey’s Perfect WeddingThrough June 5 at TheaterWorks Hartford in Connecticut and streaming online; twhartford.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      'The Inheritance' Wins Best Play at the Tony Awards

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      “The Inheritance,” the sprawling two-part play about gay culture in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, won the Tony Award for best play, making Matthew López the first Latino playwright to win the award.Inspired by the novel “Howards End” by E.M. Forster, “The Inheritance” began its life in London, where it was a commercial and critical success.López wrote in The Times, “In writing ‘The Inheritance,’ I wanted to take my favorite novel and retell it in a way that its closeted author never felt free to do in his lifetime. I wanted to write a play that was true to my experience, my philosophy, my heart as a gay man who has enjoyed opportunities that were denied Forster.”Accepting the award onstage, López said he was indebted to Forster; Terrence McNally, the playwright who died last year of complications from Covid-19 and whom López described as a mentor and the “spiritual godfather” of the play; and Miguel Piñero, the first Puerto Rican playwright to be produced on Broadway.He also urged the industry to improve its representation of Latino writers.“We are a vibrant community reflecting a vast array of cultures, experiences and yes, skin tones,” he said. “We have so many stories to tell. They are inside of us aching to come out. Let us tell you our stories.”Tom Kirdahy, who produced the play and was married to McNally, said, “This award is in loving memory for all the beautiful souls lost to AIDS and Covid, and it’s dedicated to the love of my life, my husband, Terrence McNally.”The play, which ran more than six hours in two separately sold parts, opened in November 2019 and closed with the pandemic shutdown on March 11, 2020 (it had originally planned to close on March 15). More