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    As Broadway Rebounds, ‘Some Like It Hot’ Gets 13 Tony Nominations

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    As Broadway’s rebound from the pandemic shutdown picks up pace, Tony nominators showered much-sought attention on a wide variety of shows, from razzle-dazzle spectacles to quirky adventurous fare.“Some Like It Hot,” a musical based on the classic Billy Wilder film about two musicians who witness a gangland slaying and dress as women to escape the mob, scored the most nominations: 13. But it faces stiff competition in the race for best new musical — ticket buyers have not made any of the contenders a slam-dunk hit, and there does not appear to be a consensus among the industry insiders who make up the Tony voting pool.Three other musicals picked up nine nominations apiece: “& Juliet,” which combines pop songs with an alternative narrative arc for Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers; “New York, New York,” a dance-driven show about a pair of young musicians seeking success and love in a postwar city; and “Shucked,” a pun-laden country comedy about a rural community facing a corn crisis. “Kimberly Akimbo,” a critical favorite about a high school student with a life-altering genetic condition and a criminally dysfunctional family, picked up eight nominations.The Tony nominations also feature plenty of boldfaced names. Among the stars from the worlds of pop music, film and television who earned nods are Sara Bareilles, Jessica Chastain, Jodie Comer, Josh Groban, Sean Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Wendell Pierce and Ben Platt. Another went to one of Broadway’s most-admired stars: Audra McDonald, who, with nine previous nominations and six wins, has won the most competitive Tony Awards of any performer in history.The musical “Shucked,” the rare Broadway show about corn, got nine nominations. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s Tony Awards come at the end of the first full-length season since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close for about a year and a half. Given that tourism remains below prepandemic levels, many workers have not returned to Midtown offices, and inflation has made producing far more expensive, the season has been surprisingly robust, with a wide range of offerings.“Entertainment is like food — sometimes you’re in the mood for an organic small plate, and sometimes for a burger and fries, and the best thing about New York is we’ve got the variety,” said Victoria Clark, the Tony-nominated star of “Kimberly Akimbo.”Broadway shows this season had grossed $1.48 billion as of April 30, according to figures released Tuesday by the Broadway League. That’s nearly double the grosses at the same point last season — $751 million — but lower than the $1.72 billion at the same point in 2019, during the last full prepandemic season.Other key metrics are better, too: 11.5 million seats have been filled on Broadway this season, compared with 6 million at the same point last season, but still down from the 13.8 million that had been filled by this point in 2019.The Tony nominations, which were chosen by a panel of 40 theater industry experts who saw all 38 eligible shows and have no financial interest in any of them, are particularly important to shows that are still running, which try to use the vote of confidence to woo potential ticket buyers.“It’s all about what’s going to make a show run longer and create more jobs for more people,” said Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of “Some Like It Hot.” “Hopefully we’ll sell more tickets, and the show will be more of a success.”The Tony nominations can also boost the employment prospects, and the compensation, of artists. And, of course, they are a tribute to excellence. “It means something when your peers and your colleagues see beauty in something you make,” said James Ijames, whose play “Fat Ham” was among the nominated productions.“Between Riverside and Crazy” was among the nominees for best new play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a complicated place, dominated by commercial producers but also with six theaters run by nonprofits, and the work this season, as is often the case, featured everything from experimental plays tackling challenging subjects to more mainstream fare that aims primarily to entertain.Among the five nominees for best new play, three have already won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, including “Between Riverside and Crazy,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s story of a retired police officer trying to hang onto his apartment; “Cost of Living,” Martyna Majok’s exploration of caregiving and disability; and “Fat Ham,” Ijames’s riff on “Hamlet,” set in the North Carolina backyard of a family that runs a barbecue restaurant.The two other Tony-nominated plays are each significant in their own ways: “Leopoldstadt” is Tom Stoppard’s autobiographically inspired drama about a European Jewish family before, during and after World War II, while “Ain’t No Mo’” is Jordan E. Cooper’s outlandish comedy imagining that the United States offers its Black residents one-way tickets to Africa.The nominations for “Ain’t No Mo’” were especially striking given that the show struggled to find an audience and closed early. “I’m just so elated, I can barely find the words,” said Cooper, who was nominated both as writer and actor. “There was a lot of turbulence, but we landed the plane.”Stoppard is already the winningest playwright in Broadway history, having won Tony Awards for four previous plays (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia”). He is now 85 years old, and “Leopoldstadt” is his 19th production on Broadway. Stoppard said he was proud of the nomination, but sorry the play had come to seem so timely at a moment of rising concern about antisemitism.“Nobody wants society to be divided,” he said in an interview, “and I like to think ‘Leopoldstadt’ works against a sense of human beings dividing up and confronting each other.”Jordan E. Cooper in his comedy “Ain’t No Mo’,” which was nominated for best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOf the 38 Tony-eligible plays and musicals this season, 27 scored at least one nomination, leaving 11 with no nods. Among the musicals snubbed by the nominators were “Bad Cinderella,” the critically drubbed new musical from one of the most successful musical theater composers of all time, Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as a progressive rethink of “1776,” about the debate over the Declaration of Independence, which was revived with a cast of women, nonbinary and transgender performers.One of the musicals that did not score any nominations, a revival of “Dancin’,” quickly declared plans to close: A little more than nine hours after the Tony nominations were announced, the revue’s producers said its last performance would be May 14. Among the seven plays shut out was “The Thanksgiving Play,” which is thought to be the first work on Broadway by a female Native American playwright, Larissa FastHorse.The season featured shows examining a wide variety of diverse stories, and the nominations reflect that.At a time when gender identity issues have become increasingly politicized in the nation, nominations were earned by two gender nonconforming actors: J. Harrison Ghee, a star of “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell, a supporting actor in “Shucked.”Helen Park, who is the first Asian American female composer on Broadway, was nominated in the best score category for the musical “KPOP.” “The more authentic we are to our respective cultures and stories,” she said, “the richer the Broadway soundscape and Broadway landscape will be.”Five plays by Black writers were nominated in either the best play or best play revival category, and four of the five nominees for leading actor in a play are Black.“I broke down in tears,” Pierce said about learning that he was among those nominees, for playing Willy Loman in a revival of “Death of a Salesman” in which the traditionally white Loman family is now African American. “I did not know how profoundly moving it would be. It was the culmination of years of hard work and a reflection on how much effort and toil went into the challenge of playing the role.”This was a strong season for musical revivals, and the nominated shows include two with scores by Stephen Sondheim — “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd” — as well as the Golden Age classic “Camelot” and “Parade,” which is a show about the early 20th-century lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.“Into the Woods” was one of two Stephen Sondheim revivals to earn nominations.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We’re so happy audiences are taking to it, and we hope that Sondheim would be happy this morning as well,” said Groban, starring as the title character in “Sweeney Todd.”The nominated play revivals are also a compelling bunch: a hypnotically minimalist version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” adapted by Amy Herzog and starring Chastain as a Norwegian debtor trapped in a sexist marriage; a bracing production of Suzan Lori-Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” about two brothers ominously named Lincoln and Booth; a rare staging of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” featuring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan; and a ghostly performance of “The Piano Lesson,” August Wilson’s classic drama about a family wrestling with the meaning, and monetary value, of an heirloom.The 769 Tony voters now have until early June to catch up on shows they have not yet seen before they cast their electronic ballots. The awards ceremony itself will be held on June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan in a ceremony hosted by Ariana DeBose.Julia Jacobs More

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      Martyna Majok on Hoping for Magic, and Wishing for Ghosts

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      The playwright, whose Pulitzer-winning “Cost of Living” is now on Broadway, talks about “the precarity of life” and our inherent need to be taken care of.The playwright Martyna Majok has never met her father, so it was her grandfather who played the paternal role in her life. When he died, in Poland in August 2012, she didn’t have the money to travel to his funeral.“Also, I was afraid to go,” she said on a recent afternoon, “because I just didn’t want it to be true.” Not being there, though, gave his death a sense of unreality for her: “Sometimes I just think that we haven’t spoken for a long time.”Majok (pronounced MY-oak) was missing him on the snowy January night in 2014 when she lost her job at a bar in downtown Manhattan. (“They thought I had stolen $100, and they fired me because I was mouthy.”) Back home at the latest in a string of sublets, she started to write the poignant comic monologue that opens her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living.” It’s spoken by a hapless former trucker named Eddie, whose unmooring grief for his dead wife has him wanting to believe she’s texting him from the Great Beyond.“He’s hoping for some kind of magic, some miracle, something that communicates to him that we don’t just disappear,” Majok said in an upstairs lounge at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, where “Cost of Living” — which she dedicated to her grandfather, Pawel Majok — is having a limited Broadway run through Nov. 6. “That was definitely where I was at when I was writing it. I kept hoping that I would see my grandfather’s ghost. I was seeking it out. I was looking for signs.”Katy Sullivan and David Zayas in the Broadway production of “Cost of Living.” Majok insists that her disabled characters be played by disabled actors, a decision that Sullivan calls “bold as hell.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs tinged with longing as “Cost of Living” is, it’s also laugh-out-loud funny. Yet Majok considers it a romance, twining the stories of two New Jersey couples: Eddie and his estranged wife, Ani, who is adjusting to paraplegia following an accident; and Jess, a working-class graduate of a prestigious university who takes a job as a personal care aide to John, a wealthy doctoral student with cerebral palsy.Class figures prominently, as does disability. But to Majok it is a play about “the precarity of life” — the way that one bad break, financial or physical or emotional, can tumble a person into desperation — and the need we all have to be taken care of.Majok, who once juggled late-night bartending jobs with work as a personal care aide to two disabled men, insists that her disabled characters must be played by disabled actors. That stipulation, she said, has gained “Cost of Living” a reputation for being difficult to produce, and led some rights seekers to ask her to make an exception. Short answer: No.“Which I think is brave and bold as hell,” said the actor Katy Sullivan, an amputee who has played Ani in five productions — the world premiere at Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, Off Broadway in 2017, Los Angeles in 2018, London in 2019 and now Broadway. “I am certain that she has lost out on income because she has drawn that line in the sand.”Majok is just as fierce in her dramaturgy, unafraid of lulling “Cost of Living” audiences into a pleasurable sense of comfort only to spring on them a plot twist that makes the whole room gasp, uncertain whether the emergency onstage is real or part of the play. During the Off Broadway run at Manhattan Theater Club, she recalled, a woman got out of her seat at that moment in the performance and started moving toward the stage to help.“I found that so beautiful,” Majok said, “because to me it was like, look at how instantly we care for people.”This is the tender-tough yin and yang of Majok, who pivots to humor if she tears up, as she did in speaking about her grandfather, the same way her characters joke if they go anywhere near self-pity.Lesson in betrayal: Sharlene Cruz, left, and Jasai Chase-Owens in last year’s New York Theater Workshop production of Majok’s “Sanctuary City,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJo Bonney, the director of the Williamstown, Off Broadway and Broadway productions of “Cost of Living,” said that Majok as a playwright “is never sentimental, even when people are in dire circumstances. She has faith, I think, in human resiliency. And that’s just very powerful.”Majok, whose other plays include “Sanctuary City” (2021), about a pair of undocumented teenagers, and “Queens” (2018), set among immigrant women sharing a basement apartment, was 5 when she came to the United States from Poland. She grew up mainly in New Jersey, where her mother cleaned houses and still sometimes does on the side.“I have offered to pay her to not clean,” Majok said. “‘I will give you $75 to not clean this house.’ And she’s like, ‘Why don’t you just give me $75 and I’ll still clean the house?’ I’m like, ‘No!’ Scarcity mind-set, scarcity mind-set.”In her childhood, there was some back and forth to Poland before she and her mother became firmly rooted here. Majok feels self-imposed guilt about having chosen as an adult to remain in this country, where her mother and younger sister are, rather than return to Poland, where their extended family is.That’s one reason the markers of success that she’s accumulated — among them an undergraduate degree in 2007 from the University of Chicago, an M.F.A. in 2012 from the Yale School of Drama, the Pulitzer in 2018, the Broadway debut this month — matter to her, as validation of her writing and her life.“I feel like I’m apologizing for leaving Poland,” she said in a second interview, which she’d requested in part to elucidate this. “If you leave your family, it better be [expletive] worth it.”What’s next for the playwright? She’s in the process of adapting a couple of books into films, and collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby.” Dina Litovsky for The New York TimesScrupulous in her thinking, meticulous in her writing, Majok is easy with profanity. That day, sitting on a bench overlooking the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, near her apartment in Upper Manhattan, she wore a gold necklace that she’d taken off before the photo shoot for this article, figuring it would never make it into a published picture.From a distance its lowercase cursive looks like maybe it’s spelling out a name. On closer inspection, though, it’s one brief expletive, three times in a row — a gift from Marin Ireland, who starred in the 2016 New York premiere of “Ironbound,” Majok’s breakthrough play about a Polish immigrant much like her mother, in which variations on that word appear 68 times.In the “Cost of Living” script, the number is 77, counting an author’s note explaining that in “the Jersey mouth” — and Majok does, after all, have a Jersey mouth — the expletive in question “is often used as a comma, or as a vocalized pause, akin to the word ‘like.’”Despite lingering worries about what she calls “the [expletive] hubris” of presuming she has the luxury to turn down work, Majok lets herself be picky these days about the projects she takes on. She has said yes to adapting a couple of books into films that she’s not yet allowed to discuss, but no to assorted screen projects about “lady murders.” On her wish list? Making a film of “Cost of Living.”And while she was never a collaborator on the musical adaptation of that play, which was announced in 2018, she is collaborating on a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” — which sounds like an odd fit until she says that she sees Jay Gatsby as a working-class character.It’s a psychology that she understands.Far more stable than when she started out, Majok still has a vigilance within — a part of her that is forever anticipating the kind of fracture that could break her life.“I feel like I’m more prepared for catastrophe,” she said. “But you never [expletive] know.” More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Review: Worth Its Weight in Gold

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      Subtle connections bridge the worlds of two caregivers in Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, making its Broadway debut.How do we connect with people? How do we care for them? And what does it all cost, both fiscally and emotionally? These are just a few of the questions Martyna Majok poses in her wrenching 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Cost of Living,” which opened on Monday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.After debuting at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2016, “Cost of Living” ran Off Broadway in 2017 in a Manhattan Theater Club production at New York City Center. Now Majok is making her Broadway debut, arriving with an impressive inventory of awards and praise for her poignant, socially conscious work, which includes “Sanctuary City” (2021) and “Ironbound” (2016).In her Pulitzer Award citation, the committee wrote that Majok “invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.” She does this whether exploring the worlds of undocumented immigrants or working-class New Jerseyans holding on by a thread.As “Cost of Living” begins, Eddie is certainly looking for connection — and redemption, and a way out from under the specter of loneliness since his wife’s death. On this particular night, he says, he’s been stood up for a date with his dead wife, Ani. He sits on a stool center stage at a bar, a shelf of bottles adorned with multicolored string lights floating behind him.What Eddie (an affable David Zayas), a 40-something unemployed truck driver from Bayonne, N.J., leaves out in this impromptu bar eulogy to his wife are the tough times: his years of alcoholism and then a separation.From here the play, tenderly directed by Jo Bonney, jumps back in time, when Eddie and Ani are separated. It’s a few months after a devastating accident left Ani (Katy Sullivan) a quadriplegic and double amputee. Eddie wants to help with her home care; Ani, resentful and depressed, wants to be left alone.Not too far south of Bayonne, in Princeton, Jess (Kara Young) is struggling to stay above the poverty line. A recent alum of the Ivy League school, she’s nevertheless interviewing for a job as an aide to John (Gregg Mozgala), a grad student with cerebral palsy. Jess is direct but guarded when it comes to her life, and John is pretentious and calculating, though he gets Jess to open up with his knavish charm.Kara Young, left, as the caregiver to Gregg Mozgala who plays a grad student with cerebral palsy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe play’s scenes alternate between the two stories of these caregivers, with a turntable set that rotates from Ani’s criminally beige living room and bathroom to John’s upscale, modern apartment with towering windows and a gray-tiled, sit-in shower stall. (The polished scenic design is by Wilson Chin.) Bonney’s deft negotiation of these separate settings and stories is just one of the ways “Cost of Living” impressively teeters between two main axes — the body, and the economy of its care — without toppling over.There’s a satisfying parallelism to the dynamics between the two pairs — the chemistry, the witty repartee, the heartbreak one character offers, intentionally or unintentionally, to another. Each twosome exists in their separate bubbles of Jersey life until they finally intersect. And yet Majok’s sharp writing is never predictable; even when she seems to be leading us down the path to a conventional love story, she pivots and offers an unexpected development — like a wife who sends texts from beyond the grave or a romantic invitation that turns out to be a slick power play.Bonney’s direction adds an extra layer of cohesion to the story: subtle connections that bridge the worlds, like Eddie and Jess each walking separately to the same gentle patter of rainfall on a stormy day (sound design by Rob Kaplowitz).Each of the four cast members performs with a three-dimensional pop of life. Eddie’s insistent affection and optimism is comically at odds with Ani’s dry deadpan. Sullivan’s fiery Ani speaks in a kind of poetry of insults and expletives. Young’s Jess is bright, brusque and uncompromising, even when her life is going sideways. And Mozgala portrays John as someone who is slippery, coy and clever, with a shadiness beneath.Majok’s script insists on the casting of diverse and disabled actors, helping to deepen an affecting work that readily breaks your heart, drags you through hurt and then kisses you on the forehead, sending you off with a laugh.This play left me breathless, and I’m not just using a manner of speech. As I made my way through the crowd of people exiting the theater, I took hard, shallow breaths, knowing that one deep inhale could set off a downpour of tears. This production either broke or mended something in me; I felt — brilliantly, painfully, cathartically — near the point of physical exhaustion.It seems as if the tears, the chuckles, the full body ache of feeling is the currency of an outstanding work of art. We give nearly two hours of attention, and great theater offers us empathy and humanity in return: riches of which even the world’s wealthiest can only dream.Cost of LivingThrough Oct. 30 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Will Come to Broadway This Fall

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      Manhattan Theater Club will stage the Martyna Majok play, which explores disability and caregiving, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” a play that explores disability and caregiving and which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofits that operate Broadway houses, said it would stage a production of the play at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall.The play has two parallel plots, one about a man with cerebral palsy and his hired caregiver, and the other about a double amputee and her estranged husband. The Pulitzer board described the play as “An honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.”Manhattan Theater Club previously staged the play, in 2017, at its Off Broadway space at New York City Center, where it won praise from the New York Times critic Jesse Green, who wrote, “If you don’t find yourself in someone onstage in ‘Cost of Living,’ you’re not looking.”The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway production, will be directed by Jo Bonney, and it will feature two of the same performers, Gregg Mozgala and Katy Sullivan.In 2018, the Williamstown Theater Festival, which staged the first production of the play, said it had commissioned a musical adaptation from Michael John LaChiusa; a Williamstown spokesman said those plans are now “on hold.” More