Mary Jane (Play)

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    Why ‘The Great Gatsby’ and Other Broadway Shows Are Turning to Influencers

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    To reach younger and more diverse audiences, Broadway shows are increasingly looking to Instagram and TikTok creators.On a 91-degree day in June, a group of 20- and 30-somethings in sundresses and Bermuda shorts was navigating a dimly lit cocktail lounge whose air-conditioning was on the fritz.It didn’t matter: Cocktails with names like the Ghost Writer were flowing, and patrons were posing in front of a velvet emerald curtain, holding “Team Daisy” and “Team Gatsby” hand fans emblazoned with the faces of Eva Noblezada and Jeremy Jordan, the stars of the Broadway musical “The Great Gatsby.”Flickering candles adorned tables at the side of the room, where people colored in silhouettes of the character Myrtle Wilson, a social climber in the musical, and filled out trivia sheets with questions like “Is Gatsby in East or West Egg?” Silver gift bags filled with miniature bottles of Champagne and “Old Sport” stickers sat on a table by the door.“We are in the Gatsby era,” said Francis Dominic, 31, a lifestyle and travel influencer, alluding to the Broadway musical and “Gatsby,” another high-profile stage adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel that last week ended its run at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and is also aiming for Broadway.Dominic was among about 40 TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube creators who had gathered at the Rickey lounge inside the Dream Midtown hotel to celebrate the release of the “Great Gatsby” cast album, which would begin streaming the next day.Molly Kavanaugh recorded content for a live stream.Ye Fan for The New York TimesLexy Vagasy, left, and Kavanaugh at the invite-only event for about 60 people.Ye Fan for 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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      Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.

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      Even at a challenging time for a pandemic-weakened industry, they found razzle-dazzle.Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.Broadway is in the midst of a rolling celebration — of artistic expression, of audience enthusiasm, of song and dance and storytelling itself.The overlapping runs constitute a risky bet by producers and investors, who have staked tens of millions of dollars on their ability to sell seats. Even in the best of times, most Broadway shows fail, and these are not the best of times: Production costs have soared, and season-to-date attendance is 18 percent below prepandemic levels.But the shakeout comes later. First: fanfare and flowers, ovations and optimism.WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17‘The Wiz’Easing on down the road … to BroadwayDeborah Cox, left, who plays Glinda the good witch, and Nichelle Lewis, who plays Dorothy, at the opening night of “The Wiz.” Many of the 1,600 in attendance wore green for the Emerald City.A revival of a 1975 musical that reimagines “The Wizard of Oz” for an all-Black cast.Of course “The Wiz” was going to have a yellow carpet. The show’s recurring song is “Ease on Down the Road,” and that road is the yellow brick one — the path to Oz, but also, to self-discovery.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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      ‘Mary Jane,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and More New Broadway Shows

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      This past week has been jam-packed with openings. Our reviewers think these new shows are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.critic’s pickA ‘heartbreaker for anyone human.’Rachel McAdams as a mother struggling with her own moral agony in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of “Mary Jane” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Richard Termine for The New York Times‘Mary Jane’Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in Amy Herzog’s play about an impossibly upbeat mother caring for a gravely ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system.From our review:[Herzog] is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.Through June 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA family drama that ‘feels like it’s a healing.’Jessica Lange, center, is the titular mother in “Mother Play,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, with Celia Keenan-Bolger, left, and Jim Parsons playing her children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Mother Play’Paula Vogel’s tragicomedy is a showcase for Jessica Lange, who plays a ferocious matriarch to a sister and brother played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons.From our review:Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, [Lange’s Phyllis] is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.critic’s pickA show that all the critics love.From left, Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka as members of an increasingly fractured 1970s band in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s rock drama, with songs by a real rocker (Will Butler), follows a 1970s band (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) on the cusp of fame through the prolonged, drug-fueled process of making a new album.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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      ‘Mary Jane’ Review: When Parenting Means Intensive Care

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      Amy Herzog’s heartbreaker arrives on Broadway with Rachel McAdams as the alarmingly upbeat mother of a fearfully sick child.Soon after Alex was born at 25 weeks, with multiple catastrophic disorders, Mary Jane’s husband, unable to cope, fled their marriage. Still, she hopes he “finds some peace, I really do.”She also thinks kindly of her boss, who means to accommodate her but pretty much fails to. “It’s daily moral agony for her,” Mary Jane marvels. “It’s really something to behold.”Mary Jane’s own moral agony is likewise something to behold. She feels guilty about putting the super of her Queens building, where she shares a junior one-bedroom with Alex, in a difficult position by removing the window guards. “It’s just that he loves looking out the windows, especially when he’s sick and I can’t take him outside?” she explains in upspeak.“It’s the law,” the not-unkind super replies — though Alex, now 2, can barely sit up, let alone reach the sill.“You’re an excellent superintendent,” Mary Jane says. She is the embodiment of apologizing for living.That, at its heart, is the condition that Amy Herzog’s steel-trap play “Mary Jane” explores: The death of the self in the love for one’s child. As with Alex, so for his mother: There is no cure.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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      Rachel McAdams Is Not Afraid of the Dark

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      The actress makes her Broadway debut in “Mary Jane” as the single mother of a seriously ill child. She views her acting choices as expanding her orbit.From the outside, you wouldn’t know that Rachel McAdams, the thoughtfully charming star of blockbuster rom-coms, rom-drams, a Marvel franchise and the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” has been wondering about death.Maybe it has to do with the therapist who said that her indecisiveness and deep curiosity about seeing through someone else’s eyes, which she’s harbored since childhood, could be chalked up to something called “death anxiety.”McAdams had long viewed her acting choices as expanding her orbit. “It’s been a way to live a lot of lives in one,” she said. If that was about a fear of dying — well, it didn’t rattle her.Instead, characteristically, she embraced it. “We don’t have a lot of great coping mechanisms for death in our culture,” she said. “So, yeah, I kind of welcome the opportunity to lean into that — earlier rather than later. Let’s get cozy with it. Let’s get cozy with that next adventure.”Death hovers like a specter around her latest role, as the single mother of a seriously ill child, in the play “Mary Jane.” McAdams hasn’t done theater since college; she makes her Broadway debut as the title character in this Manhattan Theater Club production, which began previews April 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It’s by the busy playwright Amy Herzog, who also adapted Broadway’s show of the moment, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”“Mary Jane” is the first of her own deceptively spare plays to appear on Broadway, after a celebrated run in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop. Dotted (surprisingly) with laugh lines, it’s about the daily muck and lasting profundity of caregiving, a nitty-gritty subject that’s rarely dramatized. “A heartbreaker for anyone human,” Jesse Green wrote in his New York Times review.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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      Amy Herzog on Adapting Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy of the People’ for Broadway

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      At a rehearsal for “An Enemy of the People,” a Broadway revival of the 1882 play, the actor Jeremy Strong paced around an auditorium, wearing pants that were damp from kneeling in ice.As Thomas Stockmann, a doctor who tries in vain to warn his Norwegian coastal community about contamination in the town’s springs, Strong looked shaken, but hopeful. “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” said Strong, known for playing the fragile yet ruthless media executive Kendall Roy on four seasons of “Succession.” “We just have to imagine.”To anyone intimately familiar with “An Enemy of the People,” written by Henrik Ibsen, those lines might sound slightly off key. Ibsen ended the play on a more defiant note, with the doctor boasting that he is the strongest man in the world, because the strongest are those who stand alone.“That didn’t resonate with me at all,” said Amy Herzog, who wrote the new adaptation, which is scheduled to begin performances on Tuesday.Herzog watches a rehearsal of “An Enemy of the People,” which stars Jeremy Strong, right, opposite Michael Imperioli, left.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesInstead of ending with Ibsen’s image of a lonely, heroic truth-teller, she changed it. And it isn’t the first time she’s boldly revamped his work.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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      What to Know About This Crazily Crowded Broadway Spring Season

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      Why are 18 shows opening in March and April, and which one is for you? Our theater reporter has answers.Is Broadway facing a bonanza or a blood bath?The next two months are jam-packed with new productions — 18 are scheduled to open in March and April — while the industry is still struggling to adapt to the new, and more challenging, realities of a postpandemic theater era.For potential ticket buyers, there will be a dizzying array of options. In early April, about 38 shows should be running on Broadway (the exact number depends on unexpected closings or openings between now and then).“From a consumer point of view, we’re excited about the amount of choice there is on Broadway,” said Deeksha Gaur, the executive director of TDF, the nonprofit that runs the discount TKTS booths. Anticipating that bewildered tourists will need help figuring out what shows to see, TDF is already dispatching red-jacketed staffers to preview performances and updating a sprawling cheat sheet as the employees brace for questions on what the new shows are about and who is in them.But the density of late-season openings — 11 plays and musicals over a nine-day stretch in late April — has producers and investors worried about how those shows will find enough ticket buyers to survive.“On the one hand, how incredible that our industry perseveres, and that there is so much new work on Broadway,” said Rachel Sussman, one of the lead producers of “Suffs,” a musical about women’s suffrage that is opening in mid-April.“On the other hand,” Sussman added, “we’re still recovering from the pandemic, and audiences are not back in full force, so there is industrywide anxiety about whether we have the audience to sustain all of these shows. It’s one of those things that only time will tell.”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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      Broadway’s Crunchtime Is Also Its Best Life

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      Eighteen openings in two months will drive everyone crazy. But maybe there should be even more.Broadway is the pinnacle of the commercial theater, a billion-dollar cultural enterprise and a jewel of New York City. So why is it run like a Christmas tree farm?I don’t mean that it invites too much tinsel. I mean that it operates at a very low hum for 10 months of the year and then goes into a two-month frenzy of product dumping.This year, 18 shows, more than half of the season’s entire output, will open on Broadway in March and April — 12 in just the last two weeks before the Tony Awards cutoff on April 25. Like the film industry in December, angling for Oscars before its end-of-year deadline, theater producers bet on the short memory of voters (and a burst of free publicity on the Tonys telecast) to hoist their shows into summer and beyond.From a business standpoint, this is obviously unwise. Instead of maintaining a drumbeat of openings throughout the year — as Hollywood, with hundreds of releases, can do despite its December splurge — Broadway, with only 30 to 40 openings in a typical season, keeps choosing to deplete the airspace, exhaust the critics and confuse the audiences with its brief, sudden, springtime overdrive.Of course, I shouldn’t care about the business standpoint; I’m one of those soon-to-be-exhausted critics. Please pity me having to see a lot of shows from good seats for free.But regardless of the as-yet-unjudgeable merits of the work, I find myself enthusiastic about the glut. I might even argue for more.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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      Rachel McAdams to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Mary Jane’

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      The play, by Amy Herzog, is about a mother caring for a chronically ill child.The film star Rachel McAdams will make her Broadway debut next spring in an acclaimed and heart-wrenching play about a mother caring for a small child with a serious illness.McAdams will star in “Mary Jane,” a drama by Amy Herzog that debuted at Yale Repertory Theater in 2017 and was followed by an Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop that same year. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the play “a heartbreaker for anyone human” and “the most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.”McAdams, who became famous playing Regina George in the 2004 movie “Mean Girls,” performed regularly onstage while growing up in Canada and studied theater at York University in Ontario. But she has not performed onstage professionally since she was a student. In a telephone interview, she said her initial career aspirations were to perform as a theater actor.“I had dreams of going to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and hadn’t really entertained Broadway — that was so far off, and even now I’m pinching myself,” she said. “I’ve been looking for a play forever, but kind of casually — not fully committed to it — and this came along, I read it, and I just was so taken with it.”She said she found the play “beautifully written” and “couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was already inside of me.”“It’s shedding light on the difficulties, but also the resiliency, of families with children with special needs,” she added. “There’s actually a lot of comedy to the piece as well — she’s drawn an amazingly positive, resilient character in Mary Jane, and really well-drawn, supporting characters around her.”McAdams was nominated for an Academy Award for the 2015 film “Spotlight.” She also starred in the 2004 film adaptation of “The Notebook”; a musical adaptation of that same story is scheduled to open on Broadway in March.McAdams said her decision to come to Broadway was not related to the dual strikes by screenwriters and actors that have largely idled Hollywood. She said she had committed to “Mary Jane” before the strikes began. And though apprehensive about returning to the stage, McAdams is also looking forward to it.“There’s no editor — you’re really so naked and vulnerable,” she said. “I hope my training will support me, but it was such a long time ago.”“I think it might be like riding a bike,” she added. However, she said, “there’s a little bit of the unknown about it. And I think also just having emotional stamina — you really don’t know until you’re there if you’re going to be able to fill your vessel up enough to keep you going. So it’s just all those ‘I won’t know until I get there’ things, but I’m excited to do the work.”The Off Broadway production won three Obie Awards, for Herzog’s playwriting, for direction by Anne Kauffman, and for a lead performance by Carrie Coon. There have since been several productions at regional theaters; one is now running in Santa Rosa, Calif.The nonprofit Manhattan Theater Club will present the Broadway production, also directed by Kauffman, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Previews are scheduled to begin on April 2; an opening date and the names of the other cast members have not yet been announced.Herzog, whose play “4000 Miles” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013, has recently turned her attention to revising classic works: She adapted Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” for a Broadway production starring Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed that ran earlier this year, and she is adapting Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” for a Broadway production planning to open next spring with Jeremy Strong in the title role. More