Medea (Play)

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    A Broadway-Bound ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Leads Olivier Award Nominations

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    The musical, starring Nicole Scherzinger, secured 11 nominations at Britain’s equivalent of the Tony Awards.A revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as a former screen idol descending into madness, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Savoy Theater in London and will transfer to Broadway this year, is in the running for 11 awards — two more than any other play or musical — including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Jamie Lloyd.When the production opened last fall, it impressed London’s often demanding theater critics. Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the production was, like its lead character, “a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.”“I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season,” Wolf added.Lloyd’s maverick production features hand-held cameras that are used to spotlight characters’ emotions at pivotal moments. Although critics appreciated the technique, Lloyd faces stiff competition in the best director category. The other nominees include Sam Mendes for “The Motive and the Cue,” which debuted last spring at the National Theater. The play, by Jack Thorne, dramatizes a fraught backstage relationship between Richard Burton and John Gielgud as they rehearse a Broadway production.Justin Martin, who directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” also received an Olivier nomination.Manuel HarlanRupert Goold is also nominated for best director, for “Dear England,” a play about the English national soccer team that also ran at the National Theater and transferred to the West End. That show secured nine nominations.Despite receiving mixed reviews, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a theatrical prequel to the Netflix show that is running at the Phoenix Theater, secured five nominations, including best new entertainment or comedy play. Houman Barekat, reviewing the production in The New York Times, said it was “exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.”This year’s nominations include a hint of TV glamour in many categories. Among the nominees for best actress in a play are Sarah Jessica Parker for “Plaza Suite,” which runs through April 13 at the Savoy Theater, and Sarah Snook (of “Succession”) for a one-woman “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at the Theater Royal Haymarket, through May 11.They will compete for that title against Laura Donnelly for “The Hills of California” at the Harold Pinter Theater, Sheridan Smith for “Shirley Valentine” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and Sophie Okonedo for “Medea” at @sohoplace.The best actor nominees include Andrew Scott for a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and James Norton for his performance in “A Little Life” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The other nominees are Joseph Fiennes for “Dear England,” Mark Gatiss for “The Motive and the Cue,” and David Tennant for “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse.The winners of this year’s awards are scheduled to be announced April 14 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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      On London Stages, Finding Something Fresh in Tragedy

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      New productions of “Medea” and “Phaedra” feature outstanding performances from Sophie Okonedo and Janet McTeer as women pushed to the edge.Tragedies are rarely absent from the London stage, but some defining theatrical titles don’t always deliver. It can be tricky to empathize with characters pushed to unimaginable extremes, and mythical landscapes can feel remote.What’s needed is a way of tapping into those works’ primal power afresh. It also helps to have performers with vocal and emotional range. London is offering two such powerhouses onstage right now: Sophie Okonedo and Janet McTeer, both Tony Award winners, though only Okonedo is in a production equal to her gifts.That would be the recently opened “Medea,” at the West End’s new in-the-round theater, @sohoplace, through April 22; performed in modern-dress without an intermission, Dominic Cooke’s expert production reminds us of the elemental fury at the heart of Euripides’ timeless play.The National Theater’s “Phaedra,” through April 8, is a new play from the Australian writer-director Simon Stone that draws from Euripides, Seneca and Racine. McTeer plays Helen, an anxious modern-day politician undone by love, as Phaedra was before her. But the tone wavers on the way to an attenuated close; the show runs nearly three hours.“Medea,” by contrast, charts a merciless 90-minute descent into the abyss, using the 1946 Robinson Jeffers adaptation from the Greek that is the play’s preferred version on Broadway.Daniels plays all the production’s male roles, including Medea’s husband, Jason.Johan PerssonWe hear the sorceress Medea before we see her, pleading for death from somewhere beneath the stage. Her husband, the explorer Jason, has transferred his affections to the daughter of the king of Corinth, leaving Medea to fester in grief and anger, and to plot literature’s most celebrated infanticide. Those children she will murder first appear onstage sweetly eating ice cream cones‌‌ — but that innocence won’t last.When Okonedo does appear, sunglasses hide the eyes. “I did not know I had visitors,” she says, deadpan, taking in the playgoers seated on all sides. (The intimacy of this circular theater opened last fall by the impresario Nica Burns is among its assets.) The effect draws us further into Medea’s plight, rendering us therapists or co-conspirators — or perhaps both.The play’s chorus consists of three women of Corinth seated in the audience who speak up now and again to voice their alarm. But Cooke’s primary innovation is to cast Ben Daniels, a London stage veteran, as all the play’s men. Seen before he speaks, Daniels circles the perimeter of the auditorium in silent slow-motion before stepping into the space to play a smugly dismissive Jason, or any of the other roles. The actor puts a deliciously camp spin on the Athenian king, Aegeus, in marked contrast to Jason’s knife-wielding machismo.The suggestion is of a male-dominated world in which the high-born Medea is doomed by her gender. Her fury, though, is directed at Jason specifically, and she commits the barbaric murder of their sons unseen, emerging afterward in embittered triumph.Throughout, Okonedo displays the suppleness of thought, and the wit, with which Medea surely once bewitched Jason, and the remorseless logic that has led to her monstrous deeds. Medea may go to extremes unknown to most of us, but this production keeps you on her side every step of the way.Chloe Lamford’s set for “Phaedra” at the National Theater encases the action in an revolving cube.Johan PerssonIt’s easy to imagine a younger McTeer as Medea, a role well matched to this fearless actress’s elegantly smoky voice and imposing physicality. As the sleekly attired Helen in “Phaedra,” she suggests a woman of wealth and power who knows how to work a room.That self-assurance is why it’s startling to watch her composure crack across a fitful evening that might work better if the production felt less remote. It’s a challenge to connect with the characters through the revolving cube of Chloe Lamford’s enclosed set.Not only must the actors be heavily amplified to be heard, but there are long blackouts while we wait for the various locations to be revealed — among them, a London restaurant, a field of reeds in the English countryside, or the rough Moroccan terrain of the play’s end.The characters at the start talk very fast, as if challenging the audience to keep up. But the gabble ceases with the unexpected appearance of Sofiane (Assaad Bouab) whose father, Ashraf, Helen’s lover, was killed in a car crash; Helen was in the vehicle at the time of the incident, which occurred when Sofiane was still a child.In “Phaedra,” Janet McTeer, left, plays Helen, who has an affair with the son of a former lover, played by Assaad Bouab.Johan PerssonHelen transfers her dormant feelings for Ashraf to the now-grown, and flirtatious, Sofiane, unaware that he is soon also bedding Helen’s daughter, Isolde (Mackenzie Davis, in an accomplished stage debut).The play surprises with its bursts of humor. Playing Helen’s sharp-tongued diplomat husband, the wonderful Paul Chahidi brings whiplash timing to a series of stinging takedowns of his philandering wife, who revels in feeling young again. (It would be helpful, though, to know more about Helen’s political life than the play lets on.)But for all McTeer’s considerable magnetism, this “Phaedra” feels like a messy story of romance gone wrong, modishly dressed up. Helen and her world may belong to the here and now, but it’s the centuries-old tale of Medea that really strikes at the heart anew. More

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      How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

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      She was unforgettable onstage playing seemingly serene women who rippled with restlessness.Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.More often than not, she’d be there, portraying women of wit and passion, whose commanding serenity rippled with hints of upheavals to come, masterly performances in masterworks by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter, Ibsen, Rattigan and Euripides. Sometimes, she’d take you to places you thought you never wanted to go, to depths where poise was shattered and pride scraped raw.How grateful, though, I felt at the end of these performances, even after a pitch-bleak “Medea,” at the National Theater in 2014, which she turned into an uncompromising study in the festering nightmare of clinical depression. Granted, I often felt sucker-punched, too, maybe because I hadn’t expected such an ostensibly self-contained person to unravel so completely and convincingly. Then again, that was part of the thrill of watching her.Her “Medea,” also for the National Theater, dared to hit rock bottom before the play had even started.Richard Hubert SmithMost of Ms. McCrory’s fans felt sucker-punched by her death, I imagine. Aside from her family — who include her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, and their two children — few people even knew she had cancer. The announcement of her death was a stealth attack, like that of Nora Ephron (in 2012), who had also managed to keep her final illness a secret.I have great admiration for public figures who are able to take private control of their last days. Still, when I saw on Twitter that Ms. McCrory had died, I yelled “No!,” with a reiterated obscenity, and began angrily pacing the room.Damn it, Ms. McCrory had within her so many more complex, realer-than-life portraits to give us. Imagine what we would have lost if Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen Mirren had died in her early 50s.McCrory, center, with Emily Watson, left, and Simon Russell Beale in “Uncle Vanya.”Stephanie Berger for The New York TimesLike Ms. Mirren, Ms. McCrory, at first glance, exuded a seductive air of mystery. Even in her youth, she had a sphinx’s smile, a husky alto and an often amused, slightly weary gaze, as if she had already seen more than you ever would.In the early 21st century, I saw her as the languorous, restless Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” a role she was born for (in repertory with a lust-delighted Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” directed by Sam Mendes); as a defiantly sensual Rosalind in “As You Like It” on the West End; and (again perfectly cast) as the enigmatic friend who comes to visit in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” at the Donmar Warehouse.In those productions, she brought to mind the erotic worldliness of Jeanne Moreau. It was her default persona in those days, and one she could have coasted on for the rest of her career. She brimmed with humor and intelligence, and I could imagine her, in another era, as a muse for the likes of Noël Coward.But Ms. McCrory wanted to dig deeper. And within less than a decade, between 2008 and 2016, she delivered greatness in three full-impact performances that cut to the marrow of ruined and ruinous lives. First came her electrically divided Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” a freethinking “new woman” torn apart by the shackling conventions of a society she could never comfortably inhabit. Then there was her heart-stopping Hester Collyer, an upper-middle-class woman destroyed by sexual reawakening, in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.”In between, she dared to be a Medea who had hit bottom before the play even started. In Carrie Cracknell’s unblinkingly harsh production, Ms. McCrory played Euripides’s wronged sorceress as a despair-sodden woman who believed she would never, ever feel better. It was the horrible, dead-end logic of depression that drove this Medea.“Nothing can come between this woman and her misery,” observed the household nanny (played by a young Michaela Coel). But it was Ms. McCrory’s gift to lead us into that illuminating space between a character and her most extreme emotions, and to make us grasp where those feelings come from and how they have taken possession of her.I never failed to experience that flash of revelation watching Ms. McCrory. London is going to seem so much lonelier whenever I return to it. More

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      Ways to Enjoy Theater Virtually

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeMake: BirriaExplore: ‘Bridgerton’ StyleParent: With ImprovRead: Joyce Carol OatesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRevel in the Power of TheaterMissing live performances during the pandemic? Get your theater fix with a handful of online stellar productions (new and old).The Tony winner André De Shields will deliver a one-man performance in “Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” on Feb. 26.Credit…Lia ChangFeb. 13, 2021In another time, the highly anticipated spring season of Broadway would be beginning. Performers would be dropping their scripts, fans would be planning their show schedules and reviewers would be sharpening their pencils. Sadly, Broadway and many theaters around the world are in the longest pause in history, but an effort to keep the industry alive has major stars taking to the virtual stage and much-lauded past productions available for streaming. These productions can’t compare with the energy of a full theater, but what they make up in accessibility is something that can’t be underestimated. The theater community is experiencing a devastating loss right now, but its ability to innovate, invent and continue to create joy gives great hope for what will return.‘Medea’The startling exclusion of Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You” from the Golden Globe nominations has only drawn more attention to the once-in-a-generation talent of the performer, director and writer. Among the current streaming offerings of the National Theater in London is its 2014 production of “Medea,” which stars Coel as the nurse to Helen McCrory’s title character in the celebrated story of a wife’s revenge on her straying husband. The production also features an intense score from Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp, the pairing behind the musical duo Goldfrapp. Available to stream for three days for $9.99. ntathome.com/products/medea‘25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love’ If your kids think “Hamilton” was the first musical to transcend the genre, introduce them to the 1996 cult success that ran for over a decade. New York Theater Workshop’s annual gala will celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Rent” with a virtual concert that brings together an impressive assemblage of the show’s original cast, including Idina Menzel, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jesse L. Martin and Anthony Rapp. They’ll be joined by an all-star lineup of “Rent” fans including Neil Patrick Harris, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Billy Porter and Jeremy O. Harris. The program will also honor the “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson, who died at 35 on the morning of the show’s first performance. March 2, 8 p.m. Eastern, and available to stream until March 6. Tickets begin at $25. nytw.org/‘Elaine Stritch at Liberty’The streaming service BroadwayHD has hundreds of live performances (available for a monthly fee of $9 or $100 for the year). But a particular gem in the mix is Elaine Stritch’s raucous 2001 autobiographical show, which combines stories about her unique life with some of her most adored songs, most notably “The Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company.” This bio show, which was filmed at London’s Old Vic in 2002, recounts her Broadway victories, as well as her struggle with alcoholism and her many rocky romances. broadwayhd.com/movies/AW2GxBd-px3F9_4Aqe1K‘Frederick Douglass: Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’As part of Black History Trilogy, a series of virtual productions from Flushing Town Hall, in Queens, the 2019 Tony winner André De Shields will portray Frederick Douglass in a stirring one-man performance. The transcendent “Hadestown” star also wrote the show, which explores the achievements and ingenuity of the abolitionist leader, as well as the darkness and horror that he experienced. The program comes after Flushing Town Hall’s “Divine Sass: A Tribute to the Music, Life and Legacy of Sarah Vaughan” from Lillias White on Feb. 18. All performances are free. February 26, 7 p.m., flushingtownhall.org/black-history-trilogy-iii‘An Evening with Ali Stroker from Enlow Recital Hall’Ali Stroker, who dazzled in her performance in the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!,” winning a best featured actress Tony for the role of Ado Annie, will appear on the stage of Kean University, in New Jersey, for a night filled with classics from the Great American Songbook. Stroker, the first person who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony, will sing favorites from Stephen Sondheim, Carole King, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lin-Manuel Miranda during the livestreamed event. February 27 at 7:30. Tickets $25, kean.universitytickets.comAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More