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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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      Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films

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      The Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes was given full rights to the band’s music and their life stories for the unusual quartet of films, planned for 2027.The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view.Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles’ musical interests, and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for the scripted films — a first — which will be financed and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The films are planned for release in 2027.“I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement on Tuesday. The announcement teased that the films would be released in an “innovative and groundbreaking” manner, but did not offer details.In recent years Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of “American Beauty,” has helped refresh the James Bond franchise with “Skyfall” and told the story of two British lance corporals in World War I in “1917.” As a theater director, he showed an ability to work with complicated biographical material over a long stretch of time with “The Lehman Trilogy,” a saga about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers that earned him a Tony Award.Biopics about pop stars have grown popular in recent years: “Bob Marley: One Love” was on track to earn an estimated $33.2 million last weekend, following on the success of films including “Elvis” in 2022 and “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2018.The Beatles have shown strength with movie audiences since they starred in “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964, playing versions of themselves. Their fans continue to show an appetite for expansive projects: Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” an over-seven-hour project, was released to much acclaim in 2021 on Disney+. More

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      ‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

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      Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      “The Motive and the Cue” Asks What Makes a Great Performance

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      “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play in London, imagines fraught behind-the-scenes maneuvering by John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor during rehearsals for a classic Broadway production.“The classicist who wants to be modern, meeting the modernist who wants to be classical.” So says Elizabeth Taylor, summing up the fractious encounter between the revered Shakespearian actor John Gielgud, and her new husband, the actor Richard Burton. It’s 1964, Taylor and Burton are the most famous couple in the world, and Burton is rehearsing the role of Hamlet for a Broadway production that Gielgud is directing.It’s not going well.That’s the setting for “The Motive and the Cue,” a new play directed by Sam Mendes, written by Jack Thorne, and starring Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton and Tuppence Middleton as Taylor.The play, which opened to enthusiastic reviews in May and runs through July 15 at the National Theater, in London, was an idea born out of the pandemic, said Caro Newling, a co-founder with Mendes of Neal Street Productions, which developed the show.Newling said that, during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Mendes was thinking about why theater mattered, and what went into creating great performances. When they were discussing those questions, she added, Mendes recalled reading a copy of “Letters From an Actor,” an account of the 1964 “Hamlet,” by William Redfield, who played Guildenstern in the production. “Suddenly, bang, this idea shot out,” Newling said.A 1964 photograph shows Richard Burton, left, and John Gielgud in a rehearsal for “Hamlet.”Getty ImagesThe idea was a play based on the fraught relationship between the rambunctious, hard-drinking Burton and the repressed, elegant Gielgud during rehearsals for “Hamlet,” with the added combustible element of a sidelined, glamorous Taylor, sitting out her honeymoon in a hotel suite.Newling and Mendes started researching, and discovered another out-of-print book: “John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet,” a fly-on-the-wall account by Richard Sterne, an ensemble actor who smuggled a tape recorder into the rehearsal room.Mendes called Thorne, the playwright behind the stage blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the television series “His Dark Materials,” and suggested the rehearsal dynamics might provide fruitful material.Initially unsure, Thorne found a focus by “understanding the position that Gielgud was in at the time. He wasn’t being loved by the public, treasured by the profession. His great rival Laurence Olivier was running the National Theater and a new kind of modern theater was dominating the West End. He took the Broadway job because he didn’t have other offers.”“Hamlet,” had been a defining role for Gielgud, who had played the part over 300 times. For the Broadway “Hamlet,” he came up with the idea — daring at the time — of doing the play as if it were a rehearsal run-through, in ordinary clothes. In “The Motive and the Cue,” Burton tries to stamp his brash personality on Hamlet, while the classicist Gielgud wants something more sensitively attuned to Burton’s deeper emotions.The cast of “The Motive and the Cue.” Jack Thorne, who wrote the play, said it was about “why we do what we do, what it feels like, and what it costs.”Mark Douet“What’s interesting is that Burton is getting it wrong, sort of on purpose, trying to show Gielgud that it must be modern,” said Flynn, who lived as a teenager in Wales, where Burton is a national hero. “I had a picture of him playing Hamlet on the door of my house for about 15 years,” Flynn said. “It felt eerie that now, I was playing him, playing Hamlet.”The irony of the Burton-Gielgud conflict, he added, was that Burton idolized Gielgud, and was desperate to be regarded as a serious actor. “He is incredibly successful, but deep down, he fears he has drifted into complacency, is not doing something valuable with his art,” Flynn said.The set, designed by Es Devlin, uses expanding and contracting scrims to create seamless transitions between the “Hamlet” rehearsals, a pink hotel suite in which Taylor and Burton throw glamorous parties for the cast and the scenes of more intimate encounters. One of these is between Gielgud and Taylor, who provides the psychological insight that allows the director to find a way to Burton.Middleton, who plays Taylor, said, “Elisabeth is the voice of reason, one of the wisest characters in the play.”“She completely understood Burton’s obsession with conquering Hamlet, and why it was so difficult for him.,” she added. “It was important to me to show she wasn’t this chaotic, floozy character she is sometimes seen as.”Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor in “The Motive and the Cue.” The play is set shortly after Taylor’s marriage to Richard Burton.Mark DouetMuch of the play is concerned with how to play Hamlet: The breakthrough moment for Burton happens when he can connect his painful past to the character’s motivations. “This is what actors have to do when they strip themselves down to play a role,” Thorne said.In the end, the 1964 production was a triumph, running for 136 performances; “The Motive and the Cue” has been a hit, too. It is currently playing to sold-out houses and its popularity suggests that the play’s central ideas — theater as a community and a crucible of emotional connection between actors and audience — have resonated after the enforced closures of the last few years.“It’s about fathers and sons, classicism and modernity, the clash of these forces,” Thorne said. “But I hope it’s also about why we do what we do, what it feels like and what it costs.” More

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      ‘Empire of Light’ Review: They Found It at the Movies

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      Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward pursue a bittersweet workplace romance in Sam Mendes’s look back at Britain in the early 1980s.“Empire of Light” takes place in and around an old movie palace in a British seaside town. This cinema, which is called the Empire, is more than a mere setting: it’s the movie’s center of gravity, its soul, its governing metaphor and reason for being.In the early 1980s, the Empire has fallen on hard times, rather like the global power evoked by its name. The sun hasn’t quite set, but the upstairs screens are now permanently dark, and a once-sumptuous lounge on the top floor is frequented mainly by pigeons. The public still shows up to buy popcorn and candy, and to see films like “The Blues Brothers,” “Stir Crazy” and “All That Jazz,” but the mood is one of quietly accepted defeat. Even the light looks tired.That light is also beautiful, thanks to the unrivaled cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose images impart a tone of gentle nostalgia. It’s possible to look back fondly on a less-than-golden age, and Sam Mendes (“Revolutionary Road,” “1917”), the writer and director, casts an affectionate gaze on the Empire, its employees, and the drab, sometimes brutal realities of Thatcher-era Britain.“Empire of Light” has a sad story to tell, one that touches on mental illness, sexual exploitation, racist violence and other grim facts of life. But Mendes isn’t a realist in the mode of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. The period-appropriate British movies that find their way to the Empire’s screens are “Gregory’s Girl” and “Chariots of Fire,” and Mendes borrows some of their sweet, gentle humor and heartfelt humanist charm.Olivia Colman plays Hilary, the Empire’s duty manager, who oversees a motley squad of cinema soldiers. There is a nerdy guy, a post-punk girl and a grumpy projectionist. They are soon joined by Stephen (Micheal Ward), a genial young man whose college plans are on hold.Hilary and her boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), are carrying on a desultory affair. For her, the rushed encounters in his office are part of a dreary workplace routine, evidence of an ongoing malaise. Things could always be worse, and for Hilary, they have been. She has recently returned to work after spending time in a mental hospital after a breakdown and takes lithium to maintain her equilibrium.Stephen’s arrival jolts her out of her torpor, which is both exciting and risky. He seems more open to experience, more capable of happiness, than anyone else in this grubby little city, and he and Hilary strike up a friendship that turns into more. His encounters with hostile skinheads and bigoted customers open Hilary’s eyes to the pervasiveness of racial prejudice. Together they nurse a wounded pigeon back to health.For a while, their romance unfolds in a quiet, quotidian rhythm that allows you to appreciate Colman and Ward’s fine-grained performances. “What are days?” the poet Philip Larkin asked — he’s a favorite of Hilary’s, along with W.H. Auden — and his answer was both somber and sublime. “Days are where we live.” The daily rituals of work at the Empire, and the pockets of free time that open up within it, add a dimension of understated enchantment, as if a touch of big-screen magic found its way into the break room, the concession stand and the box office.It’s inevitable that the spell will break, and when it does, “Empire of Light” falters. Mendes raises the stakes and accelerates the plot, pushing Hilary and Stephen through a series of crises that weigh the movie down with earnest self-importance. A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.The message is muddled and soft, like a Milk Dud at the bottom of the box, and the movie chews on it for quite a while. “Empire of Light” arrives at its emotional terminus long before it actually ends. Things keep happening, as if Mendes were trying to talk himself and us through ideas that hadn’t been fully worked out. There isn’t really much insight to be gleaned on the subjects of mental illness, racial politics, middle age or work, though an earnest effort is made to show concern about all of them.What “Empire of Light” really wants to be about are the pleasures of ’80s pop music, fine English poetry and, above all, movies. Like everyone else at the Empire, the grumpy projectionist takes a liking to Stephen, and shows him how to work the machinery, eliciting exclamations of wonder from the young man, and also from old-timers in the audience who might remember the vanished sights and sounds of celluloid. The velvet ropes and plush seats, the beam of light and the whirring — it’s all lovely and bittersweet to contemplate.Movies have always been more than a source of comfort: They have the power to disturb, to seduce, to provoke and to enrage. None of that really interests Mendes here, even though the story of Hilary and Stephen might have benefited from a tougher, less sentimental telling.Empire of LightRated R. Sex and violence, just like in the movies. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Britain’s Major Opera Companies Suffer in Arts Spending Shake-Up

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      English National Opera lost its government subsidy, and the Royal Opera House received a 10-percent cut, with funding diverted to organizations outside London.LONDON — English National Opera has for decades been one of the world’s major opera companies. In 1945, it premiered Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.” In the 1980s, it became the first British opera company to tour the United States. Last year, it started rolling out a new “Ring” cycle that is expected to play at the Metropolitan Opera starting in 2025.Now, that standing is in question.On Friday, Arts Council England, a body that distributes government arts funding in England, announced a spending shake-up. Nicholas Serota, the council’s chairman, said in a news conference that funding for London-based organizations had been reallocated to those in poorer parts of Britain, a process that involved “some invidious choices.”English National Opera was the biggest loser in the reshuffle. It will no longer receive any regular funding from the Arts Council. For the past four years, it received around £12.4 million a year, or about $14 million. The annual grant made up over a third of the company’s budget.Instead, English National Opera will receive a one-off payment of £17 million to help it “develop a new business model,” Arts Council England said in a news release, which could potentially include relocating the company to Manchester, 178 miles north of its current home at the ornate Coliseum theater in London.English National Opera was not the only major company affected by the funding overhaul. The Arts Council also cut funding to the Royal Opera House in London by 10 percent, to £22.2 million a year.In a news release, the Royal Opera said that, despite the cut and other challenges such as rising inflation, it would “do whatever we can to remain at the heart of the cultural life of the nation.”Two other companies that tour productions throughout England, Welsh National Opera and Glyndebourne Productions, saw funding drop by over 30 percent.John Allison, the editor of Opera magazine, said in a telephone interview that the changes were “unquestionably damaging to opera in Britain.” Some innovative small companies had received a funding boost, Allison said, including Pegasus Opera, a company that works to involve people of color in the art form. But, he added, it was still “a very gloomy day.”Britain’s arts funding model is somewhere between the systems of the United States — where most companies receive little government assistance, and raise their own funds via philanthropy, ticket sales and commercial activities — and continental Europe, where culture ministries bankroll major institutions. Arts Council England reviews its funding decisions every few years. This time, some 1,730 organizations applied for subsidies, requesting a total £655 million a year — far more than the organization’s £446 million budget.So, some cuts to English National Opera and the Royal Opera House were expected. Britain’s government has long stated a desire to divert arts funding from London to other regions, in a policy known as “leveling up.” In February, Nadine Dorries, the culture minister at the time, ordered the Arts Council to reduce funding to London organizations by 15 percent. The move would “tackle cultural disparities” in Britain, she told Parliament then, “and ensure that everyone, wherever they live, has the opportunity to enjoy the incredible benefits of culture in their lives.”Serota, the Arts Council chairman, said in a telephone interview that the body had not targeted cuts at opera companies specifically. “We’re still going to be investing more than £30 million in opera a year,” he said, highlighting boosts to regional organizations including the Birmingham Opera Company, English Touring Opera and Opera North.The Arts Council slashed grants for several major London theaters, too. The Donmar Warehouse lost its funding entirely, as did the Hampstead Theater and the Barbican Center. The National Theater saw its funding drop by about 3 percent, to £16.1 million per year from £16.7 million.At a time when the Bank of England says that Britain is facing a multiyear recession, even relatively small cuts will raise huge concern for arts organizations. Sam Mendes, the director of “1917” and “American Beauty,” who was the Donmar Warehouse’s founding artistic director, said in a news release that “cutting the Donmar’s funding is a shortsighted decision that will wreak long lasting damage on the wider industry.” The theater, he added, “is a world renowned and hugely influential theater, and the U.K. cannot afford to put it at risk.”Serota said he was “confident” that the Donmar would be able to find alternative sources of funding. “But I know,” he continued, “that’s an easy thing to say.” More

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      Review: In ‘The Lehman Trilogy,’ a Vivid Tale of Profit and Pain

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      The play, tracing the rise and fall of the fabled financiers, finally opens on Broadway after successful runs in London and at the Park Avenue Armory.Much of what happens in “The Lehman Trilogy” is invisible to the eye, which is not the way prestige drama usually works onstage.Directed by Sam Mendes, this British import, which reaches across 164 years of American history to trace the family saga behind the fallen financial powerhouse Lehman Brothers, was a scalding-hot ticket during a brief prepandemic run at the Park Avenue Armory. Yet it offers almost nothing in the way of spectacle, and only the slightest of costume changes: a top hat here, a pair of glasses there.In the captivating production that opened on Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater, it relies largely on an unspoken agreement between actors and audience — to imagine together, and let fancy crowd out fact.Sort of the way that heedless investors looked right past all warning signs in the faith-based run-up to the stock market crash of 2008. Illusion is illusion, after all, and financial markets, like the theater, require a certain suspension of disbelief — though when the fantasy bursts in theater, the fallout is less ruinous. When investors halted their collective game of make-believe 13 years ago, mammoth financial firms like Lehman Brothers met their swift demise, and the world’s markets suffered the aftershocks.“The Lehman Trilogy,” though, is not actually a number-crunching play; reports that Jeff Bezos took in a recent performance should not cause you to infer otherwise.Written by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, it is a vividly human tale, nimbly performed by three of the finest actors around: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, who, in making his Broadway debut, has replaced the original cast’s Ben Miles. (I did not catch Beale, Godley and Miles at the Armory; it was too scarce a ticket, and too pricey.)Slipping in and out of myriad roles, the actors spend the bulk of their time narrating, standing outside their characters. We, in turn, spend most of our time envisioning the fleet-footed story they conjure with words over three-plus hours (including two intermissions) that feel nowhere near that long.Our eyes track these witchy actors as they move through Es Devlin’s revolving glass-and-metal office set, while our minds persuade us that the story is unfolding in a succession of disparate spaces that resemble it not at all.A peculiarly gentle interrogation of the American dream’s descent into many-tentacled nightmare, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins as so many stories of this nation do: with an intrepid immigrant’s arrival. A young man from Bavaria stands before us, suitcase in hand, freshly landed in New York Harbor and certain he is worldly after 45 days at sea.From left, Godley, Beale and Lester in the play. Their feats of storytelling are the primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe year is 1844, he is Heyum Lehmann, and in a moment we will see him reborn as Henry Lehman — his Ellis Island moniker bestowed by a port official too obtuse to comprehend the newcomer’s real name.On first impression, Henry (Beale) is darling, funny and utterly sympathetic. When his younger brothers, Emanuel (Lester) and Mayer (Godley), follow him across the ocean, we feel a similar warmth toward them.This is where the mechanics of the play, with these deft and lovely actors breathing such life into the brothers, coax us into an ease at odds with moral logic as we watch their genteelly brutal acquisition and stockpiling of wealth.The brothers settle in antebellum Alabama, where even the earliest iteration of the family firm, a shop selling fabrics and clothing, relies on a local economy built on slavery. As the Lehmans grow more ambitious, they start buying and selling cotton from the plantations, making their first fortune on it.Seldom do we hear a voice of conscience — like the local physician who tells a dispirited Mayer, in the aftermath of the Civil War, that the collapse of the South’s economy should not have come as a surprise.“Everything that was built here was built on a crime,” the doctor says. “The roots run so deep you cannot see them, but the ground beneath our feet is poisoned. It had to end this way.”That is, of course, a warning that the pattern of reckless profit and resulting pain will repeat: in the 1929 crash, which Lehman Brothers managed to survive by morphing yet again, and in the 2008 crash, which it didn’t. It is also a signal that the founders of the firm — whose deaths, when they come, are meant to move us, and do — were not the ethical betters of their more vulgar descendants.With a subdued, filmic score by Nick Powell, played live by Candida Caldicot on an upright piano, “The Lehman Trilogy” is structured in three parts. It follows Emanuel and Mayer to New York, and their family through successive generations, whose principals we first meet in childhood.So here is Emanuel’s son Philip (Beale), a future shark, as a gape-mouthed tot prodded to parade his smarts for guests. Here is Philip’s son Bobby (Godley) as a buoyant 10-year-old, whose father mercilessly dismantles the boy’s love for horses as creatures rather than commodities.And most enchantingly, here is Mayer’s son Herbert (Lester), a future governor and senator, as a thumb-sucking 3-year-old playing with his father’s beard, and later as a fair-minded 9-year-old at Hebrew school, objecting to the divine massacre of the innocent children of Egypt.No matter how horrid some of the Lehmans become (not Herbert, though; never Herbert), knowing them young cushions our feelings toward them later. That’s human nature. What’s unsettling is which people in this saga of capitalism we see portrayed, which people the play helps us to imagine clearly and which people we are asked to imagine vaguely or not at all. Proximity shapes our sympathies.“The Lehman Trilogy” exists because of the cascading financial disaster that extinguished Lehman Brothers in 2008, yet its perspective is very much from the top of that deluge. Any harm bucketing down below is at best an abstraction, just as it is in 1929, when the play shows us suicides of despairing stockbrokers but none of the pain radiating through lower social strata. And slavery, the founder of the family’s feast, is kept in soft focus, off to the side.The primary reason to see “The Lehman Trilogy,” then, is to witness the superb Beale, Godley and Lester in their feats of storytelling — and to conspire with them in imagining the play’s tarnished, if not truly vanished, world.When intermission comes and the auditorium lights turn on, gaze up at that glass set. You’ll see an awfully comfortable-looking audience reflected there.The Lehman TrilogyThrough Jan. 2 at the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; thelehmantrilogy.com. Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Theater’s New Glass Menageries

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      Some of the most innovative set designers and directors are placing actors within transparent boxes, posing novel aesthetic questions in the process.IN A WORLD filtered through screens, a condition made even more acute during pandemic lockdown, the theater’s most anachronistic thrill would seem to be watching lives unfold before us. The actors may not literally be within our grasp, but the lack of a barrier between them and us, the illusion that we are, for once, actually in the room — the sound of the human voice in anguish or joy, a carafe of water crashing to the floor — has never seemed more stirring and essential.Or perhaps not. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place not in the three-sided black boxes that defined the experimental zest and emerging punk of the late 1970s, or the crowd-pleasing theater-in-the-round pioneered in ancient Greece and Rome and revitalized in the mid-20th century, but in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke the International Style’s high Modernism and the minimalist penthouses of the contemporary metropolis. There would not seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeAnd yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous. After a long Broadway hiatus, “The Lehman Trilogy,” directed by Sam Mendes, opens next month at the Nederlander Theater; during its nearly three-and-a-half-hour duration, three actors play a cavalcade of characters from the more than 160-year history of Lehman Brothers, the infamous investment house, encased in a revolving transparent box conceived by the British designer Es Devlin. The 2016 Young Vic production of Federico García Lorca’s “Yerma” (1934), directed by the then-31-year-old Australian Simon Stone, was restaged in 2018 at New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory in what was essentially a giant terrarium. That same year, the German designer Miriam Buether built a glassed-in room with a huge tilting mirror as the back wall for a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” (1991), directed by Joe Mantello on Broadway. And for his 2017 National Theater adaptation of the film “Network” (1976), which came to Broadway the following year, the Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove put his stage manager in a large glass box, casting him as a character who ran both the actual play and the mythical television broadcast at the center of the plot.Photograph by Kyoko Hamada. Set design by Todd KnopkeA thoroughly contemporary material, glass creates what Buether calls “an ultimate filmic quality, like looking through a lens.” Even before fear of infection drove us behind protective plexiglass shields and reduced most human interaction to Zoom, theater audiences had come to appreciate the trippy perceptual effects of multimedia innovations — video projections have become commonplace onstage, particularly as pioneered by van Hove and others. Such effects are now part of the theatrical experience, a way to warp audience expectations. Once, updating a classic with, say, modern dress or gender-blind casting was provocative and transformational, allowing us to see the text anew; now, the stage itself has become the terra nova that jolts us, a glass cage making literal these works’ themes of isolation and vulnerability.FOR THE VIEWER looking at something through it, glass offers both a subtle shift and a seismic one; it alters everything while visually changing very little. “You know that what you’re watching is different, but you can’t quite tell why,” says Buether, 52, who, for the second act of “Three Tall Women,” created two rooms — mirror images of each other — separated by a wall of plexiglass, and then placed a mirrored wall behind them, creating multiple images of the characters and echoing the play’s notions of identity and time. “It’s like making the fourth wall tangible, as though peering into a display case. You adjust to it quickly — I mean, it’s transparent — but it never really disappears.”For Stone, who has set shows behind glass a half dozen times, beginning with his 2011 production of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” (1885) at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, the conceit works best with a particular part of the canon: intimate plays “that plumb the dark night of the soul,” he says. A specialist in reviving the works of domestic naturalism that distinguished European theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he believes that using glass, often in near-bare environments, has enabled him to reinvent these plays for a new generation. Back when Ibsen was writing, Stone notes, it was radical to set works in bourgeois living rooms instead of castles and fields, but such environments now seem banal. “I thought to myself: ‘What would happen if you actually put the glass between the action and audience?’” he says. “‘What if you make it an obstacle that has to be overcome, that the audience has to lean into?’” A production of “The Wild Duck” from Sydney’s Belvoir St Theater, at the Barbican Theater’s International Ibsen Festival, 2014.Theatrepix/Alamy For “Yerma,” he wanted the title character’s descent into madness after she’s unable to bear a child to seem inescapable; for “The Wild Duck,” he was seeking to add a clinical aspect to a plot that culminates in a young girl unexpectedly shooting herself in the chest: “I was very conscious of not turning it into suicide porn,” he says. He used a series of revolving stacked glass boxes — roughly evocative of a Modernist chalet — for his 2017 Theater Basel production of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” published in 1901, “because it made the realities of their lives even more brutal and confined.” Paradoxically, actors thrive in the glass box, he adds: “Sometimes being fully exposed can inhibit them. You have too close a connection to the audience; you are too aware. The illusion that they are in a private room makes them feel safe.”The Young Vic’s production of “Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, 2018.Stephanie BergerStill, working behind glass is not without its unique technical challenges. If you put your cast in a box, especially one with a lid, you cut off all possibility of acoustical naturalism. Many plays these days are miked, but the amplification is designed to be undetectable, creating the illusion of proximity; once there is a closed cube, verisimilitude becomes more complex. “Yes, you lose the sound of the natural voice,” says Stone, “but you gain extreme aural intimacy.”Devlin, 50, who has designed tour sets for Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, as well as for operas, is also accustomed to the trade-offs of a glass box. For her and Mendes, who began as a theater director before moving to film, this kind of spare set provides a juxtaposition to an epic historical work like “Lehman.” The boardroom, as well as the other office spaces in which the play unspools, “conveys both claustrophobia and expanse, intruding on the audience’s domain,” she says, and winks at the glassed-in conference spaces that have become corporate America’s heavy-handed attempt at conveying “transparency.” Inside, the box is divided into three chambers with internal glass partitions on which the actors scrawl the names of the Civil War dead and the price of commodities. The rectangle’s perimeter is formed by glass panels between which are open gaps, which improve the acoustics and act like apertures, allowing the action to move from wide screen to close up. That the box also revolves creates the equivalent of a Hollywood tracking shot: “Sam loves that, of course,” Devlin says.A revolving glass box returns to Broadway in “The Lehman Trilogy.”By Nicholas CalcottBut cramming the action into a single room also has a deeper significance. When Devlin worked with the director Trevor Nunn on the 1998 London revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” (1978), which took place in a deconstructed facsimile of a domicile in which the windows were mere outlines on the walls, she referenced the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House,” a ghostly, solid cast-concrete replica of a rowhouse, which stood on an East London street for three months. Together, the sculpture and the production reminded viewers how the confines of home can be both solid and ephemeral. For “Lehman,” Devlin was also inspired by “Tango,” a semi-animated eight-minute 1981 short by the Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski, in which dozens of people seem to simultaneously inhabit a small front parlor, their elaborate dance compacting time and space. “There’s a message embedded in a single room,” says Devlin, “that architecture itself is the vessel through which history — whether intimate or monumental — is enacted. Glass helps you make that message explicit: A room is more than just a passive container. It remembers life.”Set design: Todd Knopke More

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      Side Hustles and Handouts: A Tough Year Ahead for U.K. Theater Workers

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySide Hustles and Handouts: A Tough Year Ahead for U.K. Theater WorkersWith playhouses closed for the next few months, actors and backstage crews are looking for new ways to make ends meet.The actress Amanda Lawrence modeling an outfit by Ti Green, a costume and set designer who has turned to selling clothing online while Britain’s theaters are closed.Credit…Craig FullerJan. 8, 2021LONDON — Last August, Tom Boucher was among the first in Britain’s theater industry to get back to work, after theaters were closed for months because of the coronavirus.For six weeks, Boucher, 29, was a lighting technician for “Sleepless: A Musical Romance” a show based on the popular 1993 movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” He felt so lucky to have a job again, he recalled in a telephone interview.Every day, until the run ended, Boucher went to the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater, where he was tested for the coronavirus before bathing the stage with warm tones to conjure the show’s romantic atmosphere.But that joy was short-lived, he said.Tom Boucher, shown onscreen and onstage at rear, was a lighting technician for “Sleepless: A Musical Romance.”Credit…Dale DriscollFreelancers — both actors and backstage crew members like Boucher — are the lifeblood of Britain’s theaters, making up an estimated 70 percent of the country’s 290,000 workers in the performing arts, according to U.K. Theater, a trade body. But that workforce’s flexibility makes it particularly exposed to any changes in coronavirus restrictions.Facing a new wave of the virus, England on Monday went into a national lockdown again. Theatrical performances are banned for months, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said restrictions could last until March 31, which means Britain’s estimated 200,000 freelance theater workers are once more facing financial trouble and looking for ways to get by.Boucher guessed it would be April, at best, before he could work again in a theater. On Monday, with bills piling up, he applied to the Theater Artists Fund, a body that gives emergency grants to theater freelancers imperiled by the pandemic. He was hoping for 1,000 pounds, or about $1,350.“I know it sounds silly,” Boucher said, “but £1,000 can really go a long way at the moment.”The Theatre Artists Fund, which was created by the film and theater director Sam Mendes as a response to the pandemic, gave out around 4,600 grants last year in three funding rounds, Eva Mason, a spokeswoman for the program, said in an email. It reopened to applications on Monday and received “hundreds” in two days, she added.Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s theaters seemed to be on the verge of a triumphant return. On Dec. 5, “Six,” the hit musical about the wives of Henry VIII, returned to the West End, in London, alongside several other shows including a concert version of “Les Misérables.” But then restrictions were tightened in the city, forcing those to shut, and then came the nationwide lockdown — England’s third since March.“Six” a musical about the wives of Henry VIII, returned briefly to the West End, in December.Credit…Suzanne Plunkett for The New York TimesAccording to Freelancers Make Theater Work, a campaigning organization, 36 percent of freelancers in the industry are not eligible for help under the British government’s coronavirus support programs. “I fell through every single possible crack to get government support,” Boucher said.Another private program, the Fleabag Support Fund, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the producer Francesca Moody, also saw a boom in applications this week. It opens for five days each month to applicants, and has given out 772 grants since April, worth an average £742.But such generosity only goes so far. In telephone interviews this week, four theater freelancers said they had set up their own businesses to get through the pandemic; another said he was working as a delivery driver; and another said she was relying on a combination of unemployment checks and parental support.Cakes from Flour and Fold, a baking business started by Jessica Howells, who used to work as a sound engineer.Credit…Jessica Howells“The situation actually feels worse than March,” said Jessica Howells, a sound engineer who had been working on “Phantom of the Opera” in the West End when the pandemic struck. “Back then I didn’t know anyone who had coronavirus. Now, I know a lot of people,” she added.Last summer, Howells was laid off, so she started a baking business, she said. She now makes brownies and party cakes that are delivered to customers across Britain. “It’s enough to pay the bills, to survive,” she said. Her partner, also a theater freelancer, now delivers eggs door-to-door, she added.Ti Green, a Tony Award-nominated costume and set designer, started a business a little closer to her usual line of work, making bespoke women’s wear. She loved still doing something creative, she said in a telephone interview, but was desperate to “get back into a dark theater, where everyone’s working together to create.”She had no idea when that would be, she said, but added, “I’m trying not to lose hope.”Moody of the Fleabag Support Fund said she was worried that many freelancers would leave the industry for good. “I do think we’ll lose a large swath to other jobs,” she said. “It’s a real problem for theater, as we’ll have a smaller talent pool,” she added.None of the six freelancers interviewed said they were intending to change career. One, at least, was trying to channel a new line of work back into something dramatic. Stewart Wright, 46, an actor, said in a telephone interview that last year he started working as a courier to get by. Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, he cycled around Bristol, England, delivering takeout.Bristol has many hills, and Wright can only last four hours on his bike per night, he said, but the experience had inspired him creatively: He was now working on a script for a sitcom, called “Downhill,” about a middle-aged man who loses his high-profile job and ends up as a pizza delivery guy.The actor Stewart Wright as Santa Claus in a 10-minute production he performed on doorsteps around Bristol, England.Credit…Mark DawsonWright had not given up performing entirely, he added. Last month, he co-created a 10-minute Christmas show which he performed, dressed as Santa Claus, on doorsteps in Bristol. (The production was a partnership with the Tobacco Factory theater in the city.) “I suppose I’ve been in this fight or flight mode, where I’m just trying to piece together a living from all sorts of stuff,” Wright added.He doesn’t expect to get any theatrical work this year, he said, but was trying not to think about that. “I’m not spending energy on asking, ‘When will I get work in a theater again?’ as it’s just wasted,” he said. Wright needed all the energy he could get, after all: He had to get back on his delivery bike.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More