Mendez, Lindsay

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares179 Views

    A Broadway Star Gets Married With Help From Daniel Radcliffe

    by

    Lindsay Mendez, nominated for a Tony in “Merrily We Roll Along,” married actor J. Alex Brinson in a Monday ceremony officiated by castmate Jonathan Groff. Daniel Radcliffe was their ring bearer.On Broadway, with most shows shuttered, Monday is typically the day actors and crews rest and recharge.Or, if you’re Lindsay Michelle Mendez and John Alex Brinson, it’s the day you get married.Ms. Mendez currently stars as Mary Flynn in the musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” so the wedding was planned not just around her schedule, but that of the officiant and ring bearer’s, too — Ms. Mendez’s castmates Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe.Ms. Mendez and Mr. Brinson, who is also an actor and goes by J. Alex Brinson, first met in 2019 while working on the CBS courtroom procedural “All Rise.” Ms. Mendez played the court reporter and Mr. Brinson the bailiff. In the very first episode, Mr. Brinson’s character jumped up to protect Ms. Mendez and their other castmates during a dramatic scene.“My hero from day one,” Ms. Mendez said. “Even in storytelling form.”Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.At first, the pair were just friends; both were married to other people at the time. Three years and many episodes of “All Rise” later, in the spring of 2022, they took one step closer to becoming something more when Ms. Mendez, who had divorced, asked Mr. Brinson to move in with her … as a roommate.“He was living in a hotel and filming and had to drop his laundry at a random place,” said Ms. Mendez, who has a daughter named Lucy, now 3, from her previous marriage. “I said, ‘you know, I have a 1-year-old at my house and a pullout sofa. I don’t know if that would be interesting to anyone, but you’re welcome to stay if you need a place.’”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

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Three Former Elphabas in ‘Wicked’ Scored Tony Nominations

      by

      The Green Girls are making good.Three women who have starred on Broadway as Elphaba in “Wicked” picked up Tony nominations on Tuesday.Shoshana Bean, who inhabited the role for a year starting in 2005, was nominated as best featured actress for “Hell’s Kitchen,” in which she plays a tough-minded single mother trying to protect her adolescent daughter from the temptations of the street. (This is her second Tony nomination — she was also nominated in 2022 for “Mr. Saturday Night.”)Eden Espinosa, who succeeded Bean as Elphaba in 2006, was nominated as best leading actress for playing an artistically and sexually adventurous painter in “Lempicka.”And Lindsay Mendez, who became Elphaba in 2013, scored a nomination as best featured actress for portraying a hard-drinking novelist in this season’s hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” (Mendez already has one Tony, for her portrayal of Carrie Pipperidge in a 2018 revival of “Carousel.”)Who is Elphaba? Well, “Wicked,” a musical based on a novel by Gregory Maguire, is an imagined back story for the Wicked Witch of the West, and Elphaba is that character. (Reconsidering her actual wickedness is the subject of the musical.) Her name is derived from the phonetic initials of L. Frank Baum, who wrote “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”; her skin is green as a nod to the green makeup worn by Margaret Hamilton in “The Wizard of Oz,” the much-loved film adaptation of Baum’s novel.“Wicked” has been running successfully for so long, with so many companies, and with juicy leading roles for two young women, that it now appears on the résumés of many musical theater performers.The actress playing Elphaba needs a big belt; her iconic song is “Defying Gravity.” The role was originated on Broadway in 2003 by Idina Menzel, who won a Tony for her work, and who is expected to return to Broadway sometime in the not-too-distant future with “Redwood,” a new musical about a woman and, well, trees. (The musical had a production earlier this year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.)The other main character in “Wicked” is Glinda (traditionally described as a good witch, although again, your mileage may vary); that role calls for a high soprano and was originated by Kristin Chenoweth, who is also hoping to return soon to Broadway — she is starring in a new musical called “The Queen of Versailles,” adapted from the film, that will have an initial production at the Emerson Colonial in Boston this summer. (A 2023 Glinda, McKenzie Kurtz, is currently starring in another new Broadway musical, “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” while Katie Rose Clarke, who had three separate tenures as Glinda on Broadway, is featured in this season’s revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.”)Meanwhile, “Wicked” is heading for the big screen, with Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda. The first of the film’s two parts is scheduled to be released in November, as a Thanksgiving weekend movie. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ Finally Found in the Dark

      by

      Jonathan Groff, supported by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, is thrillingly fierce in the first convincing revival of the cult flop Sondheim musical.To be a fan of the work of Stephen Sondheim, as Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, is “to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” He meant not only that Sondheim’s songs are so often crushingly poignant but that the experience of loving them can feel unrequited. The shows they are in — he was reviewing the original production of “Merrily We Roll Along” — don’t always love you back.That was in 1981, when “Merrily,” with a problematic book by George Furth, suffered an ignominious Broadway debut of just 16 performances after 44 previews. No matter that Sondheim, responding to the story of a songwriter, had written his most conspicuously tuneful score to date, prompting pop recordings by Frank Sinatra (“Good Thing Going”) and Barbra Streisand (“Not a Day Goes By”). It was universally deemed a debacle.The debacle ended the working relationship between Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, whose five shows together in the 1970s — “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures” and “Sweeney Todd” — had redefined the American musical. With “Merrily,” they thought they were taking the form even further, with a complicated backward chronology and a cast of mostly inexperienced actors who played 40-ish adults at the start and grew into themselves at the end.After the show’s death by a thousand pans, Sondheim, saying he’d rather make video games, threatened to leave the theater entirely. Luckily, that didn’t happen — and “Merrily,” too, refused to give up, instead undergoing a seemingly endless series of unsatisfactory “improvements” that only seemed to confirm the hopelessness of making it matter.But with the opening of its first Broadway revival, after 42 years in the wilderness and the death of Sondheim in 2021, “Merrily” is no longer lost. Maria Friedman’s unsparing direction and a thrillingly fierce central performance by Jonathan Groff have given the show the hard shell it lacked. Now heartbreaking in the poignant sense only, “Merrily” has been found in the dark.When we meet him after the uplift of the gleaming overture, Groff, as the composer Franklin Shepard, is alone in an empty and unappealing liminal space. (The deliberately ugly sets, perhaps uglier than necessary, are by Soutra Gilmour.) He is wearing, and will throughout the show, a solemn undertaker’s outfit — black pants, black tie, white shirt. Even as everyone else changes with the times, in vivid costumes (also by Gilmour) that mark each notch on the timeline from 1976 to 1957, Frank always remains what he was: a one-man show. “Merrily” is the funeral he throws for his own ideals.Groff, right, with Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe as friends whose relationship sours in the Sondheim-Furth musical, which is getting its first Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe contrast between the pleasures that music can provide and the damage obvious in Frank’s demeanor immediately frames what follows as a solo psychodrama. Yes, Charley Kringas, who writes the words, and their friend Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theater critic, are there throughout, trying to encourage his better angels and corral his worse ones. But despite high-wattage, laser-focused performances by Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, they have no effect on him; they are clearly Frank’s pawns, willing or otherwise.How he destroys Mary, and nearly Charley as well, not without their assistance, is revealed as the musical’s formerly absent spine. In the first scene, a 1976 party for “Darkness Before Dawn,” a hack hit movie Frank has produced now that he no longer writes music, Mary is dispatched with barely a blink, or drunkenly dispatches herself.In the next scene, as Charley enumerates Frank’s misplaced priorities in a 1973 television interview — Radcliffe handles the song “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” superbly — Groff’s coldblooded rage is terrifying. Collateral damage along the way includes Frank’s first wife, Beth (Katie Rose Clarke); his second, Gussie (Krystal Joy Brown); his probable third, Meg (Talia Simone Robinson); his producer, Joe (Reg Rogers); and even his adorable young son. Who but a monster would betray such a punim?“Merrily” is thus no longer, as it seemed in 1981, the story of the gradual, almost inevitable dimming of youth’s sweet illusions but rather the story of their falsity in the first place. Frank is only devoted to Mary and Charley when he doesn’t have access to anyone more useful. To think he turned into that monster is a mistake: He always was one, as Sondheim clearly understood. “That’s what everyone does,” Mary sings once the three-way friendship has collapsed. “Blames the way it is/on the way it was/On the way it never ever was.”Friedman has thrown in her lot with the coruscating insight of the songs, making a tactical decision — successful but not without consequences — to deprioritize everything else, including the score’s brassy élan. “Merrily” Kremlinologists will want to know that the version onstage at the Hudson Theater, though slightly bigger than the Off Broadway version that opened at New York Theater Workshop in December 2022, is still somewhat underscaled for Broadway. It has a cast of 19 instead of 17 and an orchestra of 13 instead of nine.In Maria Friedman’s unsparing production, our critic writes, the trajectories for the secondary characters at last make some sense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt takes more than even those larger numbers to deliver the Golden Age thrill that is, after all, the show’s milieu. (The original orchestra had 20 players.) Other than the costumes, the minimal design is more practical than inspiring; the sound of the band (playing new orchestrations by Sondheim’s longtime collaborator Jonathan Tunick) is especially unbalanced. The choreography by Tim Jackson too often seems charades-like. Some of the solo singing could be more effective, technically and thus emotionally.And then there is, as always, the book. Friedman has apparently made her peace with Furth’s final Frankensteined version; though its pieces are coarsely sutured and don’t quite line up, at least the thing walks. If in seeking to sweeten the main story it still leans too heavily on thin satire for laughs — morning news shows, Hollywood sycophancy — the trajectories for the secondary characters, especially Beth and Gussie, who are now more than cannon fodder, at last make some sense.In this production, though, it wouldn’t matter much if they didn’t. Radcliffe’s wit and modesty, combined with Mendez’s zing and luster, provide perfect settings for what is now (as it has never been previously) the inarguably central performance. Groff, always a compelling actor, here steps up to an unmissable one. With his immense charisma turned in on itself, he seems to sweat emotion: ambition, disappointment and, most frighteningly, a terrible frozen disgust.I don’t know whether that’s what Furth intended, but Sondheim is brutally clear about the insidiousness of great talent. In Frank, it eats everything it can find, eventually including itself. “Who says ‘Lonely at the top’?” he sings amid the end-stage cynicism of his loveless Bel Air party. “I say, ‘Let it never stop.’”What a strange and daring thing for the great and greatly missed Sondheim to dramatize, and for Friedman to forefront. I’d call it heartbreaking if the result weren’t finally such a palpable hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough March 24 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; merrilyonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Will Transfer to Broadway Next Fall

      by

      Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, now starring in an Off Broadway revival, will lead the Broadway production as well.A starry revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” one of musical theater’s most beloved flops, will transfer to Broadway next fall, hoping to right the show’s oxymoronic reputation once and for all.The production, now midway through a sold-out run at Off Broadway’s small-scale New York Theater Workshop in the East Village, stars Daniel Radcliffe (yes, of “Harry Potter” fame) alongside two popular musical theater performers: Jonathan Groff (a Tony nominee for “Spring Awakening” and “Hamilton”) and Lindsay Mendez (a Tony winner for “Carousel”). All three will lead the Broadway cast, according to an announcement Friday; the production’s dates and the theater at which it will be staged were not specified.“Merrily,” with a much-loved score by Stephen Sondheim and an oft-bashed book by George Furth, holds a special place in musical theater lore: The original production, in 1981, was a fiasco so storied — it closed two weeks after opening — that it spawned an excellent documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”The show depicts, in reverse chronological order, the fracturing of a three-way friendship between a composer, a playwright and a novelist who meet in their early 20s. The musical is based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.In the decades since the Broadway closing, the show has been revived and reimagined over and over and over again — Richard Linklater is now spending 20 years trying to film a version starring Ben Platt, Beanie Feldstein and Blake Jenner.This latest revival, which will be the first to reach Broadway since the original, is directed by Maria Friedman, a British actress who once starred in a “Merrily” run in England, and who has been developing her production for a decade, starting at Menier Chocolate Factory in London, followed by London’s West End (where it won the Olivier Award for best musical revival) and Huntington Theater Company in Boston.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times and a longtime “Merrily” observer, praised the revival’s current Off Broadway production, writing “it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast,” and concluding, “Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.” In The Washington Post, the critic Peter Marks called it “intoxicating” and “revelatory.”The lead producer of the revival will be Sonia Friedman — a prolific and powerful London-based producer who is also the sister of Maria Friedman. The producing team includes Sondheim’s widower, Jeff Romley, as well as David Babani, who is the artistic director of Menier Chocolate Factory, and Patrick Catullo. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Returns, the Way It Never Was

      by

      Maria Friedman’s rethinking of the much-loved, much-monkeyed-with 1981 Sondheim-Furth flop gets very close to coherence, and all the way to enjoyable.Many people love something about “Merrily We Roll Along” but few people love everything.It has that brilliant Stephen Sondheim score! It has that meshuga George Furth book! It’s a comedy of misbehavior, a tragedy of cynicism, a big Broadway musical, a tiny domestic drama, a timeline in search of a story that’s never found and, anyway, doesn’t make sense. Even if it did, no one is old enough/young enough to convincingly perform roles that age in reverse from 40 to 20. And if they do, they can’t sing.What no one wants is to leave the 1981 flop alone. Though too often lifeless in its many incarnations, it is also somehow deathless, rising repeatedly from the glossy grave of its beloved original cast album — remembered more fondly than the messy if emotional original production — in hopes of a transfiguration that finally makes it work.The revival that opened on Monday at New York Theater Workshop, after earlier iterations at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London and the Huntington Theater Company in Boston, comes closer to meeting that goal than any of the many I’ve seen before. Maria Friedman’s staging brings the intelligence of the songs fully alive and justifies the baroque construction. Her framing snaps the picture almost fully into focus. And with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez as the show’s central trio of backward-tumbling friends, it is perhaps for the first time perfectly cast.Is that enough to make it great, the way it never was?The question resonates with the material — which, being about show business, is always involved in a meta-conversation with itself. Groff plays Franklin Shepard, a hacky movie producer in 1976, trailing two wives with a third on the way, who gradually evolves (backward) into a promising theater composer in 1957. Radcliffe plays his word man, Charley Kringas, who, in a nationally televised meltdown in 1973, spectacularly splits from the oldest of his old friends. Mendez plays the third wheel, Mary Flynn, an embittered (what else?) theater critic and washed-up novelist whose fog of alcohol slowly burns away to reveal, by the final curtain, a hopeful innocent in love forever with the unavailable Frank.Groff as Franklin Shepard, who’s a hacky movie producer when the musical opens in 1976.Sara KrulwichFriedman clarifies this rangy structure from the first image, which replaces the ensemble scenes of previous productions with Frank standing completely alone in the ruins of his life. As disembodied voices sing the opening phrases of the upbeat title song we quickly understand that we will be focusing not on the triangle so much as its apex. No one else in the story, not even his besties and exes, is quite real to Frank anyway; they are props in his monodrama, and often mangled. This is going to be the story of a brilliant young man who, failing to grow up, inevitably punches down.Happily, Groff has the glamour and fury to shoulder that interpretation. No Frank I’ve seen has been so unapologetic in his solipsism, so sure he deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card to life’s every complication. And when someone crosses him, as Charley does singing “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” on that TV show, Frank is so livid, staring straight ahead as if his friend no longer exists, that you wait in terror for what will happen next. What you get, even worse, is what happens before.The laminated ironies of Furth’s timeline, lifted from a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play with the same title and a similar arc, have always seemed better integrated into Sondheim’s ingenious score than into the plot itself. The songs are structured like a musical in reverse, with reprises preceding instead of following fuller versions, and bits of accompaniment later revealing themselves as new melodies. By the time you hear “Our Time,” the exquisite hymn of hopefulness that ends the show, you will recognize that it has already been cannibalized for parts; a few of its bleached bones show up as early as the second number, “That Frank,” with much more cynical lyrics.Friedman’s staging for the first time raises the story to nearly the same level of expressiveness. The dialogue, which in most productions sounds like movie lines instead of actual speech, has been put through some sort of sanding machine that removes its polish and restores real texture. Even in the songs, phrases that can seem too perfectly crafted are now engorged with specifics that inform the actors’ delivery and thus our understanding. For “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” Radcliffe seems to have written a Bible of back story, giving wild spins to every line that help send the song into orbit.Visually too, Friedman simplifies, reinforces and focuses what we see. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes, though changing with the years, are similar enough to immediately specify everyone in the cast. (Frank is usually in a black suit, Charley in eye-jarring argyle, Mary in busy print shmattes.) And since all the action takes place within the cold unit set representing Frank’s midcentury Bel Air house (also by Gilmour) we never wonder why we’re watching a scene, even if it nominally takes place somewhere else. We’re watching it because it’s his brain.From left: Reg Rogers and Krystal Joy Brown, with Groff, Mendez and Radcliffe.Sara KrulwichBut those fixes, however successful, are also compromises. The Bel Air house, fairly hideous and mostly blank to allow for its transformations, necessitates a lot of choral furniture-handling that works against the sleekness of the material. Though the cast, especially Mendez, is vocally splendid, the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations, vastly reduced to nine players from 19, have undergone a radical deglamorization, making it a smart if sad choice to drop most of the brilliant overture. And if dancing doesn’t really fit Friedman’s more interior approach (the limited choreography is by Tim Jackson) the general lack of Broadway pizazz leaves the show feeling deprived of half its inheritance.With the Off Broadway run (through Jan. 22) all but sold out, and commercial producers teed up for a transfer, we may yet find out what “Merrily” can be at its best. For now, it’s just at its best so far. That means some scenes work as they never have; the Act II opener, “It’s a Hit,” which often lays an egg, is for the first time hilarious, thanks in large part to Reg Rogers as Frank and Charlie’s producer. The unlikely progress through the story of Gussie Carnegie — the producer’s secretary, then wife, then star, then ex, but in reverse — suddenly seems clear and, in Krystal Joy Brown’s fetching performance, charming if not credible.Yet at the same time, some things that used to work no longer do. The supporting characters, heavily doubled, are mostly a blur. The song “Old Friends,” which at its root is about the fatal compromises that keep people together, has a case of fake giddiness. And “Bobby and Jackie and Jack,” a comedy number about the Kennedy family that the three friends perform in a downtown club in 1960, lays the egg that “It’s a Hit” no longer does.Musicals are mysterious. Even the best are games of Whac-a-Mole: Fix one problem and another pops up. It’s therefore no small thing to say that in her effort to drag a half-living thing like “Merrily” to full life, Friedman is more than halfway there. Maybe, finally, it’s a hit.Merrily We Roll AlongThrough Jan. 22 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More