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      in Movies

      2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival Preview

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      A range of films, many of them animated, some hilarious, some serious, bubble up at this year’s festival in New York, where kids can vote for awards.One of the cinematic highlights of the 2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival could be described, at least partly, as a wild-goose chase. Or, more precisely, a domestic-hen chase.That animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!,” follows a guilt-stricken single mother trying to buy the main ingredient of her daughter’s favorite dish. But since grocers are on strike in their French city, the desperate mother steals a live hen. The bird flees from her car’s trunk to a watermelon truck to the space behind an armoire, with adults and children, including the high-spirited young daughter, Linda, in hot pursuit.A simple farce? Not exactly. The film, by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, also includes time shifts, a singing ghost, an exploration of memory and multiple references to death — that of Louis XVI and Linda’s beloved father, as well as the chicken’s potential demise. Done in loose, almost abstract animation, the movie, which is billed as the festival’s “centerpiece spotlight,” is about as far as an audience can get from typical commercial children’s fare.It is also exactly the kind of unusual work to expect at the festival, which begins on Saturday and continues on weekends through March 17 with a slate of 18 feature presentations and more than 70 short films. About three-quarters of those titles are animated.“I think when you see live action, you’re very enraptured with someone else’s story,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But with animation, she added, “you’re very excited also about your own, because I think you’re paying attention to the medium, you’re paying attention to the way that artists are using different techniques and different storytelling approaches. That really forefronts the idea of creativity and possibility.”Villaseñor and Nina Guralnick, the festival’s executive director, did not set out to focus on animation this year, but found that those films were often the most interesting. Ever since the festival’s founding in 1997, it has shown its audience — cinemagoers as young as 3 and as old as 18 — work that they’re unlikely to see anywhere else, including features that have previously been shown almost exclusively at festivals for adults.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      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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      in Theater

      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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      in Theater

      Tyne Daly Withdraws From ‘Doubt’ on Broadway, Citing Health

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      Amy Ryan will replace her in the show, which also stars Liev Schreiber and began previews on Saturday.Tyne Daly, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actress, is withdrawing from a starring role in the first Broadway revival of “Doubt: A Parable,” citing health issues.Daly was set to star in the production of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play about a sexual assault accusation against a Catholic priest. She will be replaced by Amy Ryan, who will begin performances Feb. 13.Roundabout Theater Company, the nonprofit producing the revival, announced the cast change on Tuesday, saying in a news release, “Ms. Daly was unexpectedly hospitalized on Friday and unfortunately needs to withdraw from the production while she receives medical care; she is thankfully expected to make a full recovery.” The organization did not provide further details.The “Doubt” revival, also starring Liev Schreiber, was to begin previews last Friday, but that first performance was canceled by Roundabout. The production then began performances on Saturday, with the understudy Isabel Keating going on in Daly’s stead; Keating has been performing the lead role since then, and will continue to do so through Sunday.Daly was to play Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a nun who serves as the principal at a Catholic school and who suspects the parish priest, Father Brendan Flynn, of misconduct. Schreiber is playing the priest. In 2008, the play was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; it was also adapted into an opera.Daly, 77, has worked steadily onstage and screen. She has performed in seven previous Broadway shows, winning a Tony Award in 1990 for starring in a revival of “Gypsy,” and earning two more nominations since. She has also won six Emmy Awards, for the television shows “Cagney & Lacey,” “Christy” and “Judging Amy.”Ryan, 55, has performed in five previous Broadway shows, and was nominated twice for Tony Awards in Roundabout revivals. Her last appearance on Broadway was nearly two decades ago, when she was featured in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Since that time she has worked primarily on film and television, earning an Oscar nomination for her work in “Gone Baby Gone.”The “Doubt” revival, directed by Scott Ellis, will now open March 7, one week later than initially planned. The production, which is scheduled to run until April 14, also features Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Zoe Kazan. More

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      in Theater

      Inger McCabe Elliott, Who Famously Became Con Man’s Victim, Dies at 90

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      She was a successful designer. But she was probably best known for being duped in a scheme that inspired the play “Six Degrees of Separation.”Inger McCabe Elliott, a photographer and designer who, with her husband, was conned at her home in Manhattan by a slick-talking 19-year-old purporting to be Sidney Poitier’s son — an incident that helped inspire John Guare to write his celebrated play “Six Degrees of Separation” — died on Jan. 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.Her son, Alec McCabe, confirmed the death.It was a bizarre New York tale.In early October 1983, Mrs. Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, a former top editor of Newsweek who at the time was the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, got a call from a young man who introduced himself as David Poitier.He said that he was a friend of Mrs. Elliott’s daughter Kari McCabe, and that muggers had stolen his money and a term paper he had written about the criminal justice system. He needed a place to stay, he said, until his father arrived in Manhattan the next day to direct scenes for the film version of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls.” (Mr. Poitier had six daughters but no sons, and he had no involvement in “Dreamgirls.”)Charmed, the Elliotts invited the young man — his real name was David Hampton, they later learned — to spend the night at their East Side apartment and gave him $50 and some clothes. He asked Mrs. Elliott to wake him early the next morning so that he could go jogging.David Hampton, the man who had masqueraded as Sidney Poitier’s son, in 1990 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center after the opening of the John Guare play based on his impersonation. William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe Elliotts were unable to reach Kari McCabe that night to confirm Mr. Hampton’s claim that they were friends. (She had no idea who he was, they later found out.)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

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Goodbye Mostly Mozart, Hello Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center

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      The renamed ensemble will present a mix of new and old in its first season under the conductor Jonathon Heyward.Last summer, Lincoln Center bid farewell to the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, a fixture of the city’s cultural scene since 1973, saying it was time to reimagine the ensemble for a modern and more inclusive age.On Monday, the center offered a preview of its plans. While the ensemble will remain the same in size and membership, it now has a new name, a new music director and a program aimed at drawing more diverse audiences to classical music.The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, as the ensemble is now called, will convene in July for its first season under the rising conductor Jonathon Heyward, as part of the center’s Summer for the City festival.Heyward said in an interview that he wanted to maintain the orchestra’s innovative spirit.“It’s not that I am at all reinventing the wheel,” he said. “We’re just continuing in a way that is very much in line with a previous legacy of the orchestra.”The lineup for this summer includes a world premiere by the composer Hannah Kendall; the North American premiere of Huang Ruo’s “City of Floating Sounds”; and classics by Beethoven, Haydn and, yes, even a little Mozart.There will also be offerings aimed at drawing new people to Lincoln Center, including a “Symphony of Choice” concert in which audience members will be allowed to construct the program by voting, as well as an augmented-reality exhibition about mental health and Schumann, who suffered from depression.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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      in Theater

      The Musical Force Behind the Communal, Queer ‘Bark of Millions’

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      Matt Ray is a prolific songwriter and the musical nexus of New York’s alt-cabaret scene. His next project: Taylor Mac’s latest marathon performance.“It’s the last hour, and I’m feeling the energy draining,” Taylor Mac, the performing arts polymath, announced near the end of a recent rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.If the artists — an ensemble of a dozen singers, as well as several instrumentalists — were exhausted, it was because of the sheer scale of what they were working on: “Bark of Millions,” a show by Mac and the musician Matt Ray, which has its American premiere on Monday at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Essential to that scale is Ray’s score of 55 original songs that add up to four hours of performance.That would be enough to fill several albums by any recording artist, and yet it’s business as usual for Ray. He has been not only the musical core of Mac’s recent shows — the daylong marathon “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” for which he arranged over 240 songs with the purpose of queering the American canon, and “The Hang,” for which he wrote 26 — but he has also been the force behind much of New York’s alt-cabaret scene, with collaborators including Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias and Bridget Everett.“This is a community of risk-takers and rule-breakers,” Everett said in an interview. “It’s a really exciting, vital scene. And there’s one person who’s the musical nexus of that. It’s Matt. His heart is beating at the center of all of it.”The performer Justin Vivian Bond called Ray “such a sensitive artist,” and said, “for being a consummate Leo, he’s just great at letting other people shine.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRAY, 51, has had expansive taste in music since his childhood growing up on the East Coast. Whether as a player — he started learning the piano when he was 2 years old — or as a listener, he never limited himself to any one genre. “I really admire monochromatic types of work,” he said, “but I just don’t work that way.”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

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

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      A new musical from Jason Robert Brown, Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman explores the diverging trajectories of two young writers in the late 1990s.The director Daisy Prince had a flash of inspiration for a new show nearly 20 years ago: She wanted to explore the fallout from a string of partially or entirely fabricated news articles (by writers like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair). The show would be set at a New York City magazine with a storied history — a publication much like The New Yorker. Also, it would be a musical.“I had become somewhat fixated on all these falsified news stories — these larger questions about fact, truth and story,” said Prince, who directed Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” and “Songs for a New World.”She jotted the thought down in her great big notebook of ideas. But by the time she finally returned to it, around 2010, she was certain she had missed out.“I thought by the time we were going to be able to tell this story, it would no longer be relevant,” she said.But then the Trump presidency arrived, along with his strategy of labeling unfavorable coverage as fake news — and the premise only became more timely. Now the show, titled “The Connector,” conceived and directed by Prince with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Jonathan Marc Sherman, is premiering Off Broadway at MCC Theater, where it is set to open Feb. 6.Ben Levi Ross, left, as Ethan Dobson and Hannah Cruz as Robin Martinez in the musical.Sara Krulwich/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