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    A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

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    The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.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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      First-Time Tony Winners on Their Awards: Daniel Radcliffe, Kecia Lewis and More

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      All of the actors who took home Tonys were first-time winners. Here’s what they had to say after their wins.All of the performers who received Tony Awards last night have one thing in common: they were all first-time honorees. After accepting their prizes, the winners trekked across the Lincoln Center plaza to a press room where they answered questions from The New York Times and reporters from other news outlets. Here’s a sampling of what they said.Daniel Radcliffe, “Merrily We Roll Along”Radcliffe won best featured actor in a musical for his performance as the lyricist Charley Kringas in a revival of Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” It’s Radcliffe’s fifth Broadway show, but the first for which he was nominated for a Tony.What has the “Merrily” journey been like for you?It’s been a dream, especially with it ending like this. My singing teacher, who I mentioned, one of the first things he ever had me sing to him was “Good Thing Going” whenever I worked with him for “Equus.” Going from singing that for the first time in his office in London to singing it onstage and now this, it’s insane.What’s it like to find new success after spending so much of your career in your childhood on “Harry Potter?”When I finished “Potter,” I had no idea what my career was going to be. I had already started doing some stage stuff, but I didn’t know what the future held. To have had the last year with playing Weird Al [in the 2022 movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”] and also doing “Merrily We Roll Along,” it’s been awesome. And I do think playing a character for a long time builds up in you a desire to sort of do as many things as you possibly can. I’m doing that right now.Talk a little bit about the process of learning “Franklin Shepard, Inc.?” It’s a huge moment in the show and a huge patter song.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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      Daniel Radcliffe, Pete Townshend and Sarah Paulson Party for the Tonys

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      The actress Kara Young stood surrounded by admirers inside David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center around 1 a.m. on Monday morning, fielding a swarm of well-wishers after winning her first Tony Award, for featured actress in the comedy “Purlie Victorious.” Her older brother hovered close by and periodically fanned out the train of her lime chiffon dress.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the 39-year-old playwright who penned the night’s best play revival, the searing family drama “Appropriate” — and a fellow first-time Tony winner — was next in line to compliment Ms. Young and her gown from the designer Bibhu Mohapatra.“This is a forever iconic Tonys look,” Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins told the actress. “When we’re like 70 years old, they’re going to show you in this.”The performers Kecia Lewis and Camille A. Brown.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe actresses Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesBranden Jacobs-Jenkins, the playwright.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe performers Shaina Taub and Matt Gehring.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was a flash forward on a night when, for many of the Tony Award winners, anything seemed possible. All eight of the acting honorees, across plays and musicals, earned their first-ever Tony wins on Sunday — some for their first major Broadway role or their first nomination, others after four decades in the theater.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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      Tonys Red Carpet Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brooke Shields and More

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      Broadway’s biggest stars descended on Lincoln Center in Manhattan on Sunday for the Tony Awards, an annual celebration of all the people — casts, crews and creatives — who make live theater the spectacle that it is. Since many attendees spend most of the week in costumes, the Tonys was also a chance to get dressed up and showcase personal style.The red carpet — technically a shade of blue — was packed with A-listers, a reflection of the star-studded productions that have recently overtaken Broadway. Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Sarah Paulson, Billy Porter and Nicole Scherzinger were among the celebrities who graced the awards show this year.Purple might have been the color of the evening, with several attendees incorporating shades of it into their ensembles. Men and women alike embraced bows, which appeared around some people’s necks and at the shoulders or waists of others. Of all the outfits, the following 17 stood out the most — for better or worse.Elle Fanning: Most Femme Fatale!Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesInstead of a shirt, the actress, a star of the play “Appropriate,” wore a silver necklace beneath her sleek Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket.Brooke Shields: Most Sunny and Sensible!Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesWe 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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      Daniel Radcliffe Wins His First Tony for ‘Merrily We Roll Along’

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      Daniel Radcliffe is one of the world’s most famous actors. But he’s never won a major award. Until now.Radcliffe won the Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical, for his work in the smash hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” The show is Radcliffe’s fifth on Broadway, but the first for which he was even nominated for a Tony, despite mostly admiring reviews all along the way.Radcliffe, 34, will forever be known as the actor who played the title wizard in all eight “Harry Potter” films. But even before shooting of those films concluded, he had begun making the adventurous choices — onstage and onscreen — that have helped him accomplish the rare transition from child star to respected adult actor.In “Merrily,” Radcliffe plays Charley Kringas, a lyricist-turned-playwright whose long friendship and collaboration with a talented composer (a character named Franklin Shepard, played by Jonathan Groff) has imploded.Radcliffe’s enormous star power is a significant factor in the success of this production, which promises to forever alter how “Merrily” is viewed because the show’s original production, in 1981, was a storied flop.Radcliffe has been with the production since 2022, when he played the same role, with the same co-stars, during an Off Broadway run at the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop. The Broadway production opened last October, and is scheduled to conclude on July 7.He has repeatedly shown a willingness to try new things. Radcliffe first arrived on Broadway in 2008, starring in a revival of “Equus” that required him to appear nude; his next role, in a 2011 revival of the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” required him to sing.He has since returned to Broadway to star in two more plays, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” in 2014 and “The Lifespan of a Fact” in 2018, and he also starred in an Off Broadway play, “Privacy,” in 2016 at the Public Theater.He has continued to make movies, many of them indie-ish projects including “Kill Your Darlings,” “Swiss Army Man” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”In an interview last month, two days after being nominated for the Tony Award, Radcliffe said that he keeps returning to the stage “because I love it.”“There’s something thrilling about doing something that scares you, live, a bit, every night,” he said. “And just the connection with the audience — being in a room full of people and feeling them react to the story. We’re very lucky it’s such an emotional show: There’s a lot laughs, and there’s a lot of comedy, but you can also hear people being emotionally affected by it towards the end, and that’s a very rewarding thing to be a part of.” More

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      Daniel Radcliffe on Breaking the Spell in ’Merrily We Roll Along’

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      Daniel Radcliffe caught the first batch of Tony nominations during the announcement at 8:30 a.m. He texted congratulations to his “Merrily We Roll Along” co-star Jonathan Groff, who was nominated for best actor in a musical.But then dad duty called before his own category, featured actor in a musical, was announced at 9:00.“I was in the middle of doing breakfast and trying to put my son down for his morning nap, so I got a text from a member of the cast letting me know I was nominated,” said the actor, 34, who stars as the lyricist and playwright Charley Kringas in the acclaimed revival of the 1981 Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.”Radcliffe’s Tony nomination — for his fifth Broadway role since his 2008 debut in “Equus” — is the first of his career. And it’s extra special, he said in a phone conversation from his New York apartment on Tuesday, because not only Groff, but his other “Merrily” co-star, Lindsay Mendez, was also nominated, for featured actress.“People in your line of work probably get bored of actors talking about how much they love each other, how much they enjoy working with each other,” said Radcliffe, who is best known for playing Harry Potter onscreen. “And we do say it a lot, but this group is really awesome — Lindsay, Jonathan, the whole cast. I feel so lucky.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You recently were the ring bearer at Lindsay’s wedding, for which Jonathan served as the officiant. How did that come about?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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      Daniel Radcliffe Earns First Tony Nomination for ‘Merrily We Roll Along’

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      The Boy Who Lived is finally the Actor Who Got Nominated (for a Tony).Daniel Radcliffe, who as a child actor became globally recognizable by playing Harry Potter in all eight films, notched his first Tony nomination on Tuesday for his work in one of this season’s biggest Broadway hits: an acclaimed revival of the musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”The nod has been a long time coming — in his post-Potter life, Radcliffe has consistently made artistically ambitious, and occasionally risky, choices in both stage and film roles. He has returned often to Broadway — “Merrily” is his fifth role since 2008, following “Equus” (which required him to take off his clothes), “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (which required him to sing), “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and “The Lifespan of a Fact.”“Merrily” is a 1981 musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth about the gradual implosion of a three-way friendship; in the current revival, Radcliffe plays Charley Kringas, a lyricist and playwright. Reviewing the production in The New York Times, the chief theater critic Jesse Green praised Radcliffe for “wit and modesty,” and said he handled his character’s big song “superbly.” More

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      “Harry Potter” Stuntman Tells His Story in a New Documentary

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      In a new documentary, David Holmes, a stunt performer in the ‘Harry Potter’ films, recalls his life before and after a harrowing accident on set that left him paralyzed.When David Holmes arrived at rehearsal to perfect a fight scene for the penultimate “Harry Potter” film, he was strapped into a harness that was supposed to send him flying backward.But Holmes was jerked back too fast, hitting a wall and breaking his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.His career as a stunt performer was over, at age 25. He had portrayed Daniel Radcliffe’s title character and others, including Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Draco Malfoy and Neville Longbottom, since the franchise’s first installment.After years behind the scenes, Holmes will now tell his story in a new documentary, “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived,” which is streaming on Max and will air on HBO on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and on Sky Documentaries and NOW in Britain on Saturday.Holmes is teaming up again with Radcliffe, the executive producer on the project, which captures his life before and after his injury. Radcliffe and Holmes said they hoped to call attention to stunt performers, who often put their lives at risk with little recognition.“It’s nice to know my legacy in film is not just me hitting that wall,” Holmes said in an interview.Holmes hasn’t fully embraced the limelight, Radcliffe said, and “just wants to shine it onto other people.”Radcliffe and Holmes had known they wanted to work on a project together for a while, they said. Initially, though, Holmes didn’t want to be the focus.“You put on a costume, and you take on a character the same way an actor does. You have that safety net to live behind that character,” Holmes said. “It’s very different now because it’s me.”Radcliffe and Holmes had worked together on a podcast called Cunning Stunts, interviewing stunt performers and coordinators about their work. Radcliffe had also filmed some of the interviews and thought that he’d try his hand at directing a documentary. But he wasn’t quite satisfied with his work.“We started filming some stuff, and then after a while I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m very good at this,’” he said. “We should bring someone else in.”To direct, they landed on Dan Hartley, who had worked as a video assist operator among other roles in the “Harry Potter” films and recently directed “Lad: A Yorkshire Story,” a coming-of-age film about a 13-year-old boy befriending a park ranger after losing his father. The three eventually agreed to shift the focus of the film to Holmes.It wasn’t the plan to use someone from the “Harry Potter” crew, but Hartley seemed like a perfect fit, Radcliffe said.The cast and crew grew close on the film sets, and Radcliffe referred to Holmes as a “cool older brother.”“We wanted someone who has the same kind of connection to Dave that we do,” Radcliffe said. “Not someone from the outside who is going to shape Dave’s story into something else for the sake of making something more sensationalized.”As they started creating the film, they realized it was the first time they had all spoken together about Holmes’s accident.“No one wanted to be the first one to bring it up,” Radcliffe said, “but I definitely think there was something like quite cathartic for everybody on this film who got to talk about it with each other.”Holmes spoke about what life was like after the injury and the people he had met while he was hospitalized, including Will Pike, who was injured in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and was in the bed next to his.Hartley and Radcliffe said that seeing young men being emotional was moving, as was parting from traditional masculine stereotypes that can be prevalent in stunt culture.“What I think is really powerful is seeing these young, sensitive men talking,” Hartley said. “They were just so vulnerable and honest.”Above all, Holmes said he wants his story to bring hope.“We all experienced loss in our life. I learned that at the age of 25,” he said, “and it taught me to be present to appreciate the now.” More

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      ‘David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived’ Review: Harry Potter’s Stunt Wizard

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      A documentary looks at the friendship that formed during the Harry Potter movies between Daniel Radcliffe and his main stunt double, who was seriously injured in 2009.Viewers of the eight Harry Potter features may never have considered the bonds that formed over the decade required to make them. “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived” revolves around the friendship between Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry, and Holmes, who served as his stunt double for most of those years.Radcliffe, an only child, describes viewing Holmes as a cool older-brother figure. “He did so much for me that was crazy,” Radcliffe says. The documentary shows a side-by-side comparison to illustrate how Holmes would shoot an action sequence and Radcliffe would copy his moves. “I’ve probably got more broomstick air miles than any other human being on the planet,” Holmes quips.In 2009, Holmes was seriously injured in a rehearsal for a “Harry Potter” stunt; the accident ultimately left him partly paralyzed. “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived” puts his life and his philosophy of living at its center. He has remained upbeat over the years, despite multiple setbacks and surgeries. The film also depicts his continuing rapport with Radcliffe and other members of the franchise’s stunt team, who gather in the documentary like lifelong school buddies. (Radcliffe says the “Potter” alumni he was closest to were not his fellow stars but members of the crew.)The documentary, directed by Dan Hartley, isn’t all optimism. “In the nicest way, I’m going to say I wish I’d never met him,” Greg Powell, the stunt coordinator on the series, says of the guilt he still feels over what happened to Holmes, even though both have expressed having felt like father and son during the films. “The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.David Holmes: The Boy Who LivedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More