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George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season? More
A Zelig-like rocker, the guitarist, singer and songwriter collaborated with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Peter Frampton and composed Hulk Hogan’s “Real American” theme.Rick Derringer, the ubiquitous rocker who sang the hit songs “Hang On Sloopy” and “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” in a music career that spanned several decades and also included collaborations with Hulk Hogan and Weird Al Yankovic, died on Monday in Ormond Beach, Fla. He was 77.His longtime caretaker and friend, Tony Wilson, announced his death in statement on Tuesday. No cause was given.From his early garage rock success to his many contributions to albums or tours by music royalty — Barbra Streisand, Cyndi Lauper and Peter Frampton all enlisted him — Mr. Derringer introduced himself to audiences across several generations.One of his better-known and enduring collaborations was with the Edgar Winter Group, for which he produced the instrumental chart-topper “Frankenstein,” which the band released in 1972.Early on, Mr. Derringer was the shaggy-haired guitar impresario who was the frontman for the band the McCoys, who rose to the top of the Billboard singles chart in October 1965 with their catchy rendition of “Hang On Sloopy.”The song, about a girl known as Sloopy from a rough part of town, has become synonymous with Ohio State University, where the marching band first played it during a Buckeyes’ football game in 1965. In 1985, the Ohio Legislature adopted it as the official state rock 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
Broadway’s box office has finally surpassed its prepandemic peak, fueled by three starry dramas and one green witch.The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, released data on Tuesday showing that grosses for the current theater season, which ends later this month, have now reached $1.801 billion. That’s higher than the $1.793 billion grossed at the same point in the record-setting 2018-2019 season, which was the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway in March 2020.CLOONEY HAS FIRST$4 MILLION PLAY WEEK!“Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $4,003,482 the week ending May 4. That number, for eight performances, was the highest amount ever grossed in a week by a play on Broadway.There are caveats. This season is not quite over. The numbers are not adjusted for inflation. Attendance is still down about 3 percent from its prepandemic peak. And, because the costs of producing shows on Broadway have skyrocketed, the financial failure rate is up and profitability is down.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
Working on the new movie “Thunderbolts*” and the TV series “Stranger Things,” he said, “You’re up early at 6 in the morning. But I still have that beast inside me that wants to sleep till 1 p.m.”The Red Guardian never made the varsity squad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that’s more than OK with David Harbour.“Of the people that do love these movies, we are not the favorite,” he said of the antiheroes in the new Marvel film “Thunderbolts*.” “But we really poured our hearts into this movie and tried to make something that is about isolation in modern society and light and the darkness that is within all of us.”During what Harbour called a bit of a nightmare, he worked on “Thunderbolts*” at the same time he was shooting the final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which he plays Hopper, the heroic small-town police chief. He is currently working on “DTF St. Louis,” an HBO limited series and the first thing he has produced, with Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini.In a video call from Los Angeles, he elaborated on the headphones, sunglasses and Zen mantra that he considers essential. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.An AmericanoI drink it all day long. My doctor has told me to knock it off, but it is the last vice I have. I have an assistant and she does a lot of great things for me, but probably the No. 1 job is she brings me too many Americanos throughout the day.Wired HeadphonesI love a tangled cord. I used to carry a CD player back in the early 2000s and I would put on headphones and walk around the East Village and have my little soundtrack to my life. Just sort of float through.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
The new play, set 24 years before the start of the Netflix series, combines lavish spectacle with a cast of familiar characters.After a critically acclaimed premiere in London’s West End in 2023 — where it is still running — “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a play that serves as a prequel to the popular Netflix series, is set to open on April 22 at the Marquis Theater on Broadway.Of course, fans of the show, which is set to release its fifth season later this year, are excited (though it’s small consolation for having to wait more than three years between seasons). But what if you can’t tell a Demobat from a Demogorgon? Can you plunge right in?Here’s what you need to know about the TV series, how it informs the show and more.Winona Ryder stars as Joyce Byers in the Netflix series. In the play, her character’s younger self, Joyce Maldonado, is just as spunky. NetflixWhat is the TV series about?Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind., the Netflix series follows a group of friends as they try to get to the root of supernatural forces and secret government experiments in their town. They discover an alternate dimension — the Upside Down — filled with monstrous creatures, who are not content to sit back and leave them well alone.Over the course of four seasons, a cast anchored by Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Chief Jim Hopper), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven, a young girl with mysterious powers) and Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson) save one another from the jaws of death while navigating the complexities of their relationships. (And, in Eleven’s case, eating lots of Eggo waffles.)Where does the play fall in the timeline of the TV series?It’s a prequel set in 1959 — 24 years before the start of the Netflix series — and centers on a character introduced in Season 4: Henry Creel, a troubled teenager with telepathic powers who will later become Vecna, the show’s primary antagonist.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
From “Beetlejuice” to its sequel, these are the actresses and roles that made us embrace the darkness.Is it just fashion? No, it’s an attitude, a lifestyle. And a beloved character type. The goth girl is the lovable-yet-scary outcast whose grim and ghastly exterior belies wit, smarts and a dry sense of humor that never fails to cast an honest light on the disappointing world around her. As “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” brings together two generations of legendary goth girls — Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega — we look at some of the actresses and roles that have defined the archetype since the original “Beetlejuice” in 1988.1988Winona Ryder Sets the Standard“My whole life is a dark room. One big dark room.”Winona Ryder in “Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.When Lydia Deetz appears in her family’s new Connecticut home early in “Beetlejuice,” she glances around curiously, her eyes wandering beneath her short, spiky black bangs, stopping at the sight of a spider in a web along the stairwell. Unlike her shallow, distracted parents, Lydia is clued in to the supernatural happenings of her new surroundings and has no trouble befriending the undead residents of the house.The role was one of Winona Ryder’s earliest in a career largely defined by goth girls and dark-attired outsiders. In the black comedy “Heathers,” Ryder played Veronica Sawyer, the reluctant friend to the popular girls, who prance around in bright matching outfits. Veronica, however, dresses in blacks and grays and gets drawn into a string of homicides that leaves multiple teenagers dead.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
Remember “Severance”? Remember “Stranger Things”? Today’s leisurely TV schedules are taxing memories and changing the experience.Time moves slowly in Middle-earth. Ages last for millenniums. Elves are immortal. Villains menace the land, are defeated, then are nearly forgotten before they re-emerge eons later.By this measure, it has been a blink of an eye since we last saw “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime Video. But in terms of our brief mortal lives and the traditional calendar of TV, it has been a while. Galadriel and company will return for Season 2 on Thursday, nearly two years to the day since Season 1 began in 2022.This is the Ent-like pace at which TV moves these days. The “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” took nearly as long to come back for its second outing. “Severance,” likewise a member of the debut class of ’22, will return in January, almost three years since we last saw it. The teen drama “Euphoria,” whose second season began in January 2022, will start shooting a third season … sometime in 2025. By the time it airs, one assumes its characters will be eligible for Social Security.More and more, rejoining a favorite series is like trying to remember the details of high school trigonometry. Which hobbit did what to whom? What did they do all day in that “Severance” office again? Was “Stranger Things” set in the 1980s, or was it actually made then?From left, the director Shawn Levy with the actors Noah Schnapp and Finn Wolfhard during production of “Stranger Things,” whose episodes are sometimes movie length now.Tina Rowden/Netflix, via Associated PressThere are, of course, different reasons for shows to take their time returning. We had a pandemic. There were labor strikes in Hollywood. Streaming platforms have been retrenching. Individual shows can have creative or staffing issues. Ambitious productions take longer.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
She just finished playing Flannery O’Connor and released a new album. Next up: “Inside Out 2” and a new season of “Stranger Things.”The actress and singer-songwriter Maya Hawke is on a self-awareness kick.Lately, she has been mindful of how she communicates, making an effort to be sincere and open. Career wise, she said, she’s been striving to foster collaboration and “no-bad-ideas energy.”Hawke, 25, plays Flannery O’Connor in “Wildcat,” a film released last month that is co-written and directed by her father, Ethan Hawke. In 2023, she acted alongside her mother Uma Thurman in the cinematic caper “The Kill Room.”Hawke has also been checking in with herself, making body scans part of her bedtime ritual. “It’s like a meditation thing where you tense all the different muscles in your body individually and try to let out your feelings,” she said during a video interview.Stress abatement is crucial as she focuses on back-to-back projects. She’s filming the final season of “Stranger Things” in Atlanta, her third album, “Chaos Angel,” dropped on May 31, and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” — she voices a new character, Anxiety — opens June 14.Hawke got introspective as she talked about being “a little bit of a hypochondriac,” her habit of losing things and her love of a loose fit. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Voice MemosI’m a person who’s pretty constantly creative. That doesn’t mean all of the things I create are good. They’re mostly bad. But I try to keep track of them because I never know the difference in the moment. I always try to take voice memos of little melodies that I’ll come up with or an idea for a scene I’m writing or something I think my character should say that came to me randomly.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
“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a London theater show based on the Netflix series, pummels the audience with sensory overload and its lavish budget.As theatergoers took their seats, a buttery waft of popcorn in the auditorium was an indicator of what was to come. “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” — a spinoff of the hit Netflix series, “Stranger Things” — brings a high-octane, TV-movie sensibility to the stage, pummeling the audience with horror-show frights and sensory overload: eerie smoke effects, mind-boggling levitations, scary vocal distortions reminiscent of “The Exorcist” and noise — so much noise.Directed by Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot: The Musical”; “The Crown”) and written by Kate Trefry and Jack Thorne in collaboration with the TV show’s creators, the Duffer brothers, the show runs at the Phoenix Theater, in London, through Aug. 25, 2024. It’s a gaudy, vertiginous fairground ride of a play, exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” is billed as a prequel to the Netflix series, which is set in the fictitious town of Hawkins, In., during the mid-1980s. The location is the same, but the year is 1959, and the play tells the origin story of Henry Creel, who appears as a malevolent sociopath in Season 4. We meet him here as a troubled, withdrawn adolescent (played with great aplomb by Louis McCartney) burdened with psychic, clairvoyant and telekinetic powers of unknown provenance.Henry, a newcomer to Hawkins, strikes up a tentative friendship with another oddball, Patty Newbie, played with a winning blend of naïve compassion and halting self-doubt by Ella Karina Williams. The two youngsters bond over their shared, deeply uncool, love of comic books and, somewhat improbably, land the lead roles in their high-school musical. When several of its cast members find their household pets mysteriously killed, Henry appears to be implicated. His peers take it upon themselves to investigate, and stumble, “Blair Witch”-style, into a baroque nightmare.Henry and Patty Newbie, played by Ella Karina Williams.Manuel HarlanAmid the horror, the play carries a sentimental message about young misfits finding solace and community. Patricia, an adoptee, never knew her mother (“My whole life I’ve been the girl from nowhere,” she laments,) and feels a kinship with Henry because he is misunderstood. He reassures her by pointing out that many of their favorite comic book characters are orphans: “Having no parents is basically a prerequisite to being a superhero.” Similarly, Henry is desperate not to let his strange powers define him. (He insists: “I’m not a freak! I’m normal!”)In these respects the tale is redolent of Young Adult fiction, but the can-do vibes are served up with a bleak twist, since the odds — as we know from Season 4 — are stacked against Henry. A research scientist, Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill), ostensibly enlisted to help him, has nefarious motives; the influence of Henry’s father, Victor (Michael Jibson), who has severe PTSD from World War II, is also a source of intrigue. All avenues lead, inexorably, to a big conspiracy involving a secret government program. The supporting cast comprise a panorama of recognizable social types — dumb jocks, deadbeat boyfriends, vapid bimbos, oafish policemen — whose antics provide light relief.Miriam Buether’s set evokes 1950s small-town life with a nostalgic, homey touch: a crescent of school locker rooms for the high school scenes, the community church and a local liquor store are elegantly rendered. Later on, a government psychiatric facility is a neon-lit, white brickwork affair, cold and clinical.In the show, Henry meets with Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill), right, a research scientist with questionable motives.Manuel HarlanSome of the backdrops are staggeringly elaborate. The opening scene, depicting a nautical disaster, is like something from a Hollywood action movie. In keeping with this aesthetic, the sound, by Paul Arditti, is quite simply relentless. Thunderously loud crashing sounds occur with nerve-shredding frequency — the “jump scare” technique beloved of horror movies. Henry’s paranormal powers are obscurely connected to electromagnetic energy, so there are lots of buzzing electrical noises whenever he has one of his moments.In its totality, the production is lavish to the point of embarrassment, and the sheer scale of the thing is hard to reconcile with the play’s rather modest intellectual aspirations and lack of originality. One is left simultaneously impressed and a little bewildered. Haven’t television and cinema already got these bases covered? Is this what theater is for?“Stranger Things” first aired in 2016. It’s over four years since Mike Hale suggested, in his Times review of Season 3, that the show might be suffering from “franchise fatigue.” The original concept had a certain straightforward appeal — weird goings-on in a backwoods town, sinister machinations of shady state agencies, sympathetic nerds getting a chance to shine — but it was never quite strong enough to sustain serious longevity. The show powered on regardless, because there was money to be made.“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” achieves what it sets out to do, and die-hard fans will surely lap it up — but it may well prove to be a death throe. The real spectacle here is that of a franchise eating itself.Stranger Things: The First ShadowThrough Aug. 25, 2024 at the Phoenix Theater, in London; uk.strangerthingsonstage.com. More
