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    ‘A Wonderful World’ Review: Blowing Louis Armstrong’s Horn Isn’t Enough

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    The great jazz trumpeter and sandpaper vocalist gets the old jukebox treatment in a new Broadway musical starring James Monroe Iglehart.Who, having lived through 20th-century pop culture, could fail to recognize that voice like a truck without a muffler? That piercing trumpet and embracing spirit?Who could fail to recognize Louis Armstrong?Yet he is something of a blur in “A Wonderful World,” the Armstrong jukebox musical that opened Monday at Studio 54. Not for lack of a precise embodiment. In the leading role, James Monroe Iglehart has every Satchmo detail perfectly tuned: the rumble, the chortle, the hankie, the beam, the satchel-like cheeks that inspired the nickname. If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of.But with such a major figure we want something deeper. And though subtitled “The Louis Armstrong Musical,” the show, with a book by Aurin Squire, spends too little time exploring its subject’s interior life while plumping for his greatness as if the point were in doubt. The score, drawn from songs he performed but (with two exceptions) did not write, makes the case irrefutably already, encompassing the astonishing range of a man who grew up with the blues, changed the course of jazz, excelled at swing, perfected scat and won a Grammy for “Hello, Dolly!”To balance such a rich and varied artistic life, let alone a chaotic personal one, Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here. Offering little you would not learn from a good obituary, or from a visit to the terrific museum at his home in Queens, “A Wonderful World” compresses 60 years, from youth to death and even beyond, into four discrete chapters defined cleverly but overneatly by decade, locale and wife.The 1910s segment, set in Armstrong’s native New Orleans, introduces wife No. 1, Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a prostitute with a “Kiss of Fire.” After leaving her to join the jazz scene of Chicago in the 1920s, he falls for the pianist and arranger Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who polishes his musicianship along with his wardrobe. Nevertheless, he leaves her too; she and Daisy bring down the first act with a furious medley of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.”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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      Broadway Is Singing Louis Armstrong’s Songs. Here Are 6 Classics.

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      When Christopher Renshaw was growing up in England in the 1950s and ’60s, everybody knew about Louis Armstrong. “He was an icon for me as a child,” he said. “He was just there — he’s smiling, he’s funny.”But when Renshaw — whose directing credits include the 1996 Broadway production of “The King and I” and “Taboo,” which he conceived with Boy George — was approached about creating an Armstrong musical, he quickly learned that the musician was far more than just the affable, popular entertainer he saw on television.Armstrong’s story sprawls across five decades, numerous musical and social upheavals, and his own creative breakthroughs from the revolutionary 1920s recordings with his Hot Five band to worldwide celebrity with the ’60s pop smashes “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World.”That story is now being told on Broadway in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” which is in previews at Studio 54, following a 2021 premiere in Miami and runs in New Orleans and Chicago. For the show’s creative team, exploring the offstage struggles and tensions of this cultural and musical titan was as important as illustrating his pioneering, radical work as a trumpeter and singer.“Louis Armstrong was a real Black man,” James Monroe Iglehart, who is portraying Armstrong and is one of the directors, said, noting the ways Armstrong’s image was cleaned up and deracinated for Hollywood and television. “We worked really hard to show that side of him, the good and the bad.”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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      Louis Armstrong Musical ‘A Wonderful World’ Set for Broadway

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      “A Wonderful World,” featuring Armstrong’s songs, is set to begin previews at Studio 54 in October after previous runs in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago.“A Wonderful World,” a new musical about Louis Armstrong, will have a run on Broadway starting in the fall.The musical, which has previously been staged in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago, will star James Monroe Iglehart, who a decade ago won a Tony Award for originating the role of the Genie in “Aladdin,” and who is now starring as King Arthur in a Broadway revival of “Spamalot.”The show is scheduled to begin previews Oct. 16 and to open Nov. 11 at Studio 54, where the musical “Days of Wine and Roses” is now playing a limited run.When Armstrong died in 1971, the trumpeter and singer left a legacy as one of the most important figures in the history of jazz. The show examines his life through the eyes of his four wives.The score is made up of Armstrong songs including the classic that gives the show its title, along with “When You’re Smiling,” “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and others. The book is by Aurin Squire, and Christopher Renshaw is directing; Renshaw and Andrew Delaplaine are credited with conceiving the musical.“A Wonderful World” is being produced by Thomas E. Rodgers Jr., Renee Rodgers, Martian Entertainment (Carl D. White and Gregory Rae), Vanessa Williams and Elizabeth Curtis. More

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      ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Review: Romance on the Rocks

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      Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.For all the glossy come-hither of Michael Greif’s tone-perfect production, which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, not for an instant does it glamorize the boozing itself. And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play. Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too. Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.Granted, the opening scene is still perplexing, too sparely written and staged to situate the audience properly, or let us grasp the skin-crawling 1950s creepiness of what James’s Joe Clay is up to on a yacht in the East River. A public relations guy, Joe has arranged a corporate party onboard, and procured female guests for the pleasure of the male executives.So there is a certain rancidness to his mistaking O’Hara’s Kirsten Arnesen — the impeccable secretary to the boss at the firm where they both work — for one of the women in his Rolodex. Not exactly a meet-cute, even if she does set him straight, puncturing his condescension with a tight, nice-girl smile pasted to her face.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?  More

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      Review: How to Shoot Your Parents, in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      In a stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s photo memoir, Nathan Lane stars as the father everyone’s aiming at.Several weekends a month, from 1982 to 1992, the photographer Larry Sultan visited his parents in Southern California in search of a story. Was it a mark of his failure or his overachievement that, instead of one, he found many?In any case, in “Pictures From Home,” the 1992 photo memoir that resulted, Sultan created a classic of visual polyphony. Whatever he believed the work to be — a family portrait, a marital inquest, a takedown of Reagan-era masculinity — it was so much more by being all of them at once.But a book of staged photographs, home movie stills and discrepant first-person narratives was also, by the nature of the medium, flat: the better to ponder its mille-feuille of contradictions. The camera, after all, stops time.That would seem to make Sultan’s “Pictures From Home,” however brilliant, an unlikely source for stage adaptation, the stage being where time can never stand still. And indeed, the play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.Part of that is inevitable insofar as actors must have something concrete to act. To provide it, White has developed scenes from tiny cues in Sultan’s text, turning the subterranean Oedipal conflict between father and son, and to a lesser extent the conjugal one between husband and wife, into obvious rhubarbs, skits and lectures.For actors like these, such carvings are raw meat, no matter that the carcass gets stripped. Burstein has a field day with Larry, who begins the play by announcing to the audience that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements.” As his chest puffs out, Burstein puffs it back in: “I know that’s not a modest thing to say.”It’s a peculiar choice to write Larry as a nervous pedant, proud yet endlessly defensive. But what he’s defending himself against immediately becomes clear upon Lane’s entrance as the father. “Are you still here?” is his first line.Burstein has a field day with Larry, our critic writes, and Lane’s peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining impression of Larry’s father, Irving.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the book, Irving Sultan is a glamorous remnant of the cocktails-at-lunch era of American business; at the peak of his career, he was a vice president at Schick. But having been put out to pasture some years before the photos were taken, his silver fox suaveness is mottled with flop sweat.As in his earlier plays — including “The Other Place” (a haunting Laurie Metcalf vehicle) and “The True” (catnip for Edie Falco) — White prioritizes playability over subtlety. Here he pulls at the threads of Irving’s vanity and petulance, unwinding them from his other qualities to provide the lurid outlines of a personality. That’s sufficient for Lane, of course, whose peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining if somewhat black-and-white impression. Each argumentative thrust and deflection is as sharp as an actor can render it, and anything faintly funny is primped into a generous laugh.That’s good news for the audience but less so for the real Irving, who was already skeptical about how his son would portray him, without having imagined how a playwright and Nathan Lane would. (Irving died in 2009 — as did Larry.) That the book’s tough bird winds up onstage a lovable bellyacher is one of the mysteries to be filed under “lost in translation.”Translation is even unkinder to Larry’s mother, Jean Sultan, whom Wanamaker plays with pinpoint sociological precision. (The costumes by Jennifer Moeller and the wigs by Tommy Kurzman help immensely.) What Wanamaker cannot do, because the script does not permit it, is restore dignity to a woman who deserves it. After raising Larry and his two brothers, then watching her husband short-circuit his career, she took up her own because somebody had to; in her first year as an independent real estate agent, she sold $18 million in property.Some of the book’s most trenchant photographs trace that transformation. (Projected at huge scale by 59 Productions against the back wall of Michael Yeargan’s slope-roofed, garishly green trompe l’oeil set, they look fantastic.) In them we see Jean, in late middle age, emerging from her housewifey past to become a serious breadwinner, with all the attendant anxieties. How this threatens Irving’s sense of privilege and primacy is clear enough on paper.The triple portrait of the Sultans in the play deviates from what is presented in the memoir, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet in the play Jean is reduced to third banana and comic relief. She floats in and out of the men’s arguments and dithers in search of lost To Do lists. In one particularly unfortunate bit, elaborated from an innocuous sentence in the book, she is made to perform schtick like a bawdy 1960s comedienne about the size of the zucchini Irving grows in a garden. “He’s so proud of how huge it is,” she brays.For all I know, Jean, who died in 2004, really talked like that; White has said he had “many conversations” with Kelly Sultan — the artist’s widow — about her husband’s process and “the many complexities of Irv and Jean.” But even if accurate to life as lived, the triple portrait of the Sultans in the play feels inaccurate to life as recorded in the memoir. For one thing, Larry himself is made, if sympathetic, insufferable. As he gassed on fatuously about image and illusion, I too found myself impatiently asking, “Are you still here?”At just 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission, a play should not feel padded, but it does. Still, it is hardly without its pleasures: It’s funnier than expected, and Sher’s poetic naturalism as he creates stage pictures is always moving to watch. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting reminds me of her superb work for dance.Nor does “Pictures From Home” lack for pathos — less so when it jerks the audience’s tears, at the end, than when it lets the questions of a son’s need for his parents, even well into their old age, sit patiently in frame. Stopping time with his camera, Larry tells us, was a way of not letting them die. How odd that a living thing like a play does the opposite.Pictures From HomeThrough April 30 at Studio 54, Manhattan; picturesfromhomebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Nathan Lane to Return to Broadway This Winter in ‘Pictures From Home’

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      The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, will also star Danny Burstein and Zoë Wanamaker.Nathan Lane will return to Broadway this winter, starring in a new play called “Pictures From Home” about the artistic and emotional relationship between a photographer and his aging parents.The play, written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sher, is adapted from an acclaimed memoir by the photographer Larry Sultan, also called “Pictures From Home,” featuring not only staged portraits of his parents, but also interviews with them.Danny Burstein, a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” will play Sultan; Lane, a three-time Tony winner for “Angels in America,” “The Producers” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” will play the photographer’s father, Irving; and Zoë Wanamaker will play the photographer’s mother, Jean.The Broadway production will be the first for the play, which previously had developmental readings at New York Stage and Film, the Cape Cod Theater Project and the Alley Theater in Houston.White, whose previous Broadway plays included “The Other Place” and “The Snow Geese,” said he became interested in Sultan after seeing an exhibition of the photographer’s work in Los Angeles, where White was working as a writer and producer of “The Affair.”“I was totally captivated, and thought, who are these people?” White said. “The more I read, the more I thought it was an epic story and an intimate story, and one that embodies incredible contradictions.”White described Sultan’s parents as displaying “rejecting acceptance” of their son’s long-running artistic project, which he called “a gorgeous exploration of mortality.” He said the play includes some language from Sultan’s book, and some anecdotes gleaned from interviews with Sultan’s widow, Kelly, but that most of the dialogue was invented by the playwright.Sher, a Tony winner for his revival of “South Pacific,” has been working on the project for about a year, drawn to it, he said, as “an extraordinary exploration of the aging process.” He said the play “is fundamentally about art — who gets to depict what, and how you’re represented,” and said the production would make heavy use of Sultan’s photography.Lane, who last appeared on Broadway in 2019, said he had been unfamiliar with Sultan’s work before reading the play, but that he “thought it was a beautiful piece of writing — very funny and very quietly devastating” and said he hoped that its two subjects, “parents and mortality,” would be relatable to audiences.“It has a documentary feel,” he said, “and yet it’s highly theatrical.”The play is scheduled to begin previews on Jan. 10 and to open Feb. 9 at Studio 54. Although that theater is owned by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company, the play will be a commercial production, with Jeffrey Richards as lead producer. More

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      Régine, Whose Discotheque Gave Nightlife a New Dawn, Dies at 92

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      Credited with opening the first disco, she built an empire of glittering playgrounds for the Beautiful People in Paris, New York and beyond.She was born Rachelle Zylberberg in Belgium as the Great Depression struck: a Jewish child abandoned in infancy by her unwed mother and left alone at 12 when her father, a drunken Polish refugee, was arrested by the Nazis in France. She hid in a convent, where she was beaten. After the war, she sold bras in the streets of Paris and vowed to become rich and famous someday.In 1957, calling herself Régine, she borrowed money and opened a basement nightclub in a Paris backstreet. She could not afford live music, so the patrons danced to a jukebox. Business was bad, and the young proprietor, in a decision that would have social historians wagging for decades, concluded that the problem was the jukebox.“When the music stopped, you could hear snogging in the corners,” she told the BBC, using British slang for kissing and necking. “It killed the atmosphere. Instead, I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music. I was barmaid, doorman, bathroom attendant, hostess, and I also put on the records. It was the first-ever discotheque, and I was the first-ever club disc jockey.”And so began Chez Régine, widely regarded as the world’s first discotheque. In the 1970s, its owner built a $500 million empire of 23 clubs in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, including Régine’s in Manhattan, the most famous nightspot of its era, catering to the stretch-limousine crowd of arts and entertainment stars, society celebs, princes, playboys and Beautiful People.Régine, whose chain of clubs peaked in the 1980s and faded in the ’90s, a victim of an open drug culture and radical changes in the club scene, died on Sunday. She was 92.Her death was announced on Instagram by her friend the French actor and comedian Pierre Palmade, who did not specify the cause or say where she died.A plump, effervescent empresaria with flaming red hair, Régine was known to everyone who was anyone as “the Queen of the Night.” With enormous fanfare, she opened her New York club in 1976 on the ground floor of Delmonico’s Hotel, at 59th Street and Park Avenue. She moved into the hotel’s penthouse suite. The city had just survived a fiscal crisis, but to her chic clientele that hardly mattered.Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.Brooke Shields, Régine and the French designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 in New York.PL Gould/Images/Getty ImagesShe embraced celebrities: Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn, Brooke Shields. Nobodies were admitted for stiff cover charges after the New York State Liquor Authority threatened to sue her for “social discrimination.” She managed publicity masterfully. She once wore a live boa constrictor, a gift from Federico Fellini.On a given night, you might see Franςoise Sagan, Brigitte Bardot, Diane von Furstenberg, Ben Vereen, Hubert de Givenchy and Stevie Wonder in a crowd with Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner and Robert Mitchum, with Jack Nicholson and John Gotti conspiring at a table. Régine was strict about enforcing her dress code. Her friend Mick Jagger was once refused entry for showing up in sneakers.Régine danced all night with Gene Kelly, then disappeared with him for 15 days. “Yes, we had private relations,” she told Elle in 2011.She recalled John Wayne’s awed face at their first meeting: “Are you the Régine?”And Robin Leach, chronicler of the rich and famous, told her that his reporting from Paris was a snap: “You’d just go to Régine’s every night and wait for the princesses to file in.”Régine juiced up evenings with “happenings.” One in Paris was a “Jean Harlow night.” Patrons in platinum wigs arrived in white limousines, stepped onto a white-carpeted sidewalk, and strolled up in white tuxedos and clingy white gowns with white feather boas.Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”By the late ’70s, Régine’s expansion was peaking. Besides flagships in Paris and New York, she had clubs in Monte Carlo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Saint Tropez, London, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles, Miami, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur and many other cities. All were in prime locales. Her marketing analyses included lists of each city’s elite, to be cultivated as club-goers and financiers.Régine at the debut of her nightclub in Miami in the early 1980s.PL Gould/IMAGES/Getty ImagesAsked about financing her clubs, she insisted that all she invested was her name, never her money. Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name. She also owned restaurants, cafes and a magazine; sold lines of clothing and perfumes; and sponsored dance classes and ocean cruises.She was an entertainer on the side, with small roles in films, including “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), a Sherlock Holmes tale with Nicol Williamson and Laurence Olivier, and was a moderately popular singer in Paris and New York. She had a hit with a French version of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in 1978, and she made her singing debut at Carnegie Hall in 1970.“Although Régine has a strong, dark voice, she made little effort to use it as a flexible instrument,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review for The Times. “Régine’s pert appearance and vivacious stage manner cover a multitude of inflexibilities, and the sheer exuberance of her performance was, in itself, more than sufficient enticement.”The popularity of Régine’s in New York and around the world gradually faded in the 1980s, overtaken by trendier clubs like Studio 54, the Manhattan disco founded in 1977 by Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. It, too, drew the celebrities but also a sex-and-drugs clientele and crowds of hangers-on surging for a glimpse of decadent chic.“By the end of the decade, the party began to wind down,” New York magazine reported in a retrospective on Régine’s in 1999. “A new generation of club-goers deemed her club staid and stuffy, and even Régine’s most faithful devotees found it hard to resist the sexy lure of Studio 54.”“You didn’t feel like you could start doing cocaine on the tables at Regine’s,” Bob Colacello, the author and social critic, told New York. “She wasn’t giving out quaaludes to movie stars. She didn’t have bartenders with their shirts off. She didn’t have what people wanted when the times changed.”Régine’s clubs drew celebrity clients likes Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Joan Collins, Andy Warhol, Milos Forman, Mick Jagger, Anthony Quinn and Brooke Shields. The woman behind Régine’s mystique was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, on Dec. 26, 1929, to emigrants from Poland, Joseph Zylberberg and Tauba Rodstein. In an unhappy, unstable childhood, she never knew her mother, who abandoned the family and went to Argentina, but recalled her father as a charming gambler and drinker who ran a small eatery in Paris. Rachelle, as she called herself in an interview with The Boston Globe, had a brother, Maurice, and a half sister, Evelyne.As a child, she waited on tables in her father’s restaurant near Montmartre. After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, her father was arrested and sent to a prison camp. She hid for two years in a Catholic convent, where she said she was beaten by other girls because she was Jewish. Her father escaped, and by one account she was taken hostage briefly by the Gestapo.After the war, she dreamed of a glamorous life and occasionally glimpsed what it might be like. “When I saw Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, the focus of all eyes at the best table in a chic Deauville restaurant, I vowed one day to sit where they were,” she told The New York Post in 1973.When she was 16, she married Leon Rothcage. They had a son, Lionel Rotcage, and were divorced after a few years. In 1969, she married Roger Choukroun, who helped manage her properties. They were divorced in 2004. Her son died in 2006.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.By the end of the 1990s, Régine’s international empire had dwindled to a handful of clubs in France, a place in Istanbul and a restaurant-lounge in New York called Rage.In recent years, she lived in Paris, managed her affairs, supported charities, gave occasional parties and saw old friends. In 2015, she published a book of photographs and reminiscences, “Mes Nuits, Mes Rencontres” (My Nights, My Encounters”). Pictures showed her with Charles Aznavour, Oscar de la Renta, Diana Vreeland, Michael Jackson and many others.“My son is the only thing I miss,” she told Women’s Wear Daily. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. That doesn’t interest me. I want them to laugh with me and to be happy.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      After Its Odds-Defying Run, John Cariani Says Bye to ‘Caroline, or Change’

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      For a little while on Sunday evening, after the final performance of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54, the actor John Cariani disappeared from backstage to have his portrait taken upstairs. No one had told the boys, though, and when Cariani reappeared, his young castmates — some of whom had played his son — flocked around, teasing him and hugging him. They were palpably pleased he hadn’t given them the slip.Stuart Gellman, the lost-in-grief clarinetist in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Broadway musical, is the first father Cariani has ever played. Stuart — a widower newly remarried to Rose, played by Caissie Levy — is also the first character to tap Cariani’s clarinet skills, dormant for more than 30 years. When the pandemic shutdown delayed the revival of “Caroline” by a year and a half, he used that time to polish them.Clockwise from left: Stuart Zagnit, John Cariani, Adam Makké and Joy Hermalyn in “Caroline or Change.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the production’s director, Michael Longhurst, said: “He could play a bit, and now he can play astonishingly, which is just a dream.”In a precarious theater season pocked with cancellations, “Caroline” made it the full three months and one day from its first preview to the scheduled end of its limited run without missing a performance. So did Cariani, 52, last seen on Broadway in 2018 in “The Band’s Visit.” (Some actors in that musical played instruments, but he did not.)Cariani’s previous Broadway shows, including “Something Rotten!” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” all continued after his contract with them was up, so giving a closing performance as an original cast member was new to him. On Saturday night, it took him by surprise when sadness crept into his voice midshow. Usually, he said, his feelings wait until later.By Sunday evening, sitting down for an interview in his dressing room, he was only beginning to process his experience with the production. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.In an interview after the final performance on Sunday, Cariani said that his character, Stuart, lives through his clarinet.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTell me about your evolution as a clarinetist.I played from age 10 to probably 19. Seriously, too. In college, I played in the pit orchestra for “Sweeney Todd.” And I didn’t know what the play was. I kept getting in trouble because I was watching instead of playing. And that’s when I realized I don’t want to do this. Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do. And then over the pandemic, I played every day because it was the one thing I knew I could do every day.Did developing your facility as a musician on this show coexist with deepening the character of Stuart?Yeah, the clarinet helped me with the singing and the singing helped with the clarinet. Ann Yee, our choreographer, said, “Remember, it’s all of a whole. So don’t think of it as the clarinet and the part.” It was just continuing to realize how much he communicates through his clarinet and getting to keep learning to communicate through the clarinet.Remarkably, “Caroline, or Change” made it through its entire limited run without missing a performance.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWell, that’s the only part of him that’s not recessive.Exactly. It’s the part that explodes. What was interesting is that means going for broke and making mistakes in front of a thousand people sometimes. I made mistakes in front of people, and I survived. And it was just great.You had three different children playing your son. How did that affect your presence?When I do musicals, I become more of a technician than when I do plays. And then finding freedom within the form is hard. Because I had three different kids, I just felt like — and we all felt this — you have to show up with the kid who’s there. And they’re all very different. One was sweet as can be, and so you want to take care of him. One is funny and wry and probably smarter than me. And that’s fun. And then one is mean. And they all work, because the text supports all three of those interpretations.Tony Kushner, Sharon D Clarke and Jeanine Tesori embraced during the curtain call after the last performance.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow has doing this show during the pandemic compared with any other Broadway experience you’ve had?It hasn’t felt like Broadway. It hasn’t felt like “The Band’s Visit.” I’m going to say that. Because I feel like they were equally received, very warmly received, which is a blessing. I think the pandemic changed numbers. It’s that simple. The number of people who came. I remember when Omicron hit, I heard that the box office completely stopped, like no one was buying tickets. It was noticeable. Because you could see — and people will probably give me a hard time because I shouldn’t [say this] — but the lights come up sometimes, and I can see the audience. And you see pairs [of seats] all over the place, empty.Some of them are because they didn’t sell, and some of them are because people tested positive.They tested positive; they canceled. I had friends who were going to come this last week. Six couples, all tested positive, couldn’t come. I will say that the past five shows have felt like Broadway. Because it’s our last week, we’ve had really good houses, electric audiences.Audience aside, ticket sales aside, how has it been? You’re not going, I assume, to a closing night party, right? Was there an opening party?We didn’t do any of those things.The show was “so much fun,” Cariani said. “Because it’s a mountain to climb every night.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhile audience numbers were affected by the pandemic, the show ended strong, Cariana said. “Our last week, we’ve had really good houses, electric audiences.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow careful have you had to be to make it all the way through?We don’t go out together as a company. You know, you don’t go visit. It’s just not smart right now. You don’t get to know people. That’s the other hard thing. We don’t get to know each other the way other casts have known each other. I had to ask one of the cleaning guys to take his mask off so I could know what he looks like. We wear our masks all the time backstage. We have to remind each other to take them off before we go on sometimes.Really?I wore my mask on for the J.F.K. sequence, when I don’t have to say anything, but I’m up there looking at the TV. Caissie didn’t even notice. You know who noticed? The boys were watching.“I made mistakes in front of people, and I survived,” Cariani said of playing the clarinet onstage. “And it was just great.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHave you felt safe?The hardest part for me was the commute. I ride on the subway for about 40 minutes total. The first 15 minutes of that ride, most of the people, I would say a good portion of the people, are not masked. A lot of young people, you know? It changes as you go deeper into Manhattan. And then it’s the opposite as you leave.Has this production brought you joy?Caissie and I said this the other night: Right before we come on after “Salty Teardrops,” I was like, “Remember when this was impossible and we said we’re never going to have fun with this? Can you believe how much fun it is?” It’s so much fun. Because it’s a mountain to climb every night.“The Band’s Visit” wasn’t technically difficult for me at all. I had to sing a couple songs, say some words; I had to be there, be present, you know what I mean? But I do think that Sam Sadigursky, who was our clarinet player in “The Band’s Visit,” was a huge influence on me — getting to listen to him every night. And then, I’m not going to lie. It’s fun when Jeanine Tesori comes up to you and says, “I cannot believe you’re playing it all. This is so thrilling.” Because the character plays, and it’s thrilling for her to see the character play. And Tony said that, too. Hugest moment of my life.For any other actor in the part of Stuart, what’s your advice?Remember that half of your role is the clarinet. In rehearsals, I was so focused on getting my singing and my talking right that I was forgetting about living through that clarinet. Even if you don’t play it, figure out how to live through that clarinet. More

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      in Theater

      A Season to Savor a Cherished Musical Again and Again (and Again)

      by

      Our critic didn’t set out to see “Caroline, or Change” seven times, but amid so much uncertainty the show turned out to be just what she needed.Settling into my seat at Studio 54, I let the sound design begin to transport me like a musical overture — the chittering of creatures and the bubbling of water, echoing from tall grasses and low haze on the edge of a Southern swamp.At each performance of “Caroline, or Change,” I look forward to this calming bit of preshow acclimation, even as a Confederate statue stands imposingly at center stage. And I keep my eyes peeled for the theater’s Covid safety enforcer patrolling the orchestra, arms crossed, scanning the audience for any unmasked faces. Spotting him calms me, too.When the lights dim, the statue is wheeled off, and in its place when they come up again is Caroline Thibodeaux, in the person of the astonishing British actor Sharon D Clarke, doing laundry in a Louisiana basement in 1963.I didn’t set out to see this musical masterpiece by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori seven times this season, but I have. For the record, I’d been scared to see it even once — scared the way you get when you cherish a work of art so fiercely that you don’t want to risk finding it diminished.It didn’t matter to my brain that theater’s habit of reinvention is one of the things I love about the form, or that this Broadway revival got rave reviews in London. “Caroline” is my favorite musical, and I was protective of my memory of it. I’d been mad since 2004 that George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production ran only a few months. (Hold a grudge much? Yeah, I know.)Yet Michael Longhurst’s gorgeous iteration, for Roundabout Theater Company, turned out to be just what I’ve needed: a work of intricate beauty to savor again and again in this strange, uncertain season. After catching the first preview in October, I started telling people that I would see it three times a week if I could.Sounded like I was exaggerating. I was not.Inspired by Kushner’s own Louisiana childhood, “Caroline” is the fictional story of a divorced Black maid working for a Jewish family mired in grief and paying her what they know is too little to get by on. Comedy and fantasy leaven the ugliness and pain, but the music, the lyrics, the characters are complex. It’s not a show to be absorbed in one swoop.If this production had opened as planned in what was to have been the busy spring of 2020, there’s no way I would have seen it as many times as I have. Repeated viewing at any scale is a rare luxury for me, and the chance to do it to such an extent with “Caroline” is a direct effect of the pandemic. In an unsettled season with a cascade of postponements and cancellations, lower ticket demand and fewer productions mean bargain prices and, if you’re a theater journalist like I am, a lot more free evenings.So I have been taking advantage — which I feel guilty admitting, because of course I could have spent that same time seeing deserving new work that I missed completely. Instead I’ve been giving one show a closer, longer look than usual, watching extraordinary cast members deepen their performances so far beyond that thrilling first preview that I can’t honestly regret it.Domhnall Gleeson, with Aoife Duffin in the background, in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesCritics tend to see multiple productions of the same play — especially in seasons when there seem to be 47 stagings of “King Lear” or 18 of “The Tempest” — but not multiple performances of a single production, unless it transfers somewhere, usually to Broadway from Off Broadway or an out-of-town tryout. Even then, we only see the beginning of each run, while the production keeps changing after that.In theater — unlike films and TV shows, which stay frozen no matter how many times you watch them — the ritual of repetition coexists with change. As in other kinds of live performance, exact duplication is impossible, and also not the point. Evolution is the hope, which I’ve seen realized in “Caroline.”It has been quite frankly exhilarating to watch the company get tighter and tighter, especially at a time when public perception is that Broadway in particular and theater in general are a pandemic shambles. At the matinee just this Wednesday — the matinee! — Clarke gave a shattering performance, as alive to the text and the moment as any other I’d seen, but with elements new to me: an inflection, a movement, a vocal fillip at the end of a song. Such are the many layers of her character.“I love dissecting it. I love it,” Clarke exulted to me in an interview in October, the day after the first preview.Three months on, with the musical’s limited run set to close this weekend, it feels like she is still investigating.The other show I revisited this fall was Enda Walsh’s “Medicine,” but that wasn’t because I’d been wild about it initially. Walsh’s plays sometimes land with me and sometimes don’t. This one — chaotic, often funny, with Domhnall Gleeson’s understated performance at its heart — did not.I first saw it in November at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Six days later, in an interview, Gleeson told me that he had only just figured out how the show, which the company had performed elsewhere, worked in the St. Ann’s space. I gave it another shot because of that — and because his passion for another Walsh play, “The Walworth Farce,” prompted me to read it, an experience that left me wide awake when I finished it after 1 a.m., my every nerve ending taut.The second time I saw “Medicine,” in December, I watched it more deliberately, and it absolutely landed. Outside afterward, I walked through a patch of park and stood staring out at the East River, shaken. If the play had stayed in town longer, I’d have gone again.But when I see a show repeatedly in the same run — as I did with two of the plays in Phyllida Lloyd’s Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, also at St. Ann’s — I tend to top out at three viewings.Zawe Ashton, from left, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the 2019 Broadway production of “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened with the Broadway productions of “The Cher Show” (where seeing Stephanie J. Block’s understudy at one performance made me realize Block’s particular power) and “Sea Wall/A Life” (where I listened ferociously to figure out what was sound design and what was sound bleed from outside). My curiosity about both was professional, though; going more than once was about reporting.Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was different. Its first preview blindsided me: a Pinter play that could make me cry? I became fascinated with the geometry of emotion in the production — with where Lloyd placed the characters on the set, and how their isolation signified. Determined to watch the staging from different angles in the house, I went five times in all.When I told Lloyd about that, during an interview toward the end of the show’s run, he inquired about the actors: “And have you noticed variations in their performances?” I still wonder which answer he might have been looking for: reassurance that the show had stayed lively or that it hadn’t flown off the rails.I would be a little heartbroken if “Caroline” had gone off the rails — always my worry when a production runs for a while. As it is, when it gives its final performance on Sunday, I plan to be there, seeing it for the eighth time.After that, I expect I’ll be in the market for a new obsession. I’m thinking maybe “Company.” More