The Hills of California (Play)

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    ‘Our Town,’ ‘McNeal’ and 4 More Shows Our Critics Are Talking About

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    The fall season is underway, and our reviewers think these productions are worth knowing about, even if you’re not planning to see them.Critic’s PickIdentity politics, funny at last.Daniel Dae Kim as the playwright David Henry Hwang’s stand-in in a revival of the play “Yellow Face” at the Todd Haimes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Yellow Face’David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire, directed by Leigh Silverman, arrives on Broadway starring Daniel Dae Kim as an Asian American playwright who protests yellowface casting only to inadvertently, and hilariously, cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play.From Jesse Green’s review:A smart thing about “Yellow Face,” aside from the authorial self-defamation, is that as it gets more hopelessly tangled and thus funny it also gets more serious and thus damning. The questions of identity considered as cultural matters in the first half become personal and political in the second.Through Nov. 24 at the Todd Haimes Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA brutal classic with an ideally shrewd Jim Parsons.Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Our Town’Kenny Leon directs Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and others in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love.From Jesse Green’s review:In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal. The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.Through Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickAlive with the sound of music.Laura Donnelly, far left. Clockwise from top left: Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally and Lara McDonnell as her daughters in the play “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Hills of California’In Jez Butterworth’s dying-parent drama, directed by Sam Mendes, four sisters trained by their determined mother (Laura Donnelly) to sing close harmony reunite 20 years later as acrimonious adults.From Jesse Green’s review: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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      Review: ‘The Hills of California,’ Alive With the Sound of Music

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      In Jez Butterworth’s compelling new play, four girls trained to sing close harmony wind up as acrimonious adults.Two sounds greet you at the start of “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s relentlessly entertaining new play: the crashing of waves on the beaches of Blackpool and the tinkling of a tinny piano being tuned.Both are plot points: The story concerns a musical family operating a rundown resort on the west coast of England. “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are among the marvelous oldies you’ll hear sung during the course of the action.But the crashing and tuning are thematic points, too. Though frequently funny and, even at nearly three hours, swift, “The Hills of California,” which opened on Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater, drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song.It does so within a familiar stage format — familiar in life, alas, as well: the dying-parent drama. In 1976, the four Webb sisters reunite at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse (which is neither luxurious nor within sight of the sea) as their mother, Veronica, who ran the place for decades, under several desperate versions of the name, expires upstairs.Jillian, the youngest, has failed to thrive; she’s a 32-year-old virgin who lives at home, chatters nervously and secretly smokes. The others have run as far from Blackpool as they could: Ruby and Gloria into unhappy marriages hours away; Joan, the oldest, toward a dream of fame in California. Whether she has achieved that dream is an open question; she has not been back home since she left at 15, and only Jillian believes she will return even now.All this is efficiently established in the play’s opening scene, which is so sharply and subtly directed by Sam Mendes, and so vividly performed by the cast, you hardly notice all the information you’re being fed: tics, conflicts, personalities, pecking order. Then, just as you’ve finally attached everyone’s names to their faces, Butterworth rewinds to 1955, when the sisters, played by a new set of actors, are teenagers and Veronica is a terror.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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      Laura Donnelly, ‘Hills of California’ Star, Is Not Some Delicate Flower

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      But she did “burst into tears” reading Jez Butterworth’s rewrite of his new Broadway play, which left her with 10 days “to create an entirely new character.”Most plays that transfer to New York from London arrive in close to their original form. There might be small changes to the text, to make particular lines comprehensible to American ears, but usually not much more than that.Laura Donnelly, the star of Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The Hills of California,” knew that the playwright had been planning rewrites since early in the London run, which stretched from January to June this year. The current Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theater would give Butterworth the chance.“He was really excited about that,” Donnelly, 42, said over coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, her dark hair lightened, permed and cut in a ’70s style for the play. “He kept referring to it as like, ‘little bits here and there,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool. Yep, no problem.’ I think this is also what he told Sam [Mendes], our director, and told our producers. So they scheduled in two weeks of rehearsals.”From left, Leanne Best, Helena Wilson, Donnelly and Ophelia Lovibond as singing sisters in the Broadway production of “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat Butterworth, Donnelly’s partner of nearly a dozen years, had actually ended up doing was a major rewrite of the third act — an overhaul that alters the substance, plot and even meaning of the play.From the start, Donnelly has portrayed two characters in “The Hills of California”: Veronica Webb, a guesthouse owner in Blackpool, England, in 1955, who is rigorously training her four adolescent daughters to become an American-style girl group; and Joan, her estranged and longed-for favorite child, who returns home at last in 1976, in Act III. But the Joan of the West End script was significantly different from the Joan of the Broadway script.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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      28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

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      New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore 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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      Jez Butterworth’s ‘The Hills of California’ to Open on Broadway

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      The play, about a group of English sisters who reunite at their mother’s deathbed, plans to open in New York in September. It ends a London run this month.“The Hills of California,” the latest darkly comedic drama from the acclaimed English playwright Jez Butterworth, will transfer to Broadway this fall after a well-received five-month run in London.The play, directed by Sam Mendes, is about a group of singing sisters — well, they sang together as kids — who have gathered at their childhood home in northwestern England because their mother is dying of cancer. The play is set in the 1970s, with flashbacks to the 1950s.The British press gave generally high marks to the play, which garnered five-star reviews in The Financial Times and The Stage, and four-star reviews in The Telegraph, The Evening Standard, The Observer and TimeOut.The London production is scheduled to end its run June 15. The New York production is to begin previews Sept. 11 and to open Sept. 29 at the Broadhurst Theater. Casting has not yet been announced.Butterworth’s last Broadway venture, “The Ferryman,” was also directed by Mendes, and won the Tony Award for best play in 2019. His first play on Broadway, “Jerusalem” in 2011, is a favorite among theater critics. He also wrote “The River,” which opened on Broadway in 2014.Mendes has worked frequently on Broadway, and won Tony Awards for directing “The Ferryman” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” He is also a film director, and won an Oscar for directing “American Beauty.”The lead producers of the Broadway run of “The Hills of California” include Sonia Friedman, a prolific and enormously successful British producer who also led the producing teams for Butterworth’s three previous plays on Broadway. The play’s other lead producers will be No Guarantees, which is led by Christine Schwarzman; Neal Street Productions, which is Mendes’s production company; Brian Spector; and Sand & Snow Entertainment. More

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      ‘Hills of California’ Review: A Stage Mother’s Unhappy Brood

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      Jez Butterworth’s new play explores the family dynamics of a song and dance troupe that didn’t make the big time.In Jez Butterworth’s new play, we — the audience and protagonists alike — are kept waiting and wondering.It’s the summer of 1976 and Britain is in the midst of a heat wave. In Blackpool, a seaside town in northwestern England, three sisters, Jill, Ruby and Gloria, are reunited in the guesthouse that had been the childhood home, because their hotelier mother, Veronica, is dying of cancer. They must decide whether to put her out of her misery with a high dose of morphine, or let her continue to suffer.A fourth sister, Joan, had emigrated to the United States 20 years earlier to launch a music career, and hasn’t been in touch with the family since. Will she come home now? Why did she cut contact? Well, she had her reasons.“The Hills of California,” written by Butterworth (“The Ferryman,” “Jerusalem”) and directed by Sam Mendes (“The Lehmann Trilogy”), runs at the Harold Pinter Theater in London, through June 15. Rob Howell’s impressive set makes the most of the playhouse’s nearly 40-foot grid height, with three flights of stairs leading up to the unseen guest rooms.The action unfolds on the first floor, where an endearingly tacky bamboo drinks bar and large metal jukebox imbue the cheap-and-cheerful Blackpool stylings with a quiet, sentimental dignity. The hotel is called the Seaview but you can’t actually see the water from its windows. The dialogue is zippy, the humor sharp, dark and irreverent. A minor character sets the tone in an early exchange with Jill: “How’s your mother? The nurse says she’s dying.”At several points, the set rotates to show us the hotel’s kitchen quarters, and we are transported back to the 1950s. We see the sisters as teenagers (played by four younger actors), under the rigorous if somewhat domineering stewardship of their mother, Veronica (an imperiously poised Laura Donnelly), who trains them up as a song and dance troupe. They rehearse songs by The Andrews Sisters, as well as the 1948 hit by Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers that gives the play its title. (The music is arranged by Candida Caldicot.)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