The Picture of Dorian Gray (Play)

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares125 Views

    The 2025 Tony Nominees Discuss Their Biggest Tests and Triumphs

    by

    Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      George Clooney and Denzel Washington Power Broadway to Prepandemic Heights

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Sinners’ and Shows like ‘Severance’ Give an Old Form New Life

      by

      Online, onstage and onscreen, performers are playing multiple parts. The effect of watching someone shape-shift can be both thrilling and unnerving.The much-anticipated season finale of one of my favorite sitcoms was recently derailed when its creator, Shawna Lander, ran into a few snags. In the story I’ve been following for months, a peppy if scatterbrained woman named Jennifer McCallister has gone into labor after a pregnancy that’s transformed her relationship with her sister-in-law (also named Shawna) from antagonistic to amiable. Meanwhile, Jennifer’s mother, Barb — passive-aggressive to a comically villainous degree — is getting drunk on margaritas at a local Mexican restaurant and terrorizing the wait staff when she gets a call to meet Jennifer at the hospital.But just as Jennifer was about to give birth, the story stopped. Lander announced that due to technical difficulties and illness, the audience would have to wait a few days to see what shenanigans Barb got up to, and whether this birth would help her and her son, Jennifer’s brother John, smooth over their rocky relationship. Illness foils shooting days all the time, but typically one creator’s bout of fever wouldn’t force audiences to wait well past the target air date to find out what happens. The difference with Lander’s show, which chronicles the ever-sprawling antics of the McCallister family — most sketches are actually stealth explorations of relationship dynamics — is that Lander is the show. She writes it. She produces and distributes it. She directs and shoots it.Michael B. Jordan as the twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.” He’s one of many performers this season playing multiple parts in a production.Warner Bros. PicturesAnd, most important, like several actors in hit TV shows, big-budget films and Tony-nominated Broadway productions this season, she plays every single character: Jennifer, Barb, Shawna, John, other male partners, assorted friends, the waitress, even Shawna’s two small children. They’re all Lander in wigs and different shirts, shot in close-cropped vertical framing for platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where she posts under the handle @shawnathemom. Her performances are so funny and specific that it’s shockingly easy to forget it’s all just her.The McCallister family saga boasts considerable viewership. The chronicles are followed by two million TikTok users, with nearly a million more on Instagram. Add it up, and that’s a bigger audience than watched the Season 3 premiere of “The White Lotus.”Lander’s format — playing every part herself, with shots framed and edited so the characters seem to be conversing with each other — involves a visual vocabulary familiar to comedians on vertical video platforms, who often post satirical sketches about corporate life or marriage. Just recently, a creator who goes by Sydney Jo posted the multi-episode “Group Chat” series, in which she played the multitudinous members of a friend group experiencing mounting drama over one girl’s boyfriend, culminating in a “Real Housewives”-style reunion episode. The series was such a viral hit that Sydney Jo was invited onto the “Today” show to talk about it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Sarah Snook Goes Digital

      by

      About five minutes into “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, the actress Sarah Snook, playing the louche aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, reaches out and rests a hand on Dorian Gray’s shoulder. At nearly every performance, the audience gasps. Sometimes, from sheer delight, they giggle.The gesture itself is simple, but the execution is so demanding that two years ago, when Snook first tried it, she had a panic attack. Snook plays both Lord Henry and Dorian Gray — and two dozen other characters, too. So she is putting her own hand on her own shoulder by way of an elaborate synthesis of live action, live video and recorded video. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a Victorian Gothic trifle, can now be seen in portrait mode.Even after a celebrated London run and weeks of performances at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, that moment, in which a recorded Lord Henry joins a live Dorian onscreen, hasn’t become any easier. As it approaches, Snook said she will find herself thinking: What if I’m a millimeter off? What if the magic is spoiled? The recording doesn’t protect her from imprecision, from accident. “The thing is,” she said, “it’s live theater.”Live video merges with recorded sequences to create the image of Sarah Snook reaching out to touch her own shoulder, conjuring the moment in which Lord Henry seduces Dorian Gray into a life of pleasure.Kip Williams, the director of “Dorian Gray” and until recently the artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, pioneered this technique, which he calls cinetheater, about a decade ago. Rehearsing a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” he decided to stage a chase sequence in the bowels of the theater. Some colleagues encouraged him to record it, but Williams resisted.“Theater is a live art form,” he said. “The audience knows when it’s live and when it’s not. That transiency, that temporal quality of being in the present moment is at its core.”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

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Starring Sarah Snook and 3 Million Pixels

      by

      The “Succession” actress plays all 26 roles in this Oscar Wilde classic reimagined as a video spectacle. If only there were less screen time and more IRL contact.An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot. Three million pixels, in case you’re counting. Sixteen million colors. Two cellphones, at least on a recent glitchy night when the first malfunctioned. And one Sarah Snook.Or rather a multitude of Snooks.These are among the many wonders you’ll find onstage at the Music Box Theater, where a technologically spectacular adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with Snook playing 26 roles, opened on Thursday.What you won’t find is “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”The 1890 magazine story by Oscar Wilde, which he novelized in 1891, has proved irresistible to adapters, thanks to its nifty plot device: a portrait that ages instead of the sitter. The more the gorgeous Dorian Gray falls under the decadent influence of Lord Henry Wotton, the uglier the painting by Basil Hallward becomes.To get to that plot, though, adapters have to adapt out a lot because what Wilde wrote is less the psychological thriller they imagine than a perfumed treatise on aesthetic philosophy. Another thing usually sacrificed is the homosexual undercurrent, which, even after expurgation by the story’s first editors, was deep enough to drown in. Convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labor, and died, just 46, in 1900. “Dorian Gray” was part of the evidence.Like the 1945 M-G-M movie, the current adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, downplays the treatise aspects. The queerness, though, is frank if complicated, in part because Snook, an Emmy-winning star of “Succession,” is still a woman while playing a man. Or not even a man. Her cherubic, shiny-cheeked Dorian is less the godlike 20-year-old of the novel than a barely pubescent boy.Snook provides specificity for each character: Her Wotton has a wonderful slouchy physicality, her Hallward nervous and twitchy, her Dorian (top of image) beamish.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Sarah Snook to Make Broadway Debut in One-Woman ‘Dorian Gray’

      by

      The “Succession” actress will play all 26 characters in a stage production of the Oscar Wilde novel.Sarah Snook, the Australian actress who captivated and chilled television audiences as Siobhan Roy on “Succession,” will make her Broadway debut next year in a much-praised and technologically innovative adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”Snook plays all 26 characters in the play, which she previously performed to great acclaim earlier this year in London, winning an Olivier Award for best actress.The play will transfer to New York in March, playing at a Shubert theater. The specific dates and theater have not yet been announced.“The Picture of Dorian Gray” is a late 19th-century novel by Oscar Wilde about a man who sells his soul so that he may remain young and beautiful, while the titular artwork ages. The story has repeatedly been adapted for stage and screen.This new “Dorian Gray” is adapted and directed by Kip Williams, who is the artistic director of Australia’s Sydney Theater Company, where the show began its life with another actress. Although Snook will be the only actor onstage, there is an onstage camera crew that captures, projects, and plays with her image.The lead producers are Michael Cassel, an Australian producer who has become increasingly active on the global stage, and Adam Kenwright, a British producer who was previously an executive at Ambassador Theater Group.Snook is one of many members of the “Succession” cast to turn to the stage following the end of the HBO series. Among them: Jeremy Strong, who played her brother Kendall, starred on Broadway earlier this year in a revival of “An Enemy of the People” and won a Tony Award for his performance; Kieran Culkin, who played her brother Roman, is also scheduled to come to Broadway in the spring for a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      2024 Olivier Awards: The Snubs and Surprises

      by

      Our theater critics and a reporter discuss the big winner — “Sunset Boulevard” — and the rest of the honorees at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.On Sunday night, the Olivier Awards — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — took place in London. As expected, “Sunset Boulevard” took home the most trophies (and will have a Broadway run later this year), but there were also some surprise winners. Matt Wolf and Houman Barekat, The New York Times’s London theater critics, joined the reporter Alex Marshall to discuss the winners, the snubs and the last year in British theater.Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, took home seven awards. Do you think it deserved to dominate?ALEX MARSHALL I saw “Sunset Boulevard” from the cheapest of cheap seats in the back row, but it was still my most memorable night in a theater last year. I’m not surprised that Andrew Lloyd Webber responded to the show’s wins by writing on X that it was “a highlight of my career.”For me, the only downside to its sweep is that Nicholas Hytner’s “Guys and Dolls” failed to win any major awards (it picked up one for choreography). If Lloyd’s reimagining of “Sunset” was brutal and stark, Hytner’s revamp was all exuberance and joy.Scherzinger in “Sunset Boulevard.”Marc BrennerMATT WOLF I loved everything about “Sunset Boulevard,” so, yes, I do think it deserved to dominate. That said, it must have been galling for the “Guys and Dolls” company to open that show to universal raves last spring, only to have “Sunset” come along and blindside them. The radical daring of Lloyd’s “Sunset” doesn’t happen every day, and “Guys and Dolls” was the unfortunate victim of that fact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

      by

      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Sarah Snook Is a Darkly Funny Dorian Gray

      by

      In a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Snook plays all the characters — with the help of screens.A large, rectangular screen hangs from the top of the stage at the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, rather appropriately, in portrait mode.Beneath it, the Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small team of black-clad camera operators who broadcast her every move onto the screen in real time as she simultaneously narrates and performs the title role of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”Later, several more screens descend, playing prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than twenty-five other roles. Over the course of the next two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are no other actors involved.Wilde’s 1890 novel, in which a handsome rake makes a Faustian bargain with the cosmos by trading his soul for eternal youth (and comes to regret it), lends itself to stage adaptation: It is dialogue-heavy, punctuated by witty, morally intelligent exposition; its allegory of human hubris is timeless.This adaptation, by the Sydney Theater Company, directed by Kip Williams and running through May 11, is a formally ambitious but playful multimedia production. The single-actor format and clever use of camerawork give visual expression to the novel’s themes of overweening egotism and existential dread.The play’s aesthetic palate is a blend of period and contemporary. There’s something tongue-in-cheek about much of the dated garb.Marc BrennerWe 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