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    This Year’s BroadwayCon Raises the Curtain on Mental Health

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    The ninth annual fan event will include discussions on topics such as sobriety, self-care and body image. Here are six to look out for.Watching a Broadway musical can be an overwhelming experience — to say nothing of the actors performing in it.“If you die onstage, or your character’s screamed at, your body believes that’s really happening to you every night,” said Hannah Cruz, who made her Broadway debut this spring in the women’s suffrage musical “Suffs.”For decades, the industry fostered a “suck it up” culture of steely toughness. But one focus of this year’s BroadwayCon, which will draw thousands of theater lovers to the New York Hilton Midtown from Friday through Sunday, is to facilitate conversations about how performers deal with mental health, both on and offstage.The planned discussions and events address a variety of topics, including the challenges of staying sober while working in the business and increasing accessibility for autistic audiences. Here are six events you’ll want to catch.Autism and accessibility discussionsTheatergoers who want to share their experiences being on the autism spectrum, know someone who is or just want a safe space to learn more can take part in this event hosted by Skylar Reiner, a longtime Broadway fan.“Autism and Broadway: What It Means To Be a Fan While on the Spectrum,” Friday, 10 a.m.Five autistic performing arts professionals — including Conor Tague, Desmond Luis Edwards and Madison Kopec, who recently made their Broadway debuts in “How to Dance in Ohio” — will discuss their personal experiences with accessibility in the arts, as well as best practices for collaborating with autistic creators.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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      How a Ballroom ‘Cats,’ a Gay Kiss and a Black Marine Reclaimed Old Musicals

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      How a Black lieutenant, a gay kiss and a catless ballroom are helping reclaim Broadway classics.Ten years ago, I cringed through an Encores! performance of one of the most odious musicals I’d ever seen. That’s not to throw shade on Encores!, the concert series that dredges up both diamonds and dirt from the musical theater dustbin. But “Irma La Douce,” a 1960 Broadway hit about jolly prostitutes and the men who keep them, was perhaps a dredge too far. Did I mention that it involved penguins?In a way, it was a relief that the show was so bad: There was nothing to regret in consigning it to my personal catalog of cancellation.Most of the most offensive musicals of the past are like that, providing their own incontrovertible arguments against revival, except as carefully labeled historical exhibits in some deep-future Encores! season.On the other hand, the best vintage musicals need no excuses. They should be performed as long as enough people want to see them, and perhaps even longer, until the time is right again.But between the disposables and the treasurables lies a range of works, middling to excellent, that can still be powerful despite certain problems. Often the problems arise from ways of looking at race and gender that, however progressive in their day, do not meet contemporary expectations. Who, if anyone, has the right perspective to address such works most authentically?A good answer might start with artists who represent the group that’s objectionably depicted (or gratuitously ignored) in the show itself. And though I’m not a proponent of narrow identity matching, which can shrink a capacious story to a hall of mirrors with just one person inside, I’ve seen several examples recently in which the story is instead expanded. This happens when directors and performers from the communities in question thoughtfully reappropriate material that was once appropriated from them.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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      How Does a Dressing Room Get Into Character?

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      As a child, the actor Krysta Rodriguez would mentally rearrange unfamiliar rooms as a way of soothing herself. The fixation followed her everywhere, from friends’ houses to historical sites. She remembers visiting a clothing store in Paris with her family when she was 11 and obsessing over where she would put a bed if she lived there. “As I’m thinking about it, it was probably a control issue,” she says. “I immediately try to figure out what a space wants to be. Is it a midcentury house that got renovated in the ’90s with all this incorrect architecture? I clear it away.”Over the past two decades or so, Rodriguez, 39, has mostly channeled this aesthetic intensity into her character work, for roles on both the stage and screen (including a memorable turn as Liza Minnelli in the 2021 Netflix series “Halston”). In 2022, while appearing as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s fictional girlfriend in the Broadway play “The Collaboration,” she arranged her dressing room to look like a messy artist’s loft, filled with the kind of ratty ’70s furniture that her character would have grabbed from the streets of the East Village in the ’80s. She says the actor Nathan Lane, with whom she co-starred in “The Addams Family” musical in 2010, helped her realize dressing rooms could be taken seriously when he turned his into an extravagant lounge, complete with a full bar. She also credits the actor Michael Cerveris, who painted his walls blood red and brought in a vintage barber’s chair while starring in a 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd.” “I try to use these spaces as a gateway,” Rodriguez says of her own dressing rooms. “I want to have some sense of the character, even if it’s not my personal style.”Nestled among framed photos of Jordan’s friends and family are mementos from previous performances, including a bobblehead doll of his character on the TV series “Supergirl.”Blaine DavisIn 2020, when acting work slowed during the pandemic, she turned her interest in interior design into a full-fledged business, renovating the homes of clients in her native Orange County, Calif., and beyond. But it wasn’t until this spring that Rodriguez decorated a dressing room for another actor. When her friend Jeremy Jordan was preparing for his leading role in the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” he asked Rodriguez to lend her design expertise. She took inspiration from the subtle details of the character’s Jazz Age world rather than creating what she calls a “Party City Art Deco theme.” Jordan’s only request was that she make the windowless room, deep within the Broadway Theater, feel cozy. Rodriguez decided to reimagine the space as a sunroom in Jay Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, with a soothing watercolor wallpaper of a Japanese maple tree, to reflect the era’s affinity for Japonisme, and a marine blue love seat whose tropical plant print pillows match a nearby bird of paradise.Jordan’s Jazz Age costumes. Linda Cho won the Tony Award for best costume design for her work on the production.Blaine DavisRodriguez sourced period photographs online to help Jordan get into character. Next to a bottle of Buchanan’s whisky — a reference to Gatsby’s love interest in the story, Daisy Buchanan — is a framed image of a champagne tower similar to one featured in the production.Blaine DavisWe 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: What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!” One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years

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      Cole Escola’s dragtastic White House farce asks the immortal question: Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?Like so many before them, members of the “Oh, Mary!” creative team are proudly reclaiming an insulting epithet as a badge of honor.I don’t mean “queer”; they’re way past that. I mean “stupid.”“Oh, Mary!” is “the stupidest play,” Cole Escola, its author and star, tells anyone who will listen.“I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Sam Pinkleton, its director, chimes in.They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.To start with, we don’t get a lot of comedies these days, not the kind you can feel good laughing at. Most contemporary examples of the genre — say “Bootycandy” by Robert O’Hara and “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris — use the form the way doctors use an emetic: They want you to gag on the gags. But the totally unserious “Oh, Mary!” is not medicinal in that sense. It merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they’re hilarious.But the premise is already a joke. How else would you describe a back story in which Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola in a hoop skirt the size of a yurt) longs to return to her first love, cabaret, with its “madcap medleys” and built-in excuses for diva behavior?Escola and James Scully in the play, which is on Broadway at the Lyceum Theater after debuting Off Broadway this past winter.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

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      Betty Boop Time Travels to New York, and Broadway, Next Spring

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      “BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” had a run in Chicago last year. It is slated to open at a Shubert theater in April.A long-in-the-works musical about Betty Boop, a curvy flapper first featured in animated films of the 1930s, will open on Broadway next spring following a run in Chicago last year.“BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical” has some thematic echoes of last year’s “Barbie” movie, although it was in the works before that film came along. The stage production imagines that Boop leaves her early-20th-century film life to travel to present-day New York, where musical comedy ensues. (Her first stop: Comic-Con.)The show was staged late last year at the CIBC Theater in Chicago, where The Chicago Tribune gave it an encouraging review (“there is a great deal to like, and much more work still to be done,” wrote the critic Chris Jones). The Broadway production is to open next April at a theater operated by the Shubert Organization, according to a statement from the production on Thursday; the production did not announce specific dates, theater or cast.“BOOP!” features music by David Foster, a songwriter and music producer who has won 16 Grammy Awards. The lyrics are by Susan Birkenhead (a Tony nominee for “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Working”) and the book is by Bob Martin (a Tony winner for “The Drowsy Chaperone”). The show is being directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, who won Tony Awards for choreographing the 2004 revival of “La Cage aux Folles” and the 2013 production of “Kinky Boots.”The musical’s lead producer is Ostar Productions, led by Bill Haber, who was among the founders of Creative Artists Agency and who has credits on more than 50 Broadway shows. “BOOP!” is being capitalized for up to $26 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Even for Broadway, where musicals often take years to develop, this one has had a remarkably long journey: Haber has been working on a Betty Boop musical for more than two decades, changing creative team members and collaborators along the way. In 2003, Variety reported that a Boop musical was planned for Broadway in 2005; in 2008, The New York Times reported that Foster was attached and a Broadway bow was expected in the 2010-11 season. (Neither of those productions happened.)Betty Boop was created by Max Fleischer and was initially depicted, in a 1930 film, as a poodle with some human characteristics; subsequently the character was fully human, although with improbable proportions. The character has been adapted in various forms over the years, including for merchandise that has kept her image in the public eye. She has been seen as a sex symbol of sorts, often with short dresses, a squeaky voice and a signature expression, “Boop-Oop-a-Doop.” More

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      Second Stage Becomes First Broadway Nonprofit in Decades to Name New Leader

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      The organization, which won this year’s best play revival Tony Award for “Appropriate,” has chosen Evan Cabnet as its next artistic director.Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofit organizations with Broadway houses, on Thursday named a new artistic director as the sector braces for a wave of leadership turnover.Founded in 1979 and distinguished by its commitment to presenting work by living American writers, Second Stage said that its board had chosen Evan Cabnet as its next artistic director. Cabnet is currently the artistic director of LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging writers, directors and designers. Cabnet will succeed Carole Rothman, one of the theater’s founders, who led the organization for 45 years and is stepping down in August.Second Stage has a proud history of presenting acclaimed work, including the Pulitzer-winning shows “Between Riverside and Crazy,” “Water by the Spoonful” and “Next to Normal.” Its plays and musicals have won multiple other honors; most recently, the organization’s production of “Appropriate” won this year’s Tony Award for best play revival.Second Stage owns Broadway’s smallest house, the 600-seat Hayes Theater. Like many nonprofit theaters, Second Stage has reduced its footprint since the pandemic — it let go of its Off Off Broadway space on the Upper West Side, and at the end of this year is letting go of its Off Broadway venue in Times Square, although it plans to continue to produce such work in other spaces, starting next spring at the Pershing Square Signature Center. The organization currently has 47 staffers and an annual budget of $27 million; this season it is planning to stage two Broadway shows, two Off Broadway shows and a Next Stage Festival for early-career work.The leadership of the four Broadway nonprofits has not changed for decades, and the industry is closely watching to see how a new generation of leaders might differ from its predecessors. Two of the other nonprofits will also be looking for new artistic leaders: Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, André Bishop, is ending his 33-year tenure next spring, and Roundabout Theater Company’s artistic director and chief executive, Todd Haimes, died last year after 40 years at that organization. (The fourth Broadway nonprofit, Manhattan Theater Club, is led by Lynne Meadow, who has been that organization’s artistic director for 52 years.)Cabnet, 46, is a Philadelphia native who has lived in New York since 1996 and currently resides in Brooklyn. He has led LCT3 since 2016; previously he was a freelance director and an artistic associate at Roundabout. He will start his new job on Sept. 1; the first season to feature shows he chooses will begin in the fall of 2025. In an interview, he talked about his plans; these are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      After a Brief Run, ‘Tommy’ Revival to Close on Broadway

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      “The Who’s Tommy,” which has a rock score by Pete Townshend, will end on July 21. A national tour is in the works.A revival of “The Who’s Tommy” that arrived on Broadway three decades after a successful original production will end its run on July 21. The show opened strong but faced dwindling sales at the box office.The production, which had a successful pre-Broadway run in Chicago, will now pin its hopes on a national tour, beginning in Providence, R.I., in the fall of 2025.With a rock score by Pete Townshend, “Tommy” dates back to a 1969 album from the Who; the original Broadway production opened in 1993 and ran for a little more than two years.Set in London, the show has a wild plot: A young man who loses the ability to hear, speak and see in response to childhood trauma develops a gift for pinball that allows him to attract a cultlike following.The revival began its life last year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago; the Broadway production began previews on March 8 and opened on March 28 at the Nederlander Theater. At the time of its closing, the revival will have played 20 previews and 132 regular performances on Broadway.Des McAnuff, who directed the original production, returned to direct the revival. Townshend and McAnuff collaborated on the show’s book.The revival, starring Ali Louis Bourzgui in the title role, scored mostly positive reviews, but The New York Times, which can have an outsize influence, was an outlier: Jesse Green, its chief theater critic, characterized the show as featuring “relentless noise and banal imagery.”The production was nominated for a Tony Award for best musical revival but lost to “Merrily We Roll Along.”“Tommy,” with Stephen Gabriel and Ira Pittelman as lead producers, was capitalized for $15.7 million, according to a spokesman. That money has not been recouped.The show is the third musical to announce a closing since the start of May, following “Lempicka” and “The Heart of Rock and Roll.” More

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      ‘I Might Be Real-Life Good at This’: Shooting for Broadway at the Jimmy Awards

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      The awards, which celebrated excellence in high school musical theater on Monday, have become a launchpad for future stars and Tony nominees.Shortly after Damson Chola Jr. sang the powerful “Ragtime” anthem “Make Them Hear You,” in a commanding performance that drove the Minskoff Theater to delirium on Monday night, the young singer accepted the Jimmy Award for best actor. He gave an equally poised acceptance speech, expressing gratitude with a calm cadence and the occasional wry chuckle of someone who’s seen and heard it all.“Is he 40?” my neighbor mused.Hardly. The Jimmys celebrate excellence in high school musical theater, and Chola, a recent graduate, is 18. The winner for best actress, Gretchen Shope, perhaps more expected for their age group, included in her thanks “the girl on TikTok that said I looked like Chappell Roan.” Then again, Shope had just killed with “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” from “Funny Girl,” so who’s to say what’s typical when it comes to theater kids?The actor Telly Leung led group coaching sessions at the Juilliard School, which was also home for the Jimmy Award nominees during their stay in New York.Bess Adler for The New York TimesFormally known as the National High School Musical Theater Awards, the Jimmys were founded in 2009 by the theater organization Pittsburgh CLO and a division of the Nederlander Organization. (The nickname derives from that company’s onetime chairman, James M. Nederlander.) The awards have since grown significantly in size. This year, tens of thousands of participants from across the country were narrowed down, through regional awards programs, to 102 nominees.The Jimmys have also grown in esteem: Casting agents for Broadway and national tours see them as a prime way to scout for promising performers. And you don’t even have to win to be noticed. Eva Noblezada, a 2013 finalist, went on to earn Tony Award nominations for “Miss Saigon” and “Hadestown” in 2017 and 2019, and she currently stars in “The Great Gatsby.” Casey Likes, a 2019 finalist, made his Broadway debut as the lead in “Almost Famous” and is now playing Marty McFly in “Back to the Future.” The guest presenters at the Minskoff included Justin Cooley, a 2021 finalist whose Tony nomination for his performance in “Kimberly Akimbo” came just two years later.During a whirlwind week that included intensive rehearsals, the young nominees attended the Tony Awards. “I went back to my dorm and I just cried,” said Theo Rickert, a rising senior from Illinois.Bess Adler for 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

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      Leslye Headland’s ‘Cult of Love’ to Open on Broadway in the Fall

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      The play will be produced by Second Stage, which is also planning an Off Broadway production of a two-character drama by Donald Margulies.“Cult of Love,” a play about a fractious holiday gathering of a Christian family, will come to Broadway this fall via Second Stage Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses.The announcement on Tuesday is a further sign that the current season is shaping up to be a robust one for plays, which had been considered an endangered species on Broadway, but which seem to be proliferating as the economic climate for musicals worsens.“Cult of Love” is written by Leslye Headland, a creator of the Netflix series “Russian Doll” and the Disney+ series “The Acolyte.” She has also written and directed films including “Sleeping With Other People.”The play is scheduled to begin previews Nov. 20 and to open Dec. 12 at the Hayes Theater.“Cult of Love” is Headland’s final work in a series, called “Seven Deadly Plays,” that is inspired by the seven deadly sins; this one is about pride. The play was staged in 2018 at IAMA Theater Company in Los Angeles and there was a run early this year at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California. (A planned 2020 production at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts was canceled because of the pandemic.)The Broadway production, like the Berkeley production, will be directed by Trip Cullman. The play has 10 characters and casting has not been announced.Second Stage also said on Tuesday that it would stage an Off Broadway production of “Lunar Eclipse,” a two-character play by Donald Margulies (a Pulitzer winner for “Dinner With Friends”) that had a run last year at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass.The new production, directed by Kate Whoriskey, is to star Reed Birney (a Tony winner for “The Humans”) and Lisa Emery as a long-married couple. It is to begin previews Oct. 9 and to open Oct. 30 at the Tony Kiser Theater.“Lunar Eclipse” is expected to be Second Stage’s final production in that space, which the company is exiting at the end of the year, citing financial considerations. Second Stage expects to present its spring season at the Pershing Square Signature Center while it explores options for an Off Broadway home. More