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      At James Earl Jones Memorial, Denzel Washington and Whoopi Goldberg Share Stories

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      At a gathering in the Broadway theater renamed to honor the star, speakers including Denzel Washington and Phylicia Rashad described Jones as an inspiration.Denzel Washington called him his “northern star.” Whoopi Goldberg said “getting to see him onstage was heaven.” Some of the most notable names in show business gathered in Times Square on Monday afternoon for a starry, and sometimes emotional, send-off for James Earl Jones, who died last year at the age of 93. He was remembered for his thunderous voice and his enviable acting chops, as well as for being a gentle guiding presence in the lives of young actors.For more than 90 minutes, at the Broadway theater that now bears his name on West 48th Street in Manhattan, a packed house laughed, cried and shared numerous personal stories that not only painted a bright picture of Jones, but cast him as an important figure who inspired fellow actors to reach their personal bests.“He was powerful, he was present, he was purposeful, he was humble,” Denzel Washington said of Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a short speech, Denzel Washington described Jones as having personified grace, power and dignity. Washington, who is currently starring in a Broadway revival of “Othello,” a role that Jones had made his own on Broadway more than six decades ago, said he hoped to be as good a stage actor as Jones. “He was powerful, he was present, he was purposeful, he was humble,” Washington said. “He is not only the greatest African American actor; in my opinion he is one of the greatest actors ever to be on a Broadway stage.”The actress Linda Powell recalled starring with Jones in a Broadway revival of “On Golden Pond,” which opened 20 years ago this week. She said Jones had pushed for her to be cast in the role of his daughter. “It was one of the best jobs of my life, one of the best experiences of my life, and his faith in me was a gift,” she said.Phylicia Rashad recalled seeing Jones perform when she was a young adult, and later performing as Big Mama to his Big Daddy in the 2008 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”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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      in Music

      6 Songs From ‘Just in Time’ That Capture Bobby Darin’s Legacy

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      Before David Bowie, Madonna and Beyoncé made the idea of being a pop star synonymous with constant reinvention, there was Bobby Darin.He “could sound like anybody and sing any style,” Bob Dylan wrote of the singer in his 2022 book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Not only was Darin “more flexible than anyone of his time,” Dylan noted, but “even in repose he just about vibrated with talent.”Neil Young, another rocker known for musical shape-shifting, expressed similar admiration. “I used to be pissed off at Bobby Darin because he changed styles so much,” he told Rolling Stone. “Now I look at him and think he was a [expletive] genius.”It’s that versatility, alongside his complicated life, that the new Broadway show “Just in Time,” in previews at Circle in the Square Theater, aims to explore through Darin’s swinging hits.Developed and directed by Alex Timbers (a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge!”) and starring Jonathan Groff (a Tony winner last year for “Merrily We Roll Along”), “Just in Time” is set in a nightclub, complete with an onstage band. While Darin is remembered for his magnetic performances, his story requires something more than a conventional jukebox bio-musical.Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin, singing his first big hit song, “Splish Splash,” in the musical “Just in Time” at the Circle in the Square Theater.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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      in Movies

      ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.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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      in Theater

      ‘Boop!’ Arrives on Broadway, With a Surprising 100-Year Back Story

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      Betty Boop has arrived on Broadway, nearly a century after she first boop-oop-a-dooped her way onto the big screen. “Boop! The Musical,” like the “Barbie” and “Elf” films that preceded it, imagines a transformational encounter between an anthropomorphic character and the real world (well, a fictional world full of people).Betty’s journey to the stage has been an unusual one. The original character didn’t have much of a back story, which has made her an appealing blank slate for storytellers. But her image — and Betty, at her core, is a remarkably long-lived illustration — has managed to straddle media and merchandise, surviving court battles and changing mores.“Her popularity goes on and on,” said Peter Benjaminson, author of “The Life and Times of Betty Boop.” “The musical is the latest in a series of incarnations.”Film DebutThe 1930 animated short “Dizzy Dishes.”Fleischer Studios, Inc.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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      in Theater

      Review: Clooney, Fair and Balanced, in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

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      George Clooney makes Edward R. Murrow a saint of sane journalism for a world that still needs one in a stage adaptation of the 2005 movie.“This just might do nobody any good” is a chancy first line for a play.Or maybe not too chancy at that, when the man who delivers it is George Clooney, and the man he’s portraying is Edward R. Murrow. This is, after all, Broadway, where glossy demigods of the left are loved.Still, Clooney has never previously appeared on its stages — “so … buckle up,” he writes in his bio.That Murrow has him beat in that regard, having appeared as a character in a musical called “Senator Joe,” is not surprising. He was, after all, a world-famous journalist whose first name might as well have been “crusading.” As “Good Night, and Good Luck” begins, what he’s crusading for, in a speech to news directors, is a complete rethink of television, which in choosing to “distract, delude, amuse and insulate” is making Americans “fat, comfortable and complacent.”That’s in 1958. Looking at the diminished state of television news today, you’d have to conclude he was right: His speech did nobody any good.But his journalism is another story, and that’s the one “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden, wants to tell. To do so, it quickly jumps back to 1953 and into CBS’s Studio 41, where Murrow and his producer, Fred W. Friendly, run the small empire that creates the newsmagazine “See It Now.” They are about to embark on a series of broadcasts designed to unmask, and thus destroy, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Communist-witch-hunting demagogue. Amazingly, they succeed.Clooney, at right, is aided by a capable cast, including from left: Fran Kranz, Michael Nathanson, Glenn Fleshler, Christopher Denham, Ilana Glazer, Jennifer Morris and Carter Hudson.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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      in Theater

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

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      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

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ With Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

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      Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk star in a bumpy revival of David Mamet’s play about salesmen with nothing worth selling.Watch out for Richard Roma. Top man among the bottom feeders at a scammy Chicago real estate agency, he has a hypnotic come-on and a dizzying spiel. Identifying your vulnerabilities with forensic accuracy, he’ll lance them with a blunt needle. (“You think you’re queer?” he asks one mark. “I’m going to tell you something: We’re all queer.”) If it’s what you need, he’ll be the brother who thinks big on your behalf, who sees beyond your sad habit of safety to the rewards only risk can offer.Not that there are actually rewards. The lots he’s selling in Florida, in developments ludicrously called Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, are worthless.Back at the office, too, he’s the alpha among losers. On the leaderboard of recent earnings, he stands closest by far to the $100,000 mark that will win him a Cadillac in the agency’s sales contest. (The two lowest earners will be fired.) His colleagues are merely additional marks to be bamboozled. They have schemes; he has juice.No wonder he remains, 41 years after he first hit Broadway in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” one of theater’s greatest characters: the unregulated id of sociopathic capitalism. He makes Willy Loman look like a softy. This salesman will never die.Or so I thought. But in the weirdly limp revival that opened on Monday at the Palace Theater, something has flipped. As played by Kieran Culkin, leading a sales team that also features Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, Roma is no longer the master of everyone else’s neuroses; he’s neurotic himself. Especially in the scene that ends the first act, as he winds up for a pitch into the soul of a schlub, he is so deeply weird and interior that any semblance of a confident exterior evaporates. The man couldn’t sell a dollar for a dime.Bill Burr, left, as the hotheaded Moss and Michael McKean as the strait-laced Aaronow in an Act I scene in a Chinese restaurant.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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      in Theater

      Othello and Iago, a Marriage Made in Both Heaven and Hell

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      Who exactly is in charge here?Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his “free and open nature” or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets?That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare’s “Othello” was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp.On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with “Othello,” serious spoilers follow.) It’s the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It’s Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it’s Iago who’s still alive at the end.Jake Gyllenhaal and Denzel Washington in the play’s latest revival, on Broadway through June 8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you’ve seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character’s point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned the production?Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having “the stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.”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