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      In ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Nicole Scherzinger Is 23 Feet Tall

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      A fascinating Broadway revival of the bombastic 1994 musical blows it up even further.Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declares in the film “Sunset Boulevard” that it’s not her but “the pictures that got small,” the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals especially, video and projections have grown ever more dominant. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability, then, that at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened on Sunday, the pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below.But alas, only almost.For despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it.Which isn’t praise. You will recall that Norma (Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls) is deluded: a washed-up silent film star who, in her 50-ish dotage, haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion with only her grim manservant and a recently dead chimpanzee for company. By 1949, when the musical starts, she has barely left the premises for decades, let alone made a movie; still, she believes that she, and the silents, could achieve a marvelous comeback if only Cecil B. DeMille would direct her in the epic version of “Salome” she has written.The rest is madness. She conscripts Joe Gillis, a hunky, seedy, unsuccessful screenwriter, to polish her draft and, soon enough, other things. Joe (Tom Francis) seesaws between his luxurious life as Norma’s kept man and the more idealistic promptings of Betty Schaefer, an ambitious studio underling he at first brushes off as “one of the message kids.” Still, when Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) urges Joe to adapt a story of his called “Dark Windows,” they fall in love, while the servant, Max von Mayerling (David Thaxton), offers a dark window of his own into Norma’s modus operandi with men. (Razor and gun included.) None of this ends well, or rather it does not begin well, as the tale is narrated postmortem by Joe’s corpse.The 1950 film, directed by Billy Wilder, stands at a wry remove from these tawdry proceedings, with a cool appreciation but no embrace for human pathos and the hysteria of Hollywood dreams. Norma is a drama queen, Joe a gigolo, Betty a simp and Max a goblin. We know nothing of their emotions beyond what their actions show us.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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      Sadie Sink to Star in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ on Broadway

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      Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for “The Outsiders.”Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from “Stranger Things,” will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading “The Crucible” while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction — plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.The play has nine characters — seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor — and explores how the students’ ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.“As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe,” said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read “The Crucible” in a high school English class.“Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, ‘I should reread “The Crucible”,’ and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it,” she said. “I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase ‘John Proctor is the villain.’”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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      ‘Suffs,’ the Tony-Winning Broadway Musical, Will Close Jan. 5

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      The musical, created by Shania Taub, announced that it will play its final performance on Jan. 5 and start a national tour next fall.“Suffs,” a new musical about the American women’s suffrage movement, has a lot going for it: Its producers include Hillary Rodham Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, it won Tony Awards for its score and its book, and its audiences seemed energized by how the show’s themes resonated with the candidacy of Kamala Harris.But the show has struggled to sell enough tickets to defray its running costs, and on Friday night the producers announced that it would close on Jan. 5. At the time of its closing, it will have had 24 previews and 301 regular performances. The show announced plans for a national tour, which will begin in Seattle’s in September 2025.The musical, which takes place in the early 20th century, depicts two generations of women eager to win the right to vote, but divided over how best to do that. Shaina Taub, a singer-songwriter, wrote the book and score and stars as Alice Paul, an influential suffragist. It was directed by Leigh Silverman.The show began previews on March 26 and opened on April 18 at the Music Box Theater. A pre-Broadway production at the Public Theater received reviews that were mixed; the reviews of the Broadway production were somewhat better. Writing in The New York Times, the chief theater critic Jesse Green called it “a good show and good for the world” but said “to be great, a musical (like a great movement) must grab you by the throat. ‘Suffs’ too often settles for holding up signs.”The show’s grosses have been middling — during the week that ended Oct. 6, it grossed $679,589, which is generally not sufficient to sustain a large-cast musical.“Suffs” is the sixth musical to announce closing dates since early May, following “Lempicka,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “The Who’s Tommy,” “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants.” Broadway is always a difficult industry, and most shows fail, but the odds of success are particularly long now because production costs have risen, audience size has fallen, and a high volume of shows are competing for attention.“Suffs,” with Jill Furman and Rachel Sussman as lead producers, was capitalized for $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped. More

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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: ‘Our Town’ Starring Jim Parsons Is Still Avant-Garde After 86 Years

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      The first act of “Our Town” takes place in Grover’s Corners on May 7, 1901. Nothing much happens in the fictional New Hampshire village that day, except that two local teenagers, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, fall in love completely unaware that they do so under the shadow of the granitic pillars of time.But we are aware. Even in an act entitled Daily Life, the playwright, Thornton Wilder, quietly batters us with the news that we are mortal. Immediately upon introducing George’s parents, he has his mouthpiece, the Stage Manager, convey as if it were part of their names a detail of their deaths: Doc Gibbs’s in 1930, his wife’s on a visit to Canton, Ohio. He blithely jumbles together, like their bones, the joining and splintering of human lives. “Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married,” he comments without comment.So if you think of the play as small, sweet or old-fashioned, and Grover’s Corners as a twin town to Bedford Falls or Hooterville, I respectfully offer that you have the soul of a rock. 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.And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.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 Lights to Dim for Gavin Creel

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      The landlords also said they would reconsider their process for determining who to honor with full and partial dimmings.Broadway’s theater owners, facing criticism for their decision to dim the lights outside fewer than one-third of the 41 theaters in honor of the musical theater performer Gavin Creel, have succumbed to the public pressure and agreed that all their venues would acknowledge his death.In addition to Creel, a well-known and well-liked actor who died on Sept. 30 at age 48, the theater owners said they would also dim the lights of all theaters to honor Maggie Smith, the British stage and screen star, as well as the actor Adrian Bailey, both of whom died last month. The lights for Bailey will be dimmed Oct. 17; the dimmings for Creel and Smith will be scheduled in consultation with their families.In an email on Wednesday, the theater owners described their decision via the Broadway League, the trade organization that represents them and speaks on their behalf.The lights-dimming ritual, which goes back decades, has been an increasingly fraught one for the nine entities that own and operate Broadway theaters. That small group decides not only which Broadway alumni merit such public recognition when they die, but also how many buildings should go dark, based on how those landlords evaluate the theatermakers’ contributions.In other words: Stephen Sondheim, James Earl Jones and Chita Rivera were recognized with lights dimmings at all theaters, but memorializing accomplished but less-universally known individuals with partial dimmings has been fraught. Those decisions have often been followed by pushback from artists and audiences: over whether to dim lights at all for the comedian Joan Rivers (the theater owners at first decided no, and then yes), and how many theaters should dim lights for the performers Jan Maxwell (at first one, then two), Marin Mazzie (at first six, then all) and Hinton Battle (at first nine, and then all).When the Broadway League announced, on Friday, that the theater owners had decided on a limited dimming for Creel — at first 11, and then 12 theaters after they added the Eugene O’Neill, where Creel starred in “The Book of Mormon” — a backlash arose on social media.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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      Jonathan Groff, Fresh Off Tony Win, Will Return to Broadway as Bobby Darin

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      “Just in Time,” a new musical about the “Mack the Knife” pop singer, will open next spring at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Jonathan Groff, who won his first Tony Award in June for starring in a hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” will return to Broadway next spring to play Bobby Darin in a biomusical he has been developing for years.The musical, “Just in Time,” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 23 at Circle in the Square Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The theater, with its close approximation of an in-the-round experience, will be configured to accommodate an immersive nightclub-like staging, with a 16-person cast, an onstage big band, two stages and some cabaret-style seating.The show began its life in 2018 at the 92nd Street Y as a five-performance concert called “The Bobby Darin Story,” and has been developed through a number of workshops. In an interview, Groff said he hadn’t been sure what to expect from that initial run, but that “it lit me up.”“There is some sort of kinetic magic that happens with the live execution of his material,” said Groff, 39, who was also a Tony nominee for “Hamilton” (he played King George III) and “Spring Awakening” (his breakout role). He has worked extensively on television (“Glee,” “Looking” and “Mindhunter”) and reached global audiences with his voice work as Kristoff in Disney’s “Frozen” films.Darin, a singer-songwriter whose pop career peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, is best known for the songs “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” He suffered from a heart condition, and died at the age of 37.“Dramatically he’s really interesting, because what do you do when your whole career is on borrowed time?” said the musical’s director, Alex Timbers, who won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” “His life was lived at high-octane speed. A woman he thought was his sister ended up being his mother. He went on a whole voyage into folk and pop and then decided he was a nightclub animal.”The musical has a book by Warren Leight (a Tony winner for “Side Man”) and Isaac Oliver and will be choreographed by Shannon Lewis. The show was conceived by Ted Chapin, who wrote the initial script and produced it at the Y as part of that institution’s long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.“We all got invested and excited about the idea of telling his life story in this environment of a night club,” Groff said. “We’re playing with the genre of the biomusical, trying to find our own unique point of view and way into not only his story but also the genre itself. There’s a bit of experimentation happening here.”The lead producers of “Just in Time” are Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost; the musical is being capitalized for up to $12.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      ‘The Big Gay Jamboree’ Review: A Golden-Age Fantasia on Steroids

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      The goofball spirit that made Marla Mindelle’s “Titaníque” a hit is missing from her equally campy new show drenched in pop-culture references.When “Titaníque” opened in a cramped basement space two years ago, few would have imagined that the show, a commingling of the James Cameron disaster movie and the Celine Dion songbook, would amount to more than a short-lived lark. Yet it is still running — in a proper, aboveground theater — and has spawned productions in Britain, Canada and Australia.Now Marla Mindelle, a writer of “Titaníque” who played the Dion role, is back with “The Big Gay Jamboree,” another raunchy, campy, hyperactive musical drenched in pop-culture references (though, this time, there is an original score). But whereas “Titaníque” had the casual flair of a tossed-off joke that somehow landed, “The Big Gay Jamboree” works itself into a tizzy with little to show for it. At least this time the production is starting off at a street-level venue, the Orpheum Theater, where it opened on Sunday.In “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle, who wrote the book with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and the score with Philip Drennen, takes on the juicy lead role of Stacey, an aspiring actress who, after a drunken blackout, finds herself transported to Bareback, Idaho, in 1945. Stacey may be awake, but she feels as if she is in a dream and a nightmare rolled into one. The dream part is that this hard-core show-tune fiend is not in a regular small town but in the musical-theater version of one. The nightmare is that she can’t leave. It’ll be familiar territory for fans of the TV series “Schmigadoon!,” in which a couple are marooned in a golden-age musical.As Stacey tries to figure out a way back to her regular life and her godawful millionaire boyfriend, Keith (Alex Moffat, a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus), she gets to know her new supporting cast, including the man-hungry Flora (Natalie Walker) and the man-hungry Bert (Constantine Rousouli, the “Titaníque” co-writer and co-star).It’s not long before Stacey realizes that life in a Broadway fantasy is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the good old days weren’t so great for men of a certain persuasion and women who enjoy a good time. Idaho in the 1940s probably wasn’t all too hot for Black men either, even if the town loves its music director, Clarence (Paris Nix), especially — only? — when he leads the gospel choir.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