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      With Clinton as a Producer, ‘Suffs’ Takes a Political Battle to Broadway

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      As Shaina Taub’s musical opens, the show’s team members, including Hillary Clinton, say they’re ready to give the women’s suffrage movement a bigger platform.Shaina Taub was ready to watch Hillary Clinton win in November 2016. She had been at Harvard, doing research for an ambitious musical about the women’s suffrage movement, and was swept up in what felt like the inevitable: a woman elected president of the United States. Taub had traveled to New York City from Cambridge for election night, eager to cheer on Clinton, whom she had phone banked for.But Clinton lost, and Taub was utterly deflated. Returning to Cambridge to work on a show about triumphant women was the last thing she wanted to do. Yet, it was Clinton who reignited that fire in Taub with a concession speech in which she implored “all the little girls” to never doubt that they are “deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve” their dreams.Now, after years of development and an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater in 2022, “Suffs” is scheduled to open on April 18 at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, with Clinton making her debut as a producer. (The team backing the show also includes Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.)“Many of the themes resonate with me personally,” Clinton said in a phone interview, “given my own life and career, including the tension between the so-called establishment and activist voices.”“I’ve been on both sides of that debate,” she continued. “And the larger lesson that’s in the score — that ‘progress is possible, but not guaranteed,’ and ‘the future demands that we fight for it now’ — I resonate so strongly with that.”In addition to Clinton and Taub, some of the “Suffs” cast and creative team recalled their first time voting, and shared their thoughts about what suffrage means to 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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      Rachel McAdams Is Not Afraid of the Dark

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      The actress makes her Broadway debut in “Mary Jane” as the single mother of a seriously ill child. She views her acting choices as expanding her orbit.From the outside, you wouldn’t know that Rachel McAdams, the thoughtfully charming star of blockbuster rom-coms, rom-drams, a Marvel franchise and the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” has been wondering about death.Maybe it has to do with the therapist who said that her indecisiveness and deep curiosity about seeing through someone else’s eyes, which she’s harbored since childhood, could be chalked up to something called “death anxiety.”McAdams had long viewed her acting choices as expanding her orbit. “It’s been a way to live a lot of lives in one,” she said. If that was about a fear of dying — well, it didn’t rattle her.Instead, characteristically, she embraced it. “We don’t have a lot of great coping mechanisms for death in our culture,” she said. “So, yeah, I kind of welcome the opportunity to lean into that — earlier rather than later. Let’s get cozy with it. Let’s get cozy with that next adventure.”Death hovers like a specter around her latest role, as the single mother of a seriously ill child, in the play “Mary Jane.” McAdams hasn’t done theater since college; she makes her Broadway debut as the title character in this Manhattan Theater Club production, which began previews April 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It’s by the busy playwright Amy Herzog, who also adapted Broadway’s show of the moment, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”“Mary Jane” is the first of her own deceptively spare plays to appear on Broadway, after a celebrated run in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop. Dotted (surprisingly) with laugh lines, it’s about the daily muck and lasting profundity of caregiving, a nitty-gritty subject that’s rarely dramatized. “A heartbreaker for anyone human,” Jesse Green wrote in his New York Times 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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      With ‘Succession’ Complete, the Roys’ Next Takeover Is the Stage

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      Audiences are flocking to shows with Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and other alums of the acclaimed HBO series.There seems to be a secret ingredient to stage success this season: a stint on “Succession.”So many “Succession” alums are onstage in New York and London that the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, has been dashing from theater to theater, trying to catch the work of his colleagues. On a recent trip to New York, he saw four shows featuring “Succession” alums, including a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” one of the hottest tickets on Broadway thanks to its star performer, Jeremy Strong, and “The Effect,” an Off Broadway play written by Lucy Prebble, who is also among the producers and writers of “Succession.” In London, Armstrong saw “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a critically-acclaimed, one-woman adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic starring Sarah Snook, and is booked to see “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” starring Brian Cox.“We took a lot from New York theater,” Armstrong said, nodding to the many stage actors and playwrights who helped make “Succession” a success, “and I hope this season we are giving something back.”Arian Moayed, who played the investor Stewy Hosseini in “Succession” and starred in a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” last year, theorized that the show had some theater-like attributes. “Part of what was cool about the show was that we shot it in a very one-act-y kind of way,” said Moayed. There are so many “Succession” alums onstage that one small downtown theater company in New York, Bedlam, advertised its current show, “The Assassination of Julius Caesar as told by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw,” as “STARRING NO ONE FROM SUCCESSION.”Here is a look at where the Roys and their retainers are onstage now.Brian CoxBrian Cox as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” left, and as the distant patriarch Logan Roy in “Succession.”From left: Johan Persson; Graeme Hunter/HBOIn “Succession,” Cox played Logan Roy, the merciless media mogul at the heart of the series. Cox, a veteran stage actor (his résumé includes five Broadway shows), is now starring in London’s West End in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”Jeremy StrongJeremy Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann in “An Enemy of the People,” left, and as Logan’s ambitious, wounded son Kendall in the HBO series.From left: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; HBO, via Associated PressWe 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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      Michael Stuhlbarg Is Attacked in Central Park Before ‘Patriots’ Debut

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      The actor was walking on the Upper East Side on Sunday when a man threw a rock at him, striking the back of his neck, the police said. He is set to appear on Broadway on Monday evening.One day after he was struck with a rock in a random attack on the Upper East Side, the actor Michael Stuhlbarg will appear in Monday’s first preview of the Broadway play “Patriots,” in which he stars as a Russian oligarch who helped facilitate Vladimir V. Putin’s rise.Stuhlbarg, best known for his role as a gangster in the series “Boardwalk Empire,” was walking in Central Park on Sunday evening when a man threw a rock, hitting him in the back of the neck, the police said.Stuhlbarg chased the man, Xavier Israel, 27, out of the park, where he was taken into custody and charged with assault. The location where the man was arrested on East 91st Street is the address for the Russian consulate.The police said Stuhlbarg declined medical attention.Stuhlbarg “feels fine” and will appear onstage on Monday for his debut in “Patriots,” the show said in a news release. He plays Boris A. Berezovsky, a Russian business tycoon who reigned in post-Soviet Russia and helped install Putin as president, but then had a bitter falling out with the Kremlin and died in exile.The play, written by Peter Morgan, the creator of the British royalty drama “The Crown,” and directed by Rupert Goold, opens on April 22. It was first staged in 2022 in London, where Tom Hollander played Berezovsky.Stuhlbarg, 55, had his breakthrough lead performance in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man,” going on to numerous onscreen roles, including as Dr. Richard Sackler, the prescription opioid magnate, in the limited series “Dopesick,” for which he was nominated for an Emmy.A fixture of New York’s theater scene in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuhlbarg last appeared on Broadway in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for starring in Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman.” More

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      Madonna and Barbra Are Fans. Broadway, Meet Lempicka.

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      A new musical aims to restore the reputation, in life and art, of the ambitious yet undervalued painter Tamara de Lempicka.The playwright Carson Kreitzer specializes in difficult women, disparaged women, women who should be better known. But 14 years ago, when a friend suggested the painter Tamara de Lempicka as a potential subject, Kreitzer wasn’t initially enthusiastic. The name meant nothing to her.Then in a used bookstore, a cover with Lempicka’s name caught her eye. Flipping through the monograph, image after glossy image, Kreitzer realized that she already knew Lempicka’s brash, gleaming work. She had seen it reproduced in Madonna videos and in Van Cleef & Arpels ads. There in that bookstore she felt compelled to write something as big, bold and richly colored as the paintings.“Tamara made me a musical writer,” Kreitzer, who had never written a musical before, said in a recent phone interview. “She demanded it.”After years of development, “Lempicka,” a biomusical by Kreitzer (book and lyrics) and Matt Gould (book and music), opens on April 14 at Broadway’s Longacre Theater. It is a work of recuperation, aiming to restore the reputation, in life and art, of a queer woman and an ambitious painter, who has often been undervalued, in the art market and beyond.“She wanted everything,” Rachel Chavkin, the musical’s director, said of her heroine. “She wanted more from life and ultimately life lost interest in her.”When it comes to reclaiming Lempicka, the musical is not alone. A concurrent selling exhibition at Sotheby’s, “The World of Tamara: A Celebration of Lempicka and Art Deco,” features several of Lempicka’s paintings, including “L’Éclat,” a portrait of a woman, her hair coiled like strips of film, and “Nu aux Buildings,” a sensuous nude backed by skyscrapers. This fall, San Francisco’s de Young museum will host the artist’s first major museum retrospective in the United States.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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      ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

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      Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.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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      Nicole Scherzinger to Star in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ on Broadway in the Fall

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      The revival, birthed in London, is a radically reimagined version of the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on a 1950 Billy Wilder film.Jamie Lloyd’s radically reimagined revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Nicole Scherzinger plays the faded film star Norma Desmond, will come to Broadway this fall after a rapturously received run in London.Earlier this month, the revival was nominated for 11 Olivier Awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Lloyd. The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 28 and then open on Oct. 20 at the St. James Theater.The musical, a dark thriller based on a 1950 film by Billy Wilder, features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; Glenn Close starred in both previous Broadway productions, in 1994 and 2017. (The stage role was originated by Patti LuPone in London; the film starred Gloria Swanson.)Lloyd, a British theatermaker, has carved out a distinctive niche by staging starkly spare productions of classics with a focus on psychological drama. The new production, which ended its London run in January, is stripped down in many ways — two songs have been cut, there is no grand staircase or turban and Scherzinger doesn’t even wear shoes.“It’s much more about the psychological and emotional journey as opposed to huge, elaborate sets,” Lloyd said in an interview. “It’s very much a kind of psychological chamber piece.”The show, set in midcentury Los Angeles, is about a forgotten star of the silent film era who latches onto an aspiring young screenwriter in the hopes of rebooting her career.Scherzinger, 45, has had a varied entertainment path — as a musician, an actress and a television talent show judge. The critic Matt Wolf, reviewing the London production for The New York Times, called this “a career-defining performance” for Scherzinger; the New York production will be her Broadway debut.“I guess I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Scherzinger, who studied theater in high school and college, said in an interview. “I can’t believe that it’s finally about to happen.”Scherzinger, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Kentucky, said she was eager to have another go at the role in the United States. She said she will set aside the script for a few months — she just spent three weeks visiting with her grandparents in Hawaii — before reimmersing herself in the character.“I’ll be back in America, my home, and I’m going to want to try and up my game even more,” she said. “There’s certain places I can make stronger choices, and I’m excited to play around with that to see where it can go — it’s great to be able to explore even more and go deeper.”Scherzinger, who said she has committed to nine months in the role, will be joined on Broadway by her three Olivier-nominated co-stars, Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett-Young and David Thaxton. More