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      Lifted by Lea Michele, ‘Funny Girl’ Recoups on Broadway

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      The show, which opened in the spring of 2022, has had a remarkable box office turnaround after Michele replaced its original star.The Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” starring Lea Michele is now officially a hit: It has recouped its capitalization costs, completing a remarkable box office turnaround of the sort rarely seen in the commercial theater.The show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman, Scott Landis and David Babani, announced on Monday that the production had made back the $16.5 million it cost to mount. That milestone not only gives the production bragging rights, but also means that “Funny Girl” can generate a profit during the last few weeks of its run, which ends on Sept. 3.Only a handful of Broadway productions have announced the recoupment of their capitalization costs since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as higher expenses and smaller audiences have made the always challenging economics of Broadway even more difficult.“Funny Girl,” though, is an especially unusual case: The production — the first revival of a show that had long seemed impossible to revive because of the long shadow of its original star, Barbra Streisand — opened at the August Wilson Theater in April 2022 with Beanie Feldstein in the title role. Critics were underwhelmed; the show won no Tony Awards (it was only nominated for one); and by summer its sales had drooped.The producers replaced Feldstein with Michele, generating an avalanche of press coverage (Michele was a star of “Glee,” and her character had starred in a fictional revival of “Funny Girl”) and rapturous reviews (in The Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty called Michele’s performance “one of the top five musical theater performances I’ve seen in my lifetime”). Ticket sales soared (as did ticket prices — the top price at the box office rose to $599 last Christmas), and over time the production made enough money to recover its development costs. Michele, whose reputation had been tarnished by allegations that she had behaved poorly to co-workers on “Glee,” worked tirelessly to transform the way people saw both her and “Funny Girl,” and became the toast of the town.Among the other Broadway shows that have opened since the pandemic shutdown and announced recoupment are “Six,” a pop musical about the wives of King Henry VIII; “MJ,” the Michael Jackson biomusical; and “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about sexual assault that starred Jodie Comer. Also, a handful of shows that opened before the pandemic have recouped since theaters reopened, including “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “Moulin Rouge!” Not all shows announce recoupment, and it is likely that a few other shows have quietly done so in recent months.A “Funny Girl” tour is scheduled to start next month in Providence, R.I., starring Katerina McCrimmon. More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

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      The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live.Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘The Notebook’ Musical to Land on Broadway in the Spring

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      The adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks romance novel, with music and lyrics by Ingrid Michaelson, had a well-reviewed run last year in Chicago.“The Notebook,” Nicholas Sparks’s best-selling 1996 novel about a star-crossed couple’s lifelong romance, which was adapted into a 2004 film starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, will soon arrive in New York in another form: a Broadway musical.The production had a well-reviewed world premiere at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater last fall. Steven Oxman of The Chicago Sun-Times wrote that it represented “a significant leap in artistic quality over its sources, which it respects, while also providing a clear, resonant and unique voice of its own.” He had particular praise for the “poetic” songs, by the indie singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, and the “impressive” onstage rainstorm.Previews are scheduled to begin Feb. 6, and the opening is set for March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, most recently home to “Life of Pi.”The story of the couple, Noah and Allie, is relayed in flashbacks that come to life as the older Noah reads from a notebook detailing their love story to the older Allie, who has dementia. (In a change from the book and the film, the story now begins in the 1960s instead of the 1940s.)In the Chicago production, Allie and Noah were each played by three different actors, who embodied them at various ages. The younger and older versions of the characters often share the stage, with the older couple watching as scenes from their past unfold. (Jordan Tyson and John Cardoza played the teenage Allie and Noah; Joy Woods and Ryan Vasquez depicted them in their late 20s; and Maryann Plunkett and John Beasley played the older versions.)Casting for Broadway has not yet been announced, but one casting change is certain: Beasley, who played the older incarnation of Noah, died in May at 79.The Chicago creative team will return for the Broadway run: Michael Greif (“Dear Evan Hansen,” “Rent”) and Schele Williams (“Aida,” “The Wiz”) will direct, with choreography by Katie Spelman (associate choreographer of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”). Bekah Brunstetter (“This Is Us”) wrote the book, with music and lyrics by Michaelson, a first-time theater composer. It will be produced by Kevin McCollum (“Six,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) and Kurt Deutsch, an executive at Warner Music Group.“The Notebook,” which was Sparks’s first published novel, consistently ranks among the most popular of his more than 20 books. Though the film adaptation — directed by Nick Cassavetes from a screenplay by Jeremy Leven and adapted by Jan Sardi from the novel — received mixed reviews, it became one of the highest-grossing romantic dramas of all time. More

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      ‘Spamalot’ Revival to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The new production, directed by Josh Rhodes, had a brief run at the Kennedy Center in Washington in May. Casting has not yet been announced.Make way for shrubbery: “Spamalot” is returning to Broadway.The show, a Monty Python-inspired spoof of Arthurian legend, first opened on Broadway in 2005, won the Tony Award for best musical, ran for four years, and has been widely staged since then.This new production, which had a 10-day run in May at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, will be the musical’s first Broadway revival.Previews are scheduled to begin Oct. 31, and the opening is set for Nov. 16 at the St. James Theater. The executive producer will be Jeffrey Finn, who is the Kennedy Center’s vice president of theater producing and programming.“I have been a crazy fan of ‘Spamalot’ since I saw the opening in 2005,” Finn said. “I feel as though in 2023, audiences are really looking for a fun escape and an opportunity to laugh as much as possible, and I believe this show delivers all of that.”The casting for Broadway has not yet been announced; at the Kennedy Center the cast included Alex Brightman, James Monroe Iglehart, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Rob McClure, Matthew Saldivar, Jimmy Smagula, Michael Urie and Nik Walker.The musical, based on the screenplay for “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” features a book and lyrics by Eric Idle, who was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. The music is by Idle and John Du Prez. Reviewing the original production, The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “resplendently silly” and a “fitful, eager celebration of inanity.”The revival is directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, who will be making his Broadway directing debut; he has worked on Broadway as a performer and choreographer. (Rhodes’s husband, Lee Wilkins, was a replacement swing in the original “Spamalot” company.)Rhodes described “Spamalot” as “a beautiful satire of Broadway, and of the class system,” and said he is excited to introduce Monty Python to a generation of theatergoers who may be unfamiliar with the group’s history and work. “In D.C., there was some sort of incredible energy from the audience that made us realize people were so hungry for this material,” he said. “There was a rowdiness that maybe wasn’t there before, and made it feel very special.”The “Spamalot” revival will be the first production developed by the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage program to transfer to Broadway; Finn created the program in 2018, and it has evolved from presenting semi-staged concert versions of existing musicals to presenting fully staged, but short-run, productions. The Kennedy Center had a previous history of nurturing work that transferred to Broadway; the last Kennedy Center-produced transfer was a 2014 revival of “Side Show.”A few years ago a movie version of the musical was in the works, but Paramount Pictures, which held the rights to produce it, is no longer pursuing the project, and Idle suggested on Twitter earlier this year that that the film adaptation had been killed. More

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      Pamela Blair, an Original ‘Chorus Line’ Cast Member, Dies at 73

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      As Val, one of the dancers in the hit Broadway musical, she sang a memorable song explaining how she got work by enhancing her body through cosmetic surgery.Pamela Blair, who as the sassy and profane dancer Val in the original production of “A Chorus Line” delivered a showstopping song about enhancing her breasts and butt with silicone to get work as an actress, died on Sunday at her home in Mesa, Ariz. She was 73.Her former husband, the director Don Scardino, said the cause was complications of colon surgery, including pneumonia and sepsis. She also had Clippers disease, a chronic inflammation of the central nervous system.Ms. Blair was one of the performers who were invited to the workshops where “A Chorus Line” was developed, and who told the creative team — led by Michael Bennett, who conceived, directed and choreographed the show — deeply personal stories, which were used as material to build its characters.“The core of Val came from the anarchic character that was Pam,” Mr. Scardino said in a phone interview.Ms. Blair’s brassy solo, “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (a reference to the grades Val got at an audition before undergoing cosmetic surgery), was a paean to the benefits of silicone, among them the national tours Val was hired for. (Ms. Blair herself said she didn’t have her breasts enhanced.)In a number written, like the rest of the show’s score, by Marvin Hamlisch (music) and Edward Kliban (lyrics), Val sings, in part: “It’s a gas, just a dash of silicone/Shake your new maracas and you’re fine.”And:Where the cupboard once was bareNow you knock and someone’s thereYou have got ‘em, hey, top to bottom, hey.In reviewing “A Chorus Line” in its pre-Broadway run at the Public Theater in the East Village, Allan Wallach of Newsday called Ms. Blair “a marvelously defiant blonde” and Douglas Watt of The Daily News of New York described her as “blonde and saucy.” After moving to Broadway in 1975, the show ran for 6,137 performances. Ms. Blair stayed with it for about a year before joining the national tour.In 1980, Ms. Blair recalled the experience of singing “Dance Ten; Looks Three.”“When I sang that song, I really was like that girl,” she told The Hartford Courant. “I was blond. I was dumb. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I thought, ‘Damn it, I’m an actress too.’”She returned to Broadway in 1978, first in the musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” in which she played a prostitute, and later that year in another musical, “King of Hearts,” in which she played the youngest inmate in a mental hospital.She made her final Broadway appearance in 1990 when she replaced Megan Gallagher as Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway, the only female character in Aaron Sorkin’s military drama “A Few Good Men.”“It was great at first, being the only girl with all those guys,” she told The Daily News in 1990. “But it didn’t last. Now they treat me like one of them. I get no respect. They go around backstage in their holey underwear — and even less!”Ms. Blair was also seen on soap operas like “Loving” and “Another World”; on prime-time series like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”; and in films like John Huston’s version of the musical “Annie” (1982) and Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995).Ms. Blair in 1983 on the soap opera “Loving,” one of her several television appearances.BC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesPamela Blair was born on Dec. 5, 1949, in Bennington, Vt. Her father, Edgar, worked at a company that made plastic molds. Her mother, Geraldine (Cummings) Blair, was a homemaker who worked part time in a local Christmas shop and as a library volunteer.When Ms. Blair was 16, she entered the National Ballet Academy New York. She met Mr. Bennett during a class there, which led to her being cast in her first Broadway role, in the 1968 musical “Promises, Promises,” which he choreographed.In 1972 and 1973, Ms. Blair played several roles in “Sugar,” a musical adaptation of the Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (unrelated to the current Broadway adaptation). She was the understudy for the title role, Sugar Kane, which Marilyn Monroe had played in the 1959 film, and replaced Elaine Joyce when she went on vacation.When asked how it felt to star in “Sugar,” she told the syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons: “I wasn’t that nervous. The butterflies hadn’t developed — they were still caterpillars.”In 1973, she played another small role in the musical “Seesaw,” for which Mr. Bennett was the director and one of two choreographers. A year later, she was cast as the seductive character known only as “Curley’s wife” in John Steinbeck’s stage adaptation of his novel “Of Mice and Men,” which starred James Earl Jones and Kevin Conway.“I can’t tell you how affected I was by acting with James Earl Jones,” she told Newsday. “To do a scene with him was so exciting. I would lose myself in him. I want that again.”She continued to work on TV and in films through 2009. By then, she had moved to Arizona and become a physical and massage therapist, although she return to the stage to play Miss Mona, who runs the Chicken Ranch brothel, in a 2006 Phoenix production of “Best Little Whorehouse.”Ms. Blair is survived by a sister, Cheryl Hard. Her marriages to Alfred Feola and Mr. Scardino ended in divorce.In 1980, Ms. Blair recalled the tension she felt while she was in “A Chorus Line,” mainly because of Mr. Bennett.“He made you live the show,” she told The Courant. “I mean, he’d make you think you were gonna be fired at any moment.”Near the end of her time in the show, she watched it from a seat in the audience.“I thought we were all so unhappy and yet we were giving people such joy,” she said. “I cried during the finale, and I remember thinking: This show was a miracle. Why couldn’t I have enjoyed it while it was happening?” More

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      Wrestling With His Past. And an Animatronic Shark.

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      In a rehearsal space near Times Square, Ian Shaw was talking about the strange and solemn task of portraying his own father in a Broadway play that he had co-written.“You spend most of your life running away from the father,” he explained. “Now here I was, running into the jaws of the thing.” He paused, realizing what he’d said. “No pun intended,” he added.Ian Shaw’s father is Robert Shaw, the celebrated British actor, author and Oscar-nominated star of “A Man For All Seasons,” who went on to play steely villains in “The Sting” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” before his death in 1978.Perhaps his best-known film role is Quint, the seasoned shark hunter of the 1975 blockbuster “Jaws,” whose hardened face hints at a lifetime of harrowing experiences and who delivers a memorable monologue about a shark attack he survived during World War II.Ian Shaw, when clean-shaven, could almost pass unnoticed; he has a gentle manner and friendly eyes. But on this day in early July, with his grown-out mustache and sideburns, Shaw, 53, was a dead ringer for his father in “Jaws.” This is a deliberate choice for his play, “The Shark Is Broken,” which opens Aug. 10 at the Golden Theater.From left, Shaw, Alex Brightman and Colin Donnell in rehearsal for “The Shark Is Broken.” All of the play’s action takes place inside a cramped recreation of the boat from the film.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesFrom left, Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss in the film “Jaws.”PhotofestThe one-act comedy-drama, written with Joseph Nixon, casts Shaw as his father in a fictional depiction of a particularly challenging day during the making of “Jaws” in 1974.Confined to a small fishing boat called the Orca while the crew contends with an uncooperative mechanical shark, the elder Shaw wrestles with his misgivings about the film, his history of alcoholism and the waning patience of his co-stars Richard Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) and Roy Scheider (Colin Donnell).Ian Shaw has worked steadily in theater, TV and film projects while striving not to trade on the renown of his illustrious father. Describing his own career, he said, “It’s modest, but to be at my age and have lived my whole life being an actor is a kind of a triumph.”Now, after several years of work on the play and a lifetime of reckoning with his father’s legacy, he said he was ready for a project that addressed his lineage head-on.“You still have to have the conversation about your validity in comparison to your father,” he said. “As I’ve gotten older and more mature, I feel less burdened about that. The final piece of the puzzle to getting rid of the baggage has, peculiarly, been to walk in his shoes.”Ian Shaw is one of Robert Shaw’s 10 children, and the youngest child he had with his second wife, the actress Mary Ure.Robert Shaw was a celebrated man of letters, a friend of Harold Pinter (whose play “Old Times” he starred in with Ure) and an accomplished playwright himself. He also made no secret of his heavy drinking, in an era when such habits were fundamental to the machismo of a generation of actors.Speaking to a reporter who asked him how he kept himself motivated on “Jaws” during long production delays, Robert Shaw responded with a smile: “Well, Scotch, vodka, gin, whatever,” he said.He was also openly resentful of the film roles that earned him a global fan base (and a lucrative living) but took him away from the stage.In an interview on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1971, Shaw said it was no better to be a busy actor than to be out of work: “It’s always paradoxically bad, either way. When you’re working it’s terrible because you’re usually doing rubbish, and when you’re not working it’s worse.”Ian Shaw poses for a portrait on the tugboat W.O. Decker, at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesDespite the rugged reputation that his father cultivated onscreen and off, Ian Shaw said of him, “Privately he was very affectionate and very funny and sort of naughty.”As he recalled, “One time, a quite dignified guest came to stay with us in Ireland, and he was greeted by the sight of Robert opening the door in his wife’s nightie. He thought that sort of thing was tremendously funny.”Even so, “there’s a lot of who he was on the screen,” Shaw said. “You wouldn’t want to confront him directly in an argument.”The actor described boisterous family dinners held at long tables where he would sometimes be clamoring for his father’s attention. “I would be dominating a little bit,” he said. “And he would come over, pick me up and just put me outside the room.”But the family was struck by tragedies. Ure died from an accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates in 1975, and Shaw died of a heart attack three years later.Ian Shaw, who is now married with two children of his own, was just 8 years old at the time. But, he said, “I felt I had time with him. Up to that point, I didn’t feel shortchanged.”Guy Masterson, the director of “The Shark Is Broken” and a longtime friend, said Shaw’s family history has presented professional challenges.When they would kick around ideas for possible collaborations, “Ian came to me and said he didn’t want to do anything with his dad, because he looked like him,” said Masterson, who has known the actor for some 25 years. “Every time he walked into an audition, people would expect Robert Shaw, and he was at a disadvantage.”At first, the younger Shaw balked at the notion of a biographical play about his father. “I felt like it would be an impossible thing to pull off,” he said.But over time, and with the encouragement from friends and colleagues like Masterson, he grew more comfortable. As the project germinated, Shaw also noticed the theater becoming more receptive to productions with cinematic origins, such as the plays “The 39 Steps” (adapted from the Hitchcock film) or any number of musicals based on contemporary hit movies.“The Shark Is Broken” dramatizes some of the real-life conflict between the seasoned Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss.Universal Pictures, via Getty ImagesFor research, Shaw read books like “The Jaws Log” by Carl Gottlieb, one of the film’s screenwriters, which chronicled the production’s numerous problems. He also looked at interviews his father gave in this era, trying to channel his unapologetic, forthright voice.“In a world where those types of interviews weren’t stage-managed, Robert would sometimes say things that were quite shocking,” Ian Shaw said. “It didn’t feel like he was trying to get his next job. He was just trying to speak from the heart.”He also reviewed a drinking diary that his father kept in the early 1970s, and which one of his sisters later shared with him. “It gave me a baseline about how he felt about his alcoholism,” Ian Shaw said. “He had tried to quit and couldn’t do it. He wanted to concentrate on his writing and it was interfering with that.”Before the play arrived on Broadway, “The Shark Is Broken” had a brief tryout in Brighton, England, in 2019, and ran later that summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It also played at the Ambassadors Theater in London’s West End during the 2021-22 season.In the Times Square studio, the play’s whole set fit into a small portion of the room: a cramped recreation of a bench and table inside the Orca. Shaw said he could imagine himself touring the play around in a van, “taking it to every village hall in England and making some money doing that.”The sense of claustrophobia is intended to amplify some of the well-documented conflict that took place behind the scenes of “Jaws,” like the on-set friction between Shaw and Dreyfuss: In the show, as in real life, the seasoned Shaw regards Dreyfuss as inexperienced and entitled, while Dreyfuss worries that Shaw’s drinking has gotten out of control.Within the boat’s confines, fictionalized conversations and monologues show the characters humorously squabbling and wondering if their cinematic efforts will amount to anything. They also explore the characters’ depths, as when Robert Shaw reflects on his own father, who was himself an alcoholic and died by suicide when Shaw was a child.Donnell, a star of television (“Chicago Med”) and musical theater (“Violet”), said he felt a strong obligation to help Shaw realize his goals for the play.“There’s almost a sense of duty to fulfill his vision, and to try to breathe as much life as we can into these roles,” he said.“You’re getting to witness somebody taking a deep dive on some difficult memories,” Donnell said. “I would imagine there is a bit of catharsis in not only having created the piece but getting to embody his father every night. I’m sure there is some dueling going on in his brain.”“It’s modest, but to be at my age and have lived my whole life being an actor is a kind of a triumph,” Shaw, a father of two, said of his career.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesBrightman, who recently played the title character in the Broadway musical “Beetlejuice,” said that Shaw’s involvement gave the play permission to be candid in its depiction of the “Jaws” stars.“Shows like this can be watered down and glorify a person for who they weren’t,” he said. “This play actually goes the other way and shows the three of them without a soft focus at all. I really think that we see three very flawed egomaniacs.”But the emotional draw, Brightman said, is the space it gives Shaw to connect with his father in real time.“I don’t know how many people would ever get an opportunity like this, to both honor his dad and show him with the capital-F flaws of a person,” he said.When he prepares to play his father in “The Shark Is Broken,” Shaw said his rituals include practicing his voice as he puts on his Quint costume. “I believe him to be quite fearless, so when I’m getting into character that’s one of the feelings that I absorb,” he said. “I’m very front-foot and energized, which is quite a liberating feeling.”But that is a sensation that only lasts about as long as the performance. When it’s over, Shaw said, “I do tend to quite quickly revert to who I am, which is probably a healthy thing. I’m not my father. I’m a different man.” More

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      Review: The Cocktail Wit Is Watered Down in a Rickety New ‘Cottage’

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      Jason Alexander directs a Broadway farce that aims for the high style of Noël Coward but falls on its face instead.Farce is the emergency that keeps emerging. That’s why it depends so much on doors: to admit fresh trouble and lock it in.Alas, the door in “The Cottage,” a mild farce by Sandy Rustin, works only partway. It lets people enter, yet doesn’t trap them; they can leave at any time — and never do. Even when a killer is coming, the characters merely dawdle.Dawdling is the play’s difficulty as well; everyone talks in pseudofancy circles. The stunts and capers likewise have no danger in them. And Jason Alexander’s trick-filled production, which opened on Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater, cannot hide that the stakes are too low.For Beau (Eric McCormack) and his sister-in-law, Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), those stakes are close to nonexistent. Theirs is, after all, a once-a-year tryst. And since each is already cheating merrily on a spouse, the initial problem — Sylvia wants a bigger commitment, but Beau is overbooked — does not seem very problematic.The interruptions that then arrive with the dulling punctuality of a track coach grasping a stopwatch do not much complicate matters. The first is Beau’s pragmatic wife, Marjorie (Lilli Cooper); the second is her foppish lover, Clarke (Alex Moffat). Because Clarke is Beau’s brother and Sylvia’s husband, the impact of his affair is nullified within minutes as the adulteries cancel each other out.While you try to absorb the overneat crisscross symmetry of that setup, notice the cottage itself, a classic Cotswolds hideaway fully furnished with opportune dangers: a twisty staircase, a library ladder, a trapdoor window seat and alarming taxidermy. (The amusing set is by Paul Tate dePoo III.) With croony jazz (sound by Justin Ellington) and lovely Deco frocks (by Sydney Maresca) we are clearly in the 1920s. In a marcelled blond bob (by Tommy Kurzman), Sylvia looks simply smashing.The cast mostly delivers elegant work, our critic writes, with Eric McCormack as Beau and Laura Bell Bundy as Sylvia consistently hitting their marks. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yes, that’s how they talk. If the play is not exactly new — it has been making the rounds since 2013 — it wishes it were even older. Specifically, it places itself in the “Private Lives” era of Noël Coward, when brittle Brits in smoking jackets dropped bon mots along with their ashes. (The dozen hidden-cigarette jokes provided by the prop supervisor, Matthew Frew, are the funniest part of the show.) Also suggested are the identity confusions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and the country-home sexcapades of “Nothing On,” nested within Michael Frayn’s glorious backstage farce “Noises Off.”But to suggest something is not to achieve it, and though “The Cottage” operates like a farce it only rarely achieves a farce’s liftoff. That’s when the pressure on the characters becomes so intense that it initiates a kind of verbal and physical fission.A few moments here hint at that possibility, as when Sylvia says, “So, you stuck a mustache on a mustache and changed your name to Richard?” — a line that is both perfectly logical in context and logic’s perfect opposite outside it. And Moffat’s extreme character choices, including postures that find him tied up in pretzels with his feet en pointe, nearly turn this “Saturday Night Live” clown’s performance into modern dance.But these are squibs; they zoom up, pop briefly and fizzle. Despite the cast’s mostly elegant work — Bundy and the self-mocking McCormack consistently hit their marks — the script and what feels like Alexander’s desperation to keep things aloft inevitably let them down. I am not, for instance, aware of a scene in Coward involving 30 seconds of earsplitting flatulence. Nor do the stinger chords that announce each new character’s entrance inspire confidence in the production’s genre discipline.“The Cottage” is therefore more of a spoof than a farce, and less a spoof of Coward or Wilde than of Feydeau, soap operas and middlebrow adultery comedies of the 1970s like “6 Rms Riv Vu” and “Same Time, Next Year.” More or less successfully, they all used humor to assuage the sexual anxieties of their times by showing how characters twisted into agonies of jealousy and desire might nevertheless come to a good end.Rustin wants to do something similar by introducing three additional amatory complications, including Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), about whom it would be unfair to say more. In different ways they lead Sylvia, who gradually becomes the center of the play, to reject the traditional assumptions that too often trap women in loveless marriages. Developing this feminist angle on Coward, Rustin name-checks the English suffragist leader Emmeline Pankhurst and draws on a surprise instance of intergenerational sisterhood to resolve the plot.Though the misogyny of man-made social institutions (and plays) is not exactly news, I was glad of this development in theory, and impressed with Bundy’s ability to carry it off at the just-right midpoint between silly and serious. But after all the temporizing and flatulating earlier, the last-minute arrival of a point seemed, well, beside the point. Had I laughed more than twice in the play’s previous 119 minutes, I might even have found it funny.The CottageThrough Oct. 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thecottageonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ on Broadway: Buckle Your (DeLorean) Seatbelt

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      If he could go back in time and do it again, Bob Gale probably wouldn’t change much about “Back to the Future.” This 1985 science-fiction comedy, about a teenager taking a whirlwind trip to the year 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean built by an eccentric inventor, became an endearing and endlessly quotable box-office smash.The film, which Gale wrote with its director, Robert Zemeckis, also turned into a cultural phenomenon. It bonded its stars, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, to their quirky characters and spawned two hit sequels that its creators envisioned as a self-contained saga.When the words “The End” appeared onscreen in “Back to the Future Part III,” Gale explained in a recent interview over lunch, it was a message to audiences. “We told the story we wanted to tell,” he said. “And we’re not going to milk you guys for a substandard sequel.”But like its emblematic DeLorean, the “Back to the Future” franchise has continued to reappear in the ensuing decades, in authorized books, games and theme park rides, in cast reunions and countless pop-cultural homages.The gang’s all here: Doc Brown, Marty McFly and, at the center of some of the show’s much-anticipated stunts, a replica of the DeLorean time machine.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesAnd now on Broadway: “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film. Using a time machine devised by Doc Brown, Marty McFly travels to 1955, meets his parents Lorraine and George as teenagers and must help them fall in love after he disrupts the events that led to their romantic coupling.On its yearslong path to Broadway, “Back to the Future” has faced some challenges that are common to musical adaptations and others unique to this property.While the show’s creators sought actors to play the roles indelibly associated with the stars of the film and decided which of the movie’s famous scenes merited musical numbers, they were also trying to figure out how the stage could accommodate the fundamental elements of “Back to the Future” — like, say, a plutonium-powered sports car that can traverse the space-time continuum.Now this “Back to the Future” arrives on Broadway with some steep expectations: After a tryout in Manchester, England, its production at the Adelphi Theater in London’s West End won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical. The show also carries a heavy price tag — it is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Throughout its development process, the people behind it — including several veterans of the “Back to the Future” series — tried to remain true to the spirit of the films and keep intact a story that has held up for nearly 40 years.Bob Gale, who wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis, said of the stage adaptation: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs Gale, now 72, put it: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”But, he added, “It cannot be a slavish adaptation of the movie. Because if that’s what people want to see, they should stay home and watch the movie. Let’s use the theater for what theater can do.”Gale’s inspiration for “Back to the Future” came in 1980 after seeing a photo of his father as a teenager in an old high-school yearbook, and he has become a passionate custodian of the franchise. That role dates back to at least 1989, the year a notorious “Back to the Future” Nintendo game was released. “One of the worst games ever,” he said. “I was so horrified by that I actually gave interviews to tell people, ‘Do not buy it.’”In 2005, after Zemeckis and his wife, Leslie, attended a performance of the Broadway musical “The Producers,” the “Back to the Future” creators began to contemplate a stage adaptation of their film. They hired Alan Silvestri, who wrote the scores of the “Back to the Future” movies, to create new songs with Glen Ballard, the pop songwriter who had worked with Silvestri on Zemeckis’s 2004 film version of “The Polar Express.”Gale said that as he and Zemeckis started to meet with Broadway producers, “They said all the right things. But their agenda really was, let’s get Zemeckis and Gale off this and give it to our own people to do it.”That was something Gale said he would never allow to happen. “These characters are like my family,” he said. “You don’t sell your kids into prostitution.”Instead they enlisted the British producer Colin Ingram, whom Ballard had worked with on the musical adaptation of the film “Ghost.” They hired the highly sought-after director Jamie Lloyd, and then parted ways with him in 2014. “The creative differences and the chemistry just didn’t work,” Ingram said. (Through a press representative, Lloyd confirmed that his departure was a mutual decision over creative differences but declined to comment further.)Behind the scenes: The show’s designer, Tim Hatley, was charged with evoking the spirit of the beloved film.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesUpon regrouping, the creators met with John Rando, who had directed “Urinetown” and “The Wedding Singer.” Rando said that after their initial meeting, “I grabbed Bob by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Bob, I love these characters. And I promise you I’m going to take really good care of them.’” Within a half-hour Rando said he got the call that he was hired.In conceiving “Back to the Future” for the stage, Gale said certain signature moments from the movie could never work: No scene of Doc Brown being attacked by disgruntled Libyan terrorists. (Now Marty speeds off in the DeLorean after Doc is overcome by radiation poisoning.) No set piece in which Marty races through the town square on a skateboard while the meathead bully Biff pursues him in a convertible. (Now the chase occurs on foot at school.) No pet dog named Einstein for Doc Brown. (Sorry, there’s just no dog.)A scene from the film where Biff is stopped before he can assault Lorraine remains in the show, though Gale acknowledged that this moment was “edgy.”“We want the audience to feel the jeopardy, and they do,” Gale said, adding that there were many elements from “Back to the Future” that might not withstand scrutiny if the film were being pitched today.Yet other familiar scenes presented opportunities for invention. Silvestri said he and Ballard were not given an exacting road map for where songs should go or what they should sound like. “We just kept trying to find our way,” Silvestri said. “It’s calling for a song here. It’s demanding music there.”The composers felt there had to be a rousing opening number to establish the show’s popped-collared, neon-colored version of the year 1985 and use the “Back to the Future” fanfare, and that became the song “It’s Only a Matter of Time.” There also had to be a love song for the smitten young Lorraine to serenade the enigmatic visitor she doesn’t realize is her own son, which yielded the doo-wop pastiche “Pretty Baby.”The curtain has lifted on “Back to the Future: The Musical,” but the creators of the franchise said they have no intention of pursuing more films.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThroughout the show’s development, there was a consensus that high-tech engineering and video projections would help recreate complicated scenes like Doc Brown’s perilous ascent of the Hill Valley clock tower during a fateful lightning storm.But Rando said he entrusted these elements to the show’s designer, Tim Hatley, and his production colleagues while the book, songs and performances were being nailed down.“They would keep asking me, ‘Hey, let’s talk about the clock tower sequence,’” Rando explained. “And I said, ‘Not until we get this musical right.’ And we would do readings and readings, and then finally there was a moment where we’re like, OK, now we can do it.”The actor Roger Bart, who has starred in musical comedies like “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein,” was an early candidate to play Doc Brown. He landed the role with the help of a video audition in which he wore a lampshade on his head (to mimic a mind-reading device Brown uses) and sung the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.”Though Christopher Lloyd is associated with the Doc Brown character, Bart said he felt it was not his job to copy that performance.“I’m 60,” Bart said. “There’s a certain point where I have to go, I know I’m entertaining. I’ve been in front of enough audiences to know that. If you really get bogged down with that thinking, you’re going to paralyze yourself.”The best way to play Doc Brown, Bart said, is to honor the spirit of Lloyd’s performances, “which is to create the idea that anything can happen at any moment, by being unusual in your choices.”Casey Likes joined the show as Marty for its Broadway run, after making his Broadway debut last year in “Almost Famous.” He said that his mother often compared him to Michael J. Fox when he was growing up. (The actor, who is 21, was born 16 years after “Back to the Future” was released in theaters.)At his audition, Likes said, “I wanted to convey something that was reminiscent of Michael but not an impression.”He added, “I went with the kind of vocal inflections that he had done, while trying to deliver the bright-eyed, somewhere between cool and dorky thing that he did. And I guess it worked.”As the curtain goes up on this “Back to the Future,” its creators are hopeful that it is a faithful representation of the franchise — one that they say they have no intention of continuing cinematically. As Gale put it, “We don’t need ‘Back to the Future 18.’”For its stars, their day-to-day hopes are more focused on steeling their courage when they step into the show’s mechanical DeLorean and trusting it will execute its stunts consistently.With a wry chuckle, Bart said he’d rather not have a day of work that ends with anyone “being sent to the hospital while the stage managers say, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I called that wrong,’ and you go, ‘Oh, it’s OK, I have insurance, it’s all good.’ I don’t ever want to have that conversation.” More