Theater (Broadway)

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      Idina Menzel Played Elphaba and Elsa. Now She’s Back on Broadway.

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      Menzel, a fan favorite since “Rent,” is back on Broadway in “Redwood,” and this time she’s climbing conifers.Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryNo matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.Menzel had her breakout role in “Rent,” top left, and then won a Tony in “Wicked,” top right. Her other stage roles have included the Off Broadway play “Skintight,” bottom right, and the Broadway musical “If/Then,” bottom left.Photographs by 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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      How Kara Young, a Tony-Winning Actress, Spends Her Sundays

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      Kara Young spends a rare day off brunching with her family in Harlem and popping into beauty supply stores along 125th Street.Many actors have to leave their support systems behind when they set out to follow their Broadway dreams.But Kara Young, a Tony Award-winning actress who grew up on the west side of Harlem — and lives just three blocks from where she was born — has been able to share her success with the community that raised her.Ms. Young, whose parents immigrated from Belize, attended elementary school and high school in Spanish Harlem, the neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan known for its Puerto Rican culture. “It’s a super beautiful community,” she said.“But at the same time,” she added, “I recognize that I’ve been privileged to be able to stay in the community I grew up in. Gentrification is real.”It was at the 92nd Street Y, she said, that she first became hooked on theater. Her older brother, Klay, was taking a mime class as part of an after-school program — and a 5-year-old Ms. Young knew she wanted in.Soon she was performing with the other students around Manhattan, and “that set off my imagination,” she said.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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      Jimmy Fallon Makes His Broadway Debut in “All In”

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      The “Tonight Show” host is performing in the new comedy “All In,” which features a starry cast. “It’s a dream,” he said.Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night. “It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”Fallon, backstage with one of his co-stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda.Graham Dickie/The New York Times“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.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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      ‘Cult of Love’ Review: We Wish You a Wretched Christmas

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      A hilarious, harrowing holiday gift from Leslye Headland, who brings another unhappy family to Broadway. Zachary Quinto and Shailene Woodley star.Though figgy pudding is on the menu, Evie Dahl has a different Yuletide horror in mind. “Christmas is exactly the time to talk about the things we never talk about,” she tells her reluctant siblings.No, Evie, no!Alas, despite the happy presence of stars including Zachary Quinto, Shailene Woodley and Mare Winningham, the annual ritual dinner of the Dahls is doomed from the start of Leslye Headland’s “Cult of Love,” a rip-roaring home-for-the-holidays dramedy that opened on Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater. What begins as a cheery reunion in a New England farmhouse decked out like Santa’s workshop ends as a collective meltdown with carols.Because Evie, even if she’s bossy, is right. The four Dahl children, now in their late 20s through early 40s, have plenty of grudges that urgently need airing. But how? Ginny, their passive-aggressive control freak of a mother, will not admit into her home any problems, doubts or identities that violate her sense of upbeat Christian propriety. So what if her husband, Bill, is hovering on the edge of the abyss of Alzheimer’s? Ignore it, excuse it; it will go away.The same applies to the couple’s firstborn, Mark, a divinity student turned lawyer who has lost his faith in both callings. (When he says he’s no longer a Christian, Ginny responds, “That’s not true.”) Evie, their second, a chef, is a lesbian. (“Or not,” Ginny adds.) Johnny, their third, of no known profession, is a recovering drug addict. (“If you all say so,” Ginny allows.) And Diana, the youngest? She’s either a Christmas miracle, complete with baby on board, or just psychotic, espying the devil and speaking in tongues.If that setup doesn’t exactly sound funny, there’s a reason. Though “Cult of Love,” like many unhappy family reunion plays, draws big buckets of humor from the toxic brew of religion and repression, those buckets also draw blood.Headland knows just how to get there, suggesting deep familiarity with the territory. But she also has a gift for complication and construction, as was already evident in “Bachelorette,” her Bridezillas Gone Wild breakthrough play of 2010. (That play, like this one, was a Second Stage Theater production, and later became a movie.) Loading pattern on pattern — a holiday-season design don’t for most — is for her an opportunity to dizzy us down to hell.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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      Adam Lambert Is Finding the Fun, and the Fear, in ‘Cabaret’

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      Making his Broadway debut as the show’s Emcee, the singer is reveling in what he calls “a thinking piece of musical theater.”Over at the Kit Kat Club, the change in “Cabaret” is apparent in the show’s first moments. The Emcee, as played by the singer-songwriter Adam Lambert, is nothing like the Emcee as played by the film star Eddie Redmayne, who opened the current Broadway revival last spring after it transferred from London.Lambert, in his Broadway debut, turns out to have theatrical chops: He’s lending his Emcee not only vocal shapeliness but also puckish warmth. The alienation so central to Redmayne’s interpretation has been replaced by humanity.To Rebecca Frecknall, the show’s director, Lambert’s rock-star charisma was part of his appeal.“What I didn’t anticipate was how naughty and funny he was going to be and how much he was going to enjoy that relationship with the audience,” she said by phone. “There’s also just something brilliant about what he brings of his personal identity to the role — having a queer, Jewish artist step into that space with that material.”Lambert and ensemble members in the show’s latest revival at the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan.Julieta CervantesSet in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, “Cabaret” starts out light and decadent and grows steadily, stealthily darker, with gut-punch songs like “If You Could See Her,” a satire of antisemitism. There’s also the ballad “I Don’t Care Much” — recently released as a single — which Lambert describes as “a real emotional moment” of “struggle with indifference” for the Emcee.“They were so kind to raise the key to make it more of a torch song for me,” Lambert said.With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, “Cabaret” became a hit with its original Broadway production in 1966. Lambert, 42, has known the musical ever since he was a theater kid growing up in San Diego, when his voice teacher showed him the movie adaptation.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 ‘Our Town,’ the Characters Are Fictional. The Smells Are Real.

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      The curtain had just come down on a recent Wednesday matinee of the Broadway revival of “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play set in a small New Hampshire town. But cast and crew members were already in the basement of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, lining up to assemble BLTs.The fixings were arrayed on a table: hot bacon, romaine hearts and tomato slices, white toast, mayonnaise (traditional and vegan) and, for iconoclasts, honey mustard and avocado. There were noisy debates about whether crispy or chewy bacon makes a superior sandwich.There was consensus on one matter. “What’s better than bacon?” barked Julie Halston, one of the show’s 28 actors. “Nothing.”This was not a catered meal or a special occasion. It was a BLT Wednesday, and the bacon had been fried up in the wings, just steps away from the actors as they performed the play’s final stretch. To add a sense memory, two pounds of bacon are fried at every performance.The “Our Town” cast members (from left) Heather Ayers, Hagan Oliveras and Greg Wood assembled BLTs after a recent Wednesday matinee.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesKenny Leon, who directed the show, said he was inspired by David Cromer’s 2009 Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which featured the onstage cooking of bacon during the same third-act scene, when the ghost of Emily, a leading character, visits her childhood home at breakfast time.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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      9 Best Theater Moments of 2024

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      “The Outsiders,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ragtime” were among the productions with stage moments that stood out this year.Climate protesters disrupting a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” the outdoor walking scene in “Sunset Boulevard” and the giggles prompted by a character’s reaction to a hunky celebrity’s glutes in “Hold On to Me Darling”: The rewards of live theater were aplenty this year. Here, nine other stage moments that especially stood out, listed chronologically. NICOLE HERRINGTONExpert FloppingSutton Foster does some playful mugging in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSutton Foster’s performance as the unorthodox Princess Winnifred in “Once Upon a Mattress” was full of playful mugging. But it was in the show’s indelible scene that her best physical comedy shone through: sprawling atop a tower of mattresses stacked on a pea, flailing, flopping, hopping and then propped, rear-end up, like a fitful child protesting bedtime. It’s the kind of clowning that few can pull off with Foster’s ease and charm. MAYA PHILLIPSCoroner’s Cabaret ActAndrew Durand, left, and Thom Sesma in the musical “Dead Outlaw.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beguilingly strange new Off Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” retold the true tale of an Old West bank robber whose mummified corpse landed, in 1976, on the Los Angeles autopsy table of Thomas Noguchi, coroner to the stars. Noguchi is this dark comedy’s conscience — and in Thom Sesma’s performance, a fabulous showman, too. Grabbing the dangling microphone intended for postmortem notes, he delivered a slab-side nightclub number, boasting of celebrities he had cut up. Suddenly, surreally, death was a cabaret. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESVirtuosic ViolenceA balletic rumble in “The Outsiders” is stagecraft at its best. 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