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      Review: In a Sorkinized ‘Camelot,’ That’s How Conditions Are. Alas.

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      A revival of the 1960 musical with the famously great score and infamously bad book gets a gorgeous makeover that makes no difference.About 30 minutes into its 90-minute first act, the Lincoln Center Theater revival of “Camelot” finally wakes up, as if from a pleasant drowse. That’s when Jordan Donica, as Lancelot, who has arrived in England to join King Arthur’s Round Table, tears into the boastful “C’est Moi” like a lion ripping huge bites of dramatic flesh with his teeth.And then, apparently sated, the show, which opened Thursday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, goes back to sleep for another spell, as if this were “Brigadoon.”If only it were! But “Camelot,” the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical based on T.H. White’s Arthurian tales, has what you might call a post-operetta problem. Neither content to be agreeable piffle nor ready to be Sondheimesque psychodrama, it aims for a middle path, welding Arthur’s romantic life with a free-spirited queen to his rethinking of governance with a recalcitrant gentry. Both fail, as does the show, in a way that “Brigadoon,” the team’s 1947 hit, aiming lower, does not.In “Camelot,” the clever, lightweight style of Lerner’s dialogue, and the show-off triple rhymes of his lyrics, clash with his ambition. They make Loewe’s profoundly polished music, in songs like “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight?” and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood,” which open the show, come off as charming tea party tunes. Only in flashes does the “serious” part recover, but by then it’s too late. After Lancelot finishes “C’est Moi,” the story goes back to bed for 40 minutes, at last reawakening to the clangs of a thrilling sword fight.Burnap, left, fighting Jordan Donica as Lancelot. Aaron Sorkin could not solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere to the boyish Arthur on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s not a problem a rewrite could readily solve, or at any rate it’s not one that Aaron Sorkin did. His revisions for the director Bartlett Sher’s spare-no-expense production — visually and sonically gorgeous — do make some improvements. The silly supernatural subplots have been excised (along with a beautiful song, “Follow Me”) and Guenevere, Arthur’s involuntary queen, has been strengthened with snappy backtalk. She’s now a kind of medieval Katharine Hepburn.But Sorkin cannot solve the riddle of the love triangle connecting Guenevere (Phillipa Soo) to the boyish Arthur (Andrew Burnap) on one side and the hunky Lancelot on the other. The riddle is: When is a triangle a flat line? Because only by rigging up questions of fidelity that make everyone look silly does Lerner’s plot engine turn over at all. Is Arthur still in love with the sorceress Morgan Le Fey, a woman he hasn’t seen since he was 15? Does Guenevere desire Lancelot? Who doesn’t? And why, in any case, should we care?Sorkin tries to shore up Lerner’s droopy stories by rooting the personal conflict in the political and social experiments of the time — or of some time, anyway. The new book, which is set on “the eve of the Enlightenment,” even though that was about a millennium post-Arthur, is not fussy about period. Indeed, it winks at its muddled chronology: “The Middle Ages won’t end by itself,” Arthur says, as if he knew he were middling.The historical backfill is present in White’s and Lerner’s versions, too: The idea of changing a culture of violence to one of justice is at the heart of the story. (It’s the reason Arthur convenes his knights.) The problem is that the musical doesn’t musicalize that, which is why after an hour of brittleness you desperately need the sword fight. (The fight director, still full of surprises, is the great B.H. Barry.) Even the title number, which Sorkin has Guenevere call “that stupid song about the weather,” praises the Camelot revolution in purely sybaritic terms. “The rain may never fall till after sundown” sounds like a boast on Airbnb.Lacking songs to support them, Sorkin’s historical enhancements fall flat. Particularly unconvincing is his sidebar on the evolution of magic into science, with Merlyn (Dakin Matthews, excellent) now a sage, not a wizard, and Morgan (Marilee Talkington) some kind of chemist. (Let’s not even get into Mordred, the mortifying Plot Necessity played by Taylor Trensch.) Forced to maintain the Lerner framework, he can neither justify the romantic story on modern terms nor distract from it in ways that make musical sense.The romance at least gives the principals something to do besides spouting ideas, and gives the audience, especially with Lancelot, something to hear. (After “C’est Moi,” he sings the almost-too-rich “If Ever I Would Leave You” and “I Loved You Once in Silence.”) And though Guenevere mostly gets the tea party numbers, delivered creamily, and Arthur (perhaps in deference to the vocal talents of the role’s originator, Richard Burton) gets almost nothing, both are appealing and play the West Wing of the Castle banter beautifully.Not that there’s a castle. In this, his fifth Golden Age musical revival, and fourth for Lincoln Center Theater, Sher has changed his visual approach. Not so much the costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, which are just as stunning as ever; if you wear velvet gowns or quilted tabards, you’ll want to collect them all. But instead of scenic coups like the orchestra reveal in “South Pacific” and the 52-foot ship in “The King and I,” the set designer Michael Yeargan, the lighting designer Lap Chi Chu and the projection designers at 59 Productions have pared everything to a few basic elements: arches, screens, snow, branches, shadows and “Seventh Seal” silhouettes.From left, Danny Wolohan, Anthony Michael Lopez, Soo and Fergie Philippe. The costumes, by Jennifer Moeller, are just as stunning as ever.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith so little furniture onstage, Sher, incapable of not making pretty pictures, keeps everyone moving busily; if the story refuses to make a triangle, he’ll compensate with dozens in his blocking. However fascinating that is to watch, the result feels abstract and analytical, of a piece with Byron Easley’s dainty choreography and, not to harp on them, Lerner’s lyrics. For “My Fair Lady” Lerner was able to find words that expressed character and period; in “Camelot” (with no underlying Shaw play to assist) he finds words that mostly express himself, on the bubble of the 1960s, sophisticated and dry.That is not, however, what you hear coming from the pit, where, under Kimberly Grigsby’s baton, 30 musicians play the original orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang. Their superb characterization of the story in pure sound makes you feel what the show onstage doesn’t.It may also make you feel a bit sad. What’s to be done with such beautiful work, wedded to such intractable problems? How many more Golden Age musicals can Sher and Lincoln Center Theater lavish their love on before the project turns into Encores! with elephantiasis? Is Kelli O’Hara in “Flahooley” next?Well, to be honest, I’d be there for that. But “Camelot” is a show promoted above its station because of its music and Kennedy-era associations. Neither, it seems, is sufficient today. When Arthur reports, in “How to Handle a Woman,” that the answer is simply to “love her, love her, love her,” you can’t help thinking Lerner is not in his wheelhouse. (He married eight times.) Love, with both people and musicals, isn’t enough when the differences are irreconcilable.CamelotAt the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      Review: Skewering Masculinity, in a Hot and Sizzling ‘Fat Ham’

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      A modern gloss on “Hamlet” set at a backyard barbecue remakes the tragedy as a comedy, and as a challenge for today.What might life be like if we chose pleasure over harm?So a young man wonders near the end of “Fat Ham,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by James Ijames that opened on Broadway on Wednesday, at the American Airlines Theater. Keep in mind that the young man, Tio, is stoned to the gills when he dreams this philosophy.Still, in his world as in our own, the question of harm, and self-harm, is a serious one. You might even say it’s a classic, having found its most famous expression four centuries ago in “Hamlet,” without benefit (as far as we know) of weed.If Tio is a gloss on that play’s Horatio — a loyal, hearty friend to the main character — he’s also a transformation of the template for today: laid-back and open to anything. In his dream, he says, he’s been pleasured by a gingerbread man, even though he usually prefers the “gingerbread ladies.”In the same way, “Fat Ham” is a gloss on “Hamlet” — and the best kind of challenge to it, asking the same questions but coming up with different answers. That it is a raucous domestic comedy instead of a palace blood bath (and in Saheem Ali’s production, a nonstop pleasure in itself) means that despite the enduring belligerence of mankind, and especially of men, it sees a way out.That way out is softness. The Hamlet figure, Juicy (Marcel Spears), is a “thicc” Black mama’s boy ambivalently mourning the murder of his father and suffering from what Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) diagnoses as inherited trauma. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that?” he asks. “Slavery.”But Juicy’s melancholy has a more immediate source. Within a week of the death of his father, called Pap, his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), has remarried — and to no less a bully than Pap’s brother, Rev. On the day of the wedding, Pap’s ghost arrives, under a gingham tablecloth, to pin the crime on Rev and spur Juicy to revenge. (Both Pap and Rev are played by Billy Eugene Jones.) Yet whether considering murder or suicide, Juicy, like Hamlet, waffles.You don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKilling is not news to this crowd: Pap was in jail for shanking a cook at the family’s barbecue restaurant. And Rev struts his dominance during a backyard party at which the play’s action takes place by stoking the smoker with fresh hunks of pig. He doesn’t treat his nephew, now stepson, much better. “You pansy,” he calls Juicy, who thinks of himself as an empath. “Girly ass puddle of spit.” He then makes Tedra explain how they’ve spent his online-college tuition on a bathroom makeover.“Fat Ham” is certainly clever in its parallels with “Hamlet”: The barbecue is a neat translation of the “funeral baked meats” with which Gertrude and her new husband “did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” The melancholy prince’s ploy to prove Rev’s guilt is no longer a play wherein to “catch the conscience of the king” but a game of charades. Sententious Polonius is now a church lady, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas); her children are Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) instead of Ophelia and Laertes.But you don’t need to make any of those “Hamlet” connections to enjoy “Fat Ham,” because the parallels are not as telling as the divergences. It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly and movingly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world.In that sense, it’s telling that Larry is a Marine, living at attention, possibly suffering from post-traumatic stress. His dialogue is mostly obedient monosyllables until it flowers with feeling when talking to Juicy. Though their scenes of aching tenderness do lead to a physical confrontation — “Fat Ham” is based on a tragedy, after all — it is no fatal sword fight; they both discover that confrontation can be a means of breaking open, not just breaking.And so it goes with Juicy and Tedra, Opal and Rabby, Tio and the gingerbread man. All must learn to accept love as offered, not as imagined, and to reject love, like Rev’s, that is not really love.That “Fat Ham” achieves its happy, even joyful, ending honestly, without denying the weight of forces that make “Hamlet” feel just as honest, is a sign of how capacious and original the writing is, growing the skin of its own necessity instead of merely burrowing into Shakespeare’s. It’s also a sign of how beautifully the cast brings the writing to life.It is in the relationship between Larry and Juicy that Ijames most directly addresses the cycles of male violence, seeing in the damage done to individuals the disasters of the world, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEveryone is excellent, and Thomas’s loud-lady-in-the-pew-behind-you routine is flat-out hilarious. But Spears, with his minute calibrations of feyness and fierceness, holds the whole thing together. In his scenes with Crawford, especially one in which Tedra pleads with Juicy to hold it together — “you don’t get to go crazy” — he lets us see how a character creates and re-creates himself in real time.Despite its wit and speed, Ali’s beautifully contoured staging leaves plenty of room for such quiet, profound moments. It’s a wider-spectrum account and bigger, too, than the film version produced by the Wilma Theater in 2021 and the stage premiere at the Public Theater last year.By bigger I don’t just mean Maruti Evans’s Broadway-size set, with its Broadway-size surprises, or the — really, must we? — confetti cannon at the end. (At least what it shoots is the opposite of artillery.) The performances, too, are bigger, their frank acknowledgment of the audience more sustained and more integral.For we are also part of this story. Not just when Juicy soliloquizes across the proscenium or Tedra casts us some side-eye. It takes more than seven fictional characters to choose pleasure over harm in a way that’s meaningful beyond a play — though it helps that no one in “Fat Ham” dies an unnatural death. (In “Hamlet,” almost everyone does.) If we’re to rethink masculinity after centuries of experiencing it as a call to arms, we need to witness what that might look like.For me, seeing “Fat Ham,” even multiple times, thus remains a revelation and a balm. It does one of the most important things we ask of theater: to rehearse, as many times as necessary, better ways to be — instead of choosing not to.Fat HamThrough Aug. 6 at the American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; fathambroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Ariana DeBose to Return as Tony Awards Host This Year

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      The annual ceremony, honoring Broadway plays and musicals, is to take place June 11 at the United Palace in Washington Heights.Ariana DeBose, whose exuberant embrace of song and dance enlivened last year’s Tony Awards, will return to host the annual ceremony this spring.DeBose, who in 2022 won an Academy Award for her performance in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake, appeared in six Broadway shows between 2012 and 2018, and was nominated for a Tony Award as one of three actresses playing Donna Summer in the jukebox musical “Summer.” She is currently featured in “Schmigadoon!,” a streaming musical comedy series on Apple TV+, and she has several upcoming films.Earlier this year, she sang the opening number at the BAFTA Awards, and a rapped section paying tribute to female movie stars was mocked and memed for a hot second. DeBose, who is 32, seems to have taken it in stride — in London earlier this month, she turned the kerfuffle into merch that raised money for charity, and last weekend she performed at Lincoln Center.This year’s awards ceremony will for the first time take place at the United Palace, a large theater in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The ceremony, which is presented by the Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, honors plays and musicals staged on Broadway; it is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11, and to be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.This season’s Tony nominees are to be announced on May 2. More

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      In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Finds Her Light

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      The one-woman show, coming to Broadway, is the “Killing Eve” star’s first stage role. She dared herself to do it.Until last year, the actress Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. Comer, 30, a native of Liverpool, England, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theater directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.“It kind of felt unattainable,” she said.But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for the Olivier Award-winning “Prima Facie” — an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault — shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. Opening on April 23, the play, which Comer first performed in London last year, runs 100 minutes. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.Comer put it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she said.This was on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, had arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: The reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy “Free Guy,” the action drama “The Last Duel,” the crusading BBC film “Help” and, most significantly, the queer assassin fever dream “Killing Eve” — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.A theatrical debut and an endurance test: Comer is alone onstage for the full 100-minute run of “Prima Facie.”Helen Murray“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed “Free Guy,” told me. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”Unlike many beautiful actresses, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she said. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”At the cafe, the morning sun showed her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she began to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashed.“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on “Killing Eve,” told me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”And yet, the role that Comer plays in “Prima Facie” is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (“The Jungle”), also Australian, “Prima Facie” centers on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault is never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.“Prima Facie” debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actress Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actresses. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer on “Killing Eve,” as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Emmy Award-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer said. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin said. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”Comer as the assassin Villanelle with Sandra Oh in BBC’s “Killing Eve.” “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door,” said Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with Comer on the show.BBC AmericaComer discovered theater in her teens. “I got into it because I enjoyed it. It made me happy. I don’t think that’s ever changed,” she said. A teacher put her forward for a radio drama, which led to an agent and to occasional television appearances. After graduation, she worked at a supermarket checkout and at a bar to make ends meet. Her idea of luxury was being able to make a living from acting only. Her first major break came seven years ago, when she was cast as the lead in “Thirteen,” a BBC drama about a woman who escapes from long captivity. Even then, Comer couldn’t land a stage role.But the recognition that “Killing Eve” brought changed all that. For Martin and for James Bierman, lead producer on “Prima Facie,” her lack of theater experience was never a problem. They offered her the resources — voice lessons, movement sessions — and the rehearsal time that she would need.Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.“There were elements of it that felt like theater: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she said.The challenge in translating her instincts for TV acting, Comer found, was to extend them outward so that they reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTelevision and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments. Especially if the projects are shot on location. Theater is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theater really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she said with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theater animal,” she said of Comer on a recent video call. “She’s the character. She’s there.”But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained up until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she said. “I didn’t really come up for air.”She recalled that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer said. “It spread around the theater. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”Stephen Graham, an actor who worked with a teenage Comer on “Good Cop” and then again on “Help,” saw “Prima Facie” in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance,” he said.I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theater Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she said.Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading lady facade, she understands herself as a character actress, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a Village cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognize myself,” she said.“Prima Facie” began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognize themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photos of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she said. More

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      The Broadway Star Phillipa Soo Sings Her Favorite Pop Song

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      In a new revival of “Camelot,” updated by Aaron Sorkin, the actress finds humanity in the legend of King Arthur and Guenevere.Phillipa Soo enjoys fantasy stories: “Lord of the Rings,” “House of the Dragon,” anything magical with kings and queens involved. That’s partly why, she says, she was drawn to this season’s Broadway revival of “Camelot,” based on the Arthurian legend and opening April 13 at Lincoln Center Theater. Soo, 32, stars opposite Andrew Burnap as Guenevere, King Arthur’s wife and ally — a role that’s long been associated with Julie Andrews, who originated the role onstage in 1960.But her interest went beyond the show’s mystical underpinnings. “Most poignant to me was this idea of Camelot [as] something that we are, as a society, striving toward — this ideal place where we can have democracy and justice and freedom,” she says. “We are grappling with this question of: What is human nature? Are humans fundamentally good? Are we fundamentally bad? Why are we here?”Those themes are central to the writer Aaron Sorkin’s new book for the musical, which is woven around the classic songs from Lerner and Loewe’s sweeping score. (Sorkin has stripped away the supernatural elements of the original — no more nymphs or sorcerers — to ground the play in a medieval-era reality.) Soo’s goal, then, is to make Guenevere “a real person,” someone driven above all by a desire to be loved. She sees Andrews’s iconic performance, with her gentle soprano that cemented the cast album as a musical-theater essential, not as a dare but an invitation: “She brought a lot of herself and her charm to her roles,” Soo says. “That was an inspiration for me to do the same.”Revivals are fresh territory for Soo, who began her professional career originating characters in new works: Natasha in “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” Off Broadway in 2013; the namesake heroine in the 2017 Broadway adaptation of “Amélie”; and, most famously, Eliza in “Hamilton,” which debuted at New York’s Public Theater in 2015. But this past year, she joined the “Into the Woods” Broadway revival as Cinderella, and then did a brief run as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.Yet the new “Camelot,” directed by Bartlett Sher from a rapidly paced Sorkin-esque script, feels less like a remake than a hybrid of a golden-age classic and a contemporary play. (Sorkin also wrote “A Few Good Men,” which premiered on Broadway in 1989, and more recently adapted “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage in 2018.) “The book has a tempo in itself: Those deep debates and discussions that Guenevere and Arthur get to have with each other [are understood] in a different way because they’re not through song,” Soo says. “It feels more immediate … I have to focus in a way that I haven’t before.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Soo to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs: Regina Spektor’s “Samson” (2002). More

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      Sean Hayes Returns to the Piano in Broadway’s ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      To Become Oscar Levant, Sean Hayes Revisited His First Role

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa OpaleskyAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      Alex Edelman, ‘Just for Us’ Comedian, Will Bring Show to Broadway

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      The solo performance will open on June 26 at the Hudson Theater.Alex Edelman, a comedian who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and turned the antisemitism of his online critics into material for his monologues, will bring his much-admired memoiristic show, “Just for Us,” to Broadway this summer.For the past five years, Edelman, 34, has been developing “Just for Us” and, with breaks forced by the pandemic, has performed it in Australia, England, Scotland and Canada, as well as in New York, Washington and, beginning next week, Boston, near where he grew up. The show’s sold-out Off Broadway runs, which started at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2021 and moved last year to the SoHo Playhouse and then the Greenwich House Theater, won a special citation this year at the Obie Awards.The one-man show covers a lot of thematic territory, but it is built around Edelman’s seemingly unlikely (and perhaps unwise) decision to drop in on a meeting of white nationalists gathered in Queens.“The show is about the costs of sublimating parts of ourselves to fit in,” Edelman said in an interview.The Broadway run, scheduled to last for eight weeks, will begin performances on June 22 and open on June 26 at Hudson Theater. The lead producer, Jenny Gersten, is the interim artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Massachusetts, which presented Edelman’s show last summer in the Berkshires. This will be Gersten’s first Broadway outing as a lead producer; she will produce it along with Rachel Sussman (“Suffs”) and Seaview, the theater company established by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. (Seaview is also producing this season’s “Parade” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”)Edelman said he had repeatedly reworked the show, primarily at the advice of the comedian Mike Birbiglia, who has had two of his one-man shows on Broadway; Birbiglia produced the Off Broadway runs of Edelman’s show and will help produce the Broadway run as well. The show is directed by Adam Brace, who is an associate director at Soho Theater in London.Edelman splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, where he has done some screenwriting — he worked on an adaptation of the novel “My Name Is Asher Lev” that has stalled — and said he continues to tweak “Just for Us.” A variety of prominent comedians have come to see the show, including Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal, and each time, Edelman has made a point of asking for advice.“Part of the reason you can live with a show for a long time is if you’re meticulous, little changes feel like big changes — one word can change a whole joke,” Edelman said.He is obviously jubilant about the Broadway transfer — he visited the Hudson, where Jessica Chastain and Arian Moayed, who are now starring there in a revival of “A Doll’s House,” showed him around.“I never thought I’d get to do a show on Broadway, and I genuinely can’t believe that I have this chance,” he said. “It feels a bit like fantasy camp.” More