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      Review: ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Starring Sarah Snook and 3 Million Pixels

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      The “Succession” actress plays all 26 roles in this Oscar Wilde classic reimagined as a video spectacle. If only there were less screen time and more IRL contact.An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot. Three million pixels, in case you’re counting. Sixteen million colors. Two cellphones, at least on a recent glitchy night when the first malfunctioned. And one Sarah Snook.Or rather a multitude of Snooks.These are among the many wonders you’ll find onstage at the Music Box Theater, where a technologically spectacular adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with Snook playing 26 roles, opened on Thursday.What you won’t find is “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”The 1890 magazine story by Oscar Wilde, which he novelized in 1891, has proved irresistible to adapters, thanks to its nifty plot device: a portrait that ages instead of the sitter. The more the gorgeous Dorian Gray falls under the decadent influence of Lord Henry Wotton, the uglier the painting by Basil Hallward becomes.To get to that plot, though, adapters have to adapt out a lot because what Wilde wrote is less the psychological thriller they imagine than a perfumed treatise on aesthetic philosophy. Another thing usually sacrificed is the homosexual undercurrent, which, even after expurgation by the story’s first editors, was deep enough to drown in. Convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labor, and died, just 46, in 1900. “Dorian Gray” was part of the evidence.Like the 1945 M-G-M movie, the current adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, downplays the treatise aspects. The queerness, though, is frank if complicated, in part because Snook, an Emmy-winning star of “Succession,” is still a woman while playing a man. Or not even a man. Her cherubic, shiny-cheeked Dorian is less the godlike 20-year-old of the novel than a barely pubescent boy.Snook provides specificity for each character: Her Wotton has a wonderful slouchy physicality, her Hallward nervous and twitchy, her Dorian (top of image) beamish.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 ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings a Beloved Song to Life on Broadway

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      One night in 1984, Compay Segundo, the Cuban singer and guitarist, heard in his dreams what would become his signature song.“I woke up hearing those four sensitive notes,” Segundo recalled later on. “I gave them a lyric inspired by a children’s tale from my childhood, ‘Juanica y Chan Chan.’”A hypnotic account of peasant life in Cuba, “Chan Chan” has a peculiar power, with four circular, mesmerizing opening chords that make it instantly recognizable. It gained a regional following when it was cut by the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa. But a recording of the song, in 1996, by a group of celebrated Cuban musicians who had been assembled for an album to be called “Buena Vista Social Club,” would become a phenomenon.Now more than 25 years after its release, the best-selling world music album of all time has made it to Broadway in a new musical also titled “Buena Vista Social Club.” “Chan Chan” is among eight of the album’s 10 songs featured in the show and, perhaps not surprising for such a dramatic and mysterious track, it plays a crucial role in a pivotal moment in the story.During the “Chan Chan” number, the young singer Omara (Isa Antonetti) is deciding whether to leave Cuba with her sister or remain in Havana and perform the traditional music that has a hold on her heart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the album of mostly older Cuban standards became a global sensation upon its release in 1997, Segundo’s song — about sifting sand by the sea and clearing a straw path along a journey to Cuban towns — became a standout all its own. “Chan Chan” was never released as a single, but the opening track has been streamed more than 250 million times on Spotify, almost three times more than anything else on the album. (That number is roughly the same as Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Hanson’s “MMMBop,” both No. 1 hits in 1997.) More

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      How ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Revealed a Family’s World War II Secrets

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      Descendants of characters in “Operation Mincemeat,” a hit British musical now in New York, have gotten more out of seeing it than a few catchy melodies.When William Leggatt was at work as a renewal energy developer a couple of summers ago, he received a bizarre email from a superfan of “Operation Mincemeat,” a British musical about a wacky World War II intelligence plot.As the show outlines, the operation involved British spies dressing a corpse as a military officer, stuffing a briefcase with fake letters implying an imminent invasion of Sardinia, and then dumping the corpse and documents at sea to be discovered by the Nazis.So the email contained a simple question: Was William a distant relative of Hester Leggatt, a prim secretary who appears in the musical and played a key role in the plot?The show’s superfans, who meet in an online forum and are known as Mincefluencers, believed that Hester was involved in writing fake love letters that officials planted on the body to help make the plot believable — and that she deserved to be publicly honored. But William Leggatt had no idea what the email was talking about.The cast members, from left, Claire-Marie Hall, Zoë Roberts, David Cumming, Natasha Hodgson and Jak Malone, during the curtain call last week at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt was only when he started talking to family members who were closer to the great-aunt and, later, reading a document sent by the Mincefluencers, that he realized they were right. In the end, he recalled in a recent interview, the musical “opened a whole side to my family I’d never known.”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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      George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Sets Broadway Box Office Record

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      “Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $3.3 million last week, breaking a record that was set earlier this month by Denzel Washington’s “Othello.”Broadway box office records are falling like dominoes this season as a handful of starry plays entice fans to pay sky-high ticket prices to see their favorite movie stars up close and emoting.“Good Night, and Good Luck,” a new play starring George Clooney, grossed $3.3 million last week, the most money a nonmusical play has ever made during a single week on Broadway, according to data released Tuesday by the Broadway League. And it did so with just a seven-performance week: It is still in previews, and not yet doing Broadway’s typical eight.It shattered the previous record, which was set just two weeks earlier by a new production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $2.8 million in the week that ended March 9. (Before that, the record had been held by “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which grossed $2.7 million during a holiday week in late 2023.)“Othello” still has higher ticket prices — its top seats were being sold on its website for $921, compared to $799 for “Good Night, and Good Luck” — but “Good Night, and Good Luck” is playing in a larger theater, so it is taking in more money overall.The average ticket price for “Othello” was $303.15 last week — down from previous weeks because of free seats for journalists attending press performances and guests attending opening night. The average price for “Good Night, and Good Luck” was $302.07. But “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is adapted from the 2005 movie about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, is playing in the 1,545-seat Winter Garden Theater, while “Othello” is in the 1,043-seat Ethel Barrymore.Broadway’s box office has traditionally been dominated by musicals, which tend to be more popular, to play longer, and to run in larger theaters than plays. The record for the most money made by a Broadway musical was set late last year, when “Wicked” grossed $5 million during a Christmas week when there were nine performances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Price of a Show

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      Tickets for the hottest Broadway plays are now out of reach for many. There’s a starry production of “Othello” opening on Broadway tonight. And if you’re among the many people who really, really want to see Denzel Washington as a jealous general, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a scheming Iago, it’s going to cost you: Most of the center orchestra seats, as well as a few rows in the mezzanine, are being sold for $921 apiece.The high prices for this Shakespeare classic are setting records. During its second week of previews, “Othello” grossed more at the box office than any other nonmusical play had ever grossed on Broadway.Tickets for the hottest Broadway shows are now out of reach for many. And the same is true for other sought-after live events, such as pop concerts (which now cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per ticket) and big sports games. (A few weeks before the Super Bowl, the cheapest available tickets were reselling for more than the average monthly mortgage payment.)In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how Broadway seats became so eye-poppingly pricey.Trying to break evenProducing Broadway shows has become more expensive since the pandemic, and a vast majority of them lose money. So producers have been staging more short runs of plays with stars in lead roles — the stars attract ticket buyers, and the short runs allow those stars to more quickly return to filmmaking, which pays better than Broadway. Limited runs also seem to incentivize potential ticket buyers, because people find the now-or-never aspect motivating.There is, of course, a tension between profitability and accessibility. These prices are preventing some potential theatergoers from seeing high-profile productions of important work.Investors who spend money to bring shows to Broadway embrace high ticket prices because they want at least a shot at recouping their expenses. But many theater lovers, as they reminded me in a rollicking comments thread on the story I wrote about this subject last week, find these prices upsetting, because they want to see the shows they want to see at price points they consider reasonable.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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      Phylicia Rashad Knows Her Purpose

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      The first time Phylicia Rashad realized what she wanted to do with her life, she was making her way to the exit of a bustling auditorium. This was November 1959, in Houston, after a student music festival at the 9,000-seat Sam Houston Coliseum.Rashad, who was then Phylicia Allen, had been the festival’s mistress of ceremonies. Only 11 years old, she had won the role in a contest, beating out students from other Black elementary schools in her district, which remained defiantly segregated five years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Rashad spent six weeks preparing for the concert — practicing introductions for the performers and memorizing a libretto for an orchestra. On the night of the show, she wore a brand-new yellow pinafore dress over a white shirt, white shoes, white socks with a ruffled trim and a flower tiara on top of freshly done curls.“When I walked out to the microphone to speak, I was suddenly in the spotlight for the first time,” she recalled in a recent interview. “The light was so bright, I couldn’t see anybody in the audience. So, every time I went up, I just talked to the light.”As she was leaving the venue, Rashad overheard the mothers of some students talking among themselves.“There she is,” she recalled hearing one say, gesturing toward her. “There’s that little girl who spoke so beautifully. Isn’t she beautiful?”Rashad had never thought of herself as beautiful. Among her family, she was sometimes teased because her rich brown skin was darker than that of her older brother, Tex, and younger sister, Debbie.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 ‘Othello,’ Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal Are Prey and Predator

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      Shakespeare’s leanest tragedy gets a starry, headlong production that embraces the action but misses the mystery.Just moments earlier, he was an infatuated new husband, and she his “gentle love.” Now, in Act III, Scene 3 of “Othello,” he vows to kill her.What has happened? Why does Othello, the great Black general, the savior of Venice in a war with the Ottomans, resolve to murder Desdemona, the pearl of the white aristocracy he has won at great risk?The scene in which this strange alteration occurs is one of the most gripping, baffling episodes in Shakespeare, and it remains so in the starry Broadway revival of “Othello” that opened on Sunday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.We can be grateful for that — and yet, in Denzel Washington’s commanding performance, what’s especially gripping is perhaps too baffling. As in his many movies, he leads with action, giving us a general whose psychology is as obscure to us as it is to him. Speaking very fast, with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, and stiffened by his ramrod military bearing, he betrays little evidence of the sorrows and injuries that moved Desdemona when he wooed her. Speed and decisiveness (“to be once in doubt is once to be resolved”) seem to matter more than emotion.Usually the obscure one is Othello’s ensign, Iago. Though Shakespeare provides many possible reasons he might have wanted to poison his commander with lies about Desdemona, awakening the famous green-eyed monster of jealousy, we are typically still in the dark at the end, when the cur is sent to his punishment. “I am not what I am” is his paradoxical, irreducible credo. Then what is he?Yet in a fascinating reversal, this “Othello” offers an Iago far more legible than his master. Jake Gyllenhaal’s eely take, with a physical wiggle to match his moral one, is a little bit mad scientist, a little bit Travis Bickle. His blue eyes pierce the atmospheric murk as he tracks all possible routes to his goal, like a rat in a maze, in the process allowing us to see how a twisted man thinks. He is a calculator of grievance; havoc is the carefully tabulated result. He adds up.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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      8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

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      A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel 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