Theater (Off Broadway)

Subterms

    Latest story

    163 Shares48 Views

    Lynne Meadow, Who Led Manhattan Theater Club for 53 Years, Is Stepping Down

    by

    Lynne Meadow was just 25 when she took a job running the Off Off Broadway Manhattan Theater Club. Now the nonprofit is a major player on and off Broadway.Lynne Meadow, the last of the long-serving artistic directors who for decades led the four nonprofits with Broadway theaters, plans to step down from her current position, she said in an interview.Meadow, 78, has served as artistic director of Manhattan Theater Club since 1972, and by her own count has produced or presented more than 600 shows, making her one of the most prolific and successful figures in the American theater. Among the successes: the repeatedly extended Lynn Nottage play “Ruined,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2009, and Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” which won a Tony Award earlier this month.She said she will stay with the organization as an artistic adviser, but that a search for a new artistic director is already underway.Her move will follow that of André Bishop, whose 33-year run leading Lincoln Center Theater ends next week; Carole Rothman, who in 2023 ended a 45-year tenure atop Second Stage Theater; and Todd Haimes, who died in 2023 after running Roundabout Theater Company for 40 years.The departures mean that, after decades of constancy, a new generation of leaders will oversee the nonprofit presence on Broadway. These institutions, which together control six of the 41 Broadway theaters, over the years have been an important ballast for the industry, preserving a place for new plays, risky work and large-orchestra musical revivals during periods when those types of projects have been less appealing to commercial producers.“I’m doing this because I feel that the timing is right to do this — there are things that I want to do,” Meadow said. “I’m not tired, and I’m not bored, and I’m not depressed, but I’m excited for Chapter 2.”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

    More stories

    • 75 Shares52 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Lowcountry’ Review: A Flat-Footed First Date

      by

      Abby Rosebrock’s latest offering for Atlantic Theater Company mines fertile ground, but simmers about with nary a sign of tension, sexual or otherwise.There’s exposition, and then there’s a high-debit download like in the opening scene of “Lowcountry,” at Atlantic Theater Company.David (Babak Tafti) is making dinner, changing into clean clothes, neatening things up around his down-at-the-heels studio apartment. All the while he is on the phone with Paul (Keith Kupferer). David is on speaker, so we hear both sides, which allows the playwright Abby Rosebrock to deliver — more or less smoothly — heaps of background information. It also lets the audience seize on the production’s gist: unafraid of melodramatic turns, heavy-handed, often logic-defying.David, we learn, once had to wear an ankle monitor, is involved in a custody battle, is a sex pest and works as a line cook at a Waffle House — a Bojangles takeout bag is another hint that we’re in the South. (The scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado and the costume designer Sarah Laux do what they can to evoke a guy with more problems than dollars.)On the other end of the line, Paul is David’s sponsor in a recovery program, and his purported concern and care barely hide a whiff of bossy paternalism. With only a disembodied voice, Kupferer, who was superb last year in the acclaimed film “Ghostlight,” injects a vaguely unsettling dimension to his character’s good ol’ boy — or rather good ol’ grandpa — persona. You can almost picture Paul, pacing by his pool on a phone, dispensing support that smells strongly of controlling judgment.Then again, he knows David better than we do. And the younger man, who’s preparing for a first date with a woman he met on Tinder, is, indeed, lying to Paul: He’s not actually going on a picnic — she’s coming to his place for dinner.That Tally (Jodi Balfour, from the series “Ted Lasso” and “For All Mankind”) is willing to meet a stranger at his home rather than in a neutral spot is one of several mysteries bobbing about in her wake. She looks comfortable in her own skin but also leans heavily on self-deprecating jokes that suggest fault lines. She appears forthright, but many of her answers to David’s getting-to-know-you questions are vague, which of course makes them more tantalizing. Tally shares that she was into self-help to deal with the aftermath of “Garden-variety sex stuff and workplace stuff, workplace abuse wage-theft poverty blah blah blah …” Then she coolly informs David that Bill Clinton killed her mother.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

    • 100 Shares59 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Trophy Boys’ Review: The Nerds’ Case Against Feminism

      by

      In an Off Broadway play, young men on a high school debate team prepare to argue an uncomfortable case.Has feminism failed women?That’s the uh-oh question facing the Imperium School’s senior debate team when asked to argue the affirmative in the finals of their league competition. But asserting that proposition against the girls from St. Gratia feels deeply uncomfortable to the four teenage boys who make up the team. Worse, it feels like a sure way to lose.And losers are not what Imperium’s debaters, no matter how nerdy, are expected to be. How will they get into Yale or Harvard — or “maybe … like … N.Y.U.?” — if they’re caught defending the patriarchy? How will Owen, their best speaker, run for president one day, as he intends to, with video of him vivisecting feminism in the ether forever?That’s the setup for Emmanuelle Mattana’s “Trophy Boys,” whose title suggests that what’s at stake is more than a contest. Regardless of their protestations of love for their mothers and sisters, the team members are mostly concerned with preserving their privilege as preppies and men. Their feminism is the kind that crumbles the moment it asks something of them beyond lip service.“Trophy Boys,” which opened Wednesday at MCC Theater, addresses their bad faith in many ways but not, alas, in the most important one: a convincing narrative. Mattana begins with satire so broad it’s indistinguishable from burlesque, as the Imperium team arrives at St. Gratia for their power hour of prep time. How stoked they are by the posters of feminist thought leaders — Oprah, Malala, Yoko — plastering the walls! (The classroom set is by Matt Saunders.) “I am at my most inspired when surrounded by inspiring women,” Owen says.Owen is portrayed by the playwright, who has made the casting of female, queer, trans and nonbinary actors “nonnegotiable.” Not that Danya Taymor’s production asks us to read their gray flannel, blue blazer, repp tie drag as real. (The costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) Especially when they roughhouse, leaping on desks and licking their notebooks, the cast overplays the characters’ youthfulness, making them seem less like a delivery system for gender commentary than a cartoon version of “Newsies.”But if those choices take some of the sting out of the boys’ masculine cluelessness and bro-y vulgarity, they also amp up the ambient camp. Jared (Louisa Jacobson) is a sendup of WASP obliviousness, disowning his advantages while pulling a gold watch and Tesla keys from his backpack. Scott (Esco Jouléy) is clearly in love with him, even as he overcompensates with casually sexist remarks. And David (Terry Hu) is an arrogant incel whose most salient contribution to feminism is calling his father a cuck.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

    • 113 Shares62 Views

      in Theater

      Global Arts Festival Taking Shape Inside Gowanus Power Station

      by

      The first Powerhouse: International will feature works from South Africa’s William Kentridge, Brazil’s Carolina Bianchi — and 10,000, $30 tickets.A new arts festival, featuring performance art from Brazil, an interactive installation from New Zealand, and a party presented by a Beyoncé dance captain, will be staged this fall inside a onetime power station along Brooklyn’s industrial Gowanus Canal.The three-month series, called Powerhouse: International and scheduled to run Sept. 25 to Dec. 13, is being curated by David Binder, a longtime performing arts producer and former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will take place at Powerhouse Arts, a hulking structure that since 2023 has housed fabrication studios for artists from a variety of disciplines.The festival will be the building’s first series of performing arts events, and will feature acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who is presenting his multidisciplinary opera-theater work “Sibyl”; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece “Larsen C” is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who will perform her “Cadela Força Trilogy,” a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.“We’re in this moment when there are so many barriers — cultural, physical, ideological — and this festival aims to break down those barriers,” Binder said in an interview. “What really interests me is the convergence of artists from different countries and different disciplines.”To keep the events accessible, the festival is making at least 10,000 tickets — just over half of the expected total — available for $30 each. At most configurations, the venue will have about 800 seats.Binder said he was motivated in part by a change in the types of work being presented in New York City in recent years. “There’s obviously a lot less international work in the city, a lot less art, a lot less new plays, a lot less music and dance,” he said. “I’m hoping we’re adding to the conversation.”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

    • 113 Shares71 Views

      in Television

      ‘Duke & Roya’ Review: He’s Got Swagger, She’s No-Nonsense

      by

      Jay Ellis stars as an American rapper who falls for his Afghan interpreter at an Army base in Charles Randolph-Wright’s new play.With an American behaving brashly at an overseas military base, getting locals into trouble and considering consequences only later, “Duke & Roya” feels like scarcely more than a retooling of “Madama Butterfly.” Like that old problematic chestnut, Charles Randolph-Wright’s new play is not without its pleasures, but lacking soaring melodrama, it’s hard to believe in its music.Here, the visiting Westerner is Duke (Jay Ellis), a hip-hop star at the height of his fame. In a present-day press interview, he recalls his visit to Afghanistan in 2016, during the country’s U.S. occupation, to perform for troops at a large air base near Kabul. The play, which opened Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, then flashes back to his arrival and his immediate attraction to his Afghan interpreter, Roya (Stephanie Nur).She’s a no-nonsense type, and he’s always on vacation mode. But Roya, who works for a women’s education organization, has done her research, and knows that the party boy, born to British and American diplomats, was once a bookish English major. His quoting Rumi and James Baldwin impresses her, and Duke appreciates how she challenges him.It’s the standard romance of a down-to-earth civilian who grounds a starry hot shot, and Ellis and Nur lend it enjoyable chemistry.Charm comes naturally to Ellis, a classic romantic lead in the HBO series “Insecure” who makes an amiable stage debut here. His swaggering Duke teases out the word “serendipitous” with the cascading, sweet-talking drawl of a Southern rapper, and he adeptly handles a few verses (penned by Ronvé O’Daniel). Nur finds appealing spaces for wit and agency in her more reserved, reactive role.But does the play know there’s a war on?Despite an opening scene of martial seriousness, Randolph-Wright treats Afghanistan like a Harlequin romance playground. When the two sneak out of the base for Duke to buy a piece of lapis lazuli, they’re thrown into unsurprising peril. Danger! Excitement! Two worlds collide!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

    • 138 Shares75 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cold War Choir Practice’ Review: When the President Made a Deal

      by

      Ro Reddick’s music-infused comedy, set during the Cold War, finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.For Christmas 1987, Meek knows exactly what she wants from Santa Claus. All three items should fit easily on the sleigh: a stuffed animal, a Speak & Spell for language-learning and a nuclear radiation detector. You know, to keep inside the fallout shelter she’s building in the basement.At 10 years old, alert to the world, Meek is anxious about the Cold War and hoping to help stop it — or at least protect herself and her family, should Soviet missiles ever be aimed at Syracuse, N.Y. But she is also just a little kid, inquisitive and dreamy, with an “E.T.” sweatshirt and a taste for Atomic Fireballs from the neighborhood candy shop.Played by Alana Raquel Bowers, an adult deftly channeling tweendom, Meek is the winsome protagonist of “Cold War Choir Practice,” a brainy new comedy by Ro Reddick that’s infused with choral music and spiked with espionage. Directed by Knud Adams, and featuring a jewel-studded cast, the play finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.That’s true even with the whole extra set of reverberations that the show abruptly acquired after the U.S. strike on Iran on Saturday — world peace being one of Meek’s consuming priorities. In a children’s choir, she sings of de-escalation (sample lyric: “No one has to die”) and gets matched with a pen pal from the U.S.S.R.“Dear Soviet Pen Pal,” Meek writes, brightly. “War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”Meek (Bowers) and her father, Smooch (Will Cobbs).Maria BaranovaWe 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

    • 100 Shares54 Views

      in Television

      Jay Ellis Considers Colson Whitehead His Literary GOAT

      by

      “‘Harlem Shuffle,’ ‘Crook Manifesto,’ ‘Underground Railroad,’ ‘Nickel Boys’: I feel like I did not understand or see myself in fiction until I read him.”So far this year, Jay Ellis has played a basketball coach in the Netflix comedy “Running Point” and a record-setting M.V.P. in the action movie “Freaky Tales.”This summer, he’s swapping free throws for freestyles as he steps into the role of a hip-hop star in the Off Broadway play “Duke & Roya,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater. The drama finds him stumbling into a cross-cultural romance with life-threatening consequences.“At first glance,” he said, “there’s no reason why you think these two people would ever hit it off.”He added: “We’re in a world where everyone yells, no one listens. Everybody really just wants connection, to be seen, to be understood, and I just loved the idea that these two characters do.”Ellis, 43, temporarily relocated his family of four to New York from their home in Los Angeles. One particular aspect of the local culture suits him well.“I absolutely love pizza,” he said, name-dropping his latest find, Fini. “My daughter took a bite and was like, ‘Why don’t we have pizza like this in L.A., Daddy?’”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

    • 175 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Michelle Williams to Star in Off Broadway Revival of ‘Anna Christie’ With Mike Faist

      by

      The actress will lead a revival of “Anna Christie” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by her husband, Thomas Kail, and co-starring Mike Faist.A big star is coming to the small stage: Michelle Williams, the Emmy-winning, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress, will return to New York theater this fall to lead an Off Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 drama “Anna Christie.”Williams, who was last on Broadway in 2016, will play the main character, a former prostitute who falls in love with a seaman. The seaman will be played by Mike Faist, who was nominated for a Tony Award for originating the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” and who then had a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of “West Side Story.”The production is scheduled to run from Nov. 25 to Feb. 1, with a two-week break during the winter holidays, in a 450-seat theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” who is married to Williams. The two previously collaborated on the 2019 streaming series “Fosse/Verdon.”“We met making TV about theater, and we always thought it would be fun to make theater together,” Kail said in an interview. He said he had long been interested in O’Neill — he wrote his college thesis on the playwright — and that Williams had long been interested in the role, which was originated on Broadway a century ago by Pauline Lord, and has been played since on Broadway by Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann and Natasha Richardson, and on film by Greta Garbo.“Taking something that has existed in various forms, with multiple terrific productions over the years, and having the chance to be part of a lineage is something that I love about the theater,” Kail said, “and that’s certainly something that sparked when I started having conversations with Michelle about it.”Williams has had a varied career since her breakout role in the television series “Dawson’s Creek.” She won the Emmy for “Fosse/Verdon,” was nominated for a Tony for the play “Blackbird,” and has been nominated five times for Academy Awards, for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Fabelmans.”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

    • 138 Shares132 Views

      in Theater

      Review: He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s the Future King of England

      by

      The Off Broadway play “Prince Faggot” aims to shock. But the real surprise is how good it is anyway.In 2032, a young man called Tips brings his boyfriend, Dev, home from college to meet the folks. Though cautious, Mum and Dad are neither surprised nor scandalized; after all, he’s 18, and they have known he was gay for a while.For the characters in Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” though, that gayness was long since a given. Early in the play, we are shown a famous picture of Tips at 4, looking adorable and, to them, arguably fey.Tips is better known to the world as Prince George of Wales, the oldest child of Prince William and Princess Catherine. The real Prince George is now 11. For that reason, I will hereafter refer to the character by his nickname. I am one of those who, as the play anticipates, resist the dragooning of a preadolescent boy into a dramatic argument about sexuality and monarchy — just as I cringe at the use of a slur I take no reclaimed pride in to market a title. If the playwright means to shock, mission accomplished.But here’s the real shocker: The play, which opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, is thrilling. Inflammatory, nose-thumbing, explicit to the point of pornography, wild and undisciplined (except in its bondage scenes) — yes, all that. Its arguments have so many holes in them, most hold water only briefly. Grievance is its top note: Tips is a whiner and Dev a theory queen. Love is everything and never enough.In other words, however objectionably conjectural, it’s real.Tannahill tries to sideline reality quickly though. In a throat-clearing prologue, he has the six actors (all exceptionally good in multiple roles) debate the propriety of telling the story in the first place. One (Mihir Kumar) argues that since “all children are ‘sexualized’ as heterosexual by default,” exploring a different framing is a kind of reparation. Another (K. Todd Freeman) retorts that to portray an actual child as queer is to invite a charge of grooming. A third (David Greenspan) adds wickedly, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job at grooming. I mean look at how many straights there still are.”From left, Rachel Crowl, K. Todd Freeman, N’yomi Allure Stewart and McCrea as the royals at the heart of the play.Richard Termine for 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