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    Time-Traveling Film ‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ Hits Some Bumps Onstage

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    Adapted from the offbeat 2012 movie, this new musical about loneliness and the longing for do-overs is promising but still needs to find its shape.From all appearances, Kenneth Calloway is the kind of oddball you would want to steer well clear of. Wild-eyed and radiating a frenetic intensity, he wears a fleece-lined baby-blue earflap hat so oversize that he can’t help looking tiny underneath. Also, there is the matter of the classified newspaper ad he placed.“Wanted: someone to go back in time with me,” it reads. “This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91, Oceanview, Washington 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before — safety not guaranteed.”Maybe he is a genius; more likely he is unhinged. Either way, as embodied by Taylor Trensch in “Safety Not Guaranteed,” the bumpy new musical comedy that opened on Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he is riveting. Earnest, obsessive and vulnerable, he is soon so endearing that you may have the impulse, as I did, to keep him safe — from himself, and from the team of Seattle Magazine journalists who are pursuing an article about him.Directed by the Obie Award winner Lee Sunday Evans, the musical is adapted from the offbeat 2012 film of the same name written by Derek Connolly, which starred Mark Duplass as Kenneth and Aubrey Plaza as Darius, a young journalist who bonds with him.Like the movie, the stage version (book by Nick Blaemire, music and lyrics by Ryan Miller) is about loneliness, lost chances and the longing for do-overs. It has an appealingly indie Pacific Northwest sound and an elemental goofiness, but the show hasn’t yet found its shape. (Music direction is by Cynthia Meng, who leads an onstage five-piece band.)Darius (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe), the writer who spotted the ad, is joined on her reporting trip by Jeff (Pomme Koch), her shallow dirtbag of an editor, and Arnau (Rohan Kymal), a shy, brainy researcher. Once in Oceanview, the three operate unscrupulously in undercover mode, never disclosing to Kenneth who they really are or what they’re up to.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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      3 Ambitious Song Cycles, but Only One Connects Mind and Heart

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      Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a work of wonder, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird” are less effective.Days and months, but also mere minutes, acquire outsize, perhaps even life-altering significance, in three song cycles currently playing intimate venues in Manhattan.Todd Almond’s “I’m Almost There,” at the Minetta Lane Theater through Oct. 5, takes place over just a few minutes, while Gabriel Kahane’s “Book of Travelers” and “Magnificent Bird,” upstairs at Playwrights Horizons through Oct. 13, cover periods that feel like distinct parentheses in his life.Under its goofy exterior, Almond’s “I’m Almost There” is a sneakily, formally daring experiment in pared-down musical theater that connects with both mind and heart. This 75-minute Audible production, directed by David Cromer, unfurls over the time it takes for Todd (Almond) to walk down the stairs from his apartment to the street, where Guy, who has just rung his buzzer, awaits. The two met at a brunch the day before and ended up walking around together, until an abrupt parting. Now this possible love interest has unexpectedly turned up, bearing coffee.An accomplished composer and music director (he collaborated with Laura Benanti on her recent Audible show, “Nobody Cares”), Almond has created something that feels like an interior monologue with the jumbled, digressive quality of a fever dream: Time and space unfold following their own surreal logic and Todd experiences jump cuts from one location to another as the mayhem escalates. “This is exactly what happens when you let someone talk you into brunch,” he says while trying to escape a vampire’s fangs.An undercurrent of anxiety runs through the show — Todd has a fear of falling from something (like his building’s rooftop when sleepwalking) or for someone (like a certain nice man with whom he just clicks) — but it fuels a self-deprecating, antic energy that keeps the story from lapsing into neurotic solipsism.Flanked by Erin Hill on harp and vocals and Luke McCrosson on bass, Almond, whose acting credits include “Girl From the North Country,” brings to life a gallery of eccentric characters, but does quite well on his own, enlivening his serviceable vocals with a vividly comic presence. Letting people in is tough, but Todd eventually answers that bell and opens 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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      Disoriented in America: Two Political Plays Reflect a Changed Country

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      The Off Broadway plays “Fatherland” and “Blood of the Lamb” explore the grief, anger and fear of no longer recognizing the country you love.When, in the course of human events, the political bands that have connected a people appear to be dissolving rapidly, it’s fair to ask: Who in their right mind would want to revisit the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, in the form of a play?I wouldn’t have thought that I did. That history is too recent, too fraught, too unresolved. Yet the theater has always been a place in which to search the dark corners of a nation’s soul, and to sit with grief.That emotion figures palpably in “Fatherland,” a finely calibrated, surprisingly affecting new work of verbatim theater at New York City Center Stage II. It tells the true story of Guy Wesley Reffitt, a middle-aged rioter from a Dallas suburb who was sent to prison for his role in the Capitol attack, and his son, Jackson, who was an 18-year-old high schooler when he turned his father in to the F.B.I., and just 19 when he testified against him.Conceived and directed by Stephen Sachs for the Los Angeles-based Fountain Theater, where the play was staged earlier this year, it is on one level about the profound grief of no longer recognizing a parent you love, or a child you raised. But like another new Off Broadway drama — Arlene Hutton’s “Blood of the Lamb,” more on which below — “Fatherland” is also about the grief and anger, the fear and disorientation, of no longer recognizing your own country.Using text from the transcript of the elder Reffitt’s 2022 trial, and other publicly available sources, the play calls its central characters simply Father (Ron Bottitta) and Son (an exquisitely restrained Patrick Keleher). Their clash, for all its 21st-century Americanness, is as primal as any parent-child conflict from ancient Greek drama, or from Shakespeare.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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      ‘Titaníque’ Was Her Big Hit. Is ‘Big Gay Jamboree’ Really Her Swan Song?

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      Two years after debuting the “Titanic” parody, Marla Mindelle says her new show, with Margot Robbie as a producer, may be her last as an actor.There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.The cast of “The Big Gay Jamboree” at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village.James Estrin/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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      Andrew Scott Will Perform One-Man ‘Vanya’ Off Broadway Next Spring

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      The Olivier Award-winning revival, in which the actor plays all of the parts, is to begin previews March 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Andrew Scott, the Irish actor who has parlayed his “Fleabag” hot-priest-ness into a thriving stage and screen career, will perform a one-man version of “Uncle Vanya” Off Broadway next spring.This will not be Scott’s first go at the Chekhov classic: He previously performed all the play’s parts in London’s West End last year; the critic Houman Barekat, writing in The New York Times, was underwhelmed, but critics for British outlets were far more positive, and the production won this year’s Olivier Award for best revival.The New York production is scheduled to begin previews on March 11 and to open on March 18 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. It is a commercial production, led by Wessex Grove, Gavin Kalin Productions and Kater Gordon.The original play was first staged in 1899, and is oft-revived; the most recent Broadway production, starring Steve Carell, closed just three months ago, and there was a small-scale Off Broadway production, staged in a loft, in 2023.This one-performer version was adapted by the playwright Simon Stephens, who also wrote the Tony-winning stage adaptation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Stephens and Scott previously collaborated on “Sea Wall,” a short one-man play that Stephens wrote and Scott performed onstage (in Britain) and on film.The one-man “Vanya,” directed by Sam Yates, is scheduled to run just eight weeks.Scott, 47, who had his big breakthrough with “Fleabag” (where he played the “hot priest”), is also known for the British TV series “Sherlock,” the 2023 film “All of Us Strangers” and the recent streamer “Ripley.” He has appeared on Broadway once, in the 2006 play “The Vertical Hour.” More

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      Roundabout, With 3 Broadway Theaters, Finds Leader in California

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      Christopher Ashley, the artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse and a Tony winner for “Come From Away,” will run the large New York nonprofit.Roundabout Theater Company, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit theaters and a major player on Broadway, has chosen Christopher Ashley, a Tony-winning director who runs an influential theater in California, as its next artistic director.Ashley is a prolific director, particularly of musicals with commercial aspirations, many of which he has developed at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, where he has been the artistic director since 2007.He won a Tony Award for directing “Come From Away,” an inspirational heartbreaker about a Canadian community that welcomed thousands of passengers from flights that were grounded on Sept. 11, 2001. He received Tony nominations for directing the musical “Memphis” and a revival of “The Rocky Horror Show.” He has also directed some high-profile flameouts, including “Diana,” “Escape to Margaritaville” and “Leap of Faith.”Just last week, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, an offshoot of the labor union representing American directors and choreographers, announced that next spring Ashley, who is 60, will be given the organization’s Mr. Abbott Award for his contributions to the American theater.“I have loved my time at La Jolla Playhouse, and it’s a very hard place to leave, but the opportunities and possibilities of the Roundabout are impossible to deny,” Ashley said in an interview. “The possibility of programming in their five amazing spaces is exhilarating, and they have an amazing education program, and at a moment when theater is tremendously stressed, Roundabout is, and can continue to be, a real beacon.”The transition will be gradual: Ashley plans to remain artistic director of La Jolla until Jan. 1, 2026, and to start full-time at Roundabout on July 1, 2026. Scott Ellis, who is Roundabout’s interim artistic director, will continue in that role until Ashley’s arrival and the two will collaborate during the 2026-27 season.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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      Review: What’s Eating Trump? The Singing ‘Ghost of John McCain’

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      The former senator haunts the former president, or vice versa, in this sophomoric musical satire.Usually, critics wait until a show is running to slam it, but Meghan McCain broke the embargo. By more than five months.“This is trash,” she posted on social media on April 2. “Nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people. I hope it bombs.”Perhaps she can be forgiven her haste for distaste. “Ghost of John McCain,” the show she was pre-emptively attacking, is about her father, who died in 2018. A musical satire that pictures him in purgatory — bedeviled by Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and a pole-dancing Lindsey Graham in a studded pink dog collar — probably seemed unlikely to be reverent.If only irreverence were the problem! But the show that opened on Tuesday at SoHo Playhouse turns out to be, in its muddled way, something of a love letter. It’s just a bad one.Start with the title, which promises a posthumous haunting of America by the former Arizona senator but mostly delivers a familiar and unfunny indictment of Trump. McCain and the other characters are figments of 45’s fevered imagination, imprisoned in his brain (depicted as a three-star hotel) until they admit that he is “the greatest president who’s ever lived.” For McCain that means abandoning what he considers his legacy as a principled politician and maverick Republican.This baroque and entirely internal conflict puts the title character in a dramaturgical purgatory even worse than the theological one. He’s essentially stuck playing Trump’s game, with no agency of his own. It’s Trump who thus scores the few smart zingers in Scott Elmegreen’s unruly book: “You started Trumpism,” he tells McCain. “When you picked Sarah Palin.” Palin, McCain’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election, then shows up shooting an already dead wolf at close range with a shotgun.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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      On City Strolls, ‘Fat Ham’ Writer Was Inspired by ‘Ghosts of Absence’

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      The Tower Records on Broad Street, the Borders bookstore on Chestnut, and the Kitchen Kapers boutique at the corner of Walnut and 17th Streets in Philadelphia: The playwright James Ijames shopped at all of them in the early 2000s while pursuing his M.F.A. at Temple University.I frequented them as well, in the late 1990s, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During a walk around downtown Philadelphia on a sweltering August afternoon, we noticed that those businesses were long gone. Passing by the buildings that once housed them, we reflected on how those old haunts endure, in some way, because they stay in our memories, paralleling many of the ideas of that lingering generational history Ijames gets at in his work.Our small talk — about our fondness for the city, receiving Pulitzer Prizes the same year (in 2022) and being college professors — gave way to weightier issues: gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma. Those subjects are all explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.The cast of “Fat Ham” during its Tony-nominated Broadway run in 2023.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIjames (pronounced “imes”) still lives in Philadelphia, with his husband, and teaches at Villanova University. (He is also a former co-artistic director of that city’s Wilma Theater, which produced a film version of “Fat Ham” in 2021, before the Public Theater in Manhattan staged the play’s in-person premiere in 2022.) As we stood on the corner of 15th and Locust Streets, he pointed out that his favorite video store is now a plastic surgery center.“I loved TLA Video because they carried queer independent films, like ‘The Watermelon Woman.’ It was the only place I could find that stuff,” Ijames said. “I’m sad that there isn’t a place for a little queer boy to go.”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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      Kate Mulgrew Walks the Creative and Emotional Plank in ‘The Beacon’

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      Holding tightly to the Dublin accent of her character, the actress talks about starring in Nancy Harris’s feminist thriller at Irish Rep.Sitting in her dressing room on Tuesday at Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan, talking to me about her latest role, the actress Kate Mulgrew initially sounded like herself: an American from Iowa who happens to share a voice with Kathryn Janeway, the Starfleet captain she played on “Star Trek: Voyager.”A minute or two into the interview, though, a Dublin accent started shading some of her phrases, and soon it was coloring all of them. That’s the first thing you need to know, because when you read her words here it helps to imagine their cadence as they hit the air.The second thing to know is why she would slip into that lilt and sustain it for nearly an hour. She was simply holding tight to Beiv Scanlon, the character she is playing in Nancy Harris’s thriller “The Beacon,” on the Irish Rep main stage.Not that Mulgrew, 69, has been speaking with that accent constantly, but she has been doing it “a lot,” she said. “Yesterday I didn’t. I had to go off and do some things, and I didn’t want to disconcert people who’ve known me for years. Right? That would be odd.”But if, offstage, the accent can be discombobulating even for those of us who don’t know her personally, it’s all in service of Beiv (rhymes with wave).Kate Mulgrew and Zach Appelman in “The Beacon,” at Irish Rep in Manhattan. The play opens Sunday, and is scheduled to run through Nov. 3.Carol RoseggWe 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