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      Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class’ Doesn’t Satisfy

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      The New Group production of Sam Shepard’s classic tragicomedy comes off as disjointed and self-consciously stagy.When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in “Curse of the Starving Class” — it’s with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak.The Tates’ fridge is almost always empty, and there’s a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group’s lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play.“Curse of the Starving Class,” which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.)But the cause wasn’t a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze “like some rank old animal” and breaking the door. Though Weston’s tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they’re part of the starving class, or if it even exists.The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all.Like Shepard’s “Buried Child” and “True West,” “Curse of the Starving Class” is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical.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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      ‘Grangeville’ Review: Am I My Half Brother’s Keeper?

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      A story as old as Cain and Abel gets filtered through cellphone and video confrontations in Samuel D. Hunter’s bleak two-hander.“I don’t know why we have to do this over the phone,” says Arnold, speaking from Rotterdam to his estranged half brother, Jerry, in Idaho.That’s how I felt too, at least during the first half of Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville,” a bleak two-hander named for the men’s hometown. Most of what happens happens at a distance of thousands of miles — and feels like it.The distance might have been mitigated if Arnold (Brian J. Smith) and Jerry (Paul Sparks) weren’t for the most part kept at opposite sides of a dim, featureless stage in Jack Serio’s halting production for Signature Theater. Until late in the play, the set, by the design collective dots, consists only of black walls and a janky trailer door, signifying the characters’ fractured, unsheltered childhoods. The interiorized sound (by Christopher Darbassie) and crepuscular lighting (by Stacey Derosier) lend many scenes the flat affect of a radio play.But it’s also a problem that Hunter, often brilliant with banality, has buried the characters’ Cain-and-Abel subtext so shallowly beneath repetitive and not entirely credible discussions of their dying mother’s finances. Jerry, an RV salesman and only about 50, cannot figure out how to access her bank accounts online, let alone keep ahead of her bills and reimbursements. Arnold, a decade younger and having fled the family long since, resents being pulled back by end-of-life math. He might as well ask — though it would not be Hunter’s style — “Am I my brother’s bookkeeper?”Yet an ancient fraternal struggle, like those in plays by Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks — and in the Bible — is what “Grangeville,” which opened on Monday, means to dramatize. Between discussions of prognoses and powers of attorney, we learn in the opening scenes how both men were brutalized by their mother’s violent husbands and her failure to offer protection. (She was often absent on benders.) Predictably enough, Jerry turned into a brutalizer too, in an effort, he now explains feebly, to help the sensitive and proto-gay Arnold survive.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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      Celebrating Jonathan Larson, Creator of ‘Rent,’ in a New Show Off Broadway

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      “The Jonathan Larson Project,” a years-in-the-making musical collage of Larson’s life, features songs he wrote before he died. Now it’s onstage at the Orpheum.In his Tony-winning musical, “Rent,” Jonathan Larson asked: “How do you measure a year in the life?”The question took on an even heavier weight, with striking resonance, after Larson died unexpectedly at the age of 35 in 1996, hours before the show’s first preview.In the years after, dozens of his unheard songs were discovered, revealing the inner workings of a prolific artist looking for his big break. Now, a new musical, “The Jonathan Larson Project,” celebrates those songs and raises a new question: How do you thread together snippets of Jonathan Larson’s creative output into a musical?“The Jonathan Larson Project,” currently in previews, opens on March 10 at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It was like an expedition,” the show’s creator, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, said of what it was like to pore over the archive of Larson’s work at the Library of Congress. “Like a musical theater historian expedition, because you would go and you would find one lyric that sort of matched up with one demo that sort of matched up with an idea of another notebook.”The show is a collage of Larson’s life as told through his unproduced music, some of it written when he was as young as 22, including compositions for downtown revues and cabarets, music from Larson’s futuristic dystopian musical “Superbia” and songs cut from “Rent” and “Tick, Tick … Boom!”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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      Nick Jonas, Sadie Sink and More Had Broadway Debuts as Kids. Now They’re Back.

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      Nick Jonas, Sadie Sink and Christian Slater are among this year’s unusually large cohort of stars who first appeared onstage as tweens or even younger.The New York stage has some notable nostalgia this year: More than a half-dozen performers in significant roles made their Broadway debuts as children. Some were in hits and some were in flops; they experienced joy and (in one case) trauma. A few have appeared onstage with regularity, while others pursued music or film and are now returning. Here they reflect on those early experiences.☆ ☆ ☆Nick JonasNick Jonas was just 8 when he landed a part as a Tiny Tim understudy in a 2000 production of “A Christmas Carol” at Madison Square Garden (Frank Langella was Scrooge). A year later, at 9, he made his Broadway debut as Little Jake in a revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” then starring Reba McEntire.He did two more Broadway shows in rapid succession: At 10 he played Chip, a teacup, in “Beauty and the Beast,” and at 11 he played Gavroche, a street child, in “Les Misérables.”Though he became a successful pop star in the years that followed, the stage kept calling: At 19, he returned to Broadway in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” And this spring, at 32, he is returning in the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s much-loved “The Last Five Years.”Like many of the actors interviewed here, Jonas said that in theater he found a group of peers who understood him in a way that classmates often did not. At school, Jonas said, “I definitely felt like I was strange to them.” But onstage, he said, “I finally felt like I was around my people.”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: In ‘Liberation,’ the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

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      Bess Wohl’s moving new play, about a group of women in 1970s Ohio, explores the power of sisterhood and the limits of motherhood.How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?That’s one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in “Liberation,” her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play’s warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: “It’s almost impossible to have both.”At any rate, it hasn’t been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys’ teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats “are the same thing,” she says.) Denying that she is the group’s leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone’s contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.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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      For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger

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      Act 1 was a constant struggle for rent and opportunity. But now that these emerging dramatists have emerged, what will they make of Act 2?“Absolutely not,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared.Leslye Headland chuckled. “Oh never, no.”“I don’t know anyone who could!” was Samuel D. Hunter’s astonished response.“Not really,” hedged Bess Wohl. “Until maybe last year.”The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: “Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?”To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of “An Octoroon,” which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a “horrible sublet on an air shaft,” with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play “Bachelorette” made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he’d earned in any one year from his plays — including “The Whale” and “A Case for the Existence of God” — was “less than $30,000.”Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It’s hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity?Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. (“Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night” and “Othello” are dead center in Shakespeare’s professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can’t survive the start?Or so I have often worried.Katherine Waterston, Tracee Chimo and Celia Keenan-Bolger in Leslye Headland’s 2010 play “Bachelorette.”Joan MarcusWe 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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      Live Performance in New York City: Here’s What to See This Spring

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      Onstage, Denzel Washington is Othello, and Paul Mescal is Stanley Kowalski as stars illuminate the theater marquees. Plus: FKA twigs takes “Eusexua” on tour. Bang on a Can, Twyla Tharp, and much more.BroadwayOPERATION MINCEMEAT A sneaky compassion lies at the heart of this caper of a show, a deliciously eccentric London import that won the 2024 Olivier Award for best new musical. Starring the original West End cast, it’s a riff on a bizarre true story from World War II, when British Intelligence, keen to misdirect the Germans, dressed up a dead man as a Royal Marines major, planted a fake invasion plan on him and dropped him in the sea for the enemy to find. Through June 15 at the Golden Theater. (All theater listings by LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES)Mel Semé and Natalie Venetia Belcon in the musical “Buena Vista Social Club.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB This jukebox musical about the Cuban artists who made the Grammy Award-winning 1997 album of the title isn’t straight biography. Developed and directed by Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”), it uses real people and events as a jumping-off point for its storytelling. Rooted in the recording sessions, and choreographed by Patricia Delgado and the Tony winner Justin Peck (“Illinoise”), it was an Off Broadway hit last season for Atlantic Theater Company. Performances begin Feb. 21 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.OTHELLO Denzel Washington made a Broadway box-office hit out of “Julius Caesar” two decades ago. On the big screen, he has played Macbeth. Now he takes on Shakespeare’s Othello — the honorable general and smitten newlywed. Jake Gyllenhaal is his foil as the perfidious Iago, who goads Othello into unreasoning jealousy with lies about his beloved Desdemona (Molly Osborne). Directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony winner for his revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” which also starred Washington. Feb. 24-June 8 at the Barrymore Theater.PURPOSE Fresh off his Tony win for “Appropriate,” the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins returns with a new drama about the members of a famous, albeit fictional, Black political dynasty in Chicago, reckoning with history, morality and legacy as they gather for a celebration. Phylicia Rashad directs this Steppenwolf Theater production, whose ensemble cast includes Alana Arenas, Glenn Davis, Jon Michael Hill, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Harry Lennix and another 2024 Tony winner, Kara Young. Feb. 25-July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater.GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS David Mamet’s luxuriantly crude, bare-knuckled real estate drama, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, gets its third Broadway revival. Kieran Culkin, last on Broadway a decade ago in “This Is Our Youth,” stars as Richard Roma — the Al Pacino role in the movie adaptation — opposite Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., Howard W. Overshown and John Pirruccello. Patrick Marber, a 2023 Tony winner for his production of “Leopoldstadt,” directs. How’s that for a lead? March 10-May 31 at the Palace Theater.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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      Ken Wydro, Who Helped Create an Off Broadway Phenomenon, Dies at 81

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      He and his wife, Vy Higginsen, poured all they had into “Mama, I Want to Sing,” a long-shot musical that became an enduring staple of Black theater.Ken Wydro, a playwright, director and producer who with his wife, Vy Higginsen, poured their life savings into the Off Broadway gospel musical “Mama, I Want to Sing,” an enduring work of Black theater that ran for more than 2,800 performances, died on Jan. 21 at his home in Harlem. He was 81.The cause was heart failure, his daughter, Ahmaya Knoelle Higginson, said.“Mama, I Want to Sing” tells the tale of a minister’s daughter who rises to international fame as a soul singer. The show is loosely based on the life of Ms. Higginsen’s older sister, Doris Troy, who honed her singing chops at her father’s Pentecostal church in Harlem and later tasted the big time by co-writing and recording “Just One Look,” which was a Top 10 single for her in 1963 and later became a hit for both the Hollies and Linda Ronstadt.Ms. Troy also made her mark as a backup singer on rock anthems like the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and in 1970 she released a solo album on the Beatles’ label, Apple Records, with a supporting cast that included George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston.“Mama, I Want to Sing” is “a Black Cinderella story,” Mr. Wydro said in a 2013 interview with Call Me Adam, an entertainment website. “Coming from behind, finding oneself through loss, pain and family love.”A 1988 performance of “Mama, I Want to Sing” at the Heckscher Theater in East Harlem. Nearly every major theatrical producer in New York rejected the show before it found a home there.Martha SwopeAlthough “Mama” ultimately had a marathon run, success was anything but guaranteed. Nearly every major theatrical producer in New York rejected the show, fearing that a gospel-heavy musical would attract a limited audience.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