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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

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      Courting Dark Emotions in ‘See What I Wanna See’ and a Celine Song Play

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      Revivals of a Michael John LaChiusa musical and an early work by the “Past Lives” filmmaker toy with and challenge audience expectations.The title of Michael John LaChiusa’s “See What I Wanna See” suggests a single perspective, but the show actually offers a kaleidoscopic approach to the truth. It ravels out one story about a murder and a rape only to follow it up, in Rashomon-like fashion, with variations on the same tale that features a businessman, his wife and a sociopath.In this Out of the Box Theatrics revival of LaChiusa’s 2005 musical, loosely adapted from short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the doomed husband is first represented by a puppet and is later played by Kelvin Moon Loh. In one version, he is knifed by the sociopath (Sam Simahk), and his wife (Marina Kondo) is raped; in another, his wife cheats on her “patronizing” husband, who kills himself out of grief.Indeterminacy — of the truth, of storytelling writ large — is the driving theme and it requires a precise balance. Happily, this production, directed by Emilio Ramos and featuring an Asian American and Pacific Islander cast, never lets us determine which multiverse is the “real” one. And having a puppet portray the husband before substituting a real actor (to play his spirit) is another clever way of shifting our certainties — or alliances.The second act centers on a priest (Zachary Noah Piser), whose faith is waning after 9/11. His life is like “a sentence in which every word seems to be missing a letter.” Tired of providing absolution, he posts a message about an imminent miracle. News spreads like wildfire — or a conspiracy theory — in the song “Gloryday.”As original as these stories are, “See What I Wanna See” is strewed with clichés: The thief sings about being the “devil in disguise,” and the husband, resuscitated as a ghost by a medium (a delightful Ann Sanders), needs “some sort of release.” If the lyrics are not on par with, say, the great, similarly macabre “Sweeney Todd,” the actors (especially the compelling Kondo) keep us on our toes through quicksilver changes in mood.Though tonally different, the two acts feel like different shows rather than two halves of the same musical. What binds them are sequences about two lovers in medieval Japan that precede each act. They are told first from the perspective of the woman, Kesa (Kondo), and then her lover, Morito (Simahk). Both end as Kesa is about to plunge a knife into Morito’s throat. Whose is the truer tale? It’s impossible to say.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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      ‘Forbidden Broadway’ Review: Let Them Somewhat Entertain You

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      From its perch way Off Broadway, the long-running satire slings its affectionate arrows at Patti, Audra and the rest.At its best, topical satire, which is what the “Forbidden Broadway” franchise has been slinging for 42 years, is both timely and well targeted. The timeliness means that audience members know the material being ribbed; the targeting makes sure they know why.Admittedly, timeliness is a vague concept when your subject is Broadway, where the targets recur at regular intervals. It’s thus not a big problem that many of the songs in the show’s latest edition — which opened on Thursday at Theater 555 in the far west reaches of Hell’s Kitchen — send up musicals and performers that Gerard Alessandrini, who created, writes and directs the series, has sent up before.But the targeting in this outing, subtitled “Merrily We Stole a Song” in a nod to the flood of Sondheim revivals, including “Merrily We Roll Along,” is too often hazy. The opening number, repurposing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” from “Guys and Dolls” as “Sit Down, You’re Blocking the Aisle,” feels like a title that went looking for a topic. (It’s about rude patrons.) A segment about the upcoming “Gypsy” revival posits the unlikely idea that Audra McDonald is haunted by the ghosts of previous Roses. (“Merman’s gotta let go!”) Having to admit that Lincoln Center’s revival of “South Pacific” was terrific (even if its “Camelot” was “horrific”) turns a Tchaikovsky-themed takedown of that institution into a shrug.To be sure, those numbers, and most of the others, are performed well by the four-person company, if rarely as well as they would be if performed by the people they are parodying. That’s a built-in problem when satire has little to satirize; if the worst snipe you can take at McDonald is that she’s a glorious soprano and Merman wasn’t, you’re not going to be able to throw much shade.Punching wild is also a problem here. Instead of using relevant songs to make his points, Alessandrini sometimes conscripts baffling outliers into service. A takeoff called “Great Gatsby for Dummies,” featuring a wicked Jeremy Jordan impersonation by Danny Hayward, is paired with the irrelevant song “Good Morning” from a 1939 movie. And a running gag in which Doc Brown and Marty McFly visit Broadway past and future, with a young Sondheim strangely in tow, is so in the weeds it has ticks. (It does, however, offer a glimpse of the 23rd century’s Ozempic Theater.)Punches perfectly thrown at the ripest subjects provide the evening’s better moments, even if some of the low blows are mere sideswipes. Of Ariana DeBose’s recent award show hosting, Alessandrini writes: “A girl like that/Could kill the Tonys.” Chris Collins-Pisano does a deadly Ben Platt channeling Liza at the Palace in his recent run there: “Everybody loves charisma/So nobody loves me.” And a rewrite of “The Ladies Who Lunch” provides Jenny Lee Stern, a longtime “Forbidden Broadway” standout, with the opportunity for a pithy comment on Patti LuPone’s extreme mannerisms in the 2021 “Company” revival: “I’ll sink to that.”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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      A ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Musical Will Open on Broadway Next Year

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      The show, which had a previous run at Atlantic Theater Company, is scheduled to begin previews in February at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Twenty-seven years ago, “Buena Vista Social Club,” an album of prerevolutionary Cuban music that became an unexpected best seller, was released, spawning tours and documentary films and a burst of interest in the Afro-Cuban sound.Now a stage musical inspired by the making of the album is heading for Broadway.“Buena Vista Social Club” is scheduled to begin previews Feb. 21 and to open March 19 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Set primarily in Havana, the show depicts a group of aging and often overlooked musicians gathering in a recording studio, and recalling the tumultuous era decades earlier when they were young and the Cuban Revolution was gaining steam. The narrative loosely tracks with the history of the album, but contains songs that were released separately and elements that are fictionalized.The show had an Off Broadway run, at Atlantic Theater Company, that opened in late 2023; Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, described it as “full-of-riches,” praising the song and dance elements but expressing concerns about some of the storytelling. The Broadway cast will include many of the same performers and musicians as the Off Broadway production.The songs are all attributed to the Buena Vista Social Club, and the show has a book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”). The director is Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) and the choreographers are the married couple Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.The musical is being capitalized for $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lead producers are Orin Wolf, John Styles and Barbara Broccoli, who previously worked together on “The Band’s Visit.” Among the co-producers are the comedian-actor John Leguizamo; Luis Miranda, a founder of the Hispanic Federation and the father of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and LaChanze, the Tony-winning actress. More

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      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.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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      James Earl Jones’s Rich Career in Theater: ‘Othello,’ ‘The Great White Hope’ and More

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      The world will remember James Earl Jones, who died Monday at the age of 93, for his contributions to film, some of which are secure in the pop-culture canon.New York, however, will remember Jones for his contributions to theater, for which he received three Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement in 2017) and, in 2022, a rare distinction: the renaming of a Broadway theater in his honor.Jones once recalled that when he moved to New York to study acting, in 1957, his father, Robert Earl Jones (himself an actor), took him to live performances. In rapid succession, the young man saw the opera “Tosca,” the ballet “Swan Lake,” the musical “Pal Joey” and the drama “The Crucible.” This wide range may help explain Jones’s own rich, startlingly diverse stage career.For years, the actor deftly navigated oft-produced classics, head-scratching experimental theater, searching new works by major contemporary playwrights and, later in his career, popular dramas and comedies. Jones made his Broadway debut in the late 1950s but throughout the 1960s and ’70s, he also appeared in smaller venues. In 1961, for example, he was in the Living Theater’s avant-garde, resolutely countercultural production of “The Apple.” In 1965 he won an Obie Award for his performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal” and also appeared in Georg Büchner’s “Danton’s Death” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. In the 1970s, he was Hickman in “The Iceman Cometh,” and in the 1980s he starred in two dramas by the South African playwright Athol Fugard — all three on Broadway.Here are five productions that reflect Jones’s astonishing range and his commitment to the theater.1961‘The Blacks’A cast of unknowns that included Jones, Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, Roscoe Lee Browne and Louis Gossett Jr. appeared in this explosive work by the French writer Jean Genet. An experimental take on power and oppression in which some of the Black actors wore white masks, “The Blacks” had its New York premiere in 1961 at St. Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan’s East Village. In just over a week, Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote not one but two raves about the production, praising it as “one of the most stimulating evenings Broadway or Off Broadway has to offer” and deeming it an event “on any level that matters.”1964‘Othello’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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      Lincoln Center Theater Chooses Lear deBessonet as Artistic Director

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      DeBessonet, currently the artistic director of Encores!, will work alongside Bartlett Sher, who will serve as executive producer.Lincoln Center Theater, a leading nonprofit theater with a long track record of producing luxe Broadway musical revivals as well as contemporary plays, has chosen new leadership for the first time in more than three decades.The theater’s next artistic director will be Lear deBessonet, 44, a stage director who specializes in musical revivals as the artistic director of the Encores! program at New York City Center. DeBessonet will succeed André Bishop, who has led Lincoln Center Theater since 1992, most recently with the title of producing artistic director; he is retiring in June.DeBessonet will work with Bartlett Sher, 65, a Tony-winning director who is a resident director at the organization, and who will now assume the title of executive producer. DeBessonet will select and oversee the theater’s shows and its day-to-day operations; Sher will focus on strategic planning, fund-raising and global partnerships. They will both report to the board’s chairman, Kewsong Lee.In an interview, DeBessonet said that “there is no greater job I can imagine” than running Lincoln Center Theater. “The American theater is the great passion of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be a director and to run a theater since I was a 5-year-old in Baton Rouge.”The changes come amid a tidal wave of turnover throughout the American theater, prompted by a variety of factors, including the retirements of many regional and Off Broadway theater pioneers, as well as the ousters of some leaders who lost support. Across the industry, leaders are facing a new reality: These jobs have become increasingly challenging as nonprofits face rising costs, dwindled audiences, pressures to feature programming that advances social justice but also sells tickets, and changing entertainment consumption habits.Bartlett Sher, who has been directing at Lincoln Center Theater for two decades, will become the nonprofit’s executive producer. Cindy Ord/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProWe 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