Theater

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares14 Views

    In ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Sarah Snook Goes Digital

    by

    About five minutes into “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, the actress Sarah Snook, playing the louche aristocrat Lord Henry Wotton, reaches out and rests a hand on Dorian Gray’s shoulder. At nearly every performance, the audience gasps. Sometimes, from sheer delight, they giggle.The gesture itself is simple, but the execution is so demanding that two years ago, when Snook first tried it, she had a panic attack. Snook plays both Lord Henry and Dorian Gray — and two dozen other characters, too. So she is putting her own hand on her own shoulder by way of an elaborate synthesis of live action, live video and recorded video. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a Victorian Gothic trifle, can now be seen in portrait mode.Even after a celebrated London run and weeks of performances at the Music Box Theater on Broadway, that moment, in which a recorded Lord Henry joins a live Dorian onscreen, hasn’t become any easier. As it approaches, Snook said she will find herself thinking: What if I’m a millimeter off? What if the magic is spoiled? The recording doesn’t protect her from imprecision, from accident. “The thing is,” she said, “it’s live theater.”Live video merges with recorded sequences to create the image of Sarah Snook reaching out to touch her own shoulder, conjuring the moment in which Lord Henry seduces Dorian Gray into a life of pleasure.Kip Williams, the director of “Dorian Gray” and until recently the artistic director of the Sydney Theater Company, pioneered this technique, which he calls cinetheater, about a decade ago. Rehearsing a production of Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke,” he decided to stage a chase sequence in the bowels of the theater. Some colleagues encouraged him to record it, but Williams resisted.“Theater is a live art form,” he said. “The audience knows when it’s live and when it’s not. That transiency, that temporal quality of being in the present moment is at its core.”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

    • 113 Shares27 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: A Captivating Take on Chekhov

      by

      Nina Hoss stars as a melancholic matriarch in Benedict Andrews’s immersive rendition of the classic at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Every time it feels as if we’re nearing a state of Chekhoverdose, a great production rolls around to remind us of the Russian writer’s uncanny power to pull us into his fold.Andrew Scott’s solo performance of “Vanya” at the Lucille Lortel Theater, which the New York Times’s critic Jesse Green called “a reset,” seems to have that effect on many.For me, it’s Benedict Andrews’s electric take on “The Cherry Orchard” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which left me so emotional, happy — from being reminded of the power of theater to surprise and thrill — and plain revved up that I struggled to fall asleep that night.A brief recap for those who can’t tell their sisters from their seagulls: “The Cherry Orchard” is the one in which the head of a once-wealthy family visits her estate for the first time in five years, and everybody confronts the reality that the beloved piece of land in the title must be sold to settle debts.Usually that matriarch, Ranevskaya is the play’s magnetic center, a grande dame whose efforts to come to terms with her world’s downfall embody the changes brewing in an entire society. In Andrews’s adaptation and staging, Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss, all melancholy grace and understated charisma) feels more like a part of a true ensemble. When not doing a scene, she and the other characters sit in the audience, calmly watching the proceedings. The in-the-round staging reinforces the feeling that we are them and they are us.Chekhov plays lend themselves to almost infinite variations and approaches, and Andrews’s is relatively mild compared to some radical deconstructions that mauled Chekhov beyond instant recognition.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

    • 163 Shares38 Views

      in Movies

      Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65

      by

      A wide-ranging leading man who earned critical praise, he was known to be charismatic but unpredictable. At one point he dropped out of Hollywood for a decade.Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered, she said.Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in the slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.He gave a vividly stylized performance as Jim Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.Val Kilmer as the rock singer Jim Morrison in the 1991 film “The Doors.”Sidney Baldwin/TriStar PicturesMr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), in which he played an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise.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

    • 150 Shares28 Views

      in Theater

      From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The Life of a Trans Rabbi

      by

      After disavowing her strict religious upbringing, Abby Stein came out as transgender. She is now the subject of a new play by New York Theater Workshop.One morning in 2015, a few years after she had begun to separate herself from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world in which she was raised, Abby Stein met with her father to come out as a woman.Raised in a Hasidic enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein was all but certain that her family was unfamiliar with the notion of being transgender. In their isolated community, gender roles were rigid, and the internet was blocked entirely or made “kosher” with software that restricted sites like Wikipedia.“Any modern gender theory wouldn’t speak to him,” Stein, 33, said of approaching her father. “I needed to find something that would work.”That high-stakes conversation is at the center of a new Off Broadway play, “Becoming Eve,” opening next week. In the lightly fictionalized play, the protagonist is called Chava, which is Stein’s middle name. She is portrayed by Tommy Dorfman, opposite Richard Schiff, the “West Wing” star who, playing her father, is transformed by the traditional garb of a Hasidic man, complete with a long beard and a black silken coat.The play ends shortly before the real events that turned Stein into a public figure.Dorfman, in the background, with a puppet version of the young Chava and Richard Schiff as her father in the New York Theater Workshop production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe same day that she had the conversation with her father, Stein, who was ordained as a Hasidic rabbi in 2011, came out to the larger world in a blog post. She woke up the next morning to find that the post on her typically lightly read blog had around 20,000 views.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 Shares18 Views

      in Theater

      Fisher Center at Bard Announces Civis Hope Commissions

      by

      The Fisher Center at Bard has announced a wave of works by artists including Suzan-Lori Parks, Courtney Bryan, Barrie Kosky and Lisa Kron.Hope may seem daring in this age of angst and uncertainty, but it is at the heart of three major new works coming to the Fisher Center at Bard, including a musical adaptation of “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the performing arts center announced on Tuesday.With a $2.5 million gift from the Civis Foundation, matched by Bard College for an initial endowment of $5 million, the Fisher Center said it would create the Civis Hope Commissions, a program to support “contemporary artists who will examine, interrogate and transform American artifacts, archival materials or artworks from the past to imagine a more perfect, just and hopeful future.”Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, described the program in an interview as “a rallying cry for the possibility of art.”“Art can describe things as they might be,” he said, “and see things not only as they are framed by the current news cycle. Great art has the ability to shift our consciousness and show us what we might become if we were really inhabiting our best selves. That’s what these commissions are really about.”The Civis Hope Commissions are intended to continue in perpetuity, but the Fisher Center announced three projects to start: “Jubilee,” a new musical with a libretto by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, based on Scott Joplin’s opera “Treemonisha”; Courtney Bryan’s first opera, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer”; and the “Yentl” musical, which will be the celebrated director Barrie Kosky’s first project developed in the United States.These commissions had already been in the works at the Fisher Center, but were chosen for the Civis program because they fit its mandate, Lester said, adding that working under the Civis umbrella allowed him and the artists “an opportunity to think about them in a new way.”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

    • 150 Shares38 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ With Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

      by

      Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk star in a bumpy revival of David Mamet’s play about salesmen with nothing worth selling.Watch out for Richard Roma. Top man among the bottom feeders at a scammy Chicago real estate agency, he has a hypnotic come-on and a dizzying spiel. Identifying your vulnerabilities with forensic accuracy, he’ll lance them with a blunt needle. (“You think you’re queer?” he asks one mark. “I’m going to tell you something: We’re all queer.”) If it’s what you need, he’ll be the brother who thinks big on your behalf, who sees beyond your sad habit of safety to the rewards only risk can offer.Not that there are actually rewards. The lots he’s selling in Florida, in developments ludicrously called Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, are worthless.Back at the office, too, he’s the alpha among losers. On the leaderboard of recent earnings, he stands closest by far to the $100,000 mark that will win him a Cadillac in the agency’s sales contest. (The two lowest earners will be fired.) His colleagues are merely additional marks to be bamboozled. They have schemes; he has juice.No wonder he remains, 41 years after he first hit Broadway in David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” one of theater’s greatest characters: the unregulated id of sociopathic capitalism. He makes Willy Loman look like a softy. This salesman will never die.Or so I thought. But in the weirdly limp revival that opened on Monday at the Palace Theater, something has flipped. As played by Kieran Culkin, leading a sales team that also features Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, Roma is no longer the master of everyone else’s neuroses; he’s neurotic himself. Especially in the scene that ends the first act, as he winds up for a pitch into the soul of a schlub, he is so deeply weird and interior that any semblance of a confident exterior evaporates. The man couldn’t sell a dollar for a dime.Bill Burr, left, as the hotheaded Moss and Michael McKean as the strait-laced Aaronow in an Act I scene in a Chinese restaurant.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

    • 88 Shares35 Views

      in Theater

      Andrew Scott on ‘Vanya’: ‘Who Isn’t Sad?’

      by

      “I really believe that we all do contain multitudes,” Andrew Scott said on a Friday morning in March. Scott may contain more than most. An actor of unusual sensitivity and verve, he is starring, solo, in an Off Broadway production of Chekhov’s melancholy comedy “Uncle Vanya.” The title, like the cast list, has also been condensed, to just “Vanya.”The New York transfer of this London production had opened a few nights before. In this version, the playwright Simon Stephens has relocated the action from 19th-century Russia to rural Ireland in more or less the present day. Scott plays the central character, a man who has sacrificed his own ambition to support his feckless brother-in-law. He also plays the brother-in-law, the put-upon niece, the neglected young wife, and several others. Scott is alone onstage throughout. That stage can feel very crowded.The New York Times critic Jesse Green described Scott, in performance, as a “human Swiss Army knife.” Mindful of Scott’s work in “Fleabag,” “Ripley” and the recent film “All of Us Strangers,” Green also referred to Scott as a “sadness machine.” This is a popular opinion. Variety has called him “Hollywood’s new prince of heartache.”On this morning, Scott, 48, did not appear unusually sad, though he was somewhat rumpled. The plan had been to walk over to Little Island and then along the Hudson River, toward the theater, but severe weather had changed that.“Oh my God, it’s windy,” he said, out on the street. (“You can’t get sick,” his publicist fretted.) So Scott had retreated, with a breakfast burrito and a Day-Glo orange juice, to the shelter of a nearby pier. Its windows looked out onto the river. The water — choppy, gray-green — reflected in his eyes.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 Shares51 Views

      in Theater

      12 Plays and Musicals Across the U.S. to Brighten the Spring

      by

      On stages across the country, there is no shortage of adventurous work, including plays by Lauren Yee, Larissa FastHorse and Zora Howard.Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar.‘Here There Are Blueberries’A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project”). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film “The Zone of Interest,” fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, “Six million people didn’t murder themselves.” Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.)‘Mother Russia’This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee (“Cambodian Rock Band”) is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.)‘Sunny Afternoon’Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall (“The Constituent”), this retelling of the Kinks’ rise won the Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include “You Really Got Me,” “Lola” and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.)‘Uncle Vanya’The title role in Chekhov’s lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the “Paddington” movies or Bernie in “Notting Hill.” In Simon Godwin’s production of Conor McPherson’s adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.)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 Shares28 Views

      in Theater

      Othello and Iago, a Marriage Made in Both Heaven and Hell

      by

      Who exactly is in charge here?Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his “free and open nature” or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets?That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare’s “Othello” was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp.On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with “Othello,” serious spoilers follow.) It’s the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It’s Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it’s Iago who’s still alive at the end.Jake Gyllenhaal and Denzel Washington in the play’s latest revival, on Broadway through June 8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you’ve seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character’s point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned the production?Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having “the stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.”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