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    ‘The Matchmaker’ Review: Before ‘Hello, Dolly!’ She Was Just Dolly

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    Thornton Wilder’s play became a blockbuster musical, but a production under an upstate tent makes the case for its stand-alone virtues.Though Thornton Wilder’s rarely performed play “The Matchmaker” is not a musical, it’s nevertheless a great pleasure for musical theater lovers. That’s only partly because so much of its dialogue sounds unexpectedly familiar if you know “Hello, Dolly!” — the 1964 blockbuster built on its bones. Lines that the songwriter Jerry Herman turned into lyrics, barely having to alter a word, keep popping up in Wilder’s script like old friends at a crowded party.“I am a woman who arranges things,” says Dolly Levi, the good-hearted widow who’s up in everyone’s business. “Go and get your Sunday clothes on,” says Cornelius Hackl, the 38-year-old Yonkers clerk who devises a plan for adventure in New York City. “This summer we’ll be wearing ribbons down our backs,” says Irene Molloy, the milliner he falls in love with there.But even beyond the spark of recognition that has you humming along with the script, “The Matchmaker,” now enjoying a fine revival at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, N.Y., is a musical lover’s delight, besotted with song. Wilder frequently calls for his characters to sing and dance to popular favorites of the period, roughly the 1880s. “The Sidewalks of New York,” the “Les Patineurs” waltz and others decorate and turn the plot while also dramatizing the play’s central theme: the necessity of engaging in the culture of one’s time.This production, directed with high spirits by Davis McCallum, ups the musical ante. Beneath the festival’s open-sided tent in a dell on the grounds of a former golf course, a three-piece band (fiddle, banjo, accordion) plays on a platform above the action. The Hudson Valley setting is neatly invoked at the start by a poem Wilder wrote for “The Merchant of Yonkers” — a “Matchmaker” predecessor — set charmingly to music by Alex Bechtel. “The Map of New York,” another Bechtel song, is the aural equivalent of sepia rotogravure.But the play is hardly old-fashioned — or to put it another way, it’s eternal. (Wilder, the author of “Our Town,” is always interested in the eternities.) No surprise there; the story has a provenance going back via England and Germany to the Greeks and Romans. Dolly (Nance Williamson, looking a bit like Bette Midler) is a jollier version of the parasite character of ancient comedy, who through flattery and persistence attains a place at the rich man’s table. In this case, the rich man is Horace Vandergelder (Kurt Rhoads), a Yonkers merchant whose half-million dollars, hoarded and fondled but otherwise never touched, do nothing for the world.Though Dolly finagles to land Vandergelder and cure his miserliness, you understand from the start that she is not meddling merely for her own gain. She also seeks to match the impoverished Cornelius (Carl Howell) to the widowed Irene (Helen Cespedes), and to marry Vandergelder’s niece (Anvita Gattani) to a painter (Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook) whom the blowhard merchant derides as unpromising. (“You artists produce something nobody needs at any time,” he thunders.) If Dolly must bend the truth to reach these ends — she invents a young woman named Ernestina Simple, then makes her disappear opportunely — she does so in part, as she explains with good cheer, because life should be exciting and people must live in it.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: Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita’ for the Masses

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      The actress is making her West End debut in Jamie Lloyd’s latest take on an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.“She’s a diamond in their dull gray lives,” sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in “Evita,” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband’s government, and “Evita” expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler (“Snow White” and “West Side Story”), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)The show begins and ends with Evita’s death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, “Don’t you just love the smack of firm government?” (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)Diego Andres Rodriguez as Che, Zegler, center, and James Olivas as Juan Perón. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.Marc BrennerEvita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd’s decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show’s signature tune, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” on the theater’s exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.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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      The Best Theater Moments of 2025, So Far

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      Our critic picked 10 moments that tapped into a range of emotions, often all at once.The theater is more than the sum of its parts; it is also the parts themselves. As I began to look back at the first half of 2025, I found myself primarily recalling those parts: the scene, not the script; the props, not the production. Here are 10 such moments, some sad, some funny, some furious, most all at once.Audra’s Turn at the Tonys“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock number to end them all, is often described as a nervous breakdown in song. It was certainly that when I first saw Audra McDonald slay it in the current Broadway revival of “Gypsy.” But by the time she performed it on the Tony Awards months later, it was no longer just a personal crisis: a mother grieving the lost opportunities her daughter now enjoys. The lyric “Somebody tell me, when is it my turn?” now rang out with greater depth and anger as McDonald, the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway, invoked the lost opportunities of generations of talented Black women behind her.Read our review of “Gypsy” and our feature about “Rose’s Turn.”A Multiplicity of GreenspansDavid Greenspan as an impeccably dressed palace publicist in Jordan Tannahill’s play at Playwrights Horizons. The actor takes on multiple roles in the production, each meticulously specific.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThough he was the subject of the recent Off Broadway play “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” most people don’t. Nor will Greenspan’s astonishing quadruple performance in the Off Broadway production of “Prince Faggot,” Jordan Tannahill’s shocker about a gay heir to the British throne, help pin him down: He’s that shape-shifty. A bossy palace publicist, a discreet royal servant, even the possibly gay Edward II are among his perfectly etched characters. And the monologue in which he supposedly plays himself? Indescribable (at least here).Read our review of the play.A Face and a Name to RememberNow it can be told. In the Broadway show “Smash,” based on the television melodrama about a Marilyn Monroe musical, the big number (“Let Me Be Your Star”) was deeply undersold in the opening scene. That was a marvelous feint because, at the end of Act I, to bring the curtain down with a huge surprise bang, out came Bella Coppola, as a suddenly promoted assistant choreographer, performing the same song when no one else could. Can you oversell something? Turns out, no.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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      André Bishop Takes a Bow After Hundreds of Shows at Lincoln Center Theater

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      He is moving on from 33 years at Lincoln Center Theater and will head to Rome to focus on his memoirs.André Bishop, the longtime producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, could have chosen almost anything for the final Broadway production of his tenure. He’s known for Golden Age musicals, and has a long history with new plays. But he opted to exit with “Floyd Collins,” a dark and tragic 1996 musical about a trapped cave explorer.Why would anyone select that as their swan song?“I just thought it’s the kind of serious musical that I want to go out on, because everything in it is something that I believe, in terms of the musical theater,” he told me in an interview last week at his nearly empty office — nearly empty because he’s been giving away his theater memorabilia after deciding he didn’t want his home to turn into a museum. He donated his archives — 174 cartons of papers, photos and notebooks — to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, his alma mater.“Now there would be some people who say, ‘Why do you have to do all these sad shows? Why can’t you do something toe-tapping?’ Well, that’s just not my nature,” he said. “I felt that Floyd’s looking for a perfect cave was very close to mine looking for a perfect theater — that somehow these theaters that I’ve worked in for 50 years were these perfect caves that I happened to stumble on.”Jason Gotay, in the background, and Jeremy Jordan in “Floyd Collins” at Lincoln Center Theater. “It’s the kind of serious musical that I want to go out on, because everything in it is something that I believe, in terms of the musical theater,” Bishop said.Richard Termine for The New York TimesBishop, 76, has spent the last 33 years running Lincoln Center Theater, which has a $50 million annual budget, 22,000 members, 65 full-time employees, two Off Broadway stages, and one Broadway house (the Vivian Beaumont). He programmed over 150 plays and musicals, 15 of which won Tony Awards, and then announced in 2023 that he would retire this summer; Monday was his last day on the job, and he is being succeeded by Lear deBessonet, the artistic director of the Encores! program at City Center.His departure is part of a wave of change at Broadway’s nonprofits; all four of the nonprofits with Broadway houses are naming successors for artistic leaders with decades-long tenures.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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      In Three Off Broadway Shows, They’re Coming Out and Out and Out

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      Several recent productions have featured a range of L.G.B.T.Q. stories, from strained familial relationships to self-discovery via Disney cosplay.For decades, describing a boy or a man as “artistic” was a way to imply they did not fit the accepted heterosexual mold. Of course the expression’s double meaning could be literal, as illustrated by recent coming-of-age shows in which the narrators are both gay and, well, artistic. (As for lesbians, they have long been called “handy” — bring on the tool belts.)Douglas Lyons and Ethan D. Pakchar’s “Beau the Musical” follows many of the conventional signposts of the “growing up different” genre. As a 27-year-old, Ace (Matt Rodin) revisits his middle and then high school years, when he navigated an affair with his bully, Ferris (Cory Jeacoma); figured out how to better understand his mother, Raven (Amelia Cormack); and reconnected with a once-estranged grandfather, Beau (Chris Blisset), who had secrets of his own.Josh Rhodes’s production for Out of the Box Theatrics, through July 27 at Theater 154 in Manhattan, goes how you’d expect a story involving same-sex attraction in Tennessee to go: clandestine trysts, self-loathing, violent encounters, art (in this case music) as an outlet and escape. This is well-trod terrain, but Lyons has a flair for recycling tropes, as he did in his popular comedy “Chicken and Biscuits.” And Rodin, who played a gay teacher in the musical “All the World’s a Stage” this spring, gives a warm portrayal of someone trying to find his place through music-making.The bulk of “Beau the Musical” takes place over the late 1990s and early 2000s, while Rob Madge’s autobiographical “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” largely looks back at events from the 2000s and 2010s, when Madge, who identifies as nonbinary, was growing up. The shows’ time frames overlap somewhat, but the experiences they depict are starkly different.A British production that had a five-performance run at New York City Center in June, “My Son’s a Queer” is a portrait of a child who was unconditionally loved and accepted, even when bossing their father around in a D.I.Y. Disney tribute — which we see because the Madges were fond of making home videos. Everybody in the family supported young Rob’s artistic-ness, both literal and euphemistic: Granny Grimble made them a Maleficent costume, and when problems erupted at school (“not the best of times,” the adult Rob says in a rare display of understatement), their mother took a job as a “lunch lady” to keep watch.Madge revisits those years with unflagging, if solipsistic, brightness — the young Rob often asks their parents, “Are you filming?” and a robust ego seems to have been a constant. The downside is that the City Center performance I saw did not always bear out Madge’s confidence in their talent, with performances of original songs (written with Pippa Cleary) that rarely rose above adequate.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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      How Lisa Laurén’s Artsy Childhood Inspires Her Sought-After Animal Heads

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      When Lisa Laurén gets a request for an animal costume head, she said, “it’s kind of like I’m going on a play date.”Using her imagination, resources and hands, Laurén crafts animal heads that are vivid, colorful and eye-catching.“I’m trying to condense somebody else’s dream and make it into something,” Laurén said from the kitchen of her high-ceilinged apartment on a leafy street near the Spree River in Berlin. A clay fox head covered tightly with foil stood on a large tray, awaiting its next phase of creation.The animal heads are an offshoot of Laurén’s main job as a freelance textile artist, a role that includes painting backdrops for staged productions and helping develop costumes for television, film and theater. She has worked for an array of clients including Netflix, Apple TV+, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Tate Museum in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.Lisa Laurén, a textile designer, creates imaginative animal heads for performers. “I’m trying to condense somebody else’s dream and make it into something.” Laurén has been making animal costume heads for theater, opera and artistic performances since 2011, when the Komische Oper Berlin commissioned her and a close collaborator, Benjamin Tyrrell, to make a set for a staging of Leos Janacek’s 1923 opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen,” in which many characters are forest animals.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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      Taraji P. Henson to Make Broadway Debut in August Wilson Play

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      The actress will star opposite Cedric the Entertainer in a revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” next spring.Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer have signed on to co-star in a revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” on Broadway next spring.The production — the play’s third on Broadway since 1988 — will be directed by Debbie Allen.“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is a part of Wilson’s Century Cycle, which chronicles Black life in America with one play set in each decade of the 20th century. “Joe Turner” is set in 1911; like most of the plays, it takes place in Pittsburgh.The drama is set in a boardinghouse peopled by migrants from the rural South who are searching, suffering and spiritual. Henson and Cedric will play the couple, Bertha and Seth Holly, who run the boardinghouse.Henson studied theater at Howard University, but her career has been spent in film (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and television (“Empire”). This will be her Broadway debut as an actor; she was credited as among the producers of a 2023 Broadway play, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”Cedric, a comedian who has also worked on television (“The Neighborhood”), has one previous Broadway credit; he starred in a very short-lived 2008 revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.”Allen, best known as a performer and choreographer, has one previous directing credit on Broadway — she directed a 2008 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The “Joe Turner” revival is being produced by Brian Moreland, who previously produced a 2022 revival of Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” as well as last season’s production of “Othello.”Moreland said in a statement that the show would open next spring at an unspecified Shubert theater; the rest of the cast has not yet been announced. More

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      Review: A New ‘Wrinkle in Time’ Needs to Iron Out Some Problems

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      Despite a gorgeous score and some fine performances, the musical adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle classic gets trapped in a time loop.Heather Christian, whose mind-blowing, multidimensional music seems to arrive from a studio deep in the universe, was the obvious and thrilling choice to compose the score for a stage adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” After all, the 1962 Madeleine L’Engle novel that the show is based on, a classic of both children’s literature and science fiction, is about a girl’s adventures in hyperspace, and Christian, in works including “Oratorio for Living Things” and “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” gives the distinct impression of having made such journeys herself. Certainly she has brought back riches from the far reaches of her ear that few other theater composers would dare to imagine.She does so again with “A Wrinkle in Time,” providing an exhaustingly beautiful score for a show, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, that is otherwise just exhausting. Playing at the Arena Stage in Washington through July 20, and filled with wonders, it features some first-rate performances from a vocally splendid cast but is far too overloaded and unvaried to fulfill its promise.That may be a problem built into the rich underlying material. (Other adapters, notably the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, have not done it justice either.) L’Engle’s plot about Meg Murry’s trek through space to rescue her father is complicated enough, with its witchlike trio of spiritual guides, its good and evil planets and its time warps called tesseracts. But it is much more than that: It is a moral bildungsroman, as Meg, encountering the worst of the world, must mature enough to confront it.The musical’s book, by the playwright Lauren Yee, is faithful to a fault. As in the L’Engle, Meg (Taylor Iman Jones) is an angry and disaffected seventh grader; she is often in trouble at school, especially in math class, for refusing to “show her work.” Two years since her father’s disappearance, she and her brother, Charles Wallace, an intense little genius, have formed a closed circle of support and empathy under the loving eye of their stalwart mother. It takes some daring on Meg’s part merely to allow the circle to open enough to admit one newcomer: a popular boy from school, Calvin O’Keefe.From left, Amber Gray (Mrs. Whatsit), Stacey Sargeant (Mrs. Who) and Vicki Lewis (Mrs. Which).DJ CoreyThere the story might have stalled out as a middle school romance were it not for the arrival of the three witches: Mrs. Whatsit (Amber Gray), Mrs. Which (Vicki Lewis) and Mrs. Who (Stacey Sargeant). It is they who explain how the opportunities of the tesseract might be exploited as a shortcut to finding Mr. Murry in the vast space-time of the universe. The rest of the show is concerned with the search, as the three children “tesser” repeatedly, along the way confronting a force called It that threatens to seduce the world into a coma of complacency.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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      Jordan Roth, a Broadway Big Shot, Is Now Reinventing Himself

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      Jordan Roth, the scion of a New York real estate fortune, a convention-challenging fashionista and a social media habitué, spent 15 years as a Broadway macher, running one of the big three theater landlords. He programmed hits like “The Book of Mormon” and “Hadestown,” nurtured plays and musicals in development, and joined the theater industry’s inner circle at its cloistered confabs, all the while showing up at openings in increasingly fabulous couture.But it’s fairly obvious to anyone watching Roth’s evolving public persona that he’s been looking for a new adventure.He has sold most of his stake in Jujamcyn, the company through which he owned five Broadway theaters, and he has dialed back his theater producing.Jordan Roth rehearsing what he’s calling a “narrative fashion performance” in a black box studio in Brooklyn.Now he is moving on to a different stage, combining his love of fashion, his hunger to perform, and his taste for storytelling. He is pursuing “narrative fashion performance,” and he plans a debut on July 10 at the Louvre in Paris.“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.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