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    Ian McKellen Has Clapped Back at Critics. Now He’s Playing One.

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    In the new film “The Critic,” he plays the titular acid-tongued reviewer in 1930s Britain, who is terrified of being outed as gay.In Anand Tucker’s new film “The Critic,” Ian McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a closeted reviewer in 1930s Britain who covers theater with equal measures of wit and acid. “Despite her crimes against the theater, she was sensationally gorgeous when drunk,” Jimmy writes of a young actress portrayed by Gemma Arterton.Naturally, McKellen luxuriates in such lines. When the screenwriter Patrick Marber (“Notes on a Scandal,” “Closer”) sent the actor the script, he said, “‘This is the best part I’ve ever written for anybody,’” McKellen recalled. “Well, I didn’t want to appear to be rude by not doing it.”At 85, the actor is not slowing down, and continues to test himself by playing unlikely roles (just four years ago he was a rather mature Hamlet in London) and collaborating with directors like Robert Icke. Only a recent accident temporarily set the actor off course: In June he fell off the stage during a fight scene in “Player Kings,” Icke’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” diptych, in which McKellen played John Falstaff.“The Critic,” which comes to theaters Friday, was shot over five weeks. “The budget was very small for what we were trying to achieve, Ian was 83, it was really hard,” Tucker, the film’s director, said. “But he was just on it — and he’s in almost everything.”McKellen with Gemma Arterton, who plays Nina Land, a young actress who is often panned in Jimmy Erskine’s reviews.Sean Gleason/Greenwich EntertainmentThis could also describe McKellen’s decades-spanning career: He has been in almost every kind of production — fantasy blockbusters like the “Lord of the Rings” films, onstage in plays by Shakespeare and Beckett and in drag as the dame in the beloved British holiday tradition known as pantomime.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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      ‘Counting and Cracking’ Review: One Family’s Tale Fit for an Epic

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      No theatrical wizardry is needed for this compelling drama about a woman’s journey to Australia from war-torn Sri Lanka and the generations that follow.Some shows use an extended running time to challenge the audience and its perceptions. Pulling viewers into a trance state and testing their endurance is the ultimate artistic gambit.Then there are the shows that are long simply because they have a lot to tell.Such is the case with “Counting and Cracking,” which fills its three and a half hours with an absorbing tale of family ties and national strife, from Sri Lanka to Australia, across almost five decades. When the first of two intermissions arrived, I had barely recovered from a head-spinning plot twist. And the production, which is at N.Y.U. Skirball in partnership with the Public Theater, had more in store. It’s that kind of good yarn.Written by S. Shakthidharan, who drew from his own family history and is also credited with associate direction, “Counting and Cracking” starts in 2004 Sydney. The show opens with Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera) briskly instructing her son, the 21-year-old Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar), to disperse his grandmother’s ashes in the Georges River, and then immerse himself in the water, as required by tradition.“In Tamil we don’t say goodbye,” Radha tells Siddhartha. “Only, I will go and come back.”As the show progresses, we gradually realize what these words really mean to her, and to her family and community. In 1983, when she was pregnant and living in her home country of Sri Lanka, Radha was told that her husband, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), had been killed in the budding civil war between the minority Tamil and the majority Sinhala. She fled the violence and settled in Australia, where she gave birth to a child who would grow up largely unaware of his heritage.At a steady clip, Shakthidharan and the director Eamon Flack (also credited with associate writing) hopscotch between Sydney and Sri Lanka, from the 1950s — when the South Asian nation was still known as Ceylon — to the 1980s and 2000s and back again. Even the language is in constant movement as the 16 actors juggle English, Sinhala and Tamil, providing instant translation when necessary.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: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Clean Up in ‘The Roommate’

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      A Bronx grifter and an Iowa homebody share a house and eventually learn from each other in this Broadway star vehicle.“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, parroting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robyn.A ditsy 65-year-old divorcée, Sharon is a convert to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which options for growth seemed few.But Robyn, who encouraged the experimentation from the minute she arrived to rent a room in Sharon’s Iowa City home, is alarmed by the change from meek to monster. A plate of pot brownies for the book club ladies is one thing; larceny is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” she warns, “are two different activities.”Because Robyn is played by the surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not especially amusing in itself, gets a big laugh. And because Sharon is played by the preternaturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither evokes a sigh.Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth.But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.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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      ‘Why Am I So Single?’ Review: After ‘Six,’ a Scrappy, Sappy Dating Musical

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      The duo behind the Broadway hit follow it up with a meta reflection on finding love online that is relatable and fun but lacking narrative drive.In London’s West End, two lonely singles are feeling sorry for themselves. Nancy (Leesa Tulley) and her gay, nonbinary best friend, Oliver (Jo Foster), conduct a two-hour inquest into their romantic failures while quaffing cheap bubbly on a peach-colored couch. At the same time, they bat around an idea for a musical based on these travails, which — you guessed it — turns out to be the musical we’re watching.“Why Am I So Single?” is written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, the duo behind “Six,” the breakout hit feminist musical about Henry VIII’s wives. Running at the Garrick Theater through Feb. 13, 2025, this unabashedly crowd-pleasing — though ultimately somewhat vacuous — show goes all in on relatability and schmaltz, carrying a peppy message about friendship and self-care.The songs unpack the modern dating experience in a mélange of familiar rock and pop styles. “C U Never” is a catchy tap number about the importance of not getting too hung up on people who ghost you. During “Meet Market,” several members of the supporting cast are wheeled around in pink shopping carts to symbolize the transactional nature of online dating. “Disco Ball” is about being the life of the party while feeling lonely inside, and “Men R Trash” is self-explanatory.In “I Got Off the Plane’” Nancy and Oliver lament their love-hate relationship with the sitcom “Friends,” which they blame for popularizing an unrealistic and heteronormative view of romance — whereupon members of the supporting cast take to the stage in Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer wigs and urge the pair to get over themselves.The show, directed by Moss, has the chaotic, playful energy of a student revue, with lots of amusingly forced rhymes, tenuous puns and self-aware jokes about the metafictional conceit (“Twist my arm and call me expositional”; “before we rebuild the fourth wall …”). There is a heavy reliance on bathos that borders on the formulaic: Whenever characters pour their hearts out in song, another will immediately say something dismissive. After Nancy sings a tender ballad about her dead father — the only genuinely moving song in the show — Oliver quips, “So what you’re saying is, it was the daddy issues after all?”Leesa Tulley, center, as Nancy.Matt CrockettWe 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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      Shaw Festival Presents ‘The Orphan of Chao’ and ‘Snow in Midsummer’

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      By presenting “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer,” the Shaw Festival is helping “the past to smash its way into the modern world.”For 35 years, the Shaw Festival had one central criterion for its programming: Any and all plays had to have been written during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime.This is not as confining as it sounds. Shaw, after all, was born in 1856 — when Abraham Lincoln was still an Illinois lawyer — and died a few months after Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” hit the comics pages in 1950.Nonetheless, two of the festival’s nine productions this season fall well before that time period. “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer” are adaptations of perhaps the two best-known plays from the Yuan period of classical Chinese drama, which stretched from 1279 to 1368.“To twin ‘Orphan’ with ‘Snow’ gives our audience the chance to see two very different approaches to legendary material,” said Tim Carroll, the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. “Both pieces, in very different ways, allow the past to smash its way into the modern world.”At the center of this confluence is Nina Lee Aquino, one of the most significant figures in Canadian theater. The festival not only enlisted Aquino to direct “Snow” (her debut there), but also cast her husband, Richard Lee, an actor and fight director, and their 17-year-old actress daughter, Eponine Lee, in both plays.The director Nina Lee Aquino, center, with her husband, Richard Lee, and their daughter, Eponine.Katie GalvinWe 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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      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Musical Plans Broadway Bow Next Year

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      The show, adapted from the play and movie, was first staged last winter at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.A musical adaptation of “Real Women Have Curves,” Josefina López’s exploration of immigrant experiences through the story of a group of Latina women working at a Los Angeles garment factory, will run on Broadway next year, the show’s producers said Thursday.The story began its life as a play, which had an initial production in San Francisco in 1990, and has been staged many times since. In 2002, a film adaptation was released, starring America Ferrera.Directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, the musical was first staged last December and January at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It features music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez and a book by Lisa Loomer, with additional material by Nell Benjamin.The musical is set in 1987 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, and focuses on an 18-year-old woman who is torn between staying home to work at the family factory and relocating to New York to enroll at Columbia. In addition to its immigration theme, the show also deals with body image issues.The critic Don Aucoin, writing in The Boston Globe, called the show “outstanding,” but Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times, was less impressed, deeming it “ungainly.”The Broadway run is being produced by Barry and Fran Weissler, the lead producers of the long-running Broadway “Chicago” revival, along with the actor Jack Noseworthy, who is married to Trujillo. In a news release, the producers said the play would open on Broadway in 2025; they did not specify whether it would be during the current Tony Awards eligibility season, which ends in April, or the following season, and a spokeswoman said no further information was available.The musical is being capitalized for $16.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      Wendell Pierce and Courtney B. Vance on James Earl Jones’s Influence

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      The two actors talk about how the stage and screen great was a one-of-a-kind inspiration to them, and many others.James Earl Jones had already made a lifetime impression on Wendell Pierce by the time Pierce patiently waited in a receiving line to meet Jones after his opening night performance of August Wilson’s “Fences” nearly 40 years ago.Years earlier, Jones had mesmerized Pierce in the 1970 film “The Great White Hope,” embodying integrity, creativity and dignity in the role of the boxer Jack Jefferson. The performance inspired a teenage Pierce as he began his studies at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. That, he decided, was the type of actor he yearned to be.Pierce told Jones of his impact. “Are you an actor?” Pierce recalled Jones asking in his barreling baritone of a voice. Delighted to learn that he was, Jones discussed how he enjoyed the night, but was glad it was over. There was shared energy between the actors and audience except the hole where the critics sat stoic and unmoved. They wouldn’t be there after opening night.“Now that it’s over, there won’t be that hole there,” Jones said. “People can just respond to the play. That’s the great thing about doing theater. It’s that energy between the audience and the performance. Don’t you find that?”It’s a moment Pierce cherishes after carving his own impactful career by starring in television shows like “The Wire” and “Treme” and on Broadway in “Death of a Salesman.”“I knew I was part of a collective whole of the people who had seen it that would have this unique, seminal experience that would be something that you had to be there to see,” Pierce said. “And I feel privileged that I was a part of that very few, especially in theater performances with Mr. Jones, that got to see 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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      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Are Star Crossed in Central Park

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      On a morning in mid-August, a breeze stirred Central Park’s midsummer leaves. Children skipped, dogs lolloped, a bunny peeked out from a hedge near the Great Lawn while a nearby saxophone ruined “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was a very nice day to fall in love.The actors Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler were there, hiking up to Belvedere Castle and then down to the Shakespeare Garden. Connor, 20, and Zegler, 23, don’t plan to fall in love. But the next day, at rehearsal, in Brooklyn they would discover how to make the characters they play fall desperately, terribly in love.As the stars of the “Romeo + Juliet” that opens on Broadway on Oct. 24, they will die for love, they will die for each other, eight times a week. Both are making their Broadway debuts and both have the not exactly enviable task of making a 16th-century play with (apologies for centuries-old spoilers) a famously grim ending feel breath-catchingly new and vital.Daunting? Not at all.“It should be fun,” Connor said, not without some anxiety. Zegler gave him a sardonic look. “It will be fun,” he said. Connor, a British star of the Netflix teen romance “Heartstopper,” and Zegler, an American who made a thrilling film debut in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” had never met until March, shortly after they each agreed to star in the revival, dreamed up by the Tony-winning director Sam Gold, with music by Jack Antonoff. They had been offered the roles separately, without the benefit of a chemistry read. That spring day, Gold brought them to Circle in the Square Theater, where previews will start Sept. 26, then bought them cups of coffee at the Cosmic Diner.Kit Connor, right, on the Netflix series “Heartstopper” opposite Joe Locke.Teddy Cavendish/NetflixWe 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