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      Idina Menzel Played Elphaba and Elsa. Now She’s Back on Broadway.

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      Menzel, a fan favorite since “Rent,” is back on Broadway in “Redwood,” and this time she’s climbing conifers.Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryNo matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.Menzel had her breakout role in “Rent,” top left, and then won a Tony in “Wicked,” top right. Her other stage roles have included the Off Broadway play “Skintight,” bottom right, and the Broadway musical “If/Then,” bottom left.Photographs by 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

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      Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof’

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      In a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, a woman rehearses how she would escape her building if Israeli forces were to strike.There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israel Defense Forces attacked it.“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.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 Kara Young, a Tony-Winning Actress, Spends Her Sundays

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      Kara Young spends a rare day off brunching with her family in Harlem and popping into beauty supply stores along 125th Street.Many actors have to leave their support systems behind when they set out to follow their Broadway dreams.But Kara Young, a Tony Award-winning actress who grew up on the west side of Harlem — and lives just three blocks from where she was born — has been able to share her success with the community that raised her.Ms. Young, whose parents immigrated from Belize, attended elementary school and high school in Spanish Harlem, the neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan known for its Puerto Rican culture. “It’s a super beautiful community,” she said.“But at the same time,” she added, “I recognize that I’ve been privileged to be able to stay in the community I grew up in. Gentrification is real.”It was at the 92nd Street Y, she said, that she first became hooked on theater. Her older brother, Klay, was taking a mime class as part of an after-school program — and a 5-year-old Ms. Young knew she wanted in.Soon she was performing with the other students around Manhattan, and “that set off my imagination,” she said.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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      Jimmy Fallon Makes His Broadway Debut in “All In”

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      The “Tonight Show” host is performing in the new comedy “All In,” which features a starry cast. “It’s a dream,” he said.Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night. “It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”Fallon, backstage with one of his co-stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda.Graham Dickie/The New York Times“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.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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      Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

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      The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe 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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      Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

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      Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.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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      Book Review: ‘Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,’ by Michael Owen

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      In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words, by Michael OwenThe lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.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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      At Opening Night at La Scala, Opera Is the Center of the Universe

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      Television reporters stood shoulder to shoulder delivering breathless, minute-by-minute commentary, part of a pack of more than 120 journalists from 10 countries.Celebrities, politicians and titans of industry walked the red carpet past paparazzi and officers standing sentry with capes, sashes, swords and plumed hats.Outside, protesters used firecrackers, smoke bombs and even manure as they sought to seize on the occasion to draw attention to a variety of causes.It was not a global summit, a Hollywood premiere or a royal procession. It was the start of the new opera season at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Opera may be starved for attention in much of the world. But at La Scala, the storied theater that gave world premieres of works by Donizetti, Puccini, Rossini and Verdi, opera can still feel like the center of the cultural universe. It remains a matter of national pride and patrimony, a political football and an obsession for devoted fans.“This is sacred for us,” said the critic Alberto Mattioli, who writes for La Stampa, an Italian newspaper. “Opera is our religion.”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