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      Dozens of Festival Plays Worth Traveling to This Summer

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      Across the country, you’ll find Shakespeare in amphitheaters, exciting new works on intimate stages and many regional repertories in bucolic settings.In and Around New YorkJust off Manhattan, a full-to-bursting open-air season is already underway at Little Island (through Sept. 28), a park in the Hudson River that looks from afar as if it was built atop a giant’s stash of stiletto heels. Highlights include Kate Tarker and Dan Schlosberg’s “The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter’s City” (through June 15); Sarah Gancher’s bluegrass re-envisioning of “Eugene Onegin,” directed by Rachel Chavkin (July 30-31); and “The Tune Up,” a music-filled evening of new work by Suzan-Lori Parks (July 30-Aug. 3).And at the newly renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park, Shakespeare in the Park makes a glittery return with Saheem Ali’s production of “Twelfth Night” (Aug. 7-Sept. 14), starring Lupita Nyong’o as Viola, Sandra Oh as Olivia, Peter Dinklage as Malvolio, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Maria and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Andrew Aguecheek.Amid the hive of theater development that is Poughkeepsie in summertime, New York Stage and Film’s dozen public performances at Marist College (July 11-Aug. 3) include new works by Donja R. Love, Carly Mensch, Hansol Jung, Kirsten Greenidge and John Patrick Shanley, while a reading of Drew Gasparini and Alex Brightman’s musical “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” is part of the Powerhouse Theater season (June 20-July 27) at nearby Vassar College. In Garrison, under the tent at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, “The Comedy of Errors” (June 6-Aug. 2) plays in rep with Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” (June 8-Aug. 3), followed by Dave Malloy’s chamber musical “Octet” (Aug. 11-Sept. 7).The Pennsylvania ShakespeareFestival, about an hour north of Philadelphia, takes an expansive approach to the Bard. You can see “Hamlet” (July 9-Aug. 3) and its Tom Stoppard spinoff, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” (July 17-Aug. 2). Iambic pentameter not your jam? You can also catch the musical “The Producers” (June 11-29) or the Lorraine Hansberry play “A Raisin in the Sun” (June 25-July 13). Now that’s range.Shakespeare & Company’s outdoor stage is in bucolic Lenox, Mass.Nile Scott StudiosNortheastWestern Massachusetts is a travel destination for the Berkshires’ hilly beauty and for the summer seasons of its established theaters, including Barrington Stage Company (June 3-Oct. 12), in downtown Pittsfield; Shakespeare & Company (June 19-Oct. 12), in bucolic Lenox; and Berkshire Theater Group (through Oct. 26), in both Pittsfield and Stockbridge.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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      ‘This House’: An Intimate, Intergenerational Opera Is Also a Family Affair

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      Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage tell the story of three generations in a Harlem home. Enter a second Nottage generation, her daughter, on the creative team.During the Covid pandemic, lockdowns made our homes seem like leading characters in our daily lives; those familiar confines became as much a presence in our experiences as any living creature. For the creative trio of the composer Ricky Ian Gordon and the librettists Lynn Nottage and Ruby Aiyo Gerber, that experience fueled “This House,” a new opera having its world premiere on Saturday at the Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs through June 29.)This project reunites Nottage and Gordon, who previously worked together on the chamber opera “Intimate Apparel,” a Metropolitan Opera commission that ran at the Lincoln Center Theater in 2022 after a pandemic delay.Gordon and Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, found they had a deep rapport. “The hardest thing when you’re collaborating is when you see different things,” Nottage said in a Zoom interview with the three creators. “I’ve been in collaborations where I see red, and then I realize, ‘Oh, my collaborator sees blue.’ So then how do we get to purple? That was not the case with Ricky. We had a shared vocabulary.”That common language expanded with the addition of a second librettist: Gerber, Nottage’s daughter, a writer and multimedia artist. The mother-daughter pairing seems particularly suited to “This House,” which explores the bonds and struggles of three generations of the Walker family in Harlem.(This House) ((Brad Bickhardt (Glenn) and Briana Hunter (Zoe) )))Eric WoolseyJustin Austin, left, and Kearstin Piper Brown in Gordon and Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.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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      Willem Dafoe Returns to His Stage Roots at the Venice Theater Biennale

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      Willem Dafoe is returning to his roots. While his distinctive, chiseled features are instantly recognizable from over 150 movie roles, Dafoe, 69, actually got his start in experimental theater. In 1980, he co-founded the New York City-based company the Wooster Group, and performed with it for more than 20 years.Now, he is taking on the role of a curator. Last year, Dafoe was announced as the artistic director of the 2025 and 2026 editions of the Venice Theater Biennale, one of several festivals that began life as offshoots of the Art Biennale. (The theater event is actually an annual fixture.)And there will be familiar faces around Dafoe at this year’s edition, which opens Saturday and runs through June 16. Dafoe is paying tribute to some avant-garde theater companies that shaped him and were prominent 50 years ago at the 1975 edition of the festival, with productions from Denmark’s Odin Teatret and Thomas Richards, formerly of Workcenter Grotowski. The Wooster Group’s longtime director (and Dafoe’s ex-life partner), Elizabeth LeCompte, will receive the event’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.Under the tagline “Theater Is Body. Body Is Poetry,” the Theater Biennale will also welcome a mix of European directors whom Dafoe described in a recent video interview as “modern maestros” — including Romeo Castellucci, and Milo Rau — as well as emerging artists. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did this appointment come about? Did Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Venice Biennales, reach out personally?Yes. I knew him a little bit: He was a very good friend of a dear friend of mine. I knew he wanted to talk to me, and it was the simplest of phone calls. I was very happy to accept.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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      Lea Michele Returns to Broadway in ‘Chess’

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      The “Glee” star will join Aaron Tveit and Nicholas Christopher next fall in a Broadway revival of an Abba-adjacent Cold War musical.The 1980s musical “Chess,” about a love triangle set in the geopolitically charged world of top-level chess tournaments at the height of the Cold War, will be revived on Broadway for the first time this fall, with Lea Michele playing one of the three starring roles.Michele was last on Broadway in 2023 in “Funny Girl,” whose fortunes she revived after stepping in as a replacement when the initial lead wasn’t working out. Best known for portraying an ambitious musical theater actress on the television series “Glee,” Michele will star in “Chess” alongside Aaron Tveit (a Tony winner for “Moulin Rouge! The Musical”) and Nicholas Christopher (a “Hamilton” alumnus who recently thrilled critics in an Encores! production of “Jelly’s Last Jam”).The show is the brainchild and passion project of Tim Rice, the Tony-winning lyricist of “Evita” and “Aida.” Rice collaborated with Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba on the music and lyrics.The revival was announced Wednesday, but the announcement did not include specific dates or the exact theater — only that it would be staged in the fall at a theater operated by the Shubert Organization. The lead producers will be Tom Hulce, Robert Ahrens and the Shubert Organization.“Chess,” set primarily in Bangkok and Budapest, tells a fictional story about two grandmasters, one American (Tveit) and one Soviet (Christopher), facing off at a chess tournament, joined by a woman (Michele) whom both of them, at various points, love.The musical, first staged in London in 1986 and then heavily revised for a Broadway production in 1988, has an ardent fan base, but the Broadway production was a flop, and the show has been reworked for subsequent stagings around the world.This fall’s production features another new book, by the screenwriter Danny Strong. The show will be directed by Michael Mayer, who directed Michele both in her breakout Broadway role, in “Spring Awakening,” and in “Funny Girl.”Mayer and Strong, working with Rice, have been rethinking “Chess” for some time — they collaborated on a 2018 concert presentation of the musical at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. More

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      The Patti LuPone Drama With Audra McDonald and Kecia Lewis, Explained

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      The offstage tensions between three Broadway stars became public after a dispute over sound levels, an Instagram post and a much-talked-about magazine article.Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald are two of the biggest Broadway stars of recent decades. So when LuPone pointedly referred to McDonald as “not a friend” in a new interview with The New Yorker, it caused quite a stir.LuPone made the comment when she was asked about some supportive emojis McDonald added last November to a social media post by another Broadway star, Kecia Lewis. Lewis had accused LuPone of being “racially microaggressive” after she objected to the sound levels at her Broadway show.Here’s what we know.It began with a Broadway noise dispute.When LuPone was on Broadway last year, starring with Mia Farrow in a play called “The Roommate,” she grew concerned about sounds audible from the Alicia Keys musical playing next door, “Hell’s Kitchen.” Noise is a frequent phenomenon on Broadway, and is especially noticeable at plays, where the sound levels tend to be lower than at musicals. LuPone said that she asked for help from the Shubert Organization, which operates the theaters, and that it was taken care of.Kecia Lewis, who won a Tony Award for playing a piano teacher in “Hell’s Kitchen,” posted an Instagram video in November criticizing LuPone’s actions. In what she called an “open letter” about LuPone’s complaints about the musical’s noise levels, she said, “These actions, in my opinion, are bullying, they’re offensive, they are racially microaggressive, they’re rude, they’re rooted in privilege.”She added: “Referring to a predominantly Black Broadway show as loud can unintentionally reinforce harmful stereotypes.”What does that have to do with McDonald?McDonald, a founding member of Black Theater United, a coalition formed to combat racism in the theater world, added supportive emojis to Lewis’s Instagram post. While comments on the post appear to have been removed, People magazine reported at the time that McDonald “simply commented with a series of emojis, writing: ‘❤️❤️👏🏾👏🏾’. ”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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      Her Books and Movies Provoked France. Will Her Plays Do the Same?

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      Virginie Despentes is pivoting to theater. Playgoers “really show up, even for demanding or radical works,” she says.Over the past three decades, Virginie Despentes has cemented her place as one of the most admired — and argued over — feminist authors in France. “King Kong Theory,” her 2006 book about sex, gender and her own experience of rape, sparked conversations around sexual violence in the country; her award-winning “Vernon Subutex” trilogy of novels, released between 2015 and 2017, drew international attention for its vivid depiction of misfits adrift in French society. (The first volume made the Booker International Prize shortlist in 2018.)Yet recently, Despentes, 55, has been quietly pivoting from books toward writing and directing for the stage. In 2024, she wrote the play “Woke” with three other authors, Julien Delmaire, Anne Pauly and Paul B. Preciado; in it, they confronted France’s reaction to progressive ideas on race and gender.Despentes directed the production at the Théâtre du Nord in Lille, in northern France, and now she’s back with a follow-up: “Romancero Queer,” which had its premiere last week at Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris and runs through June 29. In “Romancero Queer,” she explores power imbalances in the making of a stage show: Behind the scenes of a new production of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” a fictional group of actors struggle with their older male director for greater creative control.While Despentes has directed several movies, including “Baise-Moi” (2000) and a documentary about pro-sex feminists, “Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk)” (2009), she said in an interview in Paris that theater has turned out to be a better fit. Shortly after “Romancero Queer” had debuted, she spoke about the art forms that she has tried her hand at: literature, film and theater. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.What prompted your pivot to theater?I attend a lot of plays, and I realized that theater audiences are very curious. They really show up, even for demanding or radical works, which made me want to try it. I feel good when I’m in a theater auditorium — and these non-virtual moments feel important nowadays. I’m not at all technophobic — I spend quite a bit of time online — but I enjoy this kind of counter-rhythm, away from social media. During performances of “Romancero Queer,” I sit in the back, behind the audience, and I have yet to see anyone take out their phone.A rehearsal of “Romancero Queer,” the new play by Despentes.Teresa SuarezWe 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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      Colman Domingo’s Nat King Cole Play Explores the “Psychology of an Artist’

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      In November 1956, Nat King Cole was given his own variety show on NBC. It drew major guest stars and got good ratings, but was abandoned just over a year later because it couldn’t secure a single national sponsor; brands were too nervous about boycotts from racist viewers.“Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark,” Cole observed at the time.He couldn’t have been too shocked. Cole may have been one of the biggest pop stars of his time, charting 86 singles and 17 albums in the Top 40, but he was, after all, the first Black man to host a nationally broadcast program. (He referred to himself as “the Jackie Robinson of television.”) In 1948, when he moved into Los Angeles’s all-white Hancock Park neighborhood, a cross was burned on his lawn. A few months before the TV show debuted, Ku Klux Klansmen attacked him onstage at his concert in Birmingham, Ala., shoving him off his piano bench.Daniel J. Watts, left, as Sammy Davis Jr., and Dulé Hill as Nat King Cole in the show “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole” at New York Theater Workshop.Marc J. FranklinThose experiences and the story of the final episode of “The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” in December 1957 is now the focus of “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole,” which is running through June 29 at New York Theater Workshop. Written by Colman Domingo, an Academy Award nominee for “Rustin” and “Sing Sing,” and Patricia McGregor, the theater’s artistic director and the show’s director, the play had a long gestation period, premiering in Philadelphia in 2017. It also had a Los Angeles run in 2019.Domingo described “Lights Out,” which stars Dulé Hill as Cole, as a “dark night of the soul” that explores “the psychology of an artist.”Though today he’s best known for his recording of the holiday perennial “The Christmas Song” and for his daughter Natalie’s technology-assisted duet with him, “Unforgettable” (from her Grammy-winning album of songs associated with her father), Cole was an astonishing talent.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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      With ‘Dead Outlaw,’ the ‘Coroner to the Stars’ Is Getting One Last Act

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      For much of his early career, Thomas Noguchi spent his days as a civil servant toiling away in the basement of a building in downtown Los Angeles.But even in a city filled with larger-than-life celebrities, Noguchi, a Japanese immigrant, managed to become a household name. Because over a span of 15 years as the chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County, he inspected the bodies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Sharon Tate and many others to determine how they died. He was, as many around town called him, the “coroner to the stars.” And as such, he became something of a notorious star himself, delivering news that, he contends, people sometimes did not want to hear.“The public might not be ready, but I felt I had the responsibility to inform the public,” Noguchi, now 98, said in an interview at his home this month. “They might not accept it. But they actually heard it from the right source.”Now, more than four decades after he was demoted from his administrative post amid accusations of mismanagement, he is getting one last brush with fame. A fictionalized version of Noguchi pops up in several scenes in the Tony-nominated musical “Dead Outlaw,” and a new documentary about him, “Coroner to the Stars,” is making the rounds of the festival circuit. There’s even a new book.Thom Sesma singing the number “Up to the Stars” as Dr. Thomas Noguchi in “Dead Outlaw,” the Broadway musical about a long-lived corpse.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“With what I would find out from death investigations, the public and news people would be very interested in knowing what I feel,” he 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