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      My Friend’s Show Was Kind of Terrible. What Do I Say When I See Them?

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      You can always consider telling the truth, but it may not be advisable in this case.Do you have a question for our culture writers and editors? Ask us here.Q: What do you say to a friend at the stage door when their show was kind of terrible? Is there a “nonpliment” you’d recommend?There are three basic options here:Tell the truth, as a form of tough love.Find something to say that is appreciative but also incomplete.Lie.Each approach has its pros and cons.Truth is not always the answer.For some people, being a straight shooter is a point of pride. They view directness as a positive character trait and believe it makes them trustworthy; they may think they’re upholding high standards and prioritizing artistic integrity. But none of the artists I spoke with about this question believe this is the right approach, particularly at the stage door.There are certainly contexts in which expressing your concerns might be appropriate — particularly when you have been asked for such input, and when you have some expertise to offer. So if you are invited to a workshop for a project in development, or you are offered an early draft of a script, or you are asked to watch a rehearsal, and your friend is clear about wanting honest responses that might help them, go for it.“If you are attending an early preview of a play and your friend is genuinely requesting feedback, ground it in your viewing experience, interspersing bits of praise with constructive thoughts about how you encountered specific moments, performances or production elements,” said Lauren Halvorsen, a dramaturg who writes Nothing for the Group, a theater newsletter. “It’s also helpful to check in with your friend on their experience: ‘How are you feeling? What are you learning from these audiences? What are you still working out about the piece?’ and craft your response around their questions and concerns.”But once the show is on its feet, and you are greeting that friend backstage or at the stage door or at an after-party — fessing up that you disliked it is not the way to go.How about finessing the situation?Lots of people opt for an artful dodge. I’ve done that myself, in my case not because of friendship, but because of policy — The Times’s ethics rules say that reporters “may not comment, even informally, on works in progress before those works are reviewed,” so I often fall back on something generic like “congratulations” or “I’m so glad I was here.”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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      12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring

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      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

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      Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway

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      Rudin stepped away from show business four years ago amid reports that he had bullied assistants. He says he has “a lot more self-control” now.Scott Rudin, the powerful producer who was exiled from Broadway and Hollywood four years ago after allegations of bullying led to widespread denunciations and even protesters in the streets, has been quietly preparing to return to show business.After what he called “a decent amount of therapy,” apologies to many people and a period of reading and reflection holed up on Long Island, Rudin said that he had decided he wanted to make theater again. He is at peace, he said, with the reality that not everyone is likely to welcome him back.He called his previous behavior, particularly toward subordinates, “bone-headed” and “narcissistic.” He acknowledged that he had long yelled at his assistants (“Yes, of course”) and that he had on occasion thrown things at people (“Very, very rarely”).“I was just too rough on people,” he said.But Rudin — who produced films including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network” and Broadway shows including “The Book of Mormon” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” — said he was confident that from now on he would be able to maintain his exacting standards without terrorizing others.“I have a lot more self-control than I had four years ago,” he said. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy.” Also, he added, “I don’t want to let anybody down. Not just myself. My husband, my family and collaborators.”Rudin, 66, agreed to discuss his ambitious plans in response to requests to talk about indications that he was planning to return to producing. The result was his first detailed interview about his downfall, his time away from Broadway and his hopes to mount a comeback. His return is likely to be controversial, given that reports of the ways in which he berated and mistreated assistants helped lead to a reconsideration of workplace culture in theater.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: ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Starring Sarah Snook and 3 Million Pixels

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      The “Succession” actress plays all 26 roles in this Oscar Wilde classic reimagined as a video spectacle. If only there were less screen time and more IRL contact.An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot. Three million pixels, in case you’re counting. Sixteen million colors. Two cellphones, at least on a recent glitchy night when the first malfunctioned. And one Sarah Snook.Or rather a multitude of Snooks.These are among the many wonders you’ll find onstage at the Music Box Theater, where a technologically spectacular adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with Snook playing 26 roles, opened on Thursday.What you won’t find is “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”The 1890 magazine story by Oscar Wilde, which he novelized in 1891, has proved irresistible to adapters, thanks to its nifty plot device: a portrait that ages instead of the sitter. The more the gorgeous Dorian Gray falls under the decadent influence of Lord Henry Wotton, the uglier the painting by Basil Hallward becomes.To get to that plot, though, adapters have to adapt out a lot because what Wilde wrote is less the psychological thriller they imagine than a perfumed treatise on aesthetic philosophy. Another thing usually sacrificed is the homosexual undercurrent, which, even after expurgation by the story’s first editors, was deep enough to drown in. Convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labor, and died, just 46, in 1900. “Dorian Gray” was part of the evidence.Like the 1945 M-G-M movie, the current adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, downplays the treatise aspects. The queerness, though, is frank if complicated, in part because Snook, an Emmy-winning star of “Succession,” is still a woman while playing a man. Or not even a man. Her cherubic, shiny-cheeked Dorian is less the godlike 20-year-old of the novel than a barely pubescent boy.Snook provides specificity for each character: Her Wotton has a wonderful slouchy physicality, her Hallward nervous and twitchy, her Dorian (top of image) beamish.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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      Review: Long-Lost ‘Love Life’ Still Has a Lot to Say About America

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      Brian Stokes Mitchell, Kate Baldwin and other top-shelf singers star in an overly sentimental production of the long-lost Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner show.In recent years, Encores! has presented productions of musicals with good name recognition, including “Into the Woods,” “Titanic” and “Urinetown.” With its latest offering, “Love Life,” the series returns to its original mission statement by presenting an obscure show, one devoid of standards at that — nothing in it would start a singalong at even the most hard-core piano bar.Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical opened on Broadway in 1948, ran for 252 performances and over the years has developed a cult following largely thanks to its daring storytelling. It touched on what constitutes the fabric of American life and integrated vaudevillian interludes, thus paving the way for the likes of “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”Yet the show has been absent from New York stages in the intervening decades. There wasn’t even an original cast recording to help popularize the score. There is grainy footage of one of its original stars, Nanette Fabray, performing “Green-Up Time” on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and some numbers have popped up on various albums, like Bryn Terfel’s cover of “Here I’ll Stay.” But for the most part, “Love Life” is fairly unknown these days.Naturally, this made it a desirable target for Encores!, which is presenting a semi-staged production through Sunday at New York City Center.As directed by Victoria Clark, this “Love Life” gives us only glimpses of the musical’s potential. The vocals are top-shelf, with particularly thrilling ensemble singing and harmonies, especially on “Susan’s Dream,” which almost gets within reach of the Encores! high-water mark of “Sing for Your Supper” in its 1997 production of “The Boys From Syracuse.” (Rob Berman conducts the onstage orchestra.)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 50, the Wooster Group Is Experimenting on Itself

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      Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk reflect on their decades of making daring theater together. Just don’t call it a nostalgic exercise.The short brick building that crouches at 33 Wooster Street is known to be a haunted house. How could it not be? For this is the location of the Performing Garage, home for nearly half a century to that most storied of experimental theater troupes in New York, the Wooster Group.Performers who have acquired legendary status both among the exacting aesthetes of downtown Manhattan (Ron Vawter, Kate Valk) and on a more far-reaching level (Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray) have acted, acted out, danced, got high, stripped down, camped out, built sets, trashed sets, fallen in and out of love, and recorded and videotaped one another exhaustively in the Garage’s small but exceedingly fertile space.As for the shows themselves — usually overseen by the group’s ever-present, ever-elusive artistic director, Elizabeth LeCompte — they have always had a touch of the numinous. Bending, mixing and exploding genres and media, they dissolve the boundaries between high and low, hazy memory and hard facts, reality and its representations and, yes, the living and the dead.Classic writers — Chekhov, Racine, Eugene O’Neill, Gertrude Stein — have been resurrected in conversation with a tumultuous, shape-shifting present for an astonishing 50 years. When I first arrived in New York in the late 1970s, these shows — which played to select audiences of 100 or less — were the ones that the coolest of experimental theatergoers swooned over, gossiped about and pretended to have seen even if they hadn’t. (I can’t be on lower Wooster Street today without walking into vaporous memories of Valk and Dafoe eerily channeling and transforming O’Neill in “The Hairy Ape,” or Valk splintering into multiple simulcast selves as a soulless, preternatural femme fatale in “House/Lights.”)Scott Shepherd, foreground, in the group’s latest production, “Nayatt School Redux,” which incorporates a recording of the original.Gianmarco BresadolaWith its latest production, “Nayatt School Redux,” the group has trained its retrospective lens on itself — specifically on a play first staged at the Garage in 1978. (This reincarnation, which runs through Saturday, is completely sold out.) The result, its creators agree, is a kind of a séance.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 ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings a Beloved Song to Life on Broadway

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      One night in 1984, Compay Segundo, the Cuban singer and guitarist, heard in his dreams what would become his signature song.“I woke up hearing those four sensitive notes,” Segundo recalled later on. “I gave them a lyric inspired by a children’s tale from my childhood, ‘Juanica y Chan Chan.’”A hypnotic account of peasant life in Cuba, “Chan Chan” has a peculiar power, with four circular, mesmerizing opening chords that make it instantly recognizable. It gained a regional following when it was cut by the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa. But a recording of the song, in 1996, by a group of celebrated Cuban musicians who had been assembled for an album to be called “Buena Vista Social Club,” would become a phenomenon.Now more than 25 years after its release, the best-selling world music album of all time has made it to Broadway in a new musical also titled “Buena Vista Social Club.” “Chan Chan” is among eight of the album’s 10 songs featured in the show and, perhaps not surprising for such a dramatic and mysterious track, it plays a crucial role in a pivotal moment in the story.During the “Chan Chan” number, the young singer Omara (Isa Antonetti) is deciding whether to leave Cuba with her sister or remain in Havana and perform the traditional music that has a hold on her heart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the album of mostly older Cuban standards became a global sensation upon its release in 1997, Segundo’s song — about sifting sand by the sea and clearing a straw path along a journey to Cuban towns — became a standout all its own. “Chan Chan” was never released as a single, but the opening track has been streamed more than 250 million times on Spotify, almost three times more than anything else on the album. (That number is roughly the same as Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Hanson’s “MMMBop,” both No. 1 hits in 1997.) More

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      In ‘Streetcar,’ Patsy Ferran Gives Blanche a Nervy New Read

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      The London-based actress has been heralded as one of the most talented of her generation. Still, she worried audiences would balk at her “very unconventional Blanche.”Patsy Ferran will not judge a book by its cover. But covers are important to her. “See?” she said, palming a copy of a Barbara Kingsolver novel at a Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson bookstore. “Such a good cover. Aesthetics do matter.”Ferran, a London-based actress, is currently starring in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just up the road from the store. A latecomer to reading for pleasure, Ferran picked up fiction, particularly American fiction, during the pandemic lockdowns and has yet to put it down. Currently working her way through Percival Everett’s “James,” with Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” cued up next, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy any more books. But the shelves were calling.“I kind of explore cities via book shops,” she said. “That and good coffee.”In the store, Ferran, lively, shrewd and lightly self-deprecating, (“I do my own glam,” she said wryly as she shook out her hair from a woolly hat) picked up and put down several recent paperbacks, enthusing about their feel. “British paperbacks are so stiff, you have to crowbar them open, which I hate,” she said. Ferran decided that she might buy just one. Or two. Certainly not more than three.Ferran is starring opposite Paul Mescal in Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which is running through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFerran, 35, made her professional debut just after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in a production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” More stage roles followed, including her first lead, as Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” also by Williams, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. “This young actor is a genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking,” one critic wrote of the performance. Soon she was recognized as one of the most talented stage actresses of her generation.Small and quick, with dark, curling hair, Ferran was an unusual choice for Blanche. A great American heroine, “an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty” in Williams’s words, Blanche is typically played by willowy, languorous blondes. (Recent New York Blanches include Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson). Ferran knows this. She worried that audiences would dismiss her as the wrong cover for this particular book.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