Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Trump’s Kennedy Center Comes Into Focus With Theater and Dance Plans

      by

      Some big shows and troupes will perform, while others will stay away. And in a shift, the center will present some Broadway shows with nonunion casts.As the Kennedy Center reinvents itself for the Donald J. Trump era, it announced on Monday that its next season would feature some big names in theater and dance, but also some conspicuous absences. And, in a break with the past, the center said it would present several touring Broadway shows with nonunion casts.Artists have been divided about whether to perform at the center since President Trump became its chairman after purging its previously bipartisan board of members appointed by Democrats.The upcoming theater season will feature “The Outsiders,” which won last year’s Tony Award for best musical, but not “Hamilton,” which canceled a planned run there, citing dismay over Mr. Trump’s takeover. And its dance season will include performances by American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet but not by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, an annual fixture at the center in recent years, which said in a statement that it would pursue another opportunity next season.Mr. Trump, who continues to play a big role in trying to reshape the center, was expected to meet Monday evening with Kennedy Center board members and executives for dinner at the White House. He attended a board meeting at the center in March, recently requested $257 million from Congress to help with capital repairs and plans to attend a gala fund-raiser performance of “Les Misérables” in June.The upcoming theater season underscores some of the changes unfolding at the center. In addition to “The Outsiders” it will include tours of “Back to the Future,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “Spamalot,” all of which feature unionized casts, as has been standard at the center in recent years.But two of the tours coming to the Kennedy Center next season will feature nonunion casts, which tend to be paid less and cost less to present: “Chicago” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘We Are Gathered’ Promises to Love, Honor and Cherish

      by

      When JaDonna Harris and Marquian Harris married in 2015, they did it alone, before a justice of the peace. As their 10th anniversary approached, they contemplated a do-over that would include friends and family. But the cost was an issue, as was agreeing on a venue. Then JaDonna Harris received an email from Arena Stage. An upcoming play was looking for real couples interested in getting married or renewing their vows. She and her wife replied immediately.“We were like, this is kismet,” JaDonna Harris recalled.That play, “We Are Gathered,” is a new work by Tarell Alvin McCraney that began Friday, overlapping with Washington’s World Pride festivities. A celebration of love, each performance will culminate with what Arena Stage is calling “Love Takes Center Stage,” an immersive experience in which one or more couples will join the actors for a real marriage ceremony or vow renewal. One of the stars, Craig Wallace, has been ordained. Over the course of the show’s 30 scheduled performances, several dozen couples will participate. After each show, Arena Stage will hold a reception with cake, champagne and dancing.“We’re going to be discovering a great deal each night,” said the director Kent Gash, right, with the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesThe Harrises can’t wait.“We are happy to celebrate queer love, to celebrate the love in general all over the world and everybody’s ability to find a person that they are attached to,” JaDonna Harris said. “That’s all that matters.”McCraney began to dream up “We Are Gathered” during World Pride in Sydney, Australia, in 2023. A theater there was staging a revival of his 2012 play “Choir Boy,” a drama about a young gay man at an all-Black preparatory school. McCraney admired the production, but he wished that the play, which deals with anti-gay prejudice, didn’t feel quite so relevant. He decided that by the time the next World Pride came around, two years later, he would offer actors a script that felt more playful, more joyful.In searching for a subject, McCraney, now 44 and the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, kept returning to the idea of marriage. When he was growing up, marriage wasn’t available to gay men, but a 2015 Supreme Court decision had changed that. Now friends were asking him why he wasn’t married and he was beginning to ask that question of himself. Recent opposition to gay rights and transgender rights — including book bans and a Florida law nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” — had made that question feel more urgent. “Those things were happening pretty regularly and beginning to remind me there isn’t a lot of time and nothing is promised,” he said. “I decided, OK, I’m going to find out what this means to me.”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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Creditors’ Review: Who Pays the Price for a Bankrupt Marriage?

      by

      Liev Schreiber stars in an update of the bleak Strindberg classic about a husband and wife and the man who seeks to destroy them.If a man hates women but also everyone else, is he still a misogynist?I ask for an acquaintance: August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright whose three tempestuous marriages were not enough to exhaust his fury at wives, muses, temptresses and others. Also, it would seem, at himself.His excess of rage found its way into plays — “Miss Julie” (1888) and “The Dance of Death” (1900) are today the most famous — that feature male characters only slightly less awful than the women in their lives. That ought to be unbearable, and not just as an affront to feminism; his pox-on-both-your-genders cussedness can sometimes feel self-canceling as drama. Still, Strindberg sticks to the canon of European classics like a tick: ugly, bloodthirsty, alive.The contradiction is at its most vexing in “Creditors,” a follow-up to “Miss Julie” that flips the earlier play’s love-triangle geometry so that one woman and two men stand at its vertexes instead of one man and two women. Believe me, two men are worse: The lone woman, in this case a writer named Tekla, is literally outmanned. When Adolph, her second husband — having fallen under the influence of Gustav, his new friend — prosecutes Tekla for the theft of his happiness, Strindberg barely allows a defense.That “Creditors” is nevertheless wretchedly compelling has previously been sufficient to keep it onstage. Perhaps in a post-#MeToo age no longer. At any rate, the production that opened Sunday at the Minetta Lane Theater — starring Liev Schreiber as Gustav, Maggie Siff as Tekla and Justice Smith as Adolph, now called Adi — sets out to shift the play’s balance of power and mostly succeeds. In Jen Silverman’s thoroughgoing adaptation, Tekla is given full voice, and the men are finally held to account.The new version, set in a vague present, opens like the original in the parlor of an out-of-season seaside hotel. There, Adi, a young painter, and Gustav, a teacher of “dead languages,” are discovered in the depths of a whiskey-enhanced discussion of women and art. At first idly, then with what appears to be solicitude, and finally with the glee of a cat cornering a mouse before killing it, Gustav pokes into Adi’s professional failures, connecting them to Tekla’s galling success. Having dumped her first husband after humiliating him in a popular roman à clef, what’s to stop her from doing the same to her second?The author of dramedies that foreground women — among them “The Roommate,” “The Moors” and “Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties” — Silverman is not about to let that wife-as-witch framing stand. Still, Strindberg’s three-part structure, with its bear-trap teeth, is too ingenious to mess with. In the second part, Adi, empowered or perhaps just empoisoned by Gustav, confronts Tekla with his newfound and possibly bogus insights into what he had thought was a happy marriage. Because Smith is so sincere and appealing, his vulnerability reading as openness instead of petulance, we are at first willing to allow his line of thought.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

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Theater to Stream: ‘Yellow Face,’ Joaquina Kalukango and More

      by

      Watch the Tony nominee Daniel Dae Kim in David Henry Hwang’s comedy, and take in cabaret at 54 Below, all from your living room.‘Broadway’s Best’Watch on PBS, online or on the PBS app.At this year’s Tony Awards ceremony, on June 8, the PBS series “Great Performances” will be honored for excellence in theater. Its spring slate alone should remind everybody why “Great Performances” has been a theater gateway for so many people. Already available is a 2024 recording of the London premiere of the Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt musical “Next to Normal,” starring Caissie Levy as a woman whose bipolar disorder has a ripple effect on her family. The New York Times’ review praised Michael Longhurst’s production for giving the show “a renewed sting.”Next, you can catch the Roundabout Theater Company’s recent revival of the acidic David Henry Hwang comedy “Yellow Face,” starring Daniel Dae Kim and Francis Jue — both nominated for Tonys this year. The glorious Bob Dylan jukebox musical “Girl From the North Country,” set in 1934 Duluth, Minn., arrives May 23. A week later, American audiences can discover last year’s London production of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate” — a very funny twist on “The Taming of the Shrew” — with Stephanie J. Block as the fiery diva Lilli Vanessi and Adrian Dunbar (yes, Superintendent Hastings from the procedural “Line of Duty”) as her egotistical ex-husband, Fred Graham.‘The Other Place’ and ‘Vanya’Rent them on National Theater at Home.The National Theater at Home’s catalog is a veritable treasure trove, and a recent addition well worth checking out is “The Other Place” from the writer-director Alexander Zeldin (“Love”). Loosely based on the Greek tragedy “Antigone,” it is not driven by a high-concept staging like Simon Stone’s “Yerma” or Robert Icke’s “Enemy of the People,” which are also drastic reworkings of classics. Rather, Zeldin slowly builds a stifling sense of impending doom until an ending that hits as hard as it is quiet. Emma D’Arcy (“House of the Dragon”) appears haunted by bottled-up pain as the disrupter at a family reunion, while Tobias Menzies portrays a seemingly even-tempered uncle.Compared with that tragedy, Andrew Scott’s solo interpretation of “Uncle Vanya” feels almost cheery. If you missed the critically acclaimed, very sold-out recent run of “Vanya” in New York, you can watch an excellent capture of the original London version here. Sam Yates’s production offers not just a modernized take on the Chekhov classic but, as Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times, “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.”‘Friends and Romans’Stream it on Tubi.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Tonys 2025 Predictions: Who Will Win? And Who Should?

      by

      Our chief theater critic looks at this year’s nominees and weighs in on the plays, musicals and artists he thinks will — and should — take home trophies on June 8.Tony voters do not have it easy. As the quality of (some) shows on Broadway improves, so does the difficulty and futility of ranking them. Yet not fully futile, at least for me in my fictional Tonys: A long look back at the 2024-25 season, during which I saw all 42 eligible Broadway productions, offered a chance to recall, reorganize and enjoy in memory the work of thousands of very talented artists.Thus, below, my take on the likely winners (marked with a ✓) and my personal “shouldas” (marked with a ★) in 17 of the 26 competitive categories. I hope your own Tonys, no doubt different from mine, prove as rewarding.Best PlayCole Escola, left, and James Scully in “Oh, Mary!”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“English”“The Hills of California”“John Proctor Is the Villain”✓ ★ “Oh, Mary!”“Purpose”It’s a strong season when five new plays (with options to spare) all deserve their nominations — and one of them, “Purpose,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, while another, “English,” won in 2023. But though both, like the other nominees, are startling in some way, Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” in which Mary Todd Lincoln’s dreams of becoming a cabaret star are nearly foiled by her very Gaybraham husband, is almost freakishly so, barely containing its demented story in the very disciplined frame of a super-tight production. As good as the other nominees are, this comedy trumps them by ripping open the notion of what camp — and Broadway — can be.Best MusicalDarren Criss and Helen J Shen in “Maybe Happy Ending.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“Buena Vista Social Club”“Dead Outlaw”✓ “Death Becomes Her”★ “Maybe Happy Ending”“Operation Mincemeat”Despite its brand-extension birth, “Death Becomes Her” is a classic Broadway musical in at least this sense: It brings home the laughs. That’s no mean feat, but my vote usually goes to shows that advance Broadway instead of compromising with it. In their intimacy, their delicacy, their seriousness and faith in themselves, “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Dead Outlaw” both do that. For me, “Maybe Happy Ending,” by Will Aronson and Hue Park, has the slight edge because, on top of all that, it’s shattering (in the quietest way possible).Best Play RevivalFrom left, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz and Jessica Hecht in “Eureka Day.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times★ “Eureka Day”“Romeo + Juliet”“Our Town”✓ “Yellow Face”In this season’s death match between “Our Town,” the quintessential American drama, and “Romeo + Juliet,” the everlasting English tragedy, the Thornton Wilder revival won by a knockout. (Nobody really seemed to die in the Shakespeare.) But “Yellow Face,” by David Henry Hwang, complicating its story about colorblind casting with piquant ironies, will likely defeat them both. Still, I’d go for Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” a satire of vaccination politics that skewers both sides: anti-science know-nothings and trip-on-your-tongue progressives. It lets every kind of American cringe.Best Musical RevivalFrom left, Charlie Franklin, Jeremy Davis and Dwayne Cooper in “Floyd Collins.”Richard Termine for The New York Times★ “Floyd Collins”“Gypsy”“Pirates! The Penzance Musical”✓ “Sunset Boulevard”So sue me, I disliked “Sunset Boulevard,” which did everything in its considerable power to bury the property’s many shortcomings. That doesn’t seem to me to be a worthy goal in reviving a show. But you know what is? Getting to see our era’s biggest musical theater star (Audra McDonald) play one of the canon’s greatest roles (Rose in “Gypsy”). And though I’m loath to vote against a stage mother and a gaggle of strippers, for me, “Floyd Collins,” by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, is the necessary revelation. It’s like “Our Town” in a cave: cosmic, brutal. (Since I worked with Guettel’s mother, Mary Rodgers, on her memoirs, I refrained from reviewing the show, but I do think it should win.)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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      CNN to Livestream George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

      by

      In June, the news organization is planning a live broadcast of one of the final Broadway performances of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”George Clooney’s Broadway debut, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press.Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.“We were looking at taking the play on the road, and taking it to London, and taking it to Paris,” Clooney said in an interview on Thursday, adding, “but we also thought it never is going to be exactly what it is right now, with the same cast, and we thought it would be nice to have a record of it.“And then we thought, because the newscasts are all done live, it is the perfect thing to try to create on live television, which is always exciting — there no safety net, and it’s a fun thing to do.”Clooney said that he expects the play will be available to stream after the live broadcast, but that he does not yet know where. “That’s what we’re still working on right now,” he said. “The question is, where does it go from here, and we’ve had three different offers and we’re negotiating to find out what the best position is.”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

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      At Theatertreffen Festival, Bodies Do the Talking

      by

      Choreographer-led works at the annual German theater event range from the transgressive to the melancholic.In this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual Berlin festival showcasing the best theater from the German-speaking world, two of the 10 selected works — narrowed down from 600 by a jury — are choreography-led productions where bodies, rather than mouths, do most of the talking.The first of these, “Sancta,” is the brainchild of the Austrian choreographer, director and performance artist Florentina Holzinger. Like all her shows — including “Tanz,” which played earlier this year at NYU Skirball in New York — it comes with trigger warnings, this time for blood, needles, “self-injurious acts” and sexual violence.Holzinger, who will represent Austria at next year’s Venice Biennale, is known for traversing dance, theater and visual art, and “Sancta” is her first foray into classical music. She has reworked Paul Hindemith’s scandalous 1922 one-act opera “Sancta Susanna,” about a nun tormented by forbidden desire, to critique the patriarchal structures of the Roman Catholic church. When “Sancta” played in Stuttgart, Germany, last year, the opera house there said some nauseated audience members needed medical attention, and in Vienna, Austrian bishops denounced the show as a “disrespectful caricature.”At the Volksbühne in Berlin, “Sancta” opens with a rendition of Hindemith’s score by three wild-eyed singers in habits before morphing into a provocative variety show. Naked performers kiss, grope, and grind against a towering metal crucifix. Roller-skating nuns glide along a halfpipe and karate kick suspended metal sheets. In one stomach-churning scene, a strip of skin is sliced from a performer’s chest, fried and fed to another cast member in a techno-scored tableau evoking the Last Supper.Florentina Holzinger’s “Sancta” starts by reworking a 1922 opera about a nun tormented by forbidden desire and morphs into a provocative variety show.Nicole Marianna WytyczakIf Holzinger’s intent is to shock, she succeeds — but her efforts also backfire. The relentless barrage of subversive scenes means that, over the show’s nearly three-hour run time, it’s easy to become desensitized. Its most powerful moments lean into topical humor, rather than excess: When a performer with dwarfism walks onstage dressed in papal robes and dryly declares, “It’s official,” she elicits big laughs from the audience. (It was the day of Pope Leo XIV’s election.) Later, the performer proclaims herself the first lesbian pope, to more enthusiastic laughter.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      BAM Announces a Women-Led Next Wave and Fall Season

      by

      The arts institution, which has shrunk its programming in recent years, unveiled its fall lineup.The Brooklyn Academy of Music will welcome its 42nd Next Wave festival this fall, with most works created by female artists, the performing arts center announced on Thursday.“We led with women,” said Amy Cassello, who became BAM’s artistic director last year after serving in the role as interim. “It just felt like a good time to center women creatives.”The announcement comes at a time of leadership flux for the academy and financial fragility that was intensified by the pandemic. BAM’s staff has declined by more than a third in recent years, and its nearly $52 million operating budget is smaller than it was 10 years ago.But there is momentum, and audiences are growing.Next Wave will have 11 events, as it did last year, up from eight in 2023. That year, the festival scaled back to nearly half of the 2022 offerings amid staff layoffs.“I feel confident that we have the number of shows that make a coherent statement,” Cassello said, adding, “I wish there were more money to subsidize and support and invest in artistic work.”The festival opens with the choreographer Nora Chipaumire’s “Dambudzo” (Oct. 8-9), a blend of painting, sculpture, sound and performance, transforming the nearby performing arts space Roulette into a Zimbabwean house bar.The lineup also includes the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “LACRIMA” (Oct. 22, 24-26), a choral theater performance that, in a dark look at the fashion industry, traces the many hands across the world it takes to create a wedding dress for a British princess; Eiko Otake and Wen Hui’s “What Is War” (Oct. 21-25), a fusion of movement and video testimony about war and its aftermath on collective memory and the body; and the choreographer Leslie Cuyjet’s “For All Your Life” (Dec. 3-7), a solo performance interrogating the life insurance industry’s ties to slavery.Next season will also feature a revival of Richard Move’s dance-theater work “Martha@BAM — The 1963 Interview” (Oct. 28 -Nov. 1), in which Move recreates a 1963 interview between Martha Graham (Move) and the critic Walter Terry (the playwright Lisa Kron) at the 92nd Street Y.BAM will also present a screening of “The Mahabharata” (Sept. 18), a film adaptation of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical presentation of the Sanskrit epic that BAM staged in 1987 atthe theater now known as the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong. The Harvey will be the site of the screening of Brook’s (much shorter) 1989 film, newly restored by his son, Simon Brook.The season concludes with a revival of the raucous post-rock opera “What to Wear” (Jan. 15-17) by the avant-garde theater maker Richard Foreman, who died in January at 87. The hallucinatory work, with a score by Michael Gordon, will be conducted by Alan Pierson and directed by Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson, and run as part of Prototype, the experimental New York opera festival.“BAM has always been artist-centered and adventurous and risk-taking,” Cassello said, “and I think that’s absolutely necessary. Always has been.” More