Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Blue Man Group to End New York Run After Three Decades Off Broadway

      by

      The troupe is also closing its Chicago company, but continues to perform in Berlin, Boston, Las Vegas and, soon, Orlando.Blue Man Group, the wordless theatrical troupe of drum-beating, paint-splattering, bald blue performers, will end its run in New York on Feb. 2, more than three decades and 17,000 performances after it began.The troupe, which started as experimental street theater and is now a subsidiary of the global circus behemoth Cirque du Soleil, will also end its Chicago run on Jan. 5.But the show will continue to run elsewhere, with long-running companies in Berlin, Boston and Las Vegas, and a forthcoming run in Orlando, where it is scheduled to reopen next spring after a four-year closure prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. There have also been touring productions.The end of the New York production was announced in a news release by Jack Kenn, the company’s managing director; the release did not say why the show was closing, and a spokeswoman for the company declined to provide any further information.The closing at Astor Place Theater in Lower Manhattan comes at a challenging time for theater, as production costs are higher, and audience sizes generally lower, than before the pandemic.Blue Man Group, which began performing at Astor Place in 1991, will conclude its New York run two years after the end of “Stomp,” another wordless, percussion-heavy show that had been an Off Broadway staple since 1994. And “Sleep No More,” an immersive riff on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” that opened in 2011, says its final performance will be Jan. 5. (It has previously postponed closing dates several times.)Off Broadway has been a mixed bag since the 2020 shutdowns — many nonprofits are struggling, staging fewer shows and employing smaller casts than before. But in the commercial Off Broadway arena, there has been a rebound, as a number of shows have found ways to break through and succeed.Some producers now believe that limited run shows have better odds of success, because consumers are more motivated to buy tickets when they know it’s now or never.A new generation of long-running Off Broadway shows has arrived, although generally not with the longevity of Blue Man Group. A few examples: “The Play That Goes Wrong” transferred from Broadway to New World Stages in 2019 and is still running there; a revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” has been running at Westside Theater, also since 2019; and “Titaníque,” now at the Daryl Roth Theater, has been running Off Broadway since 2022. More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Stratford-Upon-Lake-Michigan: Royal Shakespeare Company Plays Chicago

      by

      The Royal Shakespeare Company, which keeps the plays of William Shakespeare alive in the town of his birth, was long a regular presence in the United States. It brought Ian McKellen to Brooklyn as King Lear, built a replica of its main theater in an Upper East Side drill hall and sent a stream of shows to Broadway.But in recent years the renowned troupe has taken fewer overseas trips from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.Now, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has returned to the United States — but not to New York, where some of the main importers of European work remain diminished and disoriented. It has struck up a partnership with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which is led by Edward Hall, whose ties to the Royal Shakespeare Company run unusually deep: His father, Peter Hall, the eminent British director, founded it.“My love of Shakespeare grew up from my father talking to me about Shakespeare, and why he was passionate about Shakespeare, and why he thought Shakespeare endured, and quoting Shakespeare,” he said. “I watched him work a bit, and then, like every child, you go off into a corner and find your own way, which is what I did.”His earliest memory of Shakespeare is watching “The Wars of the Roses,” directed by his father, when he was 4 or 5, and “seeing a lot of people in armor with very exciting-looking weapons.”Edward Hall, the artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is the son of Peter Hall, the founder of the R.S.C. He’s also the human for a dog named Dennis.Lyndon French for 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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Glicked’ Fans Rejoice in Bloodshed and Broadway Songs

      by

      Swords clashing and blood curdling screams of gladiators emanate from one room. Across the hallway, witches belt out show tunes.That’s the sound of “Glicked.”Last year, moviegoers swarmed to see “Barbenheimer” — the combined name for “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — when the films opened on the same day. Now, there is a push from the casts and fans of “Gladiator II” and “Wicked” — which both opened across the country on Friday — to recreate that energy for another double feature with a blended name.Isabelle Deveaux and Emma Rabuano skipped out of theater six at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn at 2:38 p.m. on Friday, after watching “Gladiator II.”At 6:15 p.m., the pair, both 25, planned to return to the Alamo Drafthouse to see “Wicked.” The crossover, Ms. Deveaux said, “felt so specifically catered to our interests.”Diego Gasca of Los Angeles went with friends to the opening day of “Wicked” at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in Manhattan, but he said that he was not interested in seeing “Gladiator II.”Colin Clark for The New York TimesOn the surface, the two films, which have a combined running time of over five hours, appear vastly different. One is a family friendly musical prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” while the other is an R-rated epic sequel about murder, war and the Roman Empire. But Ms. Deveaux and Ms. Rabuano see some common ground in the films.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

      6 Minutes. 62 People. 1 Epic ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Sequence.

      by

      A group of young men and women, all dressed in black, marches down a busy street in the heart of Times Square. Walking in formation, they dodge parked cars, bicycles and pedestrians, as the man leading them belts out a song.“Sunset Boulevard, ruthless boulevard / Destination for the stony-hearted.”This ambitious scene from the director Jamie Lloyd’s Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” hinges on a live tracking sequence that goes backstage and spills onto West 44th Street. It’s shown in real time on a massive LCD screen to the audience inside the St. James Theater, but passers-by — both unsuspecting and calculating — get a front-row view, at least during the number’s three-minute outdoor portion.“We’re sort of crossing our fingers a bit every night,” said Nathan Amzi, who designed the scene with Joe Ransom and Lloyd. Everyone, he added, “has to have laser focus to make it work.”Through rain, bone-chilling temperatures and the crush of crowds from neighboring shows, this scene, which takes 62 people to pull off, goes on.The title song, “Sunset Boulevard,” which is sung by the hapless young screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis), functions as a sort of dream sequence in the musical. The character contemplates the circumstances that led him to take up residence at a Los Angeles mansion as the boy toy of the faded silent film star Norma Desmond — and tries to justify them.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 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      ‘The Blood Quilt’ Review: An Elaborate Tapestry

      by

      Katori Hall’s new play about sisters gathering after their mother’s death features standout performances but an overabundance of themes.Quilting is about more than just fabric and stitches; it’s about blood, love, memory and trauma. That’s the premise at the center of Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt” at Lincoln Center, about four sisters gathering to complete a quilt three weeks after their mother’s death. The play itself a beautiful patchwork of themes and ideas that feel packed to the seams.It’s the first weekend of May, which means it’s time for the Jernigan sisters to convene at their family home at Kwemera, an island off the coast of Georgia where the Jernigan clan have lived for generations. But Kwemera isn’t what it used to be, and more change is imminent; there are plans for a bridge that will connect the mainland to the island, which means locals are being bought out by developers. Still, Clementine (Crystal Dickinson, with perfect gravitas), the eldest sister, remains staunchly a Kwemera woman, having lived her whole life there, where she nursed their mother in the last years of her illness.Clementine is the fierce guardian of family traditions, including the annual quilting ritual, so Gio (a riotous Adrienne C. Moore), the heavy drinking second oldest, has reported for duty, as has Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson, perfectly demure), who has brought her teenage daughter Zambia (Mirirai) for her first quilting circle. And there’s an unexpected guest — Amber (Lauren E. Banks), the youngest, who’s a successful entertainment lawyer in California and has been absent for the last few years.Quilting is a days long project, with each sister assigned her own separate duties. But the quilt isn’t the only reason for this reunion: there’s the matter of their inheritance, if any, and the financial loose ends remaining after their mother’s death. The money issues stir up the women, but it’s their contrary, complicated and self-contradictory ways of grieving, along with their long-held grudges against one another, that truly unleashes the storm of drama inside the home.The world of “The Blood Quilt,” which opened Thursday, is inviting: Hall’s characters are fully formed and clearly motivated, the family’s history is rich and Kwemera feels alive, in part thanks to the eclectic homespun set design by Adam Rigg. Quilts are draped everywhere in this tiny cabin, which is so close to the water that the front of the stage drops off into a grassy basin.Hall, who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play “The Hot Wing King,” uses the same level of artistry and meticulousness in crafting a metaphor that the sisters do in crafting their quilts. Their roles and quilting preferences mirror their places within the family. Zambia, caught in the messy adolescent process of defining her identity, takes the role of stitching the centerpiece — an apt, if heavy-handed, representation of a younger generation taking the baton in a family tradition. And the quilts themselves embody memories and even a bit of magic. A Jernigan story about a family matriarch who gave a quilt square away to each of her children sold off to slavery isn’t just emotionally resonant; it proves that these quilts are literal scraps of history.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 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Death Becomes Her,’ Spiking the Fountain of Youth

      by

      Hilarious star turns from Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard make the mostly unfunny 1992 film into an intermittently memorable Broadway musical.Not since Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne themselves performed there in 1958, leaving a trail of scrapes and bite marks in their wake, has Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater housed such equal-billing dragons as the ones Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard play in “Death Becomes Her.” The musical, which opened on Thursday, stars the two comic treasures as lifelong frenemies for whom the “lifelong” part is an understatement. Their animosity is eternal.That Hilty and Simard make it so jolly is a big relief and a big surprise. The 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie on which the show is based may be a queer camp classic, but its misogynistic ick factor is high. The leads — Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn — are shot leeringly yet unflatteringly, a queasy combo. The violence they do to each other is more vivid than the vanity at its root. What binds them, even in acrimony, goes largely unexplored. And, fatally, the film is not very funny.For its first 30 minutes, the musical is nothing but. When introduced, Hilty’s Madeline Ashford is a star of a certain age being hoisted by chorus boys in a creaky vehicle called “Me! Me! Me!” Its opening number, “For the Gaze,” establishes her epochal narcissism while also winking, in its title pun, to the material’s cult audience. The staging, by Christopher Gattelli, goes so breathtakingly over the top — costume changes, key changes, cameos by both Liza and Judy — that half the lyrics get lost in the laughs.Though best known for her vocal chops — fully exploited here in glossy songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey — Hilty is an inventive and beguiling comedian, putting a warm spin on even the meanest zingers. Indeed, one of the improvements in Marco Pennette’s book for the musical is that those zingers seem like love pinches, painful but titillating. They are often self-directed, too, and thus a kind of self-pleasure. When Simard’s Helen Sharp tells Madeline she’s stunning, the diva responds, with evident delight, “Well, thanks to my hair, makeup and neck team.” She also credits “that tapeworm diet.”Simard is simply brilliant. I say “simply” advisedly; it takes a lot of craft and homework to stand next to Hilty and not be outdone. Happily, her Helen is an astonishing creation of disappointment and disparagement: Dorothy Parker boiled down to a syrup, spitting takedowns like sour candies. “Love her like a twin,” she says of Madeline, in a voice of squeaky chalk. “Who stole my nutrients in the womb.”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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘Music City’ and ‘Babe,’ Existential Battles of the Heart and Soul

      by

      Bedlam’s country music show is a rollicking good time. But the New Group’s production of “Babe,” starring Marisa Tomei, is a frustrating one-act lacking cohesion.If country music has a superpower, it’s the ability to spin conventions and catchphrases into affecting narratives. The book for “Music City,” a terrific new jukebox show mining the JT Harding catalog, essentially does the same thing on a larger scale.While Harding’s name might not resonate, his songs have scored sizable plays on streaming services: He is a co-writer of Uncle Kracker’s “Smile,” Blake Shelton’s “Sangria” and Keith Urban’s “Somewhere in My Car.” All of those songs turn up in “Music City,” a rollicking good time that understands contemporary country music — the style and the lifestyle — in a way we don’t often see on New York theater stages.For this Bedlam production, the director Eric Tucker and the scenic designer Clifton Chadick have turned the West End Theater into the Wicked Tickle, a homey Nashville joint specializing in open mics (and evoking that city’s real-life Bluebird Cafe). One such session is underway as audience members file in and take their seats — ticket holders can sign up for a slot in that preshow section and basically warm up the room for the characters.The focus of our attention are the imaginatively named TJ (Stephen Michael Spencer), an outgoing singer-songwriter with a knack for upbeat tunes, and 23 (Casey Shuler), a soulful newcomer with a crack in her voice and a tear in her beer — largely because of the strain of dealing with her addict mother (Leenya Rideout). The two young strivers decide to try writing songs together, and Peter Zinn’s book goes exactly where you think it’s going to go, with antagonists (both played by Andrew Rothenberg) setting up some speed bumps along the way: Bakerman, a drug dealer TJ is indebted to, and Stucky Stiles, a behatted, creatively adrift country star reminiscent of Strings McCrane in “Hold On to Me Darling.”“Music City” is not lacking for earworms (which also include two numbers written for the show and four that had not been previously recorded), but it also understands that almost as important as the songs is how they came to be. TJ and 23 express themselves through music — it is who they are — so when Stucky comes fishing for new material, they must choose who will get to deliver these little pieces of their heart.The only caveat in this very effectively staged production is the superfluous, distracting choreography by John Heginbotham (Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”), but it is kept to a minimum. “Music City” is a good example of a jukebox done well, highlighting an industry that values songwriting craftsmanship as well as its commercial value and even revisiting some of the questions that were raised in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic”: What does music mean to the people who are passionate about it? How do you measure success?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

      Francesca D’Uva Works It All Out Onstage

      by

      With a solo show about grief and life, the comedian and composer brings her experimental musical comedy to an Off Broadway audience.Francesca D’Uva moved across the rehearsal room, singing and dancing, making the space her playground.Her voice jumped from a guttural, emo-metal drone to a high-pitched, almost operatic belt to a soft serenade. She played a surreal cast of characters: a sexy nurse from a Wii game she used to play; British children looking for the nanny of their dreams; Shakira.The show was an emotional pinball machine, seeming to invite laughter and tears. In one scene, she conjured the memory of her kindergarten Nativity play in which she was cast as a cow.“Everybody’s laughing at me, everybody’s mooing at me,” she sang.A familiar face in New York’s alternative comedy scene, Ms. D’Uva, 30, performs regularly at venues around the city and has appeared on television in “Three Busy Debras” and “Fantasmas.” Vulture named her a “Comedian You Should and Will Know” in 2024.Ms. D’Uva’s dramatic instincts find an outlet during the show in a range of characters, including at least one Colombian pop star.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith the Off Broadway premiere this week of “This Is My Favorite Song,” her solo show at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, she takes her genre-defying act to a new arena.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