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      ‘Arden of Faversham’ Review: An Elizabethan Noir Lost in the Fog

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      Red Bull Theater’s attempt to update this 1592 true-crime story falls flat.“Arden of Faversham,” a 1592 play that some speculate was written by Shakespeare, is an early example of a true-crime narrative, tracing the real murder of Thomas Arden by his wife and her lover. This production by Red Bull Theater aims for a contemporary parallel, but its staging, noirish and to the point, fumbles the original’s balladry and lands cold instead of coldblooded.The story, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat, has numerous gears, and they all seem to be turning in different directions. Shortly after being granted a lordly wealth of land, Arden (Thomas Jay Ryan) travels to London while bemoaning the fact that everyone knows his wife, Alice (Cara Ricketts), is cheating with the lowly tailor Mosby (Tony Roach). What’s less known, though not by much, is her plan to kill Arden, for which she separately recruits his servant, Michael (Zachary Fine, a comically anxious live-wire), and Clarke (Joshua David Robinson), a painter who knows of poison oils.For fun, Alice pits Michael and Clarke against each other; whoever kills Arden first will get to marry Susan (Emma Geer), her maid and Mosby’s sister. For overkill, Alice brings onboard the Widow Greene (a Medusa-eyed Veronica Falcón) who, smarting after the recent loss of her land (to Arden) and husband (to death), hires two bumbling henchmen to go after her new landlord as well.The plan humorously goes awry. And this production, staged by Jesse Berger at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Manhattan, doesn’t fare much better in its efforts to juggle Renaissance tragedy and crime noir, à la a Coen brothers-esque farce with feminist angles.Some of the thematic retooling pays off, like the flipping of Widow Greene’s gender (from the play’s original male Farmer), creating a kindred desire between Widow Greene and Alice to survive in a male-dominated world. Reza Behjat’s lighting nicely evokes Old Hollywood crime.Other updates, mainly playing up Alice’s agency and self-awareness, come with a price: We lose a caricature and gain a realistic portrayal, but cede the foundation upon which the initial narrative is built. In her portrayal of Alice, Rickett’s lust is palpable, but Alice and Mosby do not have a likable, or even pervertedly alluring, relationship, so their supposed crime of passion seems anything but that.There’s not only discordance in Greg Pliska’s music, which flips from jazz to period music, but also in Mika Eubanks’s costumes: a thematic free-for-all that, in one scene, throws Arden’s pinstripe suit into battle with his wife’s heavily corseted get-up. With its high wooden beams, Christopher and Justin Swader’s appealing single set recalls both a Western hunting lodge and an Elizabethan thrust stage.But in a story with as high a potential for farce, this “Arden” misses most opportunities to capitalize on its built-in momentum. Alice’s fits of rage, as she grows impatient with each failed murder attempt, should be funny for the audience. Yet Berger’s direction has little sense of comedic positioning or calibration. Alice’s outbursts, like the production, leave us feeling mostly indifferent.Arden of FavershamThrough April 1 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      Jeremy O. Harris’s Writer’s Residency Under the Tuscan Sun

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      The finalists for the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize suddenly find themselves in Italy, with plenty of time to write, reflect and make pasta.CASTIGLIONCELLO DEL TRINORO, Italy — Just two weeks ago, the lives of four promising playwrights were upended: Not only did they receive an email announcing that their work had been shortlisted for the 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize, but they were also invited to participate in a monthlong residency in Tuscany, led by the American playwright Jeremy O. Harris.Which is how those playwrights found themselves eating gourmet meals this week in a medieval village turned boutique hotel with breathtaking views of the postcard-perfect Val d’Orcia countryside. With access to a sauna and spa, as well as pasta-making classes and truffle-hunting, they are very much in a pinch-me-I-can’t-believe-it’s-true state.“The first two or three days I was like, ‘How am I here, this is insane,’” Rianna Simons, 21, said of working alongside “very lovely, very talented people in a crazy, beautiful environment.” Simons, a Bermudian-British writer who lives in London, almost didn’t come, she said, laughing, because she initially thought the email about her play “White Girls Gang” was a scam.“I need to get back to my actual writing, because while it’s been really exciting to support other people, I am still an artist, you know, so I need to create my art,” said Harris, whose “Slave Play” received multiple Tony nominations.Guido GazzilliThere are no hard and fast rules for the fellows in the program, called Substratum, which was conceived by Harris (“Slave Play,” “Daddy”), a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, who judged the competition. “I just want people to write,” he said in an interview this week. The finalists, who were among those who submitted about 1,700 works, are “writers doing something a little different,” he said. “A little off the beaten path.”The prize went to Jesús Valles for “Bathhouse.pptx,” a play exploring queer history. But because Valles, who is pursuing an M.F.A. in playwriting, was unable to leave their studies at Brown University, the slot went to Raffaella Donatich, Harris’s former assistant and an “exciting emerging writer,” Harris said, adding that she was invited on the strength of her pilot “Sex Act.”The other fellows, all at various stages of their careers, agreed that having the time to write without distractions — and not having to sweat the small stuff — was the real reward.One rule: The fellows are required to eat dinner together to “catch up on your day, see how things have gone,” said Harris, center, sitting with Raffaella Donatich and the other fellows.Guido Gazzilli for The New York Times“There’s something about having everything taken care of,” said Chloë Myerson, a 32-year-old writer from London whose play “Class” was shortlisted. Being outside of her normal life felt almost like a “weird punishment,” she said, “because as a writer, I’m always trying to carve out space” from the demands of work, relationships and life.For Donatich, 26, who lives in New York, having “so much unstructured time” was forcing her “to define the reasons why I like the thing I claim to like to do.”And Asa Haynes, 27, an actor turned playwright from London who was recognized for his work “RACISM: an unfocused theater essay,” said the experience was giving his imagination free rein. “Writing isn’t necessarily sitting down at a table with a glass of water or a cup of tea listening to some music. It’s also taking in the sun, the views, going to the spa and having a very hot sauna,” he said. “Writing is actually a lot more thinking and ruminating.”This sort of pampering is exactly what Harris envisioned for the fellows participating in the residency — the first, he hopes, of many.The residency is sponsored by Gucci, and was conceived when Harris worked with that luxury brand. “I always remind them that the only reason they know who I am is because of the theater, and so it feels disingenuous of me to accept a paycheck without figuring out a way to bring it back to the theater somehow,” he said.Harris, right, with two of the fellows: Asa Haynes, left, and DJ Hills, who is slightly obscured. Harris said he was as eager to learn “from everyone here” as he was to mentor the playwrights.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesHaving spent time in Italy during pandemic lockdown, he decided it was the perfect place for writers to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar culture and “get the type of inspiration that can really shift an artist’s brain from the consciousness of society that you’re a part of to some new amalgamation of the expat brain,” he said.He was introduced to Michael L. Cioffi, the owner of Monteverdi Tuscany, the boutique property where fellows are staying. (Monteverdi is underwriting many of the on-property expenses and experiences, like the pasta-making classes.) Cioffi, a Cincinnati-based lawyer, came to Tuscany about two decades ago, and later encountered the decaying hilltop hamlet of Castiglioncello del Trinoro, about halfway between Florence and Rome.An initial purchase became a passion project, and eventually Cioffi bought many of the hamlet’s houses, transforming abandoned stables and dilapidated farmhouses into guest rooms, a restaurant and a wellness center and spa. Only a few original residents remain.From left, Chloë Myerson, Haynes and Rianna Simons on the property, a former medieval village.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesFrom the start, Cioffi said in a Zoom interview, he conceived of the Monteverdi as a “place to share with people, but also create a platform where people could really experience the arts in a meaningful way.” He established an artist-in-residence program and a concert series; the property had already attracted the likes of Wes Anderson, who wrote “The Grand Budapest Hotel” there.“I was like, well, it already has been like the muse has already wandered the halls there, and I want to meet her and see what she has to offer us,” Harris said of the space.The group is sharing a six-bedroom house called Muri Antichi (Ancient Walls), with en-suite bathrooms, and spacious common rooms where they’ve been gathering after dinner to watch movies.Days are mostly self-structured for the fellows. Mentoring has been informal as well. Harris said he was as eager to learn “from everyone here” as he was to mentor the playwrights.Hills, right, says the monthlong experience is providing plenty of “because you’re worth it” moments. Hills, Simons, left, and Haynes, center, were among those shortlisted for the annual Yale Drama Series Prize.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesFor DJ Hills, 27, whose play “Trunk Brief Jock Thong” was shortlisted, the pampering is giving them a “because you’re worth it” moment. “There is so much flagellation as an artist; I need to be constantly throwing myself onto the ground for my work,” Hills said, adding that time in the spa has been a gift. “I, as an artist, am worth the 30 minutes to be here.”As for Harris, he is keen to work on projects that had been put on the back burner while he basked in the success of his Tony-nominated “Slave Play” and sundry other projects which, besides modeling for Gucci, include releasing a capsule collection, producing plays, writing for television and cinema and performing in the Netflix series “Emily in Paris.”“I need to get back to my actual writing,” he said, “because while it’s been really exciting to support other people, I am still an artist, you know, so I need to create my art.”In the coming weeks, the fellows will encounter a range of artists (and possibly producers), including the filmmakers Pete Ohs (“Jethica”) and Eliza Hittman (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Beach Rats”), the playwrights Jordan Tannahill and Jasmine Lee-Jones and the author Erika J. Simpson.Hilltop hamlet as muse: Monteverdi Tuscany, with views of the postcard perfect Val d’Orcia countryside, is about halfway between Florence and Rome.Guido Gazzilli for The New York TimesHarris’s experience in 2015 at MacDowell, a prestigious artists’ residency program in New Hampshire, also inspired this new program. He called that residency a confidence-boosting experience that “restructured my sense of self,” adding that he hoped the Tuscan experience would do the same for the fellows.MacDowell also showed him the importance of sharing meals. “That’s the only rule,” he added, “dinners where you can catch up on your day, see how things have gone,” and just talk.Two recent meals were an indication of the sort of banter that takes place, with topics ranging from — and this is just a small sampling — playwrights contemporary and not (from Aristotle to David Ireland and plenty in between); Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose film “Theorem” they had watched the night before); K-dramas and their Shakespearean influences; British actors doing American accents (not so great, some said); Fassbinder films; the biblical king David; olive oil; Shonda Rhimes (and how she’s not given enough credit for her innovations); a new stage adaptation of “Brokeback Mountain”; Michelin-starred restaurants; elaborate European film titles; and, because Monday was game night, good games to play (Spades, Exploding Kittens, Salad Bowl).Before dinner, the fellows learned to make ravioli and picci, a local pasta. “Also theater, you know,” said Harris, who had earlier described meals he’d eaten in terms of the pleasure he’d gotten from the chef’s storytelling, even more than the food.The group kneaded and rolled out the dough and joked happily.“Jeremy’s like the most wonderful fairy godmother,” Hills said. “We’re very fortunate to have him.” More

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      In ‘Up Here,’ the Song Stuck in Your Head Might Be Your Mean Ex-Crush

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      Developed by a team of Broadway and Hollywood all-stars, the new Hulu series sets a chorus of inner critics to song.The rats were not on the call sheet. They turned up anyway.For the members of the brain trust behind the new Hulu musical series “Up Here,” this balmy September night last year was to be a precious occasion: After more than two years of cross-country video calls, the writer and executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel had flown in from Los Angeles during the last full week of production, finally giving her a chance to hang out on set with her collaborators — a gang of Broadway powerhouses that included the highly decorated songwriting couple behind “Frozen,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.“She was one of our best friends in the pandemic,” Anderson-Lopez said at the time, at an outdoor shoot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hudson Heights. “We spent six to eight hours together a day during 2021. And we just hugged in person for the first time 10 minutes ago.”And then Sanchez-Witzel got a dose of New York City realness. As they gathered around the monitors, with the cameras rolling just a few yards away, a few enterprising rodents decided to join the fun. Snacks were stashed. Sanchez-Witzel nervously pulled up her feet. Someone joked about creating a viral video to promote the show.It was just the latest twist in the bigger challenge faced by the illustrious team behind “Up Here,” which dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Friday: how to merge that most classically New York of art forms, the stage musical, with a much younger Hollywood one — the bingeable half-hour streaming sitcom.Stage musicals have been adapted into movies for decades; live television adaptations have made a comeback in recent years, too. But turning one into serialized television is new. This alone would make “Up Here,” developed from an original musical by the Lopezes, stand out.The developers of “Up Here” on a location shoot in Manhattan, from left: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, Robert Lopez, Steven Levenson, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Thomas Kail.Sarah Shatz/HuluThe Lopezes created “Up Here” as a stage musical that debuted in San Diego in 2015, but soon shelved it. They made significant changes for the TV adaptation. Sarah Shatz/HuluAdd to that the Tony-winning creative powers of the writer Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and the director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”), and the series also comes courtesy of Broadway’s equivalent to a Marvel superteam.“I think they wanted to make sure someone hadn’t won a Tony in this group,” Sanchez-Witzel said. (She, Levenson and the Lopezes are all credited as developers.) She joked that over the years she had spent “thousands of dollars on StubHub” to watch her new collaborators’ shows.Given the surrealistic premise of “Up Here,” it was perhaps always well suited for the screen — think “Herman’s Head” with music, or “Inside Out” with nagging parents, mean ex-crushes and former friends instead of lovable little gremlins. Set at the turn of the millennium, it centers on Lindsay and Miguel (played in the series by Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes), a young couple who meet outside a bar bathroom where Lindsay’s roommate is having sex with a stranger.If a show about the lurid dating lives of 20-something New Yorkers feels a little familiar, the twist is that the characters’ thoughts, as personified by people from their lives, constantly speak up — or, rather, sing up — to interfere.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes about trying out for his role. He had ample show-tune experience.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe original musical premiered in San Diego in 2015, then was shelved while the Lopezes worked on other things. It didn’t stay on the shelf for long. Early in 2020, Kail, who since directing “Hamilton” had begun to develop a solid reputation in television (he was an executive producer and director of the acclaimed FX series “Fosse/Verdon”), was looking for a new project he could sink his teeth into. He knew the Lopezes from the theater world — in addition to their songs for the “Frozen” movies and “Coco,” Lopez had co-written “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” — and he asked if they had anything lying around.They were keen to take another crack at “Up Here.” Kail saw potential. He soon pulled in Levenson, his fellow developer of “Fosse/Verdon.” All agreed that “Up Here” would work best as a comedy series. There was just one problem.“We quickly decided none of us had any experience in half-hour television,” Levenson said. So Kail contacted Sanchez-Witzel, whose credits included “The Carmichael Show” and “New Girl.” She signed on but continued to work from Los Angeles. (Kail, the Lopezes and Levenson are also executive producers.)The team’s central task was figuring out how to translate the stage version to episodic television. The idea, as Levenson explained it, was to create a musical that spanned eight episodes but where each was also its own mini-musical. And the tunes had to be more than an accessory.“The show needed to function like a musical, where the songs actually were necessary to the storytelling, so that if you removed them, the show wouldn’t work,” Levenson said.The learning curve was steep for both sides.“Danielle told us about certain structures of a 30-minute comedy,” Anderson-Lopez said. “And we talked a lot about how when we’re looking for songs in theater or animated musicals, we’re always looking for a moment when a character is having a feeling so big, they can’t speak anymore. It was really fun figuring out those spaces in a half-hour comedy.”Eventually, the set list from the San Diego production was almost entirely put aside. The male lead’s name was also changed from Dan to Miguel.Valdes as Miguel in a scene from the series. The male lead was called Dan in the stage version. Sarah Shatz/Hulu“I felt strongly that this time around he should be not white,” said Lopez, the youngest person ever to win an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — and also the only person to have won each award more than once. He and Sanchez-Witzel share “a similar experience being nonwhite and feeling disconnected from both the white mainstream and from our immigrant histories,” he added. (Lopez is of Philippine descent; Sanchez-Witzel is Mexican American.) “We thought that’d be interesting to put into this character.”To find their lead actors, the New York-based creators followed a procedure they were all familiar with. This was an advantage for Valdes.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes, who is best known for playing Cisco/Vibe on the CW’s “The Flash” but has extensive show-tune experience, including appearing in the Broadway hit “Once” a decade ago.“It had been a long time since I’d been in that kind of musical theater space, but it felt so familiar,” he said, “like a homecoming.”Landing the part was more fraught for Whitman, whose extensive television résumé (“Parenthood,” “Arrested Development”) had not prepared her for an old-school tryout. “I had to fly to New York and stand in front of a table full of people next to a piano player and have to sing,” Whitman said in a joint video call with Valdes. “It was terrifying. I can sing, but I’d never done anything like that.”As for the actors handling Lindsay and Miguel’s inner voices, they tend to straddle both worlds. Portraying Lindsay’s parents are the writer, humorist and actor John Hodgman and the Broadway and “Brockmire” veteran Katie Finneran. Team Miguel includes Scott Porter, an original cast member of the Off Broadway hit musical “Altar Boyz” who went on to star in “Friday Night Lights.” That evening in Hudson Heights, he was rocking a goatee and suspenders that made him look like a cocky late-90s corporate bro, which is exactly what he plays.Lindsay leaves her partner (George Hampe, far right) for New York City in the pilot. The voices in her head (played by, center left, Sophia Hammons; Katie Finneran; and John Hodgman) follow her.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom his experience in theater and on “Fosse/Verdon,” Kail had learned that things went smoother if you had everyone in the same building; aside from the portions shot on location, the entire production was concentrated at a compound in Long Island City, Queens, from the writing to the choreography to the costume making.“The thing with theater is, there is a moment when you move into the theater and everybody’s under the same tent,” he said. “We wanted to try to do that here and bring everybody in.”Except, of course, for Sanchez-Witzel, who until the final full week had to make do from Los Angeles. It was great that technology had allowed her to observe the set from 3,000 miles away, she said, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of finally watching it all in person: the strips of ratty off-white carpet evoking dirty Manhattan snow, the whispers between takes, the in-person chemistry between Whitman and Valdes.Then there was the massive boulder in the middle of a block in Hudson Heights, where Lindsay and Miguel share an important kiss.“To see the rock in person — it’s probably hard for you to imagine how exciting it is,” Sanchez-Witzel said, laughing. “But to me, it’s extremely exciting!” More

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      Review: In ‘Sancocho,’ a Family Crisis Is Cooking

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      Attention to culinary detail is the best part of this heavily seasoned family drama by Christin Eve Cato at the WP Theater.“Sancocho,” a new play by Christin Eve Cato, begins long before the lights come up. As ticket holders file into the WP Theater, a large pot simmers on the stove (the hyperrealistic kitchen set is by Raul Abrego), releasing the savory scents of the stew of the title. A little later, when one of the play’s sisters describes her mother’s cooking — sofrito made from scratch, pastelillos, arroz con gandules, tender pernil, “the way she made oxtail slide off the bone” — I heard a woman in the audience audibly moan.This attention to culinary detail — the smells, the sights, the hand towels with a weave you can practically feel — is the best, most succulent part of this heavily seasoned domestic drama, produced by the Latinx Playwrights Circle, WP Theater and the Sol Project. Though it occupies a single set, a roomy kitchen somewhere in East Harlem, and introduces just two characters, sisters born to Puerto Rican parents a generation apart, the play stirs together two lifetimes of trauma and catastrophe into only 90 minutes. “Sancocho,” with the stew as its central metaphor, is a meditation on inheritance and family, how its members might eat and celebrate together, but suffer apart.Renata (Shirley Rumierk), a successful lawyer, heavily pregnant, has stopped by the apartment of her older sister, Caridad (Zuleyma Guevara), a cleaner. This is a brief visit, Renata insists: she has to leave for New Jersey before the traffic kicks off. But it is also a fraught one. Their father is dying. Renata needs Caridad to review his will. Caridad has a few items for Renata to review as well.A lesser playwright might have emphasized what separates the sisters. There are obvious differences between these women — in age; class; education; and as Caridad, who inherited their father’s complexion, points out, even skin color. But there are just as many similarities. Prickly and volatile, both are quick to take offense and just as quick to offer absolution. Caridad is clearly more at home in the kitchen. It is her kitchen, after all. And Renata doesn’t know how to peel a plantain. Yet this is a dish they cook together.The specificity of this cooking — as when Caridad shows Renata how to score the plantain’s skin and strip the peel away — gives the show its particular flavor. But the heated discussion the sisters have over and around the ingredients strains the play’s naturalism, as does the more presentational performances that the director, Rebecca Martínez, encourages. Would all of these revelations really emerge in this same moment? Why have they never had any of these conversations before? And crucially, will the stew have time to cook before the other guests arrive?In the program, Cato includes a sancocho recipe borrowed from her grandmother. Carnivorous members of the audience can make it at home. But even the vegetarians might try out a few of the play’s other recipes: for forgiveness, for love.SancochoThrough April 9 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Bad Cinderella’ Review: The Title Warned Us

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber hopes to extend an unbroken 43-year streak on Broadway. But his 13th new musical may not be the charm.First: Bring earplugs.Not just because the songs in “Bad Cinderella,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility.For that matter, bring eye plugs: The sets and costumes are as loud as the songs. If there were such a thing as soul plugs, I’d recommend them as well.That’s because “Bad Cinderella” is not the clever, high-spirited revamp you might have expected, casting contemporary fairy dust on the classic story of love and slippers. It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace (let alone the melodic delight) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.Finally, a Cinderella for streetwalkers and gym rats!That this is the supposedly improved version of the musical that opened in London in August 2021 beggars the imagination. Then simply called “Cinderella,” and welcomed with indulgent warmth by critics who were perhaps rusty after more than a year of lockdown, it has here acquired the adjective “Bad,” as if to dare headline writers with an easy mark. A more accurate adjective might have been “Unnecessary” — except perhaps for Lloyd Webber himself, whose unbroken 43-year streak of shows on Broadway, beginning with “Evita” in 1979, would otherwise end with the closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” in April.Yet if there was no good reason for “Bad Cinderella,” that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been good. Quite a few recent and incoming musicals — “& Juliet,” “Once Upon a One More Time” and “Six” among them — have more or less reasonably applied a feminist spin to pre-feminist tales and history.Grace McLean as the Queen with a bevy of shirtless pec-rippling hunks.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Bad Cinderella” seems as if it could have been in the same league. Emerald Fennell (original story and book) and Alexis Scheer (book adaptation) have rejiggered the traditional plot to give Cinderella (Linedy Genao) a better motive for marrying Prince Sebastian (Jordan Dobson) than mere infatuation; he’s already her friend instead of a stranger she meets at a ball. Her transformation from a “gutter rose” and a “rebel” to a silver-leafed stunner, with the help of a godmother (Christina Acosta Robinson) who’s more of a mad aesthetician than a fairy, is not for him, we are told, but herself.Despite that, and a series of effortful numbers Genao sings bravely, her story, which is almost entirely internal, recedes. Sebastian’s is more interesting. An unassuming, enlightened type, he has been dragooned into choosing a bride only because his brawnier and better-loved brother, Prince Charming, is presumed dead after disappearing at war. With both his mother (Grace McLean) and Cinderella’s stepmother (Carolee Carmello) devising other plans for him — the dreaded stepsisters, here hideous Valley Girls — Sebastian’s problem isn’t figuring out whom to marry (he wants Cinderella) but how.Those changes are hardly groundbreaking, especially coming from Fennell, who won an Oscar for writing the feminist revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” and Scheer, whose play “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” took a cudgel to stereotypes of innocent girlhood. Still, they ought to have been sufficient to make “Bad Cinderella” at least a winky hoot.One reason it isn’t is the unrelievedly pompous direction by Laurence Connor. Aside from those strident sets and costumes (by Gabriela Tylesova) and that aggressive sound (by Gareth Owen), there is a fundamental mismatch between the flippant fairy tale tone of the book, which wants the lightest possible treatment, and the exhaustingly one-note insistence of the staging. (The choreography is by JoAnn M. Hunter.) As in his work on the Broadway revivals of “Les Misèrables” in 2014 and “Miss Saigon” in 2017, Connor seems to favor busy, murky, late-Reagan-era oversell, not necessarily inappropriate to those late-Reagan-era shows but lacking the delicacy necessary for much that came after.Carolee Carmello, center, as Cinderella’s stepmother, with the dreaded stepsisters, played by Morgan Higgins, far left, and Sami Gayle. Genao is at right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso lacking delicacy: the songs, with workmanlike lyrics by David Zippel, and music by Lloyd Webber that often sounds like it escaped from “Phantom.” The prettiest, if most bombastic, is “Only You, Lonely You” for Sebastian, which has the engine-in-overdrive feeling of “The Music of the Night,” complete with triple-crème melody and sludgy orchestrations (also by Lloyd Webber).But “Phantom” was a show about obsession, so its richness and hysteria made sense. If anything, “Bad Cinderella” is about plotting how to “marry for love” (the title of a song in the second act) and thus requires a much lighter touch. In only one number, “I Know You,” which McLean and especially Carmello turn into the show’s comic highlight, do Lloyd Webber and Zippel hit the mark.Whether the mark is worth hitting is another matter; a comic duet that pits aging, carping viragos against each other in the manner of “Bosom Buddies” from “Mame” is not perhaps a feminist anthem. At least there are jokes to land: “I must admit I never quite forget a face/Though every feature’s in a slightly different place.” But mostly when aiming for drollery, the songwriters overshoot and wind up at operetta.Well, “Phantom” was at bottom an operetta too, yet even in an obsolete genre has run on Broadway for 35 years. If “Bad Cinderella” does not seem likely to match that success, its virtues, however invisible to me, may yet be measurable by other means.Keep in mind that Lloyd Webber’s 12 previous Broadway musicals, starting with “Jesus Christ Superstar” in 1971, have run up a total of 30,000 performances, nearly 75 years’ worth. (And he has just turned 75 himself.) What the shows have grossed in New York City — $1.4 billion for “Phantom” alone — could finance a moon mission, or pay off thousands of mortgages for employees and send their children to college.Lloyd Webber, not only British but a Lord, has been, in that sense, America’s most successful theater composer. We can argue that “Evita” wasn’t good for the culture — and “Cats” not good for anything — but somehow, he and Broadway made a match that’s lasted like no other. Even without the blessing of critics, and just like “Bad Cinderella,” it’s an implausible story about a real marriage of love.Bad CinderellaAt Imperial Theater, Manhattan; badcinderellabroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘The Hunting Gun’ Review: Letters to Burn After Reading

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      Miki Nakatani and Mikhail Baryshnikov star in this meticulously handsome stage adaptation of Yasushi Inoue’s 1949 novella.In a corner of a shallow pond, its dimly lit surface dotted with lily pads, a barefoot young woman crouches to light a stick of incense. It’s an elegant bit of stagecraft: The wisps of smoke waft low across the water as the woman meanders through it, splish-splashing softly, ankle-deep.Design is both triumph and downfall in “The Hunting Gun,” a stage adaptation of Yasushi Inoue’s 1949 novella of the same name, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. Telling its story through three women’s letters to the same man, the play stars the Japanese actor Miki Nakatani as the women, and Mikhail Baryshnikov in the wordless, physically eloquent role of the man.Shoko, the 20-year-old among the water lilies, is the author of the first letter. Her message to Josuke (Baryshnikov) is a torrent of grief for her mother, Saiko, who has recently died; shock at Saiko’s yearslong affair with the married Josuke, which a diary has revealed; and affectionate memories of Josuke and his betrayed wife, Midori, who have been kind to Shoko since she was a child.Shoko speaks her letter in Japanese while lucid, well-paced English supertitles are projected high upstage. Beneath them, on the other side of a screen, the well-dressed Josuke listens, his steady gaze giving way to anguish.The fundamental frustration of François Girard’s immaculately handsome production is the placement of the supertitles. Adapted by Serge Lamothe, this play is dense with language and dependent on it for most of its meaning. It isn’t enough for audience members to know the story’s outline in advance, or even to have read the novella.Yet the English text appears so far above Nakatani on François Séguin’s set that non-Japanese speakers are forced to choose between following the narrative and watching Nakatani, which is unfair to both the actor and the observer. Design becomes an obstacle to understanding.This is unfortunate in an otherwise meticulously calibrated production, exquisitely lit by David Finn on a tricksy set whose surface transforms from water to stone to wood, not a whit of it digital. In Renée April’s costumes, Nakatani sheds skin after skin, morphing from the prim-looking Shoko into Midori, in fit-and-flare red, then into the white-clad Saiko, who calmly dresses herself for death.This sartorial unlayering parallels the peeling away of secrets and lies with each letter to Josuke. The furious Midori — curiously hypersexual in manner as she addresses the husband who has rejected her — informs him that she has known for years about his affair with her cousin Saiko. Then Saiko tells him, with unsparing honesty, why she has decided to die.Josuke, a hunter who once aimed a rifle at his wife, receives her letter with cold contempt, while the missive from the dead Saiko undoes him. Baryshnikov, possessed of such expressive grace, conveys all of this unshowily. But he is upstage with the supertitles just above him, and that pulls focus from Nakatani. It’s as if the director decided that the play was about the man all along.The Hunting GunThrough April 15 at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan; thehuntinggun.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      in Television

      Aaron Sorkin Battled a Stroke as He Reimagined ‘Camelot’

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      “Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, an eagerly anticipated new musical from the makers of “My Fair Lady.” But happily-ever-aftering took a while.Out-of-town, while trying to trim the overlong production, one writer was hospitalized with an ulcer, and the director collapsed of a heart attack. In New York, despite starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so following a televised segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is remembered as one of the last of Broadway’s Golden Age shows, but its traditional narrative — Arthurian legend with all of its romance, politics, swordplay and sorcery — has never quite clicked.“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” the New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. That assessment has persisted. “It has one of the great scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, “but the plot starts to go haywire.”On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is scheduled to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is familiar to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing,” and he won an Oscar for writing the movie “The Social Network.” He is also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a hit film, and whose most recent Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a critical and commercial success.Clockwise from top left: Aaron Sorkin, Phillipa Soo, Jordan Donica and Andrew Burnap.Photographs by Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesBut musicals have not been part of his repertoire, until now. He earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly overstated words, is “the first time I’m putting it to use.” (He tried writing a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)This rewritten “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady”) as Lancelot, is now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a large production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical — even Lerner and Loewe reworked it post-opening, and others have tried, too — but his deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from T.H. White’s fantasy novel, “The Once and Future King,” has made the production one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theater mavens eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.“People think the show is about a love triangle, which of course it is,” said Alan Paul, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company and director of his own production of “Camelot” a few years back, “but I really think it’s about the birth of democracy, and when you look back at ‘The West Wing,’ which is one of my favorite shows, that is a TV show that believes government can work for the people.”‘You’re supposed to be dead.’Just getting to this point is an unexpected relief for Sorkin.In November, two months before rehearsals were set to begin, he woke in the middle of the night and noticed that, while walking to the kitchen, he was crashing into walls and corners. He thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the orange juice he was carrying to his home office kept spilling.Sorkin called his doctor, who told him to come in immediately; his blood pressure was so high, Sorkin said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” The diagnosis: Sorkin, 61, had had a stroke.For about a month afterward, he was slurring words. He had trouble typing; he was discouraged from flying for a few weeks; and until recently, he couldn’t sign his name (he has just discovered, thanks to “Camelot” autograph seekers, that that’s improving). Those issues are now behind him, and the main lingering effect is that he still can’t really taste food.“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” he said during one of several interviews for this article. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”After the stroke, he quit cold turkey, cleaned up his diet and started working out twice a day. And, he said, “I take a lot of medicine. You can hear the pills rattling around in me.”“If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault,” Sorkin said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesSorkin told me about the stroke almost in passing, when we were having a get-acquainted cup of tea in a hotel lobby (he loves writing in hotels) earlier this year. Trying to understand his creative process, I asked whether he prefers to write longhand or on a device. That’s when he said writing by hand had become difficult.At first he told me about his stroke only off the record; we agreed we’d revisit the subject the next time we met, so he could think through the implications of going public. By then, he had decided he was ready to describe what he had been through, in the hopes that his experience might be a cautionary tale. “If it’ll get one person to stop smoking,” he said, “then it’ll be helpful.”He is aware how lucky he is to have recovered, and to be able to continue to do the work he loves. “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again,” he said, “and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”Now he’s commuting between Los Angeles, where he lives, and New York, where he’s trimming the script, offering pointers to actors, refining word choices that don’t strike him quite right. “Let me make this very, very clear,” he said. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”‘Now with no magic!’For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”Four years ago, Lincoln Center Theater, which is a nonprofit, staged a fund-raising concert performance of the show, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Arthur. It went so well that the creative team began talking about a full-scale production.“The music is so good, and it’s incredibly fun, and I don’t know of any other pieces set in the Middle Ages with knights,” said Bartlett Sher, a veteran of Golden Age revivals (“South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady”) who directed the concert and is now directing this revival. “I realized how extraordinary the score was,” he said, “and how complicated the experience of the book was.”Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, center, starred in the 1960 production of “Camelot.”Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamySher was debriefing with Miranda when Sorkin’s name came up. “I knew Sorkin was a fan of ‘Camelot,’ because he quotes it in ‘The West Wing’,” said Miranda, who grew up hearing songs from the musical, a favorite of his mother’s, and memorized them while a passenger in her car.Sher and Sorkin already knew each other because they had collaborated on “Mockingbird,” and they were eager to work together again.“You would think we would have sat and talked for hours about the problems we had with the existing book, or what we were hoping for, but we didn’t,” Sorkin said. “I just got to work.”He made one key early decision that has guided his approach to the show: no supernatural elements. That means Merlyn, who in the original is a magician who can remember the future and can turn Arthur into a hawk, is now a wise tutor; Morgan Le Fey, who in the original can build invisible walls, is now a scientist; and the nymph Nimue is gone. Even Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone origin story is questioned.“It wasn’t that I don’t like magic — I do,” Sorkin said. “Nor were there commercial reasons — no producer wants to put on a marquee, ‘Now With No Magic!’ It was because I feel that this story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real. If a problem can be solved by waving a magic wand, it doesn’t feel like much of a problem.”‘Musicals can get tangled with.’“Camelot,” like many older musicals, has its complications for a modern audience. “From a contemporary perspective, it’s very problematic,” said Stacy Wolf, director of the music theater program at Princeton University. “The musical is about heterosexual adultery ruining a visionary government, and the woman is ultimately blamed for it.”Nonetheless, Wolf is eager to see the revival. “The music that Lerner and Loewe wrote is just incredible,” she said, “and in the same way that Shakespeare gets tangled with, and operas get tangled with, musicals can get tangled with.”Sorkin quickly realized that two songs, in particular, posed problems: the sexist-sounding “How to Handle a Woman” and the classist-sounding “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”“When I first started writing it, I thought, there’s an easy way to solve this: Don’t sing the songs,” Sorkin said.But Sher asked Sorkin to reconsider, given fan fondness for the score. “There’s a reason we see ‘Camelot’,” Sorkin acknowledged, “and the reason isn’t me.”So he came up with an alternative solution: humor. The songs are back, preceded by dialogue in which Guenevere preemptively defuses their sting with Sorkin-esque wit.“When I joined, ‘How to a Handle a Woman’ wasn’t there in the script, but then one day it was,” Soo said. “But there was also a beautifully written scene — and this is another reason why Aaron Sorkin is brilliant at what he does — that explores the song in a new way.”The revival has been extensively nurtured — there were four developmental workshops along the way, and Sorkin estimates that he has written about 10 drafts of the script. Lancelot “went from being a buffoon, like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to a three-dimensional person.” Arthur struggles to define his feelings for Guenevere, whom he marries as part of a peace treaty. And Guenevere is now a strategic helpmate, periodically outthinking her husband.“The ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country,” said Donica, left foreground, who plays Lancelot.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There have been rewrites at each stage of workshop, and there are even more rewrites still going on,” said the actor Dakin Matthews, who is playing Merlyn and another character.A case study: Morgan Le Fey, who in the original is a sorceress with a sweet tooth, and a threat to Arthur’s reign. At first, Sorkin simply cut the character — as Lerner had done for some post-Broadway productions — but, Sorkin said, “she found her way in, and she got better.”In an early workshop, the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in “Rent”), read the role, when Le Fey was little more than a spurned ex-girlfriend. “She, in a very nice but direct way, said I could do better,” Sorkin said. “She was right.”He made Le Fey a scientist, an unmarried mother, and, for a time, an opium addict. (Sorkin has been clean for 23 years after battling his own addictions.) Now she makes and sells brandy. “People coming in and auditioning — they were just leaning into being high on opium, and it wasn’t working,” Sorkin said.Marilee Talkington, who plays Le Fey, has embraced the character’s evolution.“The old version of ‘Camelot’ felt distant, but also fun and entertaining,” she said. “This version is inviting the audience to ask themselves who they are, what they want, and where there’s hope.”How much “West Wing” is there in “Camelot”? Sorkin said the screenwriting device for which he is most famous — the so-called walk and talk, in which characters converse while in motion, is a.) “probably exaggerated” and b.) a screen technique that “has no implications for the stage.” Having said that: Arthur has his best ideas while pacing.One trick Sorkin did transfer from filmdom: He intercut three scenes together, as in a movie, held together with scoring, and challenged Sher to figure out the staging. “Give Bart something like that,” Sorkin said, “and he’s a happy guy.”And there are lines that can clearly be heard as allusions to our contemporary challenges.“All of his films are about game-changers, and ‘Camelot’ is no different, because Arthur is a game-changer,” said Donica, the actor playing Lancelot. “And the ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country.”‘I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it.’I sat down with Sorkin the morning after the first preview performance, and he was obviously pleased. It struck me that this was the first time he had seemed happy with his work. “That’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s the most positive I’ve been during the process. I feel ashamed I didn’t have more confidence in everybody.”There was still work to be done over the five-week preview period — the show was running too long (“I’m sure I’ll be called upon to make some cuts, and I’m not looking forward to that”), and Sorkin was still wrestling with various bits of language (Would it be exciting or distracting if he changed an “or” to a “like,” with the effect of implying that Guenevere might be agnostic?).But until that first performance before an audience, Sorkin had repeatedly fretted about what might go wrong, remembering that at one point he told a group of young librettists, “If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault.”I found it hard to understand how someone as successful as Aaron Sorkin could be so worried, so I asked him about it.“I have had some success, and I’ve also had plenty of experience feeling anxiety about what I’m doing,” he said. “Am I going to have an idea? Am I going to be able to write this?”One startling example: “I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”Is that kind of worrying a liability, or a strength, for an artist like Sorkin? “I hope it wasn’t a waste,” he said. “And I do think to myself, as I try to relax myself a little bit, I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it. That it’s the worrying that’s driving me to do it.”Sorkin, who has already begun having meetings about possible next musicals, even while dreaming up a Jan. 6 movie he is contemplating writing and directing, said he has come to see “Camelot” as a narrative about narrative.“Ultimately, the show is a valentine to storytelling,” he said.“I like that Arthur thinks if we can just keep telling these stories, then people will be inspired and they’ll believe that we do have greatness in our grasp, and that you have to keep trying,” he added. “The greatest delivery system for an idea ever invented is a story.” More

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      in Theater

      A Stage Adaptation of ‘Smash’ Is Setting Its Sights on Broadway

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      Producers including Steven Spielberg have been exploring several possible incarnations of the decade-old TV series. Now they have a plan.A long-discussed stage musical version of the television series “Smash” is finally coming to Broadway … but fans are going to have to wait a bit more.The adaptation’s producers, who include Steven Spielberg, announced Wednesday that they expect to bring the show to Broadway during the 2024-25 theater season. They said the musical will be directed by Susan Stroman, a five-time Tony winner whose latest endeavor, “New York, New York,” starts previews on Friday.The “Smash” musical will be based on the two-season series, broadcast on NBC in 2012 and 2013, about a group of New York City theater artists struggling to bring “Bombshell,” a musical about Marilyn Monroe, to the stage. The show, with plenty of soap-style backstage drama and exuberant production numbers, was dreamed up by Spielberg, developed by Robert Greenblatt and created by Theresa Rebeck, and, although its TV run was canceled because of declining ratings, it retains a passionate fan base.“It’s crazy that we’re still talking ‘Smash,’ but not a week has gone by where somebody doesn’t tell me they miss the show, so it’s kind of great to be seeing it in another incarnation,” said Neil Meron, who was an executive producer of the TV series.Meron and Greenblatt, who will produce the adaptation with Spielberg, said the stage version would be funnier than the television show, and that it would include some of the same characters, but also new ones, and would be set in the present day.“It’s a backstage comedy about the putting on of a Marilyn Monroe musical,” Meron said, while Greenblatt’s summation was: “We’ve been calling it a comedy about a musical.”The musical will feature a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, including songs they wrote for the television series as well as new ones; the team is best known for the Tony-winning score of “Hairspray” and is represented on Broadway this season by “Some Like It Hot.” The book will be written by Rick Elice (“Jersey Boys”) and Bob Martin (“The Drowsy Chaperone”). Joshua Bergasse, who choreographed the television series, will do the same for the stage show.The producers oversaw a developmental reading of the script about a year ago, and said they expect more workshops before the move to Broadway. The long lead time was needed to accommodate the schedules of the creative team, they said; casting has not yet been determined.“Every few years the show comes back into our lives, and now we’re excited to go on a new adventure with it,” Greenblatt said.The creative team has always imagined there would be a path from the television show to the stage, but its form has changed over time. In 2013 there was a concert performance of songs from “Hit List,” the musical that was a subject of the second season, and in 2015 an effort to develop a Broadway adaptation of “Bombshell,” the musical that was the subject of the first season, was announced after a concert performance of songs from that show.But then in 2020, the current producers announced that they would develop a loose adaptation of the series itself, rather than working with one of the musicals-within-the-television-show.“What we didn’t want to do was just put the TV series onstage — we wanted our own spin on it,” Meron said. “We are very conscious of our fan base, and very conscious that there’s a new audience that’s never been exposed to ‘Smash’ before. So our take is more comedic and more of a love letter to Broadway.” More