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      ‘Floyd Collins’ Review: Trapped in a Cave and in a Media Circus

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      One of the wonders of this glorious-sounding new Broadway production is how far from claustrophobic this Kentucky cave saga feels.Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.Jordan, below, and Taylor Trensch.Richard Termine 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

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      There’s No People Like Show People

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      In a new book, the Broadway photographer Jenny Anderson captures the craft and camaraderie of making theater.When Jenny Anderson was 7, her mother was cast in a local production of “Annie” in Brookhaven, Miss., near their hometown; Anderson, who had auditioned to be an orphan, was not. But sitting backstage watching her mom rehearse, she discovered a kind of “magic.” Where an actor’s job is to be seen, Anderson, even at 7, loved to look — not just at the razzle-dazzle happening onstage but at the alchemy that happened beyond it, transforming 1990s suburban kids into Depression-era orphans and a Mississippi theater into the streets of New York City.Anderson eventually made her way to New York, where she built a career as a theater photographer. THE IN-BETWEEN (Applause, $45), her first book, collects 16 years of her work behind the Broadway stage. The volume is a celebration of the labor and love that go into making theater — the trial and error of the rehearsal room; the transformative process of layering on costumes, makeup and wigs; the back-alley cigarettes and stairwell quick changes; the frenzied laughter, reflective calm and tears that all pour into a performance, and that turn a bunch of strangers into a momentary family.Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara in 2023, dressed to go on as a couple battling alcoholism in the musical “Days of Wine and Roses.”Jenny AndersonSarah Paulson warms up backstage at “Appropriate” in 2024.Jenny AndersonThough not a performer, Anderson is undeniably a member of that club called show people, and she suffuses each of her photographs with a palpable tenderness. Devotees of Broadway will find many familiar faces here; in the span of a few pages, you can trace Caissie Levy or Gavin Creel from baby-faced hippies in the 2010 “Hair” tribe to confident veterans leading the casts of “Frozen” (2019) and “Into the Woods” (2022). This is a book, in many ways, about becoming: a twisted mother, an underdog boxer, the goddess of the underworld, a bona fide Broadway star.Caissie Levy, Gavin Creel and Will Swenson rehearsing for “Hair” in 2010.Jenny AndersonLevy starring as Elsa in “Frozen” in 2019.Jenny AndersonAndy Karl prepares for his role as the titular boxer in the 2014 musical “Rocky.”Jenny AndersonThey say magicians should never reveal their secrets. But in exposing the inner workings of so many showstopping performances, Anderson pulls us all under the theater’s spell — holding our breaths as we race toward that moment when the room is hushed and everything is possible, just before the curtain goes up.Shaina Taub — the writer, composer and star of “Suffs” — at the 2024 Tony Awards, where she took home the prizes for best book and best original score.Jenny AndersonAmber Gray pauses before performing a number from “Hadestown” at the 2019 Tony Awards.Jenny AndersonCherry Jones and Celia Keenan-Bolger share a lighthearted moment backstage at “The Glass Menagerie” in 2013.Jenny AndersonLeslie Odom Jr. takes a moment for reflection before a 2023 performance of “Purlie Victorious.”Jenny Anderson More

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      Review: Caryl Churchill Times Four Makes an Infinity of Worlds

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      “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp,” a new collection of one-acts by the great British playwright, is a cause for celebration, wonderment and grief.A girl made of glass. A god — or, really, all of them. Ghosts, but of the future. An imp who may be trapped in a bottle.Just another day in Caryl Churchill’s world.The arrival of new work by Churchill is like the arrival of a new theorem in a supposedly settled body of knowledge. “Cloud Nine” (1979) explored gender as colonialism; “Escaped Alone” (2016) domesticated the apocalypse. “Drunk Enough to Say I Love You” (2006) reframed the alliance of Britain and the United States as a sloppy date. Clones and multiverses are part of her world. With a mathematician’s precision, she posits ways of thinking about the universe and its inhabitants that, even when baffling, give more dimension to our experience of both.Her latest investigations take the form of a collection of four one-act plays at the Public Theater, under the portmanteau title “Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.” Written separately over the last few years, each is pointed enough on its own: short and edgy. But together, in a splendid and surprisingly emotional production directed by James Macdonald, a frequent Churchill collaborator, they are so sharp you hardly feel them slicing your skin.“Glass” is the most literally shattering. The life of a girl made of the substance, who lives on a mantelpiece for safety, is encompassed in 13 minutes. Her mother frets over her, her brother brags about her, her mantelpiece neighbors — an old clock, a plastic dog, a painted vase — compete with her. (She may be pretty, the clock says, but he’s useful.) Soon the girl (Ayana Workman) meets a flesh-and-blood boy (Japhet Balaban) who is entranced by the transparency of her feelings: He can see straight into them, with no need for words. When his own feelings are spoken, in the form of whispers we do not hear, the express bus to tragedy departs.The way intimacy opens to loss is a theme here; the way abstractions become characters is a miracle. Somehow, it takes just a moment to adjust to the bizarre setup and the ensuing complications. (The mother warns that if the girl goes out for a walk with the boy, she had better wear Bubble Wrap.) Nor do we trouble ourselves that the production makes no attempt to literalize the figurines. They’re just us.In a 12-minute monologue, Deirdre O’Connell looks down on the ancient parade of human viciousness.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jinkx Monsoon Sails From ‘Drag Race’ to ‘Pirates! The Penzance Musical’

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      Jinkx Monsoon talks about feeling like a lifetime of hard work is finally paying off, and her return to Broadway as a zany maid in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical.”As she prepared to discuss a part in the upcoming Broadway show “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” with the director Scott Ellis, Jinkx Monsoon had only one outcome in mind. “I knew I was going in for a meeting, but I wanted to leave with that role,” she said in a recent conversation.And she was not coy about it. “The first thing she said was, ‘I’ve never wanted anything more than this,’” Ellis recalled, laughing.Now Monsoon is above the show’s title in playbills, alongside Ramin Karimloo and David Hyde Pierce. A lifetime of hard work has added up.“I’ve done so many freaking things!” Monsoon said. “I’ve been a stand-up comedian, I’ve been a singer and a dancer and a stripper. I think auctioneer is one thing I haven’t done.”A two-time winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Monsoon, 37, a Portland, Ore., native, has an eclectic résumé that includes cabaret shows, guest starring on “Doctor Who” and a wildly popular seasonal bauble, “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” (created and performed with BenDeLaCreme). When she made her Broadway debut in January 2023 as Matron “Mama” Morton in “Chicago,” casual — or perhaps cynical — observers might have assumed she was just another TV personality crossing off another item on her wish list, like headlining Carnegie Hall. (Monsoon did that, too, in February.)Instead it was a big step toward her end goal. She then took an even bigger step, professionally and personally, last year, when she was cast as Audrey in the hit Off Broadway revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” and ended up surprising even people who know her well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Onstage and Off, Whitney White Is Everywhere This Spring

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      An actor, musician and writer, White is also now an in-demand stage director. “I am looking, I am hungry, I am searching,” she said.This spring, Whitney White directed the ensemble drama “Liberation” Off Broadway, then the two-hander “The Last Five Years” on Broadway. Just days after that musical opened, she stood in an upstairs room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rehearsing “Macbeth in Stride,” her adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, which begins performances on Tuesday.During the song “Reach for It,” White, who plays a version of Lady Macbeth, took the lead. “Power’s not supposed to look like me,” she sang into a microphone.Maybe it should.A multidisciplinary artist with an unusual number of hyphens, White, 39, is an actor, a musician, a writer for theater and television (the Amazon series “I’m a Virgo”) and an increasingly in-demand, Tony-nominated stage director. Her current projects, White observed during a rehearsal break, are all about ambitious women. “I’m weirdly one of them,” she said.White grew up in Chicago, in a one-bedroom apartment with her working single mother. Her first exposure to theater was at her grandfather’s church, the Apostolic Church of God, which boasted a 50-person choir. A visit to Cirque du Soleil was another formative experience.At Northwestern, White took theater classes, but she found the scene there cliquey, exclusionary, so she majored in political science instead. While interning for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, she realized that she had to be an artist after all.“There’s nothing else that I can really wholeheartedly do with myself,” she said.With Nygel D. Robinson at the piano, the cast of “Macbeth in Stride” in rehearsal, from left: Charlie Thurston, White, Holli’ Conway, Phoenix Best and Ciara Alyse Harris.Elias Williams 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

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      Review: In ‘John Proctor Is the Villain,’ It’s the Girls vs. the Men

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      Kimberly Belflower’s play, on Broadway starring Sadie Sink, gives high school students a chance to prosecute a #MeToo case against “The Crucible.”The first word spoken in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.”Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift.It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since #MeToo acquired its hashtag, that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action. But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.”“Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks.Others have experienced worse.But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr. Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Natalie Dessay Stars With Her Daughter in a French ‘Gypsy’

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      The soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, team up to explore one of theater’s most toxic mother-daughter relationships.That “Gypsy” is finally making its debut in France would be noteworthy enough: It took 66 years for one of the most acclaimed works in the musical-theater canon to get there.But there is an extra twist.The production running Thursday through Saturday at the Philharmonie de Paris stars the soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, as Rose, the stage mother to end all stage mothers, and Louise, Rose’s long-suffering older child.“Well, that’s acting,” Dessay, 59, said when asked if there was baggage involved with bringing the show’s psychodrama to life with her daughter. “I can play the evil witch and she can play Snow White — it’s theater.”“Yes,” Naouri, 26, interjected, “but sometimes you lose yourself in the character, and I can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction.”They laughed before Dessay jumped back in. “It’s not any more complicated than anything else,” she said. “But above all it’s more pleasant since we know each other very well and we already have this mother-daughter relationship, so we don’t have to create it. We actually have fun with it.”Their bond was clear in a joint video conversation from France as the pair huddled over a phone — Naouri had helped her mother turn on the camera — keeping an animated banter going the entire time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Stranger Things’ Scaled Up for Broadway

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      The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood.Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main characters and get moving.Not so for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.” The new Broadway play, based on Netflix’s hit horror-science fiction series, starts with a bold five-minute cold open of loud gunfire, marauding Demogorgons and no leading characters. It’s a coup de théâtre, and it swiftly signals that the lead producers, the Broadway heavy-hitter Sonia Friedman and Netflix, are betting their big-money gamble will knock theatergoers’ socks right off.The scene begins with audiences glimpsing a ship’s crew members via two rectangular boxes. It look straight out of a graphic novel. “We always wanted to open with a big scene and a big moment, something that’s going to shock the audience,” said Ross Duffer, who, with his twin brother, Matt Duffer, created the “Stranger Things” series. Both are credited as the play’s creative producers.The play is a prequel to the 1980s-set TV series, and gives an origin story about a shy teenager named Henry Creel (played by Louis McCartney) who became an important figure in Season 4. It’s set in small-town Hawkins, Ind., mostly in 1959.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