Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares56 Views

      in Theater

      With This ‘Gypsy’ Song, Audra McDonald Makes You Rethink the Broadway Show

      by

      Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan, the entire, harrowing arc of a classic tragedy is delivered in 4½ minutes that are as exhilarating as they are upsetting. All the textbook components of tragedy according to Aristotle are vigorously at work here: self-delusion and self-knowledge, pity and terror, and the sense that what is happening is somehow both unexpected and inevitable.And all of this — right down to that climatic, rushing release called catharsis — is provided, near the end of a delectably tuneful show, by a lone woman performing a single song in what is generally regarded as the cheeriest of theatrical forms, the American musical. Yet by that number’s conclusion, Audra McDonald, the Tony-nominated star of George C. Wolfe’s Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” has the flayed-skinless appearance of a figure in a Francis Bacon portrait.And while most hardcore lovers of musicals have surely heard this song before, they are likely to sense that something new is happening here — something harsher, rawer, more wondering and ultimately more devastating. An old standard is providing fresh and unsettling revelations, while an unconventionally cast, mold-cracking performer is shedding surprising light and shadow on one of the best-known characters in the genre. No wonder that audience members leave the Majestic looking as if they had just been sucker punched.A visit to the show in late March inspired the Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty to call McDonald’s interpretation of the song “if not a religious experience, then a spiritually transfiguring one.” And a friend of mine, who is not generally a fan of musicals, emailed me after a Wednesday matinee that she “was so gutted by that number that when I walked out of the theater I really didn’t know where I was or which direction to turn.”“Rose’s Turn”Audra McDonald sings on the cast album for “Gypsy.”Such is the experience of watching McDonald sing “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” the 1959 story by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne about one very determined stage mother named Rose in the dying days of vaudeville. It’s the kind of number that makes you entirely rethink both the show you’ve been watching — one you may have felt you knew all too well — and its central character.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 Shares36 Views

      in Theater

      To Play Betty Boop, Jasmine Amy Rogers Had to Transform

      by

      When Jasmine Amy Rogers learned that she had been nominated for a Chita Rivera Award, for outstanding dancer in a Broadway show, her first reaction was to laugh.“Just because I felt a little bit like an impostor,” said Rogers, who plays the Jazz Age cartoon character Betty Boop in “Boop! The Musical.” “The dancing is always something that I was so fearful of.”Indeed, the tap portion of the audition process had been, by her own admission, “really bad.” “I was so nervous that I just shut down,” Rogers recalled, just hours after the nomination was announced. “It was very embarrassing for me. I did a little bit of the tap number from the beginning and I just couldn’t pick up the pattern.”It sounded “like somebody dropped a handful of silverware in the kitchen,” according to Jerry Mitchell, the musical’s choreographer and director. But, he added in a phone interview, “she went away, she worked on it, she came back and she was better.”And she got the job. The dance award nomination came late last month. A Tony nomination for best leading actress in a musical followed shortly after that. In his review, the New York Times’s chief theater critic called Rogers “immensely likable,” adding that “she sings fabulously,” and “nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line.” Not bad for a Broadway debut.Jasmine Amy Rogers, the star of “Boop! The Musical,” is a Tony nominee for best leading actress in a musical.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 Shares45 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘Irishtown’ and ‘The Black Wolfe Tone,’ Where Are the Rolling Hills?

      by

      Two plays at Irish Repertory Theater, one featuring a “Derry Girls” star, explore the real and the mythical in cultural identity.In the rehearsal room of the Irishtown Players, the posters on the walls are a sampler of the company’s performance history: 20th-century classics, almost all. Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” is up there, of course, and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” too, and Conor McPherson’s “The Weir.”The only unfamiliar title, “The Happy Leper of Larne,” almost winks from its frame, suggesting a maudlin-cheery cousin to “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”For the Irishtown Players — the fictional Dublin troupe at the center of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s new backstage comedy, “Irishtown” — “The Happy Leper” was a hit. Now some producers are bringing the company to Broadway in the author’s follow-up play. But with mere weeks until they leave for New York, the playwright, Aisling (Brenda Meaney), has gone rogue. Her just-delivered script is a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault, set in England.To Constance (a flawlessly funny Kate Burton), the ranking company member, such a play is not Irish at all.Poppy (Angela Reed), the play’s British director, points out that by definition it is, because Aisling is.“Yes,” Constance allows, her voice rising theatrically, “but where are the rolling hills, where is the bar, why is everyone alive?”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 Shares71 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Cancels Library of Congress Concert to Protest Firing

      by

      The Broadway musical, which earned seven Tony nominations, scrapped a performance after the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla D. Hayden, was fired by the Trump administration.The Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” announced on Friday that it was canceling an upcoming concert performance at the Library of Congress, one day after the Trump administration fired its top librarian.A brief statement from the show, which earned seven Tony nominations this month, said that it had decided not to perform at the library “upon learning of the termination of Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress.”Dr. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to serve as head of the institution, was a “fierce advocate for preserving America’s cultural memory and a great champion of the Broadway community,” the statement said.No other details were given.The Library of Congress had planned to present a free concert on Monday afternoon featuring members of the cast and creative team of “Dead Outlaw” performing selections from the show at its Coolidge Auditorium.The cancellation is the latest indication of the growing tensions between some in the arts community and the Trump administration. President Trump has once again proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and last week the endowment began withdrawing grants from arts organizations around the country.This week some members of the cast of “Les Misérables” were said to be planning not to perform at a gala performance at the Kennedy Center that Mr. Trump, who took over the center, was planing to attend. Earlier this year, a string of artists and speakers canceled engagements at the Kennedy Center after Mr. Trump purged the historically bipartisan board of Biden appointees and made himself chairman.Dr. Hayden’s firing on Thursday drew swift outrage from Democrats, many of whom praised her work, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader, who said in a statement that Dr. Hayden was an “accomplished, principled and distinguished” leader of the library.She was appointed as the 14th librarian of Congress by President Barack Obama in 2016. She was fired a year before the end of her 10-year term.Cindy Hohl, the president of the American Library Association, condemned the firing in a statement, saying that Dr. Hayden’s “abrupt and unjust dismissal is an insult to the scope and breadth of work she has undertaken in her role leading the Library of Congress.”Dr. Hayden was fired in a two-sentence email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of White House personnel. The notice did not cite a cause.The Library of Congress is the latest federal cultural institution to come under fire from Mr. Trump. In February he abruptly fired Colleen Shogan, the head of the National Archives, who had been appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., without citing any reason. And in an executive order in March, he criticized the Smithsonian Institution, and directed Vice President JD Vance to seek to influence its Board of Regents.Jennifer Schuessler More

    • 138 Shares83 Views

      in Theater

      Carolina Bianchi’s Last Play Knocked Her Unconscious. ‘The Brotherhood’ Is Tougher.

      by

      Carolina Bianchi created a storm by drugging herself onstage at the beginning of a trilogy about sexual assault. Her latest play, “The Brotherhood,” asks what happens next.At first, Carolina Bianchi didn’t realize the sensation that her 2023 stage production “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” was creating. After all, she is unconscious for most of it: In order to explore the consequences of a sexual assault she experienced a decade earlier, Bianchi, a Brazilian director and performer, drinks a spiked cocktail that knocks her out onstage, then lets actors manipulate her motionless body.At the Avignon Festival in France, where the show premiered, there were tears. Audience interruptions. Post-show conversations that stretched into the early hours.Practically overnight, Bianchi became an international theater phenomenon. “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” has since been performed in 13 countries, to a mix of acclaim and bemusement. In Australia, it even triggered a debate over whether the onstage action was in breach of local laws on consent.“It took me almost six months to understand what was happening,” Bianchi said in a recent interview. “People were really touched, on different levels.”Now Bianchi is back with a follow-up, “The Brotherhood,” the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it. It picks up where the first installment left off, asking “what happens when someone comes back” from an assault, Bianchi said.“The Brotherhood” is the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it.Max Pinckers 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

    • 125 Shares69 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct’

      by

      A new play about a middle-age professor and his teenage student forces you to ask: Who’s grooming whom?We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you’ve heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman’s venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty’s labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson’s long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman’s manhandling of an actual lawn mower.Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a “world class college.” He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac.” Currently he is separated from his third.Soon another cliché enters: the “grossly underwritten” sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to “expose their mediocrity.” That’s Beatty’s Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.“The erotics of pedagogy,” Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.It is here you may say to yourself: I’ve seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays (“Oleanna”) and novels (“Disgrace”) — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man’s point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie’s lines are more like this: “I shouldn’t / I don’t know why I / Said that / Sorry I’m mm.”The thrill of this production, our critic writes, is that it doesn’t tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider.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

    • 125 Shares64 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare

      by

      The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steve Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.The actors periodically slip into trance-like choreographed dance moves with strange, synchronized gesticulations.Manuel HarlanThe music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)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 Shares101 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Will ‘The Death of Rasputin’ Have a Cult Following?

      by

      The immersive production on Governors Island is an attempt to fill the void left by “Sleep No More” and “Life and Trust.”There was an orgy in the next room. Or possibly a riot. Upstairs the aristocracy colluded. Downstairs the workers plotted. Norms were flouted, alternative medicine practiced. The world tumbled toward anarchy and decadence. Honestly, there are worse ways to spend an evening.This was “The Death of Rasputin,” an immersive event created by the collective Artemis Is Burning and staged in an arts building on Governors Island. The much delayed closing of “Sleep No More” in January and the more abrupt shuttering of “Life and Trust” last month have left a vacuum in the immersive scene. “The Death of Rasputin,” which runs through the end of May, is one attempt to fill it. (The bar offerings — pierogi, spicy pickles, an elevated White Russian — are another.) With 10 performers, this show is smaller in scale than those others, but even on a limited budget, it glimmers like a Fabergé egg. Especially if you don’t look too closely at the jewels.Jake Ryan Lozano, center, as Grigory Rasputin, the Russian mystic.Maria BaranovaConceived and directed by Ashley Brett Chipman and written by Chipman and three others, the show is set, loosely, in St. Petersburg (a.k.a. Petrograd) in 1916. Most of the scenes, even the more outré ones, have some basis in fact, though Artemis takes a relaxed approach to language and chronology. Broadly, the shows is in thrall to Grigory Rasputin, the mystic who exerted an unhealthy influence on the Romanov royal family in the years just before the Russian Revolution. His sway unsettled several aristocrats, who conspired in his murder. Legend has it that he was poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, then finally drowned in the Neva River. (The real story is probably duller.)The performance begins with a ride to the island. Ticket holders are instructed to wear black and embrace Romanov chic, albeit in comfortable shoes, which looks a little funny in the electric light of the ferry, a cult afloat. After coat check and perhaps a drink at the bar, there is an introductory scene, then participants can roam at will across two floors and a dozen or so environments in a single building.In structure and style, “The Death of Rasputin” doesn’t diverge too much from recent immersive offerings. There are drawers to poke through, letters to read, eldritch items to caress, a secret passage or two, performers to chase. (Unless you are very, very fast, sightlines remain a problem.) There is also lots of dance fighting and hanky-panky, though in a welcome departure, the characters speak and pains have been taken to offer audiences a coherent experience.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