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      ‘Patriots’ Review: What Happened to the Man Who Made Putin?

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      Michael Stuhlbarg and Will Keen shine as a kingmaker and his creature. But in Peter Morgan’s cheesy-fun play, it’s not always clear which is which.“In the West you have no idea.”So begins Peter Morgan’s play “Patriots,” which opened on Monday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. The line is spoken by the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, referring to the foods, sights and music that supposedly feed the great Russian soul. These are represented, in Rupert Goold’s entertaining if overcaffeinated production, by boozy singing and balalaikas, sometimes even fur hats.But “Patriots” also sets out to demonstrate how little the West knows about the real world of realpolitik: the grudges, enmities and insulted dignities that in the post-Soviet 1990s, with casino capitalism rampant in Russia, created Vladimir Putin.If you could ask Berezovsky, though, he’d tell you it was he who created Putin, a tenth-rate provincial nobody he eased into power, first as prime minister and later as president. Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) calls himself Putin’s “krysha” — literally his roof, figuratively his protector or, as he explains, the “bully on your side.”Spoken in the weirdly accented English of this production, which originated in London and has been remounted for Broadway with key cast changes and Netflix as a producer, “krysha” sounds confusingly like “creature.” It turns out to be a useful confusion. “Patriots” is a wild story of makers switching places with the made, of Pinocchios devouring Geppettos.Putin (Will Keen) was and is both: a liar and a manipulator. Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) was at least the latter — but, well, in the West we have no idea. We meet him in “Patriots” as a 9-year-old math prodigy, an obnoxious “golden child” fixated on winning a Nobel Prize. (That there is no Nobel in mathematics is one of Morgan’s many shortcuts.) The boy’s interests, at least as selected for ironic reference later, are in the predictability of decision making, under rational and even irrational circumstances.Keen, left, as Putin and Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky bring physical, gestural and emotional life to characters who might seem to have no insides worth exploring, our critic writes.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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      Review: ‘Grenfell’ Sees Tower Fire Through Residents’ Eyes

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      At St. Ann’s Warehouse, this documentary play about a London fire is blood-boiling and aggrieved.The notion of creating a safe space for an audience to experience a work of theater tends to provoke the tough-guy purists, because it sounds like coddling. Shouldn’t the stage be a place of daring, unhampered by any content revelations that might spoil the surprise?Presumably, anyone who arrives at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn to see “Grenfell: in the words of survivors,” a tense and enthralling documentary play about a 2017 residential fire in West London that killed 72 people, is aware of the potentially upsetting subject matter. But before the storytelling even starts, the actors in this National Theater production set about making a safe space with a preamble whose clear language and kind tone are not the least bit soppy.“We do want to reassure you that we will not be showing any images of fire,” one cast member says from the stage, which is surrounded on all sides by the audience. “If you need to leave even for a short break, our front of house staff will show you out, and if there’s an actor in the way when you want to leave, don’t worry, we will move.”Another adds: “If you do leave, you’re welcome to come back.”Our humanity tended to, the characters begin their recollections — nothing traumatic, not yet, just simple, sun-dappled memories. Because before Grenfell Tower, a 24-story public housing block, became a cautionary tale about the dangers of government penny-pinching and corporate corner-cutting, it was people’s home.Thinking back on the apartments that had been their sanctuaries, they miss the freedom of life above the tree line, the view of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, the quiet when they’d shut their door and leave the noise of the city outside. They miss the community of good neighbors.“When I got my flat in Grenfell Tower,” Edward Daffarn (Michael Shaeffer) recalls, “my heart told me it was going to be OK. I was really, really happy.”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 ‘Stereophonic’ Made Musicians Out of Actors

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      The new Broadway play conjures a group as dazzling as peak Fleetwood Mac. This is how five actors with limited training (one never held a bass) became rock stars.About a week into rehearsals for the Off Broadway premiere of David Adjmi’s latest play, “Stereophonic,” Will Butler sent an email to the cast. Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire, had a new band, Will Butler + Sister Squares, and a new self-titled album. A club in Brooklyn would soon host the record release party. Butler, the composer of “Stereophonic,” had a proposition: The actors should open for him.Sarah Pidgeon, a cast member, remembered reading the message last August during a rehearsal break. “I immediately said no,” she recalled. “Because what if it’s a failure?”She had taken piano lessons as a child, but Pidgeon didn’t consider herself a musician. Neither did any of the other actors. “Stereophonic,” which opened last week at Broadway’s Golden Theater, is set in recording studios in the mid-1970s, and conjures an unnamed band as dynamic, dazzling and sexy as peak Fleetwood Mac or Led Zeppelin. It would be daunting enough to impersonate a band of that caliber onstage after a full rehearsal period. But to play a real show in a real club after just a few weeks. This was an invitation to public humiliation.Juliana Canfield (“Succession”), another cast member, was also a no. “I was like, Geez, we can’t get through one tune without falling apart,” she said. “This could be really, really embarrassing.”But the men in the fictional band insisted. (“We suffered from peer pressure,” Pidgeon joked.) Which explains how on Sept. 23, the five actors — Will Brill on bass, Canfield on keyboards, Tom Pecinka on guitar, Pidgeon on tambourine, Chris Stack on drums — stood onstage at the Williamsburg club Elsewhere, in front of hundreds of ticket holders who didn’t know the group was only pretending to be a band. There were no scripted lines for them that night, no characters to hide behind.Brill described it as “a really extreme piece of exposure therapy” and “just horror.” But the therapy worked. At Elsewhere, for the first time, the actors — panicked, exhilarated — felt like a band.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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      ‘Cabaret’ Review: Dancing, and Screaming, at the End of the World

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      Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin star in a buzzy Broadway revival that rips the skin off the 1966 musical.Just east of its marquee, the August Wilson Theater abuts an alley you probably didn’t notice when last you were there, perhaps to see “Funny Girl,” its previous tenant. Why would you? Where the trash goes is not usually part of the Broadway experience.But it is for the latest revival of “Cabaret,” which opened at the Wilson on Sunday. Audience members are herded into that alley, past the garbage, down some halls, up some stairs and through a fringed curtain to a dimly lit lounge. (There’s a separate entrance for those with mobility issues.) Along the way, greeters offer free shots of cherry schnapps that taste, I’m reliably told, like cough syrup cut with paint thinner.Too often I thought the same of the show itself.But the show comes later. First, starting 75 minutes beforehand, you can experience the ambience of the various bars that constitute the so-called Kit Kat Club, branded in honor of the fictional Berlin cabaret where much of the musical takes place. Also meant to get you in the mood for a story set mostly in 1930, on the edge of economic and spiritual disaster, are some moody George Grosz-like paintings commissioned from Jonathan Lyndon Chase. (One is called “Dancing, Holiday Before Doom.”) The $9 thimbleful of potato chips is presumably a nod to the period’s hyperinflation.This all seemed like throat clearing to me, as did the complete reconfiguration of the auditorium itself, which is now arranged like a large supper club or a small stadium. (The scenic, costume and theater design are the jaw-dropping work of Tom Scutt.) The only relevant purpose I can see for this conceptual doodling, however well carried out, is to give the fifth Broadway incarnation of the 1966 show a distinctive profile. It certainly does that.The problem for me is that “Cabaret” has a distinctive profile already. The extreme one offered here frequently defaces it.Let me quickly add that Rebecca Frecknall’s production, first seen in London, has many fine and entertaining moments. Some feature its West End star Eddie Redmayne, as the macabre emcee of the Kit Kat Club (and quite likely your nightmares). Some come from its new New York cast, including Gayle Rankin (as the decadent would-be chanteuse Sally Bowles) and Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell (dignified and wrenching as an older couple). Others arise from Frecknall’s staging itself, which is spectacular when in additive mode, illuminating the classic score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the amazingly sturdy book by Joe Masteroff.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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      Review: In ‘Still,’ Confessions Doom Two Reunited Lovers

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      Despite a juicy premise, this Colt Coeur production, starring Tim Daly and Jayne Atkinson, never manages to take off.In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin hymned the bag as the proper shape for stories: it “is full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts.”One of the characters in Lia Romeo’s “Still,” a writer, carries just such a bag — a possible wink to her fellow novelist. The tote is large enough to house a ukulele, an avocado and a package of macadamia nuts — all of which are divulged in the play’s single moment of spontaneity — but its owner can’t seem to effect any Le Guinian “transformations” or “tricks.” There is a sense of stasis to the aptly named two-hander, which never ripens from a situation into a story.“Still,” a Colt Coeur production that opened recently at DR2 Theater in the East Village, begins with two characters, former flames, meeting in a bar. Mark (a suave Tim Daly) and Helen (Jayne Atkinson) are in their mid-60s and haven’t seen each other in years. Sharing a bottle of wine, they shoot the breeze about their children and recent divorce (him) and new book and cancer diagnosis (her).At first, they are content to pretend their past romance has subsided into a platonic relationship, but as the alcohol goes to their heads, they admit to carrying a torch for each other. A highlight of the show is their seduction scene: It’s the first I’ve seen onstage that unabashedly invokes the corporeal indignities of aging. The director Adrienne Campbell-Holt has Mark and Helen walk slowly toward each other while making sotto voce confessions: “I’m missing the nail on my right big toe,” “I have three fake teeth,” “I have arthritis in my knees.” Do I need to spell out what happens next?Alexander Woodward’s softly lit set spins to reveal a hotel room. Resting against each other in bed, Mark and Helen proceed, post-coitally this time, with their confessions. Mark, who lives in Colorado, is considering relocating to Washington, D.C., to run for Congress, as a “moderate” Republican. “I wish you’d told me that before we ——” Helen says, gesturing limply to the bed with rumpled sheets. She considers herself a liberal, but political differences aren’t the only thing on her mind.Part of the reason their relationship ended was because she had an abortion. Despite what Mark told her decades ago, he wanted Helen to have the baby. She, on the other hand, had felt — and still feels — that it would have been a mistake. “When we walked out of that clinic, I was — scraped out, and I was sad. But I felt so light, knowing that … all my cells were my own again,” she tells him. The stage is thus set for a real conflict.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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      Alfred Molina on the Museum He Never Misses When He’s in New York

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      “Every time I’m in the city, I make a visit,” said the actor, who is performing on Broadway in “Uncle Vanya.”After more than 30 years in Los Angeles, Alfred Molina is enjoying his newly minted status as an Upper West Sider.“My wife and I have bought an apartment here, and we’re slowly transitioning to New York,” he said last month at Lincoln Center Theater before a rehearsal for the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya,” which opens on Broadway on Wednesday.Molina, 70, has been nominated for three Tony Awards, for “Art,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and, most recently, “Red,” in which he starred as the painter Mark Rothko in 2010. “Vanya,” in which he plays the pompous professor Alexander Serebryakov, is his return to a New York stage after nearly 15 years.The play is “a chance to work with some fantastic people,” he said of the cast, which includes Steve Carell as Vanya, Jayne Houdyshell as Vanya’s mother, and William Jackson Harper as the local doctor Astrov. It is directed by Lila Neugebauer, and after Molina saw two other plays she worked on this year, “Appropriate” and “The Ally,” he said, “they both just knocked me out, so it was a no-brainer.”Molina, who is originally from London, shared his favorite walk in New York, why he loves the subway, and a Jonathan Groff-inspired song lyric that he came up with seemingly on the spot. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Jazz in the MorningI like to start my day with something bright and fast, like Art Pepper or Dexter Gordon. I’ve listened to jazz since I was a teenager — I wasn’t good at sport or popular with the girls, but I loved music, particularly Black American music. I used to read the music papers — the weekly Melody Maker, the New Musical Express — and whenever a review of a band or album used the word “jazz,” I would try to listen to it.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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      ‘Stereophonic’ Review: Hitmakers Rendered in Sublime Detail

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      In David Adjmi’s new play, with songs by Will Butler, a ’70s band’s success breeds tension, and punches up the volume on Broadway.Peering behind the mystique of rock ’n’ roll has undeniable voyeuristic appeal. So there is an immediate thrill to seeing the mahogany-paneled control room and glassed-in sound booth that fill the Golden Theater stage, where “Stereophonic” opened on Friday. But David Adjmi’s astonishing new play, with songs by the former Arcade Fire member Will Butler, delivers far more than a dishy glimpse inside the recording studio during rock’s golden age.A fly-on-the-wall study of how people both need and viciously destroy each other, “Stereophonic” is a fiery family drama, as electrifying as any since “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Its real-time dissection of making music — a collaboration between flawed, gifted artists wrangled into unison — is ingeniously entertaining and an incisive meta commentary on the nature of art. The play is a staggering achievement, and already feels like a must-see American classic.It’s 1976 in Sausalito, Calif., and a not-yet-famous band — at least not solely inspired by Fleetwood Mac — is laying down the record that will propel it to stardom and unravel the personal lives of its members (in much the same way that making “Rumours” did for Fleetwood Mac). The setting (a marvel by scenic designer David Zinn) is a pressure-cooker: The coffee machine is broken but there’s a gallon bag of cocaine, and tensions and affections — both creative and personal — are running hot.Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDirected with a conductor’s precision by Daniel Aukin, “Stereophonic” is an epic canvas rendered in hyper-intimate detail: whispered confidences and technical adjustments, slouches and stares, lots of lying around and rolling joints. Stillness and silence are as expressive as Adjmi’s meticulously orchestrated dialogue, body language sometimes even more so. It’s possible to read the band’s ascension to fame beyond the confines of the studio, as its previous album creeps up the Billboard charts, in the swiveling hips of its lead singer alone (and in the progression of prints and flares in Enver Chakartash’s divine costumes).When the poetic and insecure Diana, played with stunning vulnerability by Sarah Pidgeon, sits down at the piano some 45 minutes into the three-hour show, the actor’s radiant voice delivers the first significant composition the audience hears: “Bright,” a folk-tinged rock ballad with sterling, ethereal vocals. Until then, notes trickle out in brief bursts. Often interrupted or doled out in riffs, the expressions of character and discord generated by Butler’s music are abstract — their fragmentation designed to make you want more. (Savor the early sessions when everyone can stand to be in the same room.)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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      Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai Toast Their New Broadway Show ‘Suffs’

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      Dozens of theater, film and media stars turned out on Thursday night for the opening of “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage.“This is thrilling,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, said on a chilly Thursday night outside the Music Box Theater on 45th Street, as women in strapless gowns walked a purple carpet.Ms. Clinton, a noted Broadway superfan, was making her Broadway producing debut with “Suffs,” a new musical about women’s suffrage that traces the campaign for the right to vote from 1913 through the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which was celebrating its opening night.The show not only arrives in a presidential election year, as states attempt to tighten voting laws, but also as Broadway is bringing more female-centric stories to the stage. Audience interest in such stories has also been strong — in the previous week, “Suffs” ranked in the top 10 of the 36 shows on Broadway in the percentage of its seats filled.“I’m so excited that audiences are embracing this story,” Ms. Clinton said. “It’s historic and relevant, and it’s emotional, and it shows the relationships among these women who fought so hard to get us the right to vote.”Huma Abedin, at the opening night of “Suffs” at the Music Box Theater on Broadway.Lin-Manuel Miranda, right, with his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr.Anna Wintour, left, the global editorial director of Vogue, with Sara Bareilles, the performer. 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