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      ‘Amm(i)gone’ and ‘A Mother’: Sons Calling for Their Mothers

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      The maternal embrace of young men and their battles figures in two very different plays, one a solo work and the other a Brechtian riff starring Jessica Hecht.In Adil Mansoor’s “Amm(i)gone,” a tender solo play about the ache he feels for his lost closeness with his mother, we, the audience, never glimpse her clearly. That is not a criticism, only a truth, and it has nothing to do with a lack of love on his part or hers.Soul-baring and sweetly funny, “Amm(i)gone” — whose title blends “ammi,” the Urdu word for mom, with “Antigone” — is in fact remarkably respectful. As an adult, Mansoor has never found a way to be his whole gay self with his piously Muslim mother. But she held him in her lap when they emigrated from Pakistan when he was 3 months old, and as a young child in suburban Chicago, he clung to her, his best and sole friend.He remains protective of his mother’s privacy. When he shows us projections of family photographs from before the late 1990s, when she started wearing a hijab, he shields her image from us; in some pictures with darling little him, we see only her embroidered-over outline. But he is now, we sense, just as shrouded from her, albeit metaphorically.“If coming out to your mom means that you call her and you say, ‘Ammi, I’m gay,’ that is a thing I have never done,” he says. “I have never directly spoken to my mother about my queerness.”Which is not the same as saying that his mother — a social worker who, he tells us, “holds theater accountable” for changing him — doesn’t know.Directed by Mansoor and Lyam B. Gabel at the Flea, in TriBeCa, this is a richly designed co-production by PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth Theater, the Flea and Kelly Strayhorn Theater. (Set and lighting are by Xotchil Musser, sound design by Aaron Landgraf and media design by Joseph Amodei and Davine Byon.)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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      ‘Manhunt’ Is a Case Study in Fragile Masculinity

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      A new play by Robert Icke about a real-life police chase takes the form of an imagined trial.One of the largest manhunts in British police history took place in northeastern England in summer 2010. The fugitive was Raoul Moat, a 37-year-old bodybuilder and former nightclub bouncer with a history of violence. He had just been released from prison when he shot Samantha Stobbart, his former girlfriend, and her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, in a jealous rage. Stobbart survived, Brown didn’t.The next day, Moat fired a sawed-off shotgun at a police officer, David Rathband, at point-blank range, blinding him. While he was on the run, Moat reportedly vowed to “keep killing police until I am dead.”The story was a rolling news sensation at the time. Moat was a clear and present danger, and the situation was fluid. But sheer scale of the police operation to track him down — involving more than 100 armed officers and a military aircraft — was unusual by British standards. The manhunt ended when, after a six-hour standoff with the police, Moat turned his gun on himself.In the weeks after his death, Moat was celebrated as a folk hero in some corners of the internet, and was lauded for what was seen as uncompromising machismo. A Facebook page in his honor amassed 35,000 members.The cast of “Manhunt.” Alongside Edward-Cook, center, a small ensemble plays multiple parts.Manuel HarlanA bracing new play, “Manhunt,” at Royal Court Theater in London presents Moat’s story as a case study in fragile masculinity. Written and directed by Robert Icke — whose recent West End “Oedipus” is heading to Broadway — it takes the form of an imagined trial in which Moat, speaking from beyond the grave, both re-enacts and reflects on the terrible events of the last week of his life.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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      Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Old Friends’ Review: A Broadway Party With 41 Songs

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      Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga lead the festivities in a new Broadway revue of the great musical dramatist’s work.Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a 1973 fund-raiser held on the set of the original production of “A Little Night Music.” It featured so many stars, speeches and songs that even truncated, even then, its recording filled two LPs.I snapped that album up and wore it out. The cover alone was fascinating, with the titles of nine of his shows spelled out in intersecting Scrabble tiles. (Something like nine more shows were to come before his death in 2021 — and one after.) Threaded through those tiles like a secret theme was Sondheim’s name itself.I was younger then, a teenager, but that secret theme became part of my life’s music.How then to hear a new Sondheim revue with fresh ears and fresh heart? As the latest, “Old Friends,” says right in its name, we are already well acquainted.Whether onstage, online, in cabarets or, like “Old Friends,” on Broadway, all such compendiums play their own game of Sondheim Scrabble. Though there are many hundreds of songs in the catalog, compilers must pick from the same limited subset of favorites, arranging them in various concatenations and outcroppings. Occasionally a 10-point rarity turns up, but most of the choices are deeply familiar to those who have followed the man’s work.Peters and Jacob Dickey in the “Hello, Little Girl” number from “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Old Friends,” which opened on Tuesday at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is in that sense a lot like its predecessors. The 41 numbers it features come from the main pool, with an emphasis on songs from “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Company,” “Follies” and “Into the Woods.” Most of them were brilliant in their original context; many remain so outside it. Some are sung spectacularly by a bigger-than-usual cast of 17, led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Others are middling, a few are misfires.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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      The Best Classical Music Performances of March 2025

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      Watch and listen to recent highlights, including Nicole Scherzinger on Broadway, a pair of Janacek operas and Cécile McLorin Salvant.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what has hooked them recently. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Nicole ScherzingerAn excerpt from the song “With One Look.”I would not have expected the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, Nicole Scherzinger, to convincingly portray a Hollywood has-been in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s almost irredeemably cheesy musical “Sunset Boulevard.” And yet she is giving a spectacular and audacious performance as Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s dark, stripped-down revival on Broadway.Where Norma typically recedes, a reclusive grande dame floating about the stage in a fog of self-regard, Scherzinger explodes with kinetic energy. Her singing, sculpted and emotive, soars. She stares down the challenge of a rangy song like “With One Look” with a clean, secure belt and still accesses an undeniably pretty, flutelike head voice. Her Norma’s eager desire to entertain and be adored, in stark contrast to the modern-noir staging, becomes a clear sign of her derangement.But there’s pathos, too. When Scherzinger’s Norma shows up to the Paramount lot, her fantastical confidence cracks a bit in front of Cecil B. DeMille, the director on whom she has pinned her hopes of a career resurgence. In her insecure hesitation, she seems to acknowledge, on an almost subconscious level, that Norma knows she’s kidding herself.Like a nuclear reaction, though, that fissure in Norma’s self-perception generates a colossal amount of emotional energy, which Scherizinger pours into a coruscating performance of “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” Norma may be a joke to the outside world, but Scherzinger’s performance creates a world of its own, one where a silent-film star has a magnificent inner life that truly sings. OUSSAMA ZAHRWe 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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      ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’: What to Know About the Broadway Show

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      The new play, set 24 years before the start of the Netflix series, combines lavish spectacle with a cast of familiar characters.After a critically acclaimed premiere in London’s West End in 2023 — where it is still running — “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a play that serves as a prequel to the popular Netflix series, is set to open on April 22 at the Marquis Theater on Broadway.Of course, fans of the show, which is set to release its fifth season later this year, are excited (though it’s small consolation for having to wait more than three years between seasons). But what if you can’t tell a Demobat from a Demogorgon? Can you plunge right in?Here’s what you need to know about the TV series, how it informs the show and more.Winona Ryder stars as Joyce Byers in the Netflix series. In the play, her character’s younger self, Joyce Maldonado, is just as spunky. NetflixWhat is the TV series about?Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind., the Netflix series follows a group of friends as they try to get to the root of supernatural forces and secret government experiments in their town. They discover an alternate dimension — the Upside Down — filled with monstrous creatures, who are not content to sit back and leave them well alone.Over the course of four seasons, a cast anchored by Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Chief Jim Hopper), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven, a young girl with mysterious powers) and Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson) save one another from the jaws of death while navigating the complexities of their relationships. (And, in Eleven’s case, eating lots of Eggo waffles.)Where does the play fall in the timeline of the TV series?It’s a prequel set in 1959 — 24 years before the start of the Netflix series — and centers on a character introduced in Season 4: Henry Creel, a troubled teenager with telepathic powers who will later become Vecna, the show’s primary antagonist.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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      The Loose Screws, Hot Flames and Infinite Joy of William Finn

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      The composer and lyricist of “A New Brain,” “Falsettos” and other shows answered the pains of life with jaunty songs. He died this week at 73.When I met William Finn in 2005, at work on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” he was seated in his office in front of what looked like a trash heap but might have been a desk. On a couch nearby, one of his collaborators sank slowly beneath a rising tide of detritus; when she spoke, Finn kept overwhelming her too. Bearlike and blustery, garrulous and appetitive, he grabbed at every idea floating around the room, just as he grabbed at insane rhymes and jangly melodies in writing his sometimes hilarious, sometimes haunting (sometimes both) songs.The opportunistic lyrics were what first attracted me. By the time of “Spelling Bee,” Finn, who died Monday at the age of 73, had already made a name for himself with the “Falsettos” trilogy, his take on a family (and thus a society) shattered by disease and disaffection in the early years of AIDS. Yet despite the sadness of that story (the book is by Finn and James Lapine), the melodies are mostly jaunty and the words outrageously playful. In the show’s opening number he rhymes “four Jews” with “loose screws.”Listen to a selection of Finn’s songs on Spotify: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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      At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self

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      With the Off Broadway debut of his 1958 play “The Swamp Dwellers,” the Nigerian Nobel laureate looks back on the writer he was when he was starting out.We are living, all of us, in an exhausting world, and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You don’t become as profoundly invested in art and politics as he has been over his long life unless you care to your core about the path that we as a species are charting.“I’m a fundamentalist of human freedom,” he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. “It’s as elementary as that.”In the late 1960s, during Nigeria’s civil war, he was held for two years as a political prisoner, having agitated against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, bringing the possibility of a death sentence, but he remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was succeeded by a leader who promised reform. In between, cementing Soyinka’s status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Academy lauding his “vivid, often harrowing” works and their “evocative, poetically intensified diction.”As his 90th birthday approached last summer, though, he decided to give himself an unusual gift — in reaction to what he called “the double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza,” which made him so pessimistic that his impulse was to withdraw completely.“I remember going months saying to myself, I don’t want to read any newspapers, I don’t want to watch television news, I just want to get out, stay out and enjoy what it feels like,” he said, sitting in a greenroom at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theater for a New Audience is giving his 1958 play “The Swamp Dwellers” its Off Broadway premiere.Leon Addison Brown as Makuri in “The Swamp Dwellers” at Theater for a New Audience.Hollis KingWe 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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      ‘Boop! The Musical’ Review: Betty Gets a Broadway Brand Extension

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      The It girl with the spit curl looks great for 100, but her Broadway musical, which feels like one big merch grab, is boop-boop-a-don’t.Some shows are “what?” shows, leaving you baffled. Perhaps they involve roller-skating trains or shrouds of Turin.Others are “how?” shows, as in: Dear God, how did that happen?But the most disappointing subgenre of musical, at least in terms of opportunity cost, is the “why?” show: a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for. Its intentions are foggy and sometimes suspicious.“Boop! The Musical” — now playing at the Broadhurst Theater, in a production directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell — is a “why?” show par excellence.And excellence it has. As Betty, the flapper of early talkie cartoons, Jasmine Amy Rogers is immensely likable. She sings fabulously, sports a credible perma-smile, nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line. I can’t imagine anyone making more of the exhausting opportunity, let alone in a Broadway debut.She is ably supported by other young talent in featured roles, luxury-cast veterans doing their damnedest and a hard-working ensemble selling Mitchell’s insistent, imaginative, precision-drilled dances. When his pinwheel kick-lines hop in unison, not one foot among 26 is left on the floor.Or make that 27, because Pudgy, Betty’s pug, a marionette with a lolling pink tongue operated by the puppeteer Phillip Huber, sometimes shakes a leg too.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