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      Bernadette Peters Loves a Day Out in New York

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      Back on Broadway for “Old Friends,” the actress reflects on the art she saw with Sondheim and the delights of the High Line and Central Park.Growing up in Queens, Bernadette Peters was enraptured by trips into Manhattan to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History.“There’s something special about revisiting them as an adult, with fresh eyes,” said Peters, 77, a two-time Tony-winning actress who originated the roles of the Witch in “Into the Woods” and Dot in “Sunday in the Park With George.”She’s doing much the same thing in her latest turn on Broadway — her first in nearly seven years — in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” a concert-style revue of songs by the acclaimed composer and lyricist who died in 2021, in which she stars opposite Lea Salonga.Though Peters has played a number of the featured roles, her song choices are surprising — singing “I Know Things Now” as Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, in the “Into the Woods” segment.“I like a challenge,” said Peters, who put her stamp on half a dozen Sondheim characters, including Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” Desirée Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music” and Sally Durant Plummer in “Follies.”In a phone interview last month from Los Angeles, where “Old Friends” was wrapping up a pre-Broadway run, Peters, who was anxious to get back to home to New York City and her rescue dogs Charlie and Rosalie, shared 10 of her Big Apple-inspired cultural essentials.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 Brandon Kazen-Maddox, an American Sign Language Artist, Spends Their Sundays

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      Brandon Kazen-Maddox has always felt an affinity with mermaids.“We both straddle two worlds,” said Mx. Kazen-Maddox, 36, an American Sign Language dancer, choreographer and filmmaker who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.Mx. Kazen-Maddox, like both their parents, is hearing. But they grew up living with their mother at her parents’ home in Washington State, where their maternal grandparents, both of whom are deaf, spoke with their hands.Soon, Mx. Kazen-Maddox learned to do the same. “I like to say my words are just along for the ride,” they said.Mx. Kazen-Maddox said they enjoyed spending time at Riverside Park, dancing and listening to music, near their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMx. Kazen-Maddox has been interpreting professionally since 2012 and has worked on the Broadway production of “Aladdin” and for former President Joe Biden, the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and the actress Marlee Matlin.In a half-hour PBS special scheduled for Tuesday, “SOUL(SIGNS): Making Music Visible,” Mx. Kazen-Maddox documented the process of choreographing, filming and performing an A.S.L. music video for Morgan James’s “Drown,” shedding light on their own relationship with music and sign language.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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      Theater to Stream: David Tennant as ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Death of England’ and More

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      Take in Shakespeare, experimental theater and a three-play series on the fallout of Brexit, all available to watch at home.‘Macbeth’Stream it on Marquee TV.In the 2023 production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by Max Webster, an unusual request was made of audience members as they entered the theater: Wear headphones.The actors, too, wore headsets, their quips, shouts and whispers transmitted digitally into the audience’s ears, at times alternating between the left and right earphones. Writing for The New York Times, the critic Houman Barekat said that “the transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy.” The production conjures “just enough novelty,” he added, “to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory.”Luckily for Shakespeare fans, the show, which was nominated for three Olivier awards, including best revival, best actor and best sound design, was recorded live.From Barekat’s critical notebook, which praised David Tennant’s turn as Macbeth, a “gaunt, energetic bundle of angst”:Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go.The N.Y.C. Fringe FestivalAzhar Bande-Ali in “Bad Muslim.”Peter CooperStream it on frigid.nyc.Each year, the New York City Fringe Festival, presented by the nonprofit theater company Frigid, uses a lottery system to randomly select the plays it produces, giving less established theater makers a chance to stage their work.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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      Suzanne Rand, Half of a Once-Popular Comedy Team, Dies at 75

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      Like Nichols and May before them, Monteith and Rand had their own Broadway show. Unlike Nichols and May, they faded from view after they broke up.Suzanne Rand, who worked with John Monteith in a comedy team that was often compared to the groundbreaking Mike Nichols and Elaine May — and that, like them, became the stars of a two-person Broadway show — died on April 2 in Manhattan. She was 75.Ruben Rand, her stepson, confirmed the death, in a rehabilitation facility. The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.Ms. Rand and Mr. Monteith — she was the exuberant one; he was the more low-key partner — had backgrounds in improvisational comedy when they formed their act in 1976. Their sketches included Ms. Rand’s portrayal of a guilt-ridden fly killer who tries to revive a swatted pest, and the two of them as movie critics assigned to review a pornographic film who then mimic its action.They built sketches around suggestions from the audience — settings, pet peeves, objects, occupations, film and television genres — and performed scripted material.Their male-female partnership and their quick repartee led to comparisons with Nichols and May, who met in the 1950s and whose collection of wry, savvy and satirical improvisations, “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” reached Broadway in October 1960 and ran for 306 performances.Monteith and Rand in performance in Chicago in 1980, a year after they appeared on Broadway.Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesWe 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 a Musical Comedy Makeover, ‘Smash’ Lives Up to Its Name

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      En route to Broadway, the TV series about backstage shenanigans and Marilyn Monroe has been rejiggered, with the same great songs but a whole new plot.Great musical comedies are great mysteries, and not just because they’re so rare. They’re also mysteries in the way they operate. To succeed, they must keep far ahead of the audience, like thrillers with twists you can’t see coming. They are whodunits with songs instead of murders.“Smash,” which opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, is more of a who’ll-do-it, and when the big song comes, it’s a killer. But the effect is the same: It’s the great musical comedy no one saw coming.Or at least I didn’t. In 2012, I enjoyed the first season of the NBC television series, also called “Smash,” on which the musical is based. Its pilot, setting up a competition between two aspiring modern-day actresses to play Marilyn Monroe in a Broadway-bound musical, was terrific fun. But as the weeks wore on, the story becoming soapier and gloppier, the fizz fizzled out. Only the songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and the dances, by Joshua Bergasse, sparked highs.So I wasn’t sure what to make of the announcement that the material was being retooled for Broadway as a comedy instead of a melodrama. A video of “Let Me Be Your Star,” the thrillingly emotional duet that was the high point of the pilot, left me baffled. Rearranged as a solo at the start of the new show, it sounded all wrong: too cool, too light, with a Las Vegas leer. Was the creative team, led by the director Susan Stroman, planning to fix the property by trashing the few things the series got right?That turned out to be a brilliant feint.The Broadway “Smash” being the kind of mystery I mentioned, I’ll try to be careful about spoilers. But there’s so much to enjoy at the Imperial that I could give away 10, and there would still be 20. In any case, I spoil nothing to say that “Smash” remains the story of a Monroe musical called “Bombshell.” But in this version the actresses are not midlevel hopefuls; rather Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder) is already a star, and Karen Cartwright (Caroline Bowman) her longtime understudy. They are not in competition — at first.That changes dramatically when Ivy reads a book about Method acting. No longer content to play a “bubbly, sparkly” Monroe, she insists on giving her character more depth. Even though this is exactly what the creative team has been trying to avoid — a show that wallows in tawdry tragedy — she hires a coach from the Actors Studio, keepers of the Method flame. When this strange, forbidding coach arrives, pushing absurd ideas and amphetamines, “Bombshell” begins to crater.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: ‘Becoming Eve’ Offers Testaments Old and New

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      A trans woman comes out to her Hasidic Jewish father in this Off Broadway play that tussles with faith and family bonds.A few minutes into “Becoming Eve,” an inventive, sympathetic Off Broadway play produced by New York Theater Workshop at Abrons Arts Center, Chava (Tommy Dorfman), a college student, executes an abrupt costume change. Though she bursts onto the set, the makeshift sanctuary of a synagogue on the Upper West Side, in a cropped pink sweatshirt and flowered minidress, she soon runs into a side room and emerges in loose jeans and a drab, body-camouflaging hoodie. From her original look, only a pair of pink sneakers remain.Even this outfit (Enver Chakartash designed the costumes) is daring in its way. Chava was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. So if these jeans are comparatively modest, they remain far more modern than the clothes that Chava grew up in, which were men’s clothes. Chava is trans, and she has arrived at this sanctuary to come out to her father, Tati (Richard Schiff), an ultraorthodox rabbi.“Becoming Eve,” written by Emil Weinstein and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is based on Abby Chava Stein’s memoir of the same name. In her 20s, Stein left her community and her religion, then she came out as trans. (Stein has since returned to Judaism, and is a rabbi at a progressive congregation in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.) Though mostly set within that sanctuary (designed by Arnulfo Maldonado, with dramatic lighting by Ben Stanton), the play also includes flashbacks of Chava as a child and adolescent and as a young husband. In these sections, Chava is played by a series of puppets (expertly designed by Amanda Villalobos and deployed by two puppeteers). Dorfman, standing nearby, voices these scenes.Because Chava knows that her father lives untouched by the modern world (with heavy restrictions on the internet and most media) and that he is allergic to sentiment, Chava has found biblical commentary that seems to argue her case. To help her, she has enlisted Jonah (Brandon Uranowitz), the chatty, empathetic rabbi of this progressive synagogue. The play allows for heady scriptural dialogue, which speaks to Weinstein and Rafaeli’s faith in the audience’s intelligence. (One reasonable concession: These Yiddish conversations are rendered in English.)But the show is perhaps too intellectual and careful. Weinstein and Rafaeli, in a laudable effort to be fair to all, exercise perhaps too light a touch. (Regarding the women in Chava’s life, Judy Kuhn as her mother, Mami, and Tedra Millan as Fraidy, her wife, that touch is feather light; they are given little to do.) There are no villains here, no victims, which seems right and yet it results in a reticence that extends to Dorfman’s performance.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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      ‘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