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      At Edinburgh Fringe, There Are 2 Plays About Gwyneth Paltrow

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      Multiple shows at the Edinburgh Fringe make camp fun out of the 2023 civil action that spurred a thousand memes — and one of them is a triumph.Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, was unsuccessful when he sued the actress turned wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow over a collision on a Utah ski slope. Though he claimed that she had crashed into him, a jury determined it was actually his fault. The live-streamed 2023 civil case was an unseemly but strangely fascinating spectacle featuring two equally dislikable archetypes: the vexatious litigant and the preening, out-of-touch celebrity.But in another sense, Sanderson won: His name is now forever etched into pop culture folklore, as not one but two new stage productions about the ski trial at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe attest.In “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover.Jonny RuffThe more rough and ready of the two, “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, is a camp burlesque in which both parties are mercilessly skewered. Linus Karp, in drag, plays Paltrow with the drawling malice of a pantomime witch. She’s an entitled girlboss whose altruistic affectations mask a sociopathic character, while Joseph Martin as Sanderson is dull mediocrity personified. The characters’ partners are played by plucky audience volunteers, aided by a teleprompter, and Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, is represented as star-struck and hopelessly incompetent by a disheveled ventriloquist’s dummy, voiced by Martin.In this telling, both Sanderson and his lawyer are driven not so much by monetary greed as by a pathetic desire to connect with Paltrow. They are moths to the flame of celebrity, and Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover. There are snowball fights, some jousting with skis and snatches of music. When Paltrow utters the immortal line that spurred a thousand memes, “I lost half a day of skiing,” the stage lighting switches to a deep red to emphasize the severity of her plight. At the end of the show, the audience gets to be the jury, voting via QR code to decide who wins.Linus Karp as Paltrow, with Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, played by a puppet.Jonny RuffWe 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 the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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      In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.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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      What’s the Next ‘Baby Reindeer’? Maybe Francesca Moody Has the Script.

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      Francesca Moody has put on some of the Edinburgh Fringe’s biggest breakout hits. This year, she has three shows that she’s hoping will go global.One day in fall 2018, the British theater producer Francesca Moody was rummaging around in her bag for something to read during a train ride when she found a script she’d been meaning to look at for weeks.Glancing at its first page, she read a scene in which a man logs onto his voice mail. “You have 50 new messages,” the cellphone’s robotic voice says. The messages are all from a woman named Martha.For the rest of the train journey, Moody couldn’t take her eyes off the script of “Baby Reindeer,” a one-man play about a comedian’s struggles with a female stalker who he occasionally, with self-destructive results, encourages.“It was just a thriller,” Moody recalled in a recent interview. “And what was amazing was it wasn’t a normal victim-perpetrator narrative. It was about all the gray areas in between.”When the train reached its destination about an hour later, Moody didn’t get up. She stayed in the empty carriage to devour the script’s final pages. By then, Moody recalled, she’d already decided two things: That she had to produce this play, and it had to be at Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the best place in Britain to generate buzz for new plays and musicals by lesser-known writers.Success there, she knew, could propel the show to success in London. Maybe in New York, too. Although at that moment, she couldn’t predict that “Baby Reindeer” would also secure a Netflix deal and 11 Emmy nominations.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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      Sydney Lemmon Puts the Twisted Humanity Behind Tech on Broadway

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      After a small part in “Succession,” the actor has a breakout role in “Job,” in which she plays a content moderator having a mental breakdown.Jane is a young professional living in the Bay Area whom you might find at SoulCycle. The actor Sydney Lemmon has taken that description of her character in “Job” with a grain of salt.The young woman she is presenting to Broadway audiences is not a stereotypical millennial. Instead, Lemmon’s Jane is a formidable vessel of reckless passion, someone who has been shaped by the corporate grind of a Silicon Valley job monitoring the heinous acts that people upload onto social media. She is a self-described “Xanax girlie” white knuckling her way through a mandated therapy session meant to determine whether she is ready to return to work after a psychological breakdown that went viral.Oh, and Jane has a gun, too.“She loves her job,” Lemmon said last week during an interview in her dressing room at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “But the thing that most people seem to connect with when I talk to them at the stage door is her feeling of isolation.”Lemmon has played the character for more than a year, charting an unlikely path in a hit commercial production nearly seven years after she first appeared on Broadway, following her graduation from the Yale School of Drama. Smaller roles in film and television — including a short run on the acclaimed HBO series “Succession” — helped raise her profile within the industry; theater, however, is where she has developed a cult following.Lemmon and Peter Friedman in “Job,” which is running through Oct. 27 at the Helen Hayes Theater.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“All of the show was crafted around Sydney,” said Michael Herwitz, the production’s director.“When we cast her, she was absolutely not what we thought we wanted,” he recalled. “We thought Jane was going to be someone demure, a petite white woman who graduated college two years ago and wouldn’t necessarily pose a physical threat.”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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      ‘Life and Trust’ Review: Choose Your Own Faustian Adventure

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      A new theatrical experience in the Financial District is composed of 25 individual stories, but it’s hard to make sense of any of them.In one room in Conwell Tower, a stately skyscraper in the Financial District, a police officer strips off his shirt and flogs himself — passionately, even sensually — before coolly donning his uniform again. At the end of a long hall, a woman performs a Houdini-esque escape from a straitjacket. Elsewhere, in a dark underground boxing ring, two men trade punches in a cinematic fight scene where lights flash and dim with each maneuver, the bodies sometimes moving in slow motion like scenes from a “Rocky” film.What are these characters’ motivations, and what is their connection to one another? Your guess is as good as mine.In “Life and Trust” — the new theatrical experience from Emursive, producers of the popular “Sleep No More” with Punchdrunk — the story never rises to meet the spectacle, creating a visually appealing yet narratively incoherent piece of exploration theater.The show, directed by Teddy Bergman, begins on Oct. 23, 1929, the evening before the stock market crash. The audience has been invited to a “prospective investors fete” by the head of the Life and Trust Bank, a J.G. Conwell, who has made his fortune mass-producing a mysterious bright green syrup that’s something between a panacea and an addictive opiate.There is, of course, something shady about this invitation: Early in the show a suited man purrs to the audience, “If you choose to invest with us, you’re one of ours … forever.” (It turns out “forever” means roughly three hours in this site-specific show … which can sometimes feel like an eternity.) Faced with the imminent fall of his financial empire, Conwell takes a devilish offer to travel back in time to the Gilded Age.In this earlier time of glamour and pleasures, we meet a younger Conwell and dozens of other characters based on real historical figures, from eugenicists to magicians. The show is mostly dialogue-free; acrobatic choreography by the Tony nominees Jeff and Rick Kuperman is meant to fill some of the role speech would. Sometimes it works, as when one character shows otherworldly control over another through mirrored movements — a wave of one’s hand seems to command another’s body to tumble forward. Other instances, particularly during scenes of confrontation or seduction, when the characters’ bodies repeatedly swoon into one another, feel less novel and instead highlight how unclear the relationships and stories are.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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      Tony Winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Returns to Broadway With ‘Purpose’

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins had Broadway success this year with a drama starring Sarah Paulson. In February, he’ll return with a new play directed by Phylicia Rashad.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won a Tony Award in June for the Broadway production of “Appropriate,” his blistering play about a white Southern family grappling with some serious baggage.This season, Jacobs-Jenkins will return to Broadway, now with “Purpose,” a stormy play about a Black Midwestern family wrestling with its own legacy.“Purpose,” which had a well-received run earlier this year at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, is to begin previews Feb. 25 and to open in mid-March at the Helen Hayes Theater. The Broadway production is being directed by Phylicia Rashad, who also directed the play at Steppenwolf; Rashad, best known for “The Cosby Show,” has won two Tony Awards as an actor, for “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Skeleton Crew”; this will be her first time directing on Broadway.Set in contemporary Chicago, “Purpose” is about the Jaspers, a civically engaged family of preachers and politicians. There are some parallels to Jesse Jackson’s family, but the story is fictional.In the play, the family gathers at the home of its patriarch — a civil rights activist and preacher who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — to welcome the eldest son, a politician, home from prison as his wife prepares to serve her own sentence. The gathering is complicated by the presence of the younger son, a divinity school dropout, who shows up with an unexpected friend.The critic Chris Jones, writing in The Chicago Tribune, called it an “absolutely not-to-be-missed” play.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, with the Tony for best revival of a play for “Appropriate.”Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressPhylicia Rashad, with her Tony for best actress in a play for “Skeleton Crew” in 2022. This will be her Broadway directorial debut.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJacobs-Jenkins, 39, has for a decade been touted as among the nation’s most important young playwrights. He is a two-time Pulitzer finalist (for “Gloria” and “Everybody”), but “Appropriate” was his first play on Broadway. It took so long for it to get there that the production, which starred Sarah Paulson, was deemed a revival and won the Tony Award in that category. Now, Jacobs-Jenkins is working on a musical adaptation of Prince’s “Purple Rain” that will have an initial production in Minneapolis next spring, while also preparing to return to Broadway with “Purpose.” (And before then, he has a new Off Broadway show this fall: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” at Soho Rep.)“I’m shocked, honored, surprised, confused, nervous,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in a phone interview, referring to having two Broadway plays in a row. “I definitely feel like there’s some kind of turnover: In this post-recovery period, lots of surprising things are happening.”“I feel like suddenly my cohort is stepping into some new space that wasn’t available to us before,” he added.And are “Appropriate” and “Purpose” related? “Not really,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “But it wouldn’t be ridiculous to read them against each other.”Though the nonprofit Second Stage Theater owns the Helen Hayes Theater, this will be a commercial production. The lead producers include David Stone and Marc Platt, who are the lead producers of “Wicked”; the film producer Debra Martin Chase; the actress LaChanze; and Rashad V. Chambers, Aaron Glick and Steppenwolf. More

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      My Midsummer Dream: 7 Plays, 5 Days, 4 Stages, 1 Story

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      At the Stratford Festival, a remix of genders and genres tells a brand-new, age-old tale of personal freedom.Walking the streets of this almost-too-charming town along the I-kid-you-not Avon River, I’ve often had the experience of hearing voices in my head.I am but mad north-northwest, as Hamlet would have it. After all, at the Stratford Festival, 400 miles in that direction from my usual haunts, internal voices are utterly normal, the result of seeing, cheek by jowl, so many new productions. After you see two or three, they start a conversation, sometimes delighting in what they have in common and sometimes arguing about what they don’t.During a visit in July, those voices were louder than ever. The five plays and two musicals I caught in five days on four stages were not just conversing but collaborating, seeming to scribble in one another’s scripts. “Twelfth Night” wrote part of “La Cage aux Folles.” “Something Rotten” cribbed “Romeo and Juliet.” “Hedda Gabler” and “The Goat” drank from the same bloody fountain.And “Cymbeline”? Well, that little-loved Shakespeare once again proved to be mad on its own.The clash and coupling of such seemingly different works is the great value, and great pleasure, of the repertory system, one so difficult to sustain that few theaters bother anymore. Stratford is by every measure — budget, employment, attendance, production — the largest repertory theater in North America, and likely the largest nonprofit theater, period.Also the broadest. Where else could you take in so easily a program so diverse, by genre, era, style and origin? Indeed, if you hit the right part of the season, which this year began on April 16 and runs through Nov. 17, you could theoretically see all 12 shows in one week.That efficiency wouldn’t matter unless the shows were good; in some years, that’s all they are, and that’s enough. But this year, both in scope and quality, Stratford outdid itself, with a thrilling “Goat” and “Gabler,” a delightful “Cage” and “Rotten” and a scintillating “Twelfth Night.”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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      Sutton Foster and Michael Urie Reunite in the Zany ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

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      The hit Encores! production has transferred to Broadway, with a cast fiercely dedicated to entertaining its audience.Princess Winnifred and Prince Dauntless are goofy and playful characters. In most musicals, they would provide comic relief from the main story line. But in “Once Upon a Mattress,” it’s the funny people who rule, both literally and figuratively.All the more so since Winnifred and Dauntless are played by Sutton Foster and Michael Urie in symbiotic performances that are highly controlled and precise while maintaining the appearance of off-the-cuff abandon.And with the rest of the cast mostly following suit, it is refreshing to see actors so actively dedicating themselves to entertaining their audience. This kind of unabashed reveling in the joys of strutting your stuff appears to be in demand, too, judging by the recent success of “Oh, Mary!” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”The family-friendly “Once Upon a Mattress,” which premiered in 1959, is a good fit for the Encores! series — which stages shows that are rarely revived and presented this one in January. Now the production has transferred, with some changes in the supporting cast, to the Hudson Theater on Broadway.Like many Encores! entries, Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea” would probably struggle to crack anybody but a tween’s Top 10 list of the best musicals ever.Also like many of those entries, “Once Upon a Mattress” turns out to be surprisingly sturdy in the right hands. Rodgers’s music is zingy and Barer’s lyrics often deploy sneakily enjoyable wordplay (“I lack a lass; alas! Alack!”). Just as important, the book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller is engineered to let gifted comic actors run loose — it is no coincidence that Carol Burnett originated the role of Winnifred.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