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      How Chris Perfetti of ‘Abbott Elementary’ Spends His Sundays

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      On his weeks off from shooting the ABC sitcom, the actor unwinds by whipping up “the biggest salad ever” and seeking out a Sunday-night show.For the actor Chris Perfetti, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights, every day is leg day.“It’s worth it for the view,” said Mr. Perfetti, 35, who portrays the sixth-grade teacher Jacob Hill on “Abbott Elementary,” Quinta Brunson’s public school mockumentary set in Philadelphia. The fourth season premiered this month.Mr. Perfetti, a longtime New York theater actor who broke out on the show in 2021, still considers Brooklyn home, though he is also in Los Angeles six months of the year shooting “Abbott.” (He recently bought a 100-year-old cottage in the woods in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, though he said he has no plans to give up his Brooklyn one-bedroom, where he lives on the building’s top floor.)“I definitely miss New York when I’m in L.A. more than I miss L.A. when I’m in New York,” said Mr. Perfetti, who was born in Rochester, N.Y.He studied drama at the State University of New York at Purchase in Westchester County and spent his weekends taking Metro-North trains into Manhattan to see shows.“I pretty much jet back here as soon as they call cut on ‘Abbott,’” he said.LATE START I wake up before noon, but not by much. “Abbott” requires me to wake up in the wee, wee dark hours of the morning — I’m usually up at 4:30 or 5:30 a.m. to be on set. That requires an alarm every day, so on the days when I’m not shooting, I let my body get as much sleep as I can.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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      Lin-Manuel Miranda Releases ‘Warriors’ Album With Eisa Davis

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      He collaborated with Eisa Davis to make a concept album inspired by the 1979 movie. One big change: the main gang is made up of women.“The Warriors,” a 1979 film about a group of gang members fighting their way home to Brooklyn from the Bronx, isn’t the most brutal movie ever made, but it’s not exactly Sesame Street either — when it was first released, it was blamed (on pretty flimsy evidence) for inciting violence. And yet, somehow, Lin-Manuel Miranda found himself watching the movie when he was 4, thanks to a friend’s older brother.Sure, the experience was a little scary. But the film also stuck with him. Miranda, like any number of New Yorkers raised in the ’80s, treasures the sights and sounds of a bygone city preserved in the film, as well as its empathy for its characters. (If some of the gang members seem heroic, well, the story, from a novel by Sol Yurick, is based on an ancient Greek military narrative by Xenophon, “Anabasis.”)Now, after a pivot to television and film, the “Hamilton” creator has spent the last two-plus years working with the playwright and performer Eisa Davis to create a “Warriors” concept album.“You write the things that won’t leave you alone, and this won’t leave me alone,” Miranda said in a joint interview with Davis, conducted at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.The album was released on Friday by Atlantic Records. You can listen here.What is ‘The Warriors’ about?Miranda offers a succinct plot summary: “All the gangs of New York are meeting in the South Bronx for this unprecedented peace summit. Cyrus, the charismatic leader who has called the summit, is assassinated. The assassin blames the Warriors, and the Warriors have to fight their way home to Coney [Island], while every other gang in the city is trying to kill them.”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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      Sadie Sink to Star in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ on Broadway

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      Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for “The Outsiders.”Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from “Stranger Things,” will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading “The Crucible” while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction — plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.The play has nine characters — seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor — and explores how the students’ ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.“As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe,” said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read “The Crucible” in a high school English class.“Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, ‘I should reread “The Crucible”,’ and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it,” she said. “I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase ‘John Proctor is the villain.’”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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      Adam Driver in ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ a Satire of Sincerity

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      A country music star embodies the clichés of celebrity in an Off Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 comedy.Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket there.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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      In ‘Vladimir,’ a Russian Reporter’s Fight Is an Apt Election Season Tale

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      The writer Erika Sheffer takes a big swing in a Manhattan Theater Club production examining “the point at which a society finds itself on the brink.”For Raya Bobrinskaya, a hard-nosed newspaper journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, being poisoned is a hazard of the job. She almost expects it to happen to her at some point.When at last it does, along with the gushing blood and wrenching pain comes instant regret — not over her reporting, but over her 20-something daughter having to witness the attempt on her life.“I’m so sorry,” Raya says. “I didn’t want you to be here for this, I really didn’t, I promise.”Until this whoosh of oxygen to the plot, Erika Sheffer’s new play, “Vladimir,” is a very slow burn. From the end of the first act on, though, the drama crackles, full of tension, intrigue and poignancy.Directed by Daniel Sullivan for Manhattan Theater Club, it is an apt play for this election season: a palimpsest meditation on hijacked democracy. In a program note, Sheffer mentions her distress at the “most recent rise of extremism and violence in American politics.” She began reading about Putin’s ascension, she adds, “and became interested in the point at which a society finds itself on the brink.”“Who chooses to fight and who stays silent?” she asks.In “Vladimir,” at New York City Center Stage I, the choice between courage and complacency tends to be an easy one for the restless, witty Raya (Francesca Faridany). Infuriated by Putin, driven by a love of her country, Raya cannot will herself to avert her gaze from abuse of power, however much safer that would be.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 Enduring Allure of ‘Showgirls’? A French Play Investigates in Song.

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      Inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 film, “Showgirl” considers what it means to be an actress who gets naked.Las Vegas was a hot location for movies in 1995. Nicolas Cage battled his demons in the character study “Leaving Las Vegas,” with Elisabeth Shue caught in the crossfire. Sharon Stone was a shrewd hustler turned mob wife in the Martin Scorsese drama “Casino.” All three actors landed Oscar nominations (Cage won), and even when certain critics didn’t care for those films, they at least respected them.That cannot be said of the third major Vegas movie from that year: Paul Verhoeven’s NC-17-rated “Showgirls,” the flashy, brash, somewhat bonkers tale of a dancer named Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) who claws her way to the top of the seminude entertainment heap — or volcano, as the case may be.And yet it is that film that has inspired a documentary, drag tributes, musical spoofs, memes, academic essays (some of them collected in the recent anthology “The Year’s Work in ‘Showgirls’ Studies,” from Indiana University Press) and even a poetic retelling in sestinas. The latest entry in this ever-evolving galaxy is Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet’s “Showgirl,” a French play with an original techno score that will be performed at N.Y.U. Skirball on Friday and Saturday.‘It Doesn’t Suck’Saldana discovered the movie fairly early, catching it on VHS a couple of years after its release. She watched it like most people did around that time: for a laugh.“As I started doing more and more dance, I realized it’s a cult film in that world, like ‘Flashdance’ or ‘The Red Shoes’ — something else was going on,” Saldana, 45, said in a video interview from France.“I genuinely love this film,” she added. “Every time I watch it, I discover something new.”The various takes on “Showgirls” nowadays cover a wide spectrum in which serious-minded dissections counterbalance the midnight-screening crowd’s laughter and the drag satires. The movie is “revered both at the ‘low’ end of pop culture as a hardy cult favorite, and at the ‘high’ end by academics as a critical fetish object,” Adam Nayman wrote in his book “It Doesn’t Suck: ‘Showgirls.’”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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      Political Theater: 7 Shows That Wrestle With Cultural Issues

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      These productions are grappling with climate change, reproductive rights, the Arab Spring and accusations of sexual assault.The stage has always been a political setting, whether explicitly or implicitly. The lights go down, and confrontation and conflict ensues. With the U.S. presidential election around the corner, and the political fractures of society on full display, recent theater productions have grappled with these difficulties head-on. Here are a few of the current and upcoming productions tackling loaded and thorny issues.‘The Ford/Hill Project’Oct. 16-20 at the Public TheaterThat this verbatim play was staged at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington on Oct. 7, the first day of the Supreme Court’s new term, should make its political mission clear enough. As for the play itself? The actors onstage were re-enacting the accusations of sexual assault and harassment leveled at two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Bret Kavanaugh.“The Ford/Hill Project,” which begins performances on Wednesday at the Public Theater in Manhattan, interweaves real excerpts from the Senate hearings in which Anita Hill recounted her sexual harassment allegations against Thomas and, 30 years later, Christine Blasey Ford recounted hers against Kavanaugh. The replication of verbatim quotes allows the audience to attend these seismic political events themselves, draws attention to the very public nature of these proceedings and the theatricality of politics, and highlights the connection between our past and present.In a recent video call, Lee Sunday Evans, the play’s director and co-creator, discussed how the performance breaks from being pure re-enactment. Hill and Ford “were extraordinarily alone when they gave their testimony,” she explained, but in the piece, “they’re able to stand side by side.” She added that she hopes the play helps people see their stories as more related and “creates a space where they don’t have to be alone.”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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      York Theater Artistic Director Out After ‘Hurtful’ Diversity Comments

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      James Morgan, who has been with the small New York theater company for 50 years, blamed the effects of a stroke for his behavior.The longtime leader of the York Theater Company, a small New York nonprofit known for its emphasis on musical theater, is acknowledging making “hurtful” comments about diversity that he says prompted his abrupt departure from the organization.James Morgan, who has served as producing artistic director of the York since 1979, and who has been with the company for 50 years, issued a letter on Monday saying that he had suffered a stroke in 2022, and attributed his behavior to that medical incident.“During a recent staff meeting, I responded to a colleague’s concerns about the diversity of our audiences in a way that was inappropriate and hurtful,” Morgan wrote in the letter. “The words came out — at a raised volume that has been one of the side effects of the stroke — differently than I intended them.”The York is a niche company, founded in 1969, that operates out of a church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. During fiscal 2023, it had an annual budget of $2.2 million, according to a filing with the Internal Revenue Service; Morgan was paid a salary of $95,000.On Friday at 5 p.m., the company issued a news release saying that Morgan had “resigned from his duties, effective immediately.” Jim Kierstead, the board’s president, raised the diversity issue in his statement in the news release, saying, “We will soon be announcing plans for a future filled with diversity, talent, and musical theater in order to continue our long legacy of supporting artists of all backgrounds.”It quickly became clear that Morgan’s departure had been preceded by the resignation of Gerry McIntyre, the theater’s associate artistic director.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