Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Viola’s Room’: A Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter

      by

      “Viola’s Room,” a transporting gothic mystery at the Shed, is the latest immersive work from Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: “Viola’s Room.”Didn’t see “Viola’s Room”? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of “Viola’s Room,” then called “The Moon Slave,” at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators.“It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,” Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has.A reconceived “Viola’s Room” began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas (“Sleep No More,” which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater.The show is extremely tech heavy, involving more than 2,000 light cues. There are also bespoke scents, like one called “Burnt Witch.” George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s all about trying to do things that our audiences aren’t expecting,” Barrett said. “Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.”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

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      How Do You Adapt James Baldwin? Very Carefully.

      by

      His works have been slow to come to stage and screen. But a new production of the novel “Giovanni’s Room” shows how rewarding it can be when done right.Few writers turn out their career-defining work on the first try. But that was James Baldwin with his 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The semi-autobiographical book, about a day in the life of a Black teen whose stepfather is a minister of a Harlem Pentecostal church, was received by critics with glowing praise. Today it remains lauded as one of the great novels of modern American literature.Baldwin’s second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was quite a different story — literally and figuratively. A thematic departure from its predecessor, the novel was about two gay white men: David, a closeted American man, who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, in Paris. In the book Baldwin unpacks motifs related to masculinity and queerness, classism and American exceptionalism all through sparkling dialogue and robust, deeply ruminative prose.Though now considered a significant work of the 20th-century queer literary canon, “Giovanni’s Room” didn’t share the immediate adoration and popularity of its predecessor. In fact, it was rejected by his publisher, Knopf, when first submitted. “We think that publishing this book, not because of its subject but because of its failure, will set the wrong kind of cachet on your writing and estrange many of your readers,” the editor Henry Carlisle wrote in a letter to Baldwin in 1955. But Dial Press published the book in 1958, and almost immediately Baldwin had further plans for it.First there was the stage. In 1958 he produced a dramatization of “Giovanni’s Room” for the Actors Studio starring the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar as Giovanni. The play didn’t make it to Broadway, but Baldwin intended to return “Giovanni’s Room” to the stage, or even adapt it to film. He insisted on creative control, which hindered some potential efforts from other artists.James Baldwin in 1973.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the late ’70s he collaborated with the South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn on a screenplay, with hopes of big names like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando taking part. The project never got off the ground, though; Baldwin’s literary agent requested $100,000 for the book option, which the writer couldn’t afford.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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Fight Back’ Recreates an Act Up Meeting From 1989

      by

      This immersive theater experiment enlists attendees to help recreate an AIDS activist meeting from 1989 as an exercise in empathy.On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989.Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise’s immersive theater experiment “Fight Back” seeks to recreate.Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency.Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life.That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which “Fight Back” means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn’t expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989.“But I do think that there’s something about inhabiting with your body,” he said, “and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.”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

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Michelle Williams to Star in Off Broadway Revival of ‘Anna Christie’ With Mike Faist

      by

      The actress will lead a revival of “Anna Christie” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by her husband, Thomas Kail, and co-starring Mike Faist.A big star is coming to the small stage: Michelle Williams, the Emmy-winning, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress, will return to New York theater this fall to lead an Off Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 drama “Anna Christie.”Williams, who was last on Broadway in 2016, will play the main character, a former prostitute who falls in love with a seaman. The seaman will be played by Mike Faist, who was nominated for a Tony Award for originating the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” and who then had a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of “West Side Story.”The production is scheduled to run from Nov. 25 to Feb. 1, with a two-week break during the winter holidays, in a 450-seat theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” who is married to Williams. The two previously collaborated on the 2019 streaming series “Fosse/Verdon.”“We met making TV about theater, and we always thought it would be fun to make theater together,” Kail said in an interview. He said he had long been interested in O’Neill — he wrote his college thesis on the playwright — and that Williams had long been interested in the role, which was originated on Broadway a century ago by Pauline Lord, and has been played since on Broadway by Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann and Natasha Richardson, and on film by Greta Garbo.“Taking something that has existed in various forms, with multiple terrific productions over the years, and having the chance to be part of a lineage is something that I love about the theater,” Kail said, “and that’s certainly something that sparked when I started having conversations with Michelle about it.”Williams has had a varied career since her breakout role in the television series “Dawson’s Creek.” She won the Emmy for “Fosse/Verdon,” was nominated for a Tony for the play “Blackbird,” and has been nominated five times for Academy Awards, for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Fabelmans.”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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Billy Porter to Star in ‘Cabaret’ on Broadway

      by

      The show’s producers said they plan to end the New York run at the end of the actor’s run, on Oct. 19.Billy Porter, who won a Tony Award for the musical “Kinky Boots” and starred in the television series “Pose,” will return to Broadway as the Emcee in the revival of “Cabaret.”And then, that revival is planning to close.Earlier this year, Porter portrayed the Emcee in the London production of “Cabaret,” opposite Marisha Wallace as Sally Bowles. On Wednesday, the revival’s producers announced that Porter and Wallace would reprise their performances in New York, starting July 22 and running until Oct. 19.The show’s producers said they plan to end the New York run at that point, though it will continue in London. The New York production opened in the spring of 2024, starring Eddie Redmayne; it was nominated for nine Tony Awards, and won one, for its scenic design. (The August Wilson Theater was converted into a club-like setting with preshow performances in the lobby spaces and rings of seats, some with small cafe tables, around the stage.)The show is a hit in London, and it swept the Olivier Awards there. But the initial reception was much cooler in New York. Reviews were mixed — in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called the director Rebecca Frecknall’s staging “misguided.” Although it sold well with Redmayne in the lead role, it has struggled since — its weekly grosses peaked at $2 million in May 2024, but last week they were $763,000.Set in Berlin in 1929 and 1930, it depicts a group of people linked by a nightclub whose livelihoods and lives are threatened by the rise of Naziism. The show has had a succession of performers in the lead roles, starting with Redmayne and Gayle Rankin, followed by Adam Lambert and Auli’i Cravalho; and now Orville Peck and Eva Noblezada.The show is expensive to stage — it cost up to $26 million to capitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — and has been expensive to run as well. It has not recouped its capitalization costs.With music by John Kander, a book by Joe Masteroff, and lyrics by Fred Ebb, the show is a classic, first staged on Broadway in 1966 and revived three times previously. It was adapted into a Hollywood film in 1972; both the film and the first two Broadway productions starred Joel Grey as the Emcee. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Review: He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s the Future King of England

      by

      The Off Broadway play “Prince Faggot” aims to shock. But the real surprise is how good it is anyway.In 2032, a young man called Tips brings his boyfriend, Dev, home from college to meet the folks. Though cautious, Mum and Dad are neither surprised nor scandalized; after all, he’s 18, and they have known he was gay for a while.For the characters in Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” though, that gayness was long since a given. Early in the play, we are shown a famous picture of Tips at 4, looking adorable and, to them, arguably fey.Tips is better known to the world as Prince George of Wales, the oldest child of Prince William and Princess Catherine. The real Prince George is now 11. For that reason, I will hereafter refer to the character by his nickname. I am one of those who, as the play anticipates, resist the dragooning of a preadolescent boy into a dramatic argument about sexuality and monarchy — just as I cringe at the use of a slur I take no reclaimed pride in to market a title. If the playwright means to shock, mission accomplished.But here’s the real shocker: The play, which opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, is thrilling. Inflammatory, nose-thumbing, explicit to the point of pornography, wild and undisciplined (except in its bondage scenes) — yes, all that. Its arguments have so many holes in them, most hold water only briefly. Grievance is its top note: Tips is a whiner and Dev a theory queen. Love is everything and never enough.In other words, however objectionably conjectural, it’s real.Tannahill tries to sideline reality quickly though. In a throat-clearing prologue, he has the six actors (all exceptionally good in multiple roles) debate the propriety of telling the story in the first place. One (Mihir Kumar) argues that since “all children are ‘sexualized’ as heterosexual by default,” exploring a different framing is a kind of reparation. Another (K. Todd Freeman) retorts that to portray an actual child as queer is to invite a charge of grooming. A third (David Greenspan) adds wickedly, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job at grooming. I mean look at how many straights there still are.”From left, Rachel Crowl, K. Todd Freeman, N’yomi Allure Stewart and McCrea as the royals at the heart of the play.Richard Termine for 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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway’s ‘Real Women Have Curves’ to Close Because of Soft Sales

      by

      The immigration-themed musical is the second show to announce a plan to close in the aftermath of this year’s Tony Awards.“Real Women Have Curves,” an immigration-themed musical about a young woman whose academic aspirations conflict with her mother’s desire for her to stay close to home and to help out at the family’s small business, announced on Tuesday that it would close on June 29 after struggling to find an audience on Broadway.Based on Josefina López’s 1990 play and a 2002 film, the musical began previews April 1 and opened April 27 at the James Earl Jones Theater. At the time of its closing, it will have played 31 previews and 73 regular performances.The musical is set in 1987 in an East Los Angeles dressmaking shop owned and operated by Latina women, some of whom are undocumented immigrants; it has echoes of events currently unfolding in Los Angeles, where immigration raids have prompted protests.“Real Women Have Curves” was nominated for two Tony Awards, for best original score (by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez) and for best featured performance by an actress (Justina Machado), but won neither. It is the second show to post a closing notice after going home empty-handed from the June 8 awards ceremony, following “Smash.”Reviews for “Real Women Have Curves” were mostly positive. In The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called it “a bouncy, crowd-pleasing comedy about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s ambitions.” She added, “It is also a tale of immigrant life in this country, and the dread woven into the fabric of daily existence for undocumented people and those closest to them.”“Real Women Have Curves” has had difficulty selling tickets throughout its run. It has been grossing about $400,000 most weeks, which is well below today’s running costs for a large-scale Broadway musical. The producers, in a last-ditch effort to boost ticket sales, picked up the costs for the cast to perform a song on the Tony Awards broadcast (not a given, since the show was not nominated for best musical), but that did not save the show.The musical was capitalized for up to $16.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show’s development — has not been recouped.“Real Women Have Curves” features a book by Lisa Loomer with Nell Benjamin; it is directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo. Produced by Barry and Fran Weissler and Jack Noseworthy, the show had an initial production that opened in 2023 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      American Mythmakers, Revisited: Hunter S. Thompson and John Wilkes Booth

      by

      Two shows attempt to make sense of the gonzo journalist and Lincoln’s assassin, cultural figures forever intertwined with American history.Two shows on stages just outside Washington, “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical” and “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!,” create a diptych of American mythmaking: One character sees the country crumbling and aims to shake it awake, the other sees it in betrayal of its founding principles and tries to burn it down.The writer Hunter S. Thompson had little regard for professional deadlines, but in “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” running through July 13 at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., he faces one he can’t ignore. With a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a .45 in the other, the bathrobe-clad gonzo journalist — staring at a typewriter that has just landed with a thud onto the stage — neutrally informs the audience: “It’s February 20th, 2005. The day I die.” Then the self-proclaimed “major figure in American history,” played with feral charisma by Eric William Morris, manically attempts to commit his life, and the life of these disunited states, to the page.Created by Joe Iconis (music, lyrics, book) and Gregory S. Moss (book), and directed with anarchic propulsion by Christopher Ashley, the show is a frenzied, frothing act of theatrical resurrection. Morris is accompanied by a nine-member ensemble that functions as a Greek chorus of demons, muses and collaborators, ferrying us from Thompson’s Louisville boyhood to his professional dust-ups with the Hells Angels and drug-fueled detours through the underside of the American dream. His Colorado home, Owl Farm, serves as both writing bunker and memory palace. Crammed with gewgaws, it looks like the kind of place that would make people rethink their ideas about souvenirs.Subtlety was never Thompson’s forte, and this bio-musical wisely avoids making it an organizing principle. Iconis’s propulsive score is peppered with protest anthems, beat-poet swagger and a recurring rock ’n’ roll hymn to outsiders and misfits. “All hail Hunter S. Thompson,” the ensemble chants. “Hail to the freak.” Too much exposition? Too little? That depends on your familiarity with Thompson, a philandering husband and neglectful father who ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., cherished his constitutional right to own guns and nursed a near-cellular antipathy toward Nixon (played here by a reptilian George Abud).Though the show splendidly commits to unfiltered, maximalist expression, quieter moments also resonate, including when a young Hunter (Giovanny Diaz De Leon) reads a copy of “The Great Gatsby” and resolves to one day write into existence a more democratic country.Ben Ahlers as the title character in “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!” at Baltimore Center Stage.J Fannon PhotographyWe 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