Theater

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares161 Views

      in Theater

      Broadway’s Debacles Live On at Joe Allen’s ‘Flop Wall’

      by

      The posters in the theater-district restaurant document the shows that went wrong.Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a wall of posters in a Manhattan restaurant that spotlights failed Broadway shows. We’ll also get details on a state senator who wants to take away Tesla’s right to operate five dealerships in New York.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesThere’s a place where Broadway flops live on: a wall at the restaurant Joe Allen in the theater district that is lined with posters of duds and disasters. “Everyone remembers the hits,” Joe Allen’s website says, “but we revel in the flops.” My colleague Sarah Bahr, who revels in both, writes about what it takes to make the flop wall:Donald Margulies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of the 2000 drama “Dinner With Friends,” has a spot on the wall.But it’s not that play that earned him that place.It’s a show almost no one has heard of, a comedy called “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” that starred Faith Prince. It opened on Broadway on Dec. 8, 1994, and ran for just 12 performances.A poster for that production is one of the more than 50 posters for little-known Broadway shows featured on what is known as the “flop wall,” the brick wall opposite the bar at Joe Allen. Among them are “Doctor Zhivago,” which ran for 23 performances a decade ago, and “Moose Murders,” which closed the same night it opened in 1983.“Sometimes having a life in the theater is electrifying, and sometimes it is electrocuting,” Margulies said after a rehearsal for his latest play, “Lunar Eclipse,” which is set to begin performances Off Broadway next month.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

    • 150 Shares102 Views

      in Theater

      My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

      by

      What is it about Chekhov’s melancholy inaction hero that makes him, and the play he stars in, so meaningful at all ages?Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.In the one-man show “Vanya,” Andrew Scott plays the title character as a man stuck in arrested development.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.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 Shares102 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Review: This American (Immigrant) Life

      by

      On Broadway, the musical adaptation is a bouncy crowd pleaser about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s dreams.A brief scene in the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is as harrowing as anything in the most serious drama on Broadway: a group of terrified workers in a small Los Angeles dress factory, hiding in the dark as they listen to an immigration raid taking place next door.When the raid is over, the first sounds to break the quiet are soft weeping and breath laden with fear.It’s a jolt of somber realism in a show that opts, ultimately, to lean in a feel-good direction. Yet such is the balancing act of “Real Women Have Curves,” which opened on Sunday night at the James Earl Jones Theater.Based on Josefina López’s play of the same name, and on the 2002 HBO film adaptation starring America Ferrera, it is a bouncy, crowd-pleasing comedy about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s ambitions. 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.At 18, newly graduated from high school, Ana García (Tatianna Córdoba) is the only American citizen in her family, and the only one with legal status. An aspiring journalist, and the daughter of immigrants who came to California from Mexico, she is spending the summer of 1987 doing an unpaid internship at a neighborhood newspaper.Then the dress factory owned by her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), receives a huge order that needs to be turned around fast. Their fireball of a mother, Carmen (Justina Machado), ropes Ana in to work there, 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

    • 100 Shares84 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: This Bandit Has Mummy Issues

      by

      A truly twisted yarn about a long-lived corpse makes a surprisingly feel-good Broadway musical.Out on the plains, around a campfire, the violent drifter sings a beautiful song. “The sky is black but filled with diamonds / You can almost hold them in your hands” goes the yearning lyric, with a fingerpicked accompaniment and twangs from a lap steel guitar.But listen a little longer. “Up there God is preaching,” the man continues, bitterly. “Laughing while you’re reaching.” And then this amateur Nietzsche, wondering why he should care about a universe that evidently does not care about him, jumps up with his gun to go rob a train.That’s the gorgeously perverse opening of “Dead Outlaw,” the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you. As directed by David Cromer, in another of his daringly poker-faced stagings, the show is to Broadway what a ghost train is to an amusement park, with screams and laughs but much better music.That it should be on Broadway at all is a scream and a laugh. Developed by Audible, and performed last year at the 390-seat Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, “Dead Outlaw” was a critical darling and insider hit, the kind that seems to do best doing least. No matter how cosmic its concerns, it was deliberately small — eight performers, five musicians, one set — and deliberately niche. It was not, in other words, for all markets.Yet here it is, surprisingly intact, at the 1,048-seat Longacre Theater, where it opened on Sunday in the biggest market of all.You know what else is surprisingly intact? That singing bandit. Born Elmer McCurdy in 1880, he spends his first 30 years on earth alive, the next 65 not. The embalmer did a good job.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 Shares166 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Just in Time’ Review: Jonathan Groff Channels Bobby Darin

      by

      Groff is sensational as the ’60s “nightclub animal” in a Broadway bio-musical jukebox that doesn’t live up to its star.When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means it.The admission comes near the start of “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened on Saturday at Circle in the Square. It’s a warning to the 22 audience members seated at cabaret tables in the middle of the action that they may want to don raincoats as he sings and dances, sweating and spitting, a-splishin’ and a-splashin’.But Groff is wet in another sense too: He’s a rushing pipeline, a body and voice that seem to have evolved with the specific goal of transporting feelings from the inside to the outside. A rarity among male musical theater stars, he is thrilling not just sonically but also emotionally, all in one breath.And Darin, the self-described “nightclub animal” who bounced from bopper to crooner to quester to recluse, is a great fit for him. Not because they are alike in temperament, other than a compulsion to entertain and be embraced by an audience. Nor do they sound alike: Groff’s voice is lovelier than Darin’s, rounder and healthier. But the Broadway and Brill Building songs Darin sang, some of which he wrote, offer the scale, the snap and the bravura opportunities that are more often, now as then, a diva’s birthright, not a divo’s.In other words, Groff is sensational.“Just in Time,” directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, at first seems like it will be too. Certainly the opening is a wonderful jolt. Making the smart choice to introduce Groff as himself, not as Darin, the show immediately breaks out of the jukebox box, liberating its songs from service as literal illustrations. My dread that oldies involving the word “heart” would be shoehorned into the story line about Darin’s rheumatic fever was temporarily tamped.Michele Pawk, left, as the maternal Polly and Emily Bergl as the sisterly Nina, indulging and fretting over the young Darin, a sickly boy not expected to live past 16.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead, “Just in Time” begins as a straight-ahead floor show in the Las Vegas style, with Groff, in a perfectly cut suit by Catherine Zuber, buzzing between song and patter while seducing the audience. The set designer Derek McLane has converted Circle’s awkward oval into a sumptuous supper club, with silver Austrian draperies covering the walls and clinking glasses of booze at the cabaret tables. A bandstand at one end of the playing space, and banquettes surrounding a mini-stage at the other, suggest a blank showbiz canvas, with flashy gold-and-indigo lighting by Justin Townsend to color it in. Darin, it seems, will be merely a pretext.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

    • 188 Shares98 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Is Now a Broadway Show. Here Are 5 Things to Know.

      by

      The new musical is based on Josefina López’s original play and the 2002 film adaptation that starred America Ferrera.Joy Huerta wasn’t so sure about musical theater.When the director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo approached Huerta in 2019 about adapting Josefina López’s play “Real Women Have Curves” into a musical, she had her doubts.Huerta, best known as half of the brother-and-sister pop duo Jesse & Joy, was unfamiliar with the 1990 play, and she had never seen the popular 2002 film adaptation starring America Ferrera. But then she began reading the script. And it was then, she said, that she understood why the story could be so compelling set to song.“I remember being so excited about it, because I was like, ‘Anyone can relate to this,’” said Huerta, 38, who composed the music and wrote the lyrics with Benjamin Velez, 37, for the show, which is now a Broadway musical scheduled to open on Sunday.Set in 1987 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, “Real Women Have Curves” explores immigrant experiences through the story of a group of Latina women working at a garment factory. The focus is on an 18-year-old who is torn between staying home to help her undocumented family members and relocating to New York to attend Columbia University on a scholarship. The production had an earlier run in 2023 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.Shortly after performances began on Broadway this month, Huerta, Velez and Lisa Loomer, who wrote the book with Nell Benjamin, discussed their inspirations and approach to adapting the story for the stage. In a separate conversation, Tatianna Córdoba, 25, who stars as the musical’s young heroine, Ana García, spoke about making her Broadway debut in a role she identifies with so closely. Here are five things to know about the production.“Real Women Have Curves” is at the James Earl Jones Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/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

    • 150 Shares110 Views

      in Theater

      Patrick Adiarte, Actor Seen in Musicals and on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 82

      by

      As a young immigrant from the Philippines, he had roles on Broadway in “The King and I” and “Flower Drum Song.” He was later a familiar face on TV.Patrick Adiarte, who was imprisoned as a baby in the Philippines during World War II and then found a new life in the United States as an actor and dancer on Broadway, in Hollywood and on television, died on April 10 in Los Angeles. He was 82.The cause of death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia, said Stephanie Hogan, his niece.Mr. Adiarte had a varied career, in which he played many characters, of various ethnicities, before he was cast in the first season of “M*A*S*H” as Ho-Jon, the Korean helper of the wisecracking doctors Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) and Trapper John (Wayne Rogers).As a child, Patrick portrayed one of the children of the king of Siam (now Thailand), who are tutored by a widowed schoolmistress in the original 1951 Broadway production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The King and I.” As a teenager, he played an assimilated Chinese American character in another of their shows, “Flower Drum Song” (1958).Mr. Adiarte, center, with Mike Lookinland, left, and Christopher Knight in a 1972 episode of “The Brady Bunch.”ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHe also appeared in the movie versions of both shows, in 1956 and 1961.In the 1960s and early ’70s, he was seen on several TV series. On “Bonanza,” he played a Native American named Swift Eagle; on “Ironside,” he was a Samoan boxer; on “CBS Playhouse,” he was a Viet Cong guerrilla. He played a Hawaiian tour guide in two episodes of “The Brady Bunch,” filmed in Hawaii.In “High Time,” a 1960 film directed by Blake Edwards, he played an Indian exchange student who rooms with Bing Crosby, whose character returns to college in his 50s.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

    • 150 Shares174 Views

      in Theater

      How a Kentucky Man Trapped in a Cave Became a Broadway Musical

      by

      Floyd Collins was pinned under a rock while exploring a cave in 1925. That history, recounted in song, is now on Broadway.When Roger Brucker heard that the story of a trapped Kentucky cave explorer who slowly starved to death was being turned into a musical, he was doubtful. “Aren’t musicals supposed to be fun?” he thought.Brucker, 95, knows more than most about the doomed explorer Floyd Collins. He co-wrote the book “Trapped!,” which is considered the definitive history of the events that unfolded during the so-called Kentucky Cave Wars, a period of rapid subterranean exploration in the 1920s when the state commercialized its extensive cave systems for tourism opportunities.Collins was an accomplished spelunker in 1925 when he entered Sand Cave alone, only for a 27-pound rock to pin his ankle and trap him underground. Over the course of 14 days, he died of thirst, hunger and exhaustion, compounded by hypothermia.Turning that story into “Floyd Collins,” which made its Broadway debut at Lincoln Center Theater this week, was an exercise in bringing a bleak history to life through song.Tina Landau, the show’s director, bookwriter and additional lyricist, was an undergraduate student at Yale University — decades before she conceived “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” and “Redwood” — when she came across a blurb about Collins in an anthology on American history. It focused on the media circus around the failed rescue, one of the most prominent national news stories between the two world wars.Landau, 62, said her perspective on the story was different from when she wrote the show, which premiered in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons, in her late 20s. She understands it now as an individual confronting his mortality.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