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      Big Apple Circus Review: A City Tour, Pizza Rats Included

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      The third poodle wouldn’t join the conga line. Its fluffy co-stars pranced on their hind legs, while the third one scampered from side to side, reluctant to keep the rhythm. The poodle’s trainer coaxed and gently urged. But sometimes a dog just doesn’t want to dance.This was at the Big Apple Circus, the annual, genial extravaganza that sets up its big-top shop in a corner of the Lincoln Center Plaza. The opening performance was on the Saturday after Election Day, the tent lit in nonpartisan red and blue. The city still felt unsettled and even here the vibes were arguably off — acrobats stumbled, jugglers dropped batons, a unicycle rider lasted barely a second on the pedals.Vibes aside, a circus is still a circus. And a circus, however wobbly, is still a joy. There are buckets of popcorn to eat, light-up toys to wave, clowns to cheer. If this year’s acts are not exactly death defying, some of us have enough to worry about these days and may welcome the presence of a net, a mat. A soft place to land, spangles for days and nachos covered in Day-Glo orange cheese, that’s escapism enough.Rafael Abuhadba and one of his poodles at the circus. Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe circus’s theme this year is Hometown Playground. Whether the two-dozen or so performers and musicians actually call New York home is left unaddressed, but several of them are costumed as pizza rats (well, two pizza rats, one gamine pizza mouse), which is perhaps the next best thing.In a relatively brisk two hours, the show, which does without a ring master or mistress, visits a few tourist sites — Central Park, Coney Island, Harlem. Other acts are given vague tie-ins to the five boroughs. An acrobat performs an upside-down routine dressed as a construction worker. (Upside-down they don’t cat call.) He is followed by a trio on the Russian swing apparatus, also dressed as construction workers, which suggests certain imaginative limits. The poodles, all shelter rescues, arrive in a checkered cab. A couple of them are dressed as Ziegfeld girls.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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      ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Review: Darren Criss and Helen J Shen Are Robots in Love

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      A supersmart musical about making a connection arrives on Broadway in a joyful, heartbreaking, cutting-edge production.Claire is low on energy, so she pops across the hall to Oliver’s pad for a pick-me-up. But Oliver, a creature of routine, doesn’t like being interrupted while listening to jazz and waiting for mail. She insists, he gives in, and a spark, maybe a literal one, is ignited.Never was a meet cute as cute — and as quietly ominous — as it is in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending,” which opened Tuesday at the Belasco Theater. That’s because the pair are robots, and Claire’s battery is running down fast. Hooking her up to his charger may signal, for Oliver, the beginning of love. It may also signal the end of it.That we nonrobots also connect, pair and empower one another to share a too-brief lifetime is the surprising double vision that makes “Maybe Happy Ending” a ravishing addition to the catalog of Broadway nerdicals. The term is high praise, honoring supersmart, usually small-scale shows — like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo” — that nevertheless have big emotional impact. This one, directed with breathtaking bravura by Michael Arden, gets bonus points for difficulty, too: Under cover of sci-fi whimsy, it sneaks in a totally original human heartbreaker.The sci-fi elements are handled lightly and humorously in the book by Hue Park and Will Aronson, thus dodging the invidious scrutiny that the genre often elicits. By 2064, when their story takes place, Helperbots — android servants like embodied Siris — have been assisting humans with daily tasks for decades. But Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen) are now obsolete, living out their days in a pleasant retirement home in Seoul as their operating systems antiquate and replacement parts become scarce.Still, they remain fully sentient and distinct. Oliver, an early model Helperbot 3, is more stylized and herky-jerky than Claire, a later model Helperbot 5. His lips are pursed, his feet splayed, his language not quite natural (he can’t stop saying “thank you”) and his hair a hard helmet like a Playmobil figurine’s. Even so, he spent enough years with his former owner, James Choi, to have absorbed some human analog tastes — the jazz LPs especially — and to miss him fiercely. Surely Choi (Marcus Choi, excellent) will reclaim him one day.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 Vegetarian’ Review: Putting a Nobel Prize Winner’s Work Onstage

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      After Han Kang won the Prize in Literature last month, a stage version of her novel “The Vegetarian” sold out its run at a struggling Paris theater.Other Paris theaters may be a little envious of the Odéon this fall. In a stroke of good luck, long before the Nobel committee met to decide its 2024 honorees, the playhouse had scheduled a new stage adaptation of a work by Han Kang, the South Korean novelist and surprise winner of this year’s Prize in Literature.Now, Parisians are flocking en masse to “La Vegetariana,” an Italian-language version of Han’s “The Vegetarian,” directed by Daria Deflorian. The sold out run, through Nov. 16 at the Ateliers Berthier, the Odéon’s second stage, is a welcome opportunity to dive into Han’s surreal style, by way of a thoughtful, if at times muted, production.“La Vegetariana” is tightly focused on the novel’s central characters. Yeong-hye, whose sudden conversion to vegetarianism bewilders everyone around her, is watched closely by her nameless husband, sister and brother-in-law. In the novel, each of the three narrates a section. Here, too, they introduce Yeong-hye and comment on her directly to the audience in long monologues.In that sense, Deflorian, who coadapted the novel with Francesca Marciano and also appears in the role of the sister, treats the source material with reverence. Onstage, Yeong-hye remains an enigmatic figure, speaking as little as she does on the page. Initially afraid of meat, she later stops eating altogether. She requires no food, she says at one point, because she believes she is morphing into a tree.Unfortunately, without directorial intervention, an impenetrable heroine can also make for dull theater. As Yeong-hye, Monica Piseddu wanders the near-empty stage like a sleepwalker, dressed in an oversize T-shirt. While each scene is announced through projections with the abruptness of a movie script (“Couple’s House. Inside at Night.”), the shadowy lighting traps the characters in a kind of perpetual twilight, with gray walls as their cheerless background.Deflorian, left, in the role of the unnamed sister of Yeong-hye, played by Monica Piseddu.Andrea PizzalisWe 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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      ‘A Wonderful World’ Review: Blowing Louis Armstrong’s Horn Isn’t Enough

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      The great jazz trumpeter and sandpaper vocalist gets the old jukebox treatment in a new Broadway musical starring James Monroe Iglehart.Who, having lived through 20th-century pop culture, could fail to recognize that voice like a truck without a muffler? That piercing trumpet and embracing spirit?Who could fail to recognize Louis Armstrong?Yet he is something of a blur in “A Wonderful World,” the Armstrong jukebox musical that opened Monday at Studio 54. Not for lack of a precise embodiment. In the leading role, James Monroe Iglehart has every Satchmo detail perfectly tuned: the rumble, the chortle, the hankie, the beam, the satchel-like cheeks that inspired the nickname. If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of.But with such a major figure we want something deeper. And though subtitled “The Louis Armstrong Musical,” the show, with a book by Aurin Squire, spends too little time exploring its subject’s interior life while plumping for his greatness as if the point were in doubt. The score, drawn from songs he performed but (with two exceptions) did not write, makes the case irrefutably already, encompassing the astonishing range of a man who grew up with the blues, changed the course of jazz, excelled at swing, perfected scat and won a Grammy for “Hello, Dolly!”To balance such a rich and varied artistic life, let alone a chaotic personal one, Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here. Offering little you would not learn from a good obituary, or from a visit to the terrific museum at his home in Queens, “A Wonderful World” compresses 60 years, from youth to death and even beyond, into four discrete chapters defined cleverly but overneatly by decade, locale and wife.The 1910s segment, set in Armstrong’s native New Orleans, introduces wife No. 1, Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a prostitute with a “Kiss of Fire.” After leaving her to join the jazz scene of Chicago in the 1920s, he falls for the pianist and arranger Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who polishes his musicianship along with his wardrobe. Nevertheless, he leaves her too; she and Daisy bring down the first act with a furious medley of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.”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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      Paul Mescal Rides ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to Brooklyn

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      The award-winning production will begin performances in February as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s next season.Brooklyn Academy of Music next spring will present an Olivier Award-winning revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” starring Paul Mescal, the Irish actor, in the role made famous by Marlon Brando.The production is the high point of the next season at BAM, which, like many nonprofit arts organizations, has been struggling to rebuild after a period of economic challenges and leadership change.“Streetcar,” one of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, imagines a down-on-her-luck Southern woman’s disruptive visit to the New Orleans home of her sister and brother-in-law. It was first staged on Broadway in 1947, and this latest revival began at London’s Almeida Theater in 2022, and then transferred to the West End in 2023. Not only did the production win an Olivier, but so did Mescal and Anjana Vasan for their portrayals of Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Vasan will join Mescal in Brooklyn, as will Patsy Ferran, reprising her London performance as Blanche DuBois.The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the London production “an electrifying ensemble production.”Mescal, an Oscar nominee for “Aftersun,” is also known for the series “Normal People” and the film “All of Us Strangers,” but he is likely to become much better known this month because he is starring in “Gladiator II.” “Streetcar” is his American theater debut.The production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, will return to the West End from Feb. 3 to 22 at the Noël Coward Theater before transferring to BAM where it is scheduled to run from Feb. 28 to April 6. The producers of the West End production, led by ATG Entertainment, a large British theater company with a growing presence in New York, are credited as presenting partners at BAM.Among the other highlights of the BAM season is a production of “The Threepenny Opera” performed by the Berliner Ensemble under the direction of Barrie Kosky. Joshua Barone, reviewing the production in Berlin for The New York Times, called it “hauntingly enjoyable.”BAM will also present “Macbeth in Stride,” Whitney White’s reimagining of Lady Macbeth “as an indomitable Black female icon.” The production was at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company last year; in The Washington Post, Celia Wren called it “an ingenious meditation on ambition and the Bard.”Both of those shows will be in April; the opera is being presented with St. Ann’s Warehouse, and the play is a co-production with Shakespeare Theater Company and Philadelphia Theater Company, both of which staged it last fall, and Yale Repertory Theater, which is staging it next month.There will also be dance (including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Batsheva Dance Company and the annual DanceAfrica event), music (including Max Richter), films and children’s programming. More

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      The Avett Brothers Braved Choppy Waters to Bring ‘Swept Away’ to Broadway

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      The Avett Brothers were all ears a decade ago when a determined crew of theater upstarts and veterans came aboard to adapt their maritime album for “Swept Away.”In the early days of the 21st century, before the Top 5 albums and the three Grammy nominations, the Avett Brothers were a band of three young guys, relentlessly touring their blend of folk-rock-country, sprinting from show to show in their van. Between gigs, Scott Avett’s father gave him a copy of “The Custom of the Sea,” Neil Hanson’s book chronicling the 19th-century wreck of the Mignonette, a British yacht, and its tragic aftermath.On the road, Scott would recap the pages he had read, to his brother Seth and their bandmate Bob Crawford. They eventually decided that the harrowing survival story of these crewmen, stranded off the Cape of Good Hope on the South African coast, would be the foundation for their second studio album. It was released in 2004, and they titled it “Mignonette.”Over the next few years, the Avett Brothers were selling out arenas, their style of Americana, including emotionally probing lyrics, establishing them as stars in the genre. And then, one day about a decade after “Mignonette” came out, they received a curious call: A young theater producer named Matthew Masten asked if they would be interested in having the album adapted for a stage musical.“It sounded like a good idea,” said Scott Avett, who sings and plays guitar and banjo in the group. “But ideas are a dime a dozen, and a very small percentage of them seem to happen.”It took another decade, numerous stops and starts, and several regional productions of this unlikely story, but the new musical “Swept Away” has finally reached Broadway. It opens on Nov. 19 at the Longacre Theater.The crewmen of “Swept Away”: Adrian Blake Enscoe as the thrill-seeking Little Brother, Stark Sands as the pious Big Brother, John Gallagher Jr. as the Mate, and Wayne Duvall as the stoic Captain. 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

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      Everyone Else Is Giving a Standing Ovation. Do I Have To?

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      Theatergoers and other performing-arts lovers are noticing the practice seems to have become the rule, not the exception.Do you have a question for our culture writers and editors? Ask us here.Q: Are standing ovations expected now? It seems like every show or concert I’ve seen lately has ended with one.First things first: You’re not imagining things. Standing ovations have become ubiquitous in recent years. They’re now so frequent that it often feels to me as if the audience members making a statement are those who choose to remain seated, rather than those who rise to their feet.How common is this?Standing ovations are nearly universal on Broadway, but a little more variable Off Broadway — more common for musicals than plays, more common for upbeat shows than those that end in emotional darkness, more common for those with younger audiences, who tend to be more demonstrative (and sometimes more spry).The pattern seems to be similar in the classical music world. Zachary Woolfe, our classical music critic, tells me that standing ovations are now de rigueur at opera and symphony performances in the United States, but less so in Europe.In other areas of the performing arts, ovations aren’t quite as frequent. Gia Kourlas, our dance critic, says it is rarer to see a whole crowd rise after a dance performance — although it does happen at particularly thrilling shows. Jason Zinoman, our comedy critic, says he doesn’t see ovations at comedy clubs, but that big-name comedians will get ovations when performing in theaters.Why is it happening?The act of applauding to signal approval goes way back. It’s not clear when standing ovations began, but they seemed to become more popular in the mid-20th century as a way of acknowledging remarkable performances, and they have become a more routine way of acknowledging performers at the end of a show.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 Todd, Prolific Actor Best Known for ‘Candyman,’ Dies at 69

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      Mr. Todd’s decades-long career spanned across mediums and genres, but he was largely associated with a scary figure summoned in front of a mirror.Tony Todd, a prolific actor whose more than 100 film and television credits included “Candyman” and “Final Destination,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 69.Jeffrey Goldberg, Mr. Todd’s manager, announced the death in a statement on Saturday morning. He did not specify the cause.Mr. Todd’s decades-long acting career spanned genres and mediums. He starred or had prominent roles in several films, including the 1990 remake of “Night of the Living Dead,” “The Crow,” “The Rock” and Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War movie, “Platoon.” His television credits include “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “24,” “The X-Files,” and many other shows. He also lent his rich voice to animation and video games.He was perhaps best known for his role as the titular demon in the 1992 movie “Candyman,” He told The New York Times in 2020 that he was proud of playing the terrifying figure with a hook for a hand, a Black man who had been wronged in life and is summoned from the beyond by people who call his name five times while looking in a mirror — unleashing vicious attacks in which the Candyman slices to death those who dared to disturb him. “If I had never done another horror film,” he said, “I could live with that, and I’d carry this character.”Mr. Todd reprised the role in the film’s 1995 and 1999 sequels and returned to it for the 2021 reboot, directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Jordan Peele.In the “Final Destination” franchise, Mr. Todd played the role of the mysterious funeral-home owner William Bludworth — the rare recurring character in a film series that famously killed off all of its new characters by the time the end credits rolled.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