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      ‘Illinoise’: A Place of Overflowing Emotion, but Little Dance Spirit

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      Justin Peck, who directs and choreographs a narrative dance musical to Sufjan Stevens’s concept album “Illinois,” resorts to his usual standby: community.“They trust themselves more than actors do,” Jerome Robbins once wrote of dancers. “Dancers know they will make it their own. Actors have the complication of wanting to make it their own, and their horror of exposing what their own is. Dancers always reveal themselves.”But the dancers in “Illinoise,” Justin Peck’s reimagining of Sufjan Stevens’s adventurous concept album “Illinois” (2005), are in a knotty situation. In the show, now at the Park Avenue Armory, the dancers are also the actors. And rarely does it feel like they are revealing facets of themselves — or showing the clarity that radiates through unaffected dancing.Instead their performances are a bizarre hybrid. They act out the dancing and dance out the acting. They struggle with both, partly because of their daunting task: Turning their very adult selves into younger selves on the cusp of adulthood. Even the dewier-looking ones have trouble. How could they not? Peck has them bouncing between giddiness and angst, with little in between.It’s hard to pin down what “Illinoise” wants to be, though it clearly has Broadway ambitions. Is it the musical theater version of a story ballet? A concert with dancing? Does it even care about dancing, really? The show, referred to as “A New Kind of Musical,” has little that seems new; it’s drowning in sentimentality, which is about as old school as it gets. And it doesn’t have much of a story, but what is there — by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury — is opaque. There’s no dialogue. It’s the music that is the undisputed star here.With new arrangements by the composer Timo Andres, and featuring three fine vocalists, the music carries the production, often leaving the dancers with little to do but mirror the lyrics. It’s exhausting to watch them sweat through this choreography. “Illinoise” is another attempt by Peck to build a community through dancing bodies, but the community is too delicate, too self absorbed for real connection.Ricky Ubeda, top, and Ahmad Simmons.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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      A Broadway-Bound ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Leads Olivier Award Nominations

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      The musical, starring Nicole Scherzinger, secured 11 nominations at Britain’s equivalent of the Tony Awards.A revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as a former screen idol descending into madness, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show, which ran at the Savoy Theater in London and will transfer to Broadway this year, is in the running for 11 awards — two more than any other play or musical — including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Jamie Lloyd.When the production opened last fall, it impressed London’s often demanding theater critics. Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said the production was, like its lead character, “a bit mad: reckless and daring, stretching its source material to the limit and beyond.”“I can’t imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season,” Wolf added.Lloyd’s maverick production features hand-held cameras that are used to spotlight characters’ emotions at pivotal moments. Although critics appreciated the technique, Lloyd faces stiff competition in the best director category. The other nominees include Sam Mendes for “The Motive and the Cue,” which debuted last spring at the National Theater. The play, by Jack Thorne, dramatizes a fraught backstage relationship between Richard Burton and John Gielgud as they rehearse a Broadway production.Justin Martin, who directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” also received an Olivier nomination.Manuel HarlanRupert Goold is also nominated for best director, for “Dear England,” a play about the English national soccer team that also ran at the National Theater and transferred to the West End. That show secured nine nominations.Despite receiving mixed reviews, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a theatrical prequel to the Netflix show that is running at the Phoenix Theater, secured five nominations, including best new entertainment or comedy play. Houman Barekat, reviewing the production in The New York Times, said it was “exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.”This year’s nominations include a hint of TV glamour in many categories. Among the nominees for best actress in a play are Sarah Jessica Parker for “Plaza Suite,” which runs through April 13 at the Savoy Theater, and Sarah Snook (of “Succession”) for a one-woman “The Picture of Dorian Gray” at the Theater Royal Haymarket, through May 11.They will compete for that title against Laura Donnelly for “The Hills of California” at the Harold Pinter Theater, Sheridan Smith for “Shirley Valentine” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and Sophie Okonedo for “Medea” at @sohoplace.The best actor nominees include Andrew Scott for a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and James Norton for his performance in “A Little Life” at the Harold Pinter Theater. The other nominees are Joseph Fiennes for “Dear England,” Mark Gatiss for “The Motive and the Cue,” and David Tennant for “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse.The winners of this year’s awards are scheduled to be announced April 14 in a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. More

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      ‘Corruption’ Review: Onstage, a Scandal’s Human Drama Is Muffled

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      A new play by J.T. Rogers goes behind the scenes of the shady “news-gathering” that rocked Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire over a decade ago.“Corruption,” J.T. Rogers’s tantalizing new phone-hacking play, starts on Rebekah Brooks’s wedding weekend. In a village in the English countryside, the flame-haired power broker, one of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite tabloid editors, has drawn the cream of Britain’s political class to her celebration.Prime Minister Gordon Brown is there, and so is David Cameron, the Tory who will succeed him. But Brooks (Saffron Burrows) is sequestered in conversation with her charmless boss, Rupert’s son James (Seth Numrich). He informs her that television and new media are the company’s focus now.“Newspapers are a relic,” James says. So his contempt is already evident when he tells her that she is the new chief executive of News International, the Murdoch-owned British newspaper group. Congratulations?It will be on Brooks’s watch, anyway, that a many-tentacled scandal erupts, with the revelation that her journalists clandestinely acquired the voice mail messages not only of celebrities and politicians but also of a missing child who was later found dead. Multiple arrests ensue, with accusations of phone hacking, police corruption and perverting the course of justice. Rupert Murdoch shuts down News of the World, his top-selling Sunday tabloids. Through it all, he remains loyal to Brooks.As a news story evolving in real time, the scandal made for jaw-dropping reading. As a play, though, “Corruption” is uncompelling — counterintuitively so, given the inherent drama: the crimes, the coverup, the comeuppance (or not), the clashes of personality. Also the stakes, which include the well-being of a democracy in which one culture-shaping media magnate holds too much sway.Tom Watson (Toby Stephens), a Labour member of Parliament as the scandal brews, is the central figure. (Murdoch, frequently mentioned, is a looming unseen presence.) Rumpled and besieged, Watson is determined to expose the widespread, under-the-radar operation: the surveillance, the intimidation, the gathering of secrets. The police, in the meantime, are oddly incurious about the voluminous records of a private investigator who they know hacked phones for News of the World.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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      ‘Dead Outlaw’ Review: Not Much of a Bandit, but What a Corpse

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      The creators of “The Band’s Visit” return with this mischievous ghost story of a musical based on an odd slice of Old West history.In the final chapter of Elmer McCurdy’s macabre posthumous journey through the American West, his red-painted corpse dangled from a noose inside a Southern California amusement park ride: a creepy bit of décor to spook the thrill seekers.More than six decades after his death, poor old arsenic-preserved McCurdy was presumed to be a mannequin — until, in 1976, the TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man” came to shoot an episode at the ride, and a crew member discovered otherwise.“This is a man!” the freaked-out Teamster shouts in “Dead Outlaw,” a mischievous but never meanspirited ghost story of a musical about McCurdy from the creators of “The Band’s Visit.”Conceived by David Yazbek, who wrote the “Dead Outlaw” music and lyrics with Erik Della Penna, this oddball new show reunites Yazbek with the book writer Itamar Moses and the director David Cromer. Based on a sensationally ghastly scrap of Old West and pop culture history that has inspired books, previous plays and a documentary, it is 180 degrees different from “The Band’s Visit,” the gently comic, Tony Award-winning tale about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli town. It’s also terrific fun.“Dead Outlaw,” which opened Sunday in an Audible production at the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, is a compact, deliciously deadpan yarn that stretches over almost a century.It traces Elmer’s hapless life as an alcoholic drifter turned bungling criminal, and his involuntary second act as a formidably well-embalmed sideshow attraction. Along the way, it casts a jaundiced eye at the callous American lust for guns and money, and takes puckish pleasure in reminding us that we’ll all be shadows like Elmer soon enough.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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      How Ingrid Michaelson Made ‘The Notebook’ Into a Musical

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      Family history is “wrapped up in these songs,” said the singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who is making the leap to Broadway with an adaptation of the popular romance novel.The stage manager’s office on the second floor of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in Times Square is about the size of a half bathroom and has the charm of a utility closet. It’s crowded and overlit, thanks to a high-wattage vanity mirror situated near a 1970s-era mini sink.Ingrid Michaelson surveyed the room where we were to begin our interview, and sighed. “It’s not glamorous at all — but it is,” she said. “There’s just a small, lucky group that gets to see these little rooms.”With the opening of “The Notebook” on Thursday, Michaelson will make the turn from a successful mid-list singer-songwriter to Broadway composer. Though other pop writers have made the same foray into musical theater — including Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, and Michaelson’s friend Sara Bareilles — Michaelson was an unlikely choice, because “The Notebook” is a huge franchise and she isn’t a hitmaker. “Quirky” is a word that turns up in articles about her, and quirky is rarely a mass-market trait.Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 romance novel was a publishing phenomenon that has sold 14 million copies worldwide. In 2004, it was adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and its feverishly passionate dialogue (“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!” Gosling shouts, in the middle of a rainstorm.) made it as beloved by fans as it was scorned by critics. Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”“I remember watching the movie with my friend — we rented it from Blockbuster,” Michaelson, 44, recalled. “I cried and cried and cried at the end.” She was dressed casually, in a gray knit cap, baggy flannel shirt and torn jeans. In conversation, she gravitated toward self-deprecation and the spilling-over candor of a lifelong New Yorker. She was droll and funny, but cried several times during our interview. At one point, on the topic of losing our parents, we both cried at the same time.“The Notebook” begins in an old age home, where Allie, who has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize her husband, Noah. He reads to her from a notebook, which tells the story of how they met and fell in love in their late teens, only to be separated by a conniving parent. They meet again 10 years later, when Allie is engaged to someone else. Will her marital pledge hold firm in the face of true love? We know the answer, but the reward of their reunion is offset by the pain of seeing them both in distress.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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      Dominique Blanc, at 67, Is in Her Prime

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      In 2003, three decades into her career, Dominique Blanc experienced every actor’s worst nightmare: The phone stopped ringing.Approaching 50, she was one of France’s most celebrated performers, fresh off an acclaimed stage run in a classic tragedy, Jean Racine’s “Phèdre.” But the subsequent, yearslong lack of offers “deeply unsettled me,” Blanc said in a recent interview. “I found myself in extreme solitude. I really believed I would never be able to set foot on a stage again.”“La Douleur,” a searing, award-winning one-woman show that will have its American premiere at the FIAF Florence Gould Hall in New York on March 13, became a way to process the hurt and take charge. Blanc’s character, lifted from a book by the French author Marguerite Duras, awaits her husband’s return from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, uncertain whether he is even alive.The show grew out of a series of readings she did from the book with the director Patrice Chéreau, a longtime collaborator. In 2008, Blanc pitched him a light stage version, requiring only a table, chairs and old costumes from Blanc’s closet. While Duras’s book was translated into English as “The War: A Memoir,” its original title simply means “Pain,” and in her show, Blanc starkly recreates women’s anguish as their partners return from untold horrors.“It was the first time I was completely alone onstage, with this extraordinary yet difficult text. I had so much fear,” Blanc said. “But it saved me.”For several years, Blanc reclaimed her artistic agency by performing “La Douleur” in theaters, school gymnasiums and prisons, both in France and abroad. In 2022, as the theater world prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of Chéreau’s death, the production was revived.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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      Review: In ‘Doubt,’ What He Knows, She Knows, God Knows

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      Liev Schreiber and Amy Ryan star in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s moral head spinner about pride, the priesthood and presumptions of pedophilia.Here are a few things Sister Aloysius cannot abide: ballpoint pens, “Frosty the Snowman,” long fingernails like Father Flynn’s, Father Flynn himself.She is what you’d call a forbidding nun, a Sister of Charity without much of it. (Her name means something like “warrior.”) The principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, she defines a good teacher as one who is a discomfort to her students, a “fierce moral guardian,” not a friend.“If you are vigilant,” she tells young Sister James, “they will not need to be.”But Father Flynn, following the spirit of the recent Second Vatican Council, and presumably his own inclinations, does not lead with fear. In ministering to his mostly Italian and Irish congregation, he seeks to give the church “a more familiar face.” His sermons are warm, told with jokes and accents. He coaches the boys’ basketball team. Add to Sister Aloysius’s catalog of unholy tendencies his suggestion that they occasionally take the students for ice cream.Even if nothing else set these two forces in opposition, there would be enough here for a fine play about varieties of faith. But John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable,” first seen on Broadway in 2005, is much more than that. It is a sturdy melodrama, an infallible crowd-pleaser, a detective yarn, a character study and an inquest into the unknowable.It is also, in the handsome revival that opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, something I hadn’t really noticed before: a battle of the sexes. For in the church of that day, as perhaps in our own, mutual distrust often arose between the men who had all the power and the women who saw how they used it.Why, after all, should Aloysius (Amy Ryan) already dislike the popular Flynn (Liev Schreiber) when the action begins? Why should she suspect that behind his “more familiar face” lies overfamiliarity? Is it his ballpoint pen? Those detestable fingernails?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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      Paper Bag Players Celebrate 65 Years of Making Magic Out of the Ordinary

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      The children’s theater company will bring its latest production, “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!,” to stages in New York this spring.What fun can you have with plain brown grocery sacks and empty cardboard cartons?Preschoolers know how to derive joy from these objects (as does any curious cat). But perhaps the best way to appreciate their magical potential is to watch the Paper Bag Players, a New York City children’s theater company that thrives on turning the ordinary into the unexpected.Families can experience that transformative power on Sunday, when the nonprofit troupe presents “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!” at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan. (They will also perform in April at the Jewish Museum and SUNY Orange in Middletown, N.Y.) The production consists of 13 musical skits tailored for audiences ages 3 to 9, and it celebrates a milestone that any performing-arts organization would envy: the company’s 65th season, making it one of the longest-operating children’s theater troupes in the nation.“At the heart of our theater is making imaginative use of materials,” John Stone, the players’ executive director, composer and music director, said during a group interview with the company’s principals.The troupe’s devotion to paper and cardboard, from which it has devised sets, props and towering characters, dates to its earliest days. In 1958, its founders, who included the dancers Judith Martin and Remy Charlip, began to experiment with simple objects. Over the years, the raw materials have expanded to include foam board, Tyvek and household tools like mop heads.Clockwise from bottom left, Brenda Cummings, Jan Maxwell, James Lally and, in the bed, Judith Martin, in “Cookies” (1984).Ken HowardThe new production, “It’s a Marvelous Paper Bag World!,” includes the 1991 skit “Lost in the Mall,” starring actors wrapped in cardboard.Martha Swope via The Paper Bag Players“We take our inspiration from them,” Stone said of children. “Then we’re making our own sorts of things with them in mind, or with their kind of play in mind. And that gives it back to the kids. And it’s an upward spiral of inspiration.”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