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

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      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

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      Billy Porter to Star in ‘Cabaret’ on Broadway

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      How ‘Passengers’ Retooled After a Performer’s Injury

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      The 7 Fingers company was about to begin performances of its multidisciplinary, train travel-themed show “Passengers,” and it was in a big pickle: A cast member was injured while practicing an especially tricky segment. It was anticlimactic — initially nothing seemed askew at the Tuesday evening rehearsal I had been observing — but the consequences were weighing on everybody. The first preview, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, was a mere two days away.The troupe, which specializes in a hybrid of circus and theater incorporating movement and music, had been running through part of a hand-to-trapeze segment. That discipline combines ground and aerial acrobatics, and is a signature number of the director and choreographer Shana Carroll. She had developed it for the Cirque du Soleil show “Paramour,” then took it to the 7 Fingers, the Montreal-based collective she helped found in 2002.Like many circus acts, hand-to-trap (as it’s commonly referred to), is spectacular but also dangerous. A flyer is catapulted up or dropped down by porters on the floor and one on a trapeze. There is no net or mat underneath the trapeze, because that’s where the floor team stands.The director and choreographer Shana Carroll, with her back to the camera, observing the juggler Pablo Pramparo, during rehearsal of “Passengers.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“My safety mat becomes my porters, my colleagues,” said Marie-Christine Fournier, who is this production’s flyer.At one point on Tuesday, Fournier was in the air, dangling from the wrists of Eduardo DeAzevedo Grillo, a porter who was hanging upside down, batlike, from a trapeze. He released her and she gracefully dove into the arms of seven company members who were waiting underneath 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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      Harris Yulin, Actor Who Perpetually Played the Bad Guy, Dies at 87

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      As an award-winning actor and director, he appeared in scores of stage plays, movies and TV shows over six decades, most often as unsavory characters.Harris Yulin, a chameleonic character actor who for more than six decades portrayed guys whom critics described as unsympathetic, soulful, menacing, corrupt and glowering, both onstage and onscreen, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.His wife, Kristen Lowman, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.Inspired to pursue an acting career when he first took center stage at his bar mitzvah, Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name. But to many audiences he was instantly recognizable, even as a man of a hundred faces. He played at least as many parts, including J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous TV anchorman.“I’m not always the bad guy,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It just seems to be what I’m known for.”Mr. Yulin, left, earned an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a mobster in a 1996 episode of the sitcom “Frasier,” with David Hyde Pierce, center, and Kelsey Grammer. Gale M. Adler/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesHe wasn’t just any bad guy. One reviewer characterized him as “an eloquent growler.” Another wrote that “his whiskeyed voice sounds just like that of John Huston.”Honors followed. Mr. Yulin was nominated in 1996 for a prime time Emmy Award for playing a crime boss in the TV comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off Broadway Theaters for his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006. In the late 1990s he won Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”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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      Two Fresh Looks at Molière: ‘Imaginary Invalid’ and ‘Prosperous Fools’

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      Red Bull Theater’s smart “The Imaginary Invalid” and Taylor Mac’s dismaying “Prosperous Fools” attempt to engage with the French writer’s comedy.Based on. An adaptation of. After. Inspired by.When these words precede the title of a new production of a classic play or the name of a long-dead writer, chances are good you’ll be in for a ride. Now two shows drawing from Molière — Red Bull Theater’s revival of “The Imaginary Invalid” and the Taylor Mac play “Prosperous Fools,” both running through June 29 — illustrate, with widely diverging degrees of success, how far that ride can go.In “The Imaginary Invalid,” Jeffrey Hatcher compresses the plot of Molière’s three-act comedy, from 1673, into a 90-minute romp, and rewrites the jokes but preserves the essence of the story and characters.The production, now running at New World Stages, reunites Hatcher with the director Jesse Berger, with whom he had cooked up marvelously funny takes on Nikolai Gogol (“The Government Inspector”) and Ben Jonson (“The Alchemist”). Happily, lightning can strike thrice.Aside from nods to “Les Misérables” and Édith Piaf, the play’s structure is intact, and still revolves around the hypochondriac Argan (Mark Linn-Baker). The doctors administering the treatments he constantly requests (all played by Arnie Burton) appear to have graduated from Quack U. “All these things they do to you, it’s like you donated your body to science but they couldn’t wait,” Argan’s no-nonsense maid, Toinette (Sarah Stiles), tells him.He does not listen, of course — though Molière and Hatcher aim their arrows at Argan, they also skewer profit-driven snake-oil peddlers and greedy bad agents.Much of the plot involves efforts to fleece or deceive Argan, and much of the production is shamelessly focused on making the audience laugh. Which it does, thanks to a company of expert farceurs who look to be tremendously enjoying themselves — like “Oh, Mary!,” this show understands that perfect silliness requires perfect execution.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