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      Listen to the Best Songs From 8 Tony-Nominated Shows

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Stereophonic” and others are up for top prizes at Sunday’s ceremony. Our critic takes stock of their cast albums, all available now.Cast albums are both keepsakes and fantasies, preserving a show for those who have seen it and implying it for those who have not. At their best, they are also stand-alone works of musical-theater art. Listening to the recordings of the eight shows nominated for Tony Awards in the best musical and best score categories — all of which are now available — I was impressed by how often and how variously they reached that standard. Below, in chronological order by opening date on Broadway, a guide to the latest batch of future treasures.‘Here Lies Love’The first of the season’s best score nominees, this sung-through biography of Imelda Marcos was the only one not to release a cast recording. That’s a shame, but die-hards can seek out the 2014 Off Broadway version or the 2010 concept album, with its whacka-whacka disco-beat ditties by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Remastered in 2023, and with a very different collection of songs from the Broadway show, the concept album is naturally less theatrical; with each track featuring a different singer in a totally distinctive style — Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Natalie Merchant, Sia — character development is impossible. Instead, it offers hypnotic dance-floor euphoria, as in Cyndi Lauper’s take on Imelda’s “Eleven Days” of courtship.“Eleven Days”“Here Lies Love,” featuring Cyndi Lauper, from the 2010 concept album (Nonesuch)‘Days of Wine and Roses’A story of husband-and-wife alcoholics on diverging paths toward recovery and disaster is bound to be harrowing, but Adam Guettel’s score carefully balances the inevitable lows with the sometimes wild highs. The cast album brilliantly captures that full-spectrum range, especially in the edge-of-danger singing by Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James at their finest. Their quasi-operatic cries for relief and forgiveness effectively contrast (but do not contradict) the jazzy mania of songs like “Evanesce,” in which the snockered characters sound like xylophones and leap like dolphins, making you ache if not for drink then for these desperate drinkers.“Evanesce”“Days of Wine and Roses” (Nonesuch)‘Water for Elephants’Jessica Stone’s thrilling staging is a real eye-catcher in this circus-based musical at the Imperial Theater. But the cast album demonstrates how the songs, by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective, can grab you by the ears. Avoiding the rut of some Americana scores, PigPen, along with its arrangers and orchestrators, offers a wide variety of sounds and formats that suit the milieu and the action: bravura showstoppers for the ringmaster, soaring anthems for the hero, haunting ballads for the woman caught between them. One of those ballads is “Easy,” a heartbreaker even if you have no idea that it’s sung to a dying horse.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 Writer Behind “Stereophonic,” the Most-Nominated Play in Broadway History

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      David Adjmi felt out of place in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, where he grew up. He felt uncomfortable at the Juilliard School, where he studied playwriting. Some of the earliest productions of his plays taught him that his theatrical style could be frustrating and alienating for his collaborators and his audiences. In a review of a 2013 Off Off Broadway production of Adjmi’s play “Marie Antoinette,” the Times theater critic Ben Brantley called Adjmi “a polarizing playwright who specializes in sounding the depths of shallowness.” Adjmi decided that mainstream success was out of reach for him. He considered giving up writing altogether.But that’s not what happened. Adjmi told Melissa Kirsch the story of how he came to write “Stereophonic,” his newest play, which was recently nominated for 13 Tony Awards, a record for a play.On today’s episodeMelissa Kirsch, the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle for The Times and the writer of The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Illustration by The New York TimesThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      This Year’s Tony Nominees in Portraits

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      ‘Purlie Victorious’Kara Young“My mime teacher had a double-jointed hand, and she taught me this skit about a dying butterfly in a forest. You find the dying butterfly, and you pick it up and your hand becomes the butterfly. And I performed this very often because I was the one who was able to do the double-jointed hand.”‘Purlie Victorious’Leslie Odom Jr.“I played Martin Luther King in our Black history show in kindergarten. The pictures that I hold the dearest are of my grandmother and my father clapping in the front row. My dad looks like I just won the Nobel. He’s so proud that I’ve memorized my little four lines as Martin Luther King.”‘An Enemy of the People’Jeremy Strong“One of the real formative experiences for me was seeing Ian Holm do ‘Lear’ at the National in the ’90s. He was a little man with tremendous, immense power and vulnerability. And I remember him on the heath at the end — he was naked in front of the well-heeled audience, and I remember being very affected by a human being willing to be that open and unprotected in front of people. It changed my life.”‘mary jane’Rachel McAdams“I saw ‘Cats’ in Kitchener, Ontario. My dad was a mover, and he actually helped move the company, so we got free tickets. I was 8. I was walking on air when I came out of that show. I still remember looking down at my little white patent leather shoes and thinking my whole world has been cracked open.”‘Merrily We Roll Along’Daniel Radcliffe“The first time I was onstage was in a school play called ‘Nellie the Elephant,’ when I was 5 or 6 — I was dressed as a monkey. But my first proper stage appearance was when I was about 13, in ‘The Play What I Wrote,’ that Kenneth Branagh directed, and they had a different celebrity in every night, and I did like three performances. As the guest, if you knew the lines, you could get laughs. So even knowing very little about comedy, I got laughs, and I remember feeling, ‘Oh, that’s incredible fun.’”‘Merrily We Roll Along’Jonathan Groff“The first time I remember being onstage was playing Sandy, the dog, in a dance recital. I was 4 years old, and they were doing a number from ‘Annie,’ and I was in a dog head costume, and I remember hearing the audience laugh at me moving my head back and forth, and I was hooked.”‘Merrily We Roll Along’Lindsay Mendez“The first show I saw on Broadway was at the Gershwin Theater. I saw ‘Show Boat.’ It was just so grand and incredible. I was, I think, 12 years old. I had loved theater as a little kid, but getting to see it at that level, it hit me for the first time that I could pursue it as an adult for a living.”‘Appropriate’Sarah Paulson“Janet McTeer in ‘A Doll’s House’ — that was a very early, if not the first, Broadway show that my mother took me to see. I was in the first row of the mezzanine, and I’ll never forget the energy with which she came onstage. It was like watching a lightning bolt.”‘Appropriate’Corey Stoll“Courtney B. Vance was playing Corey in the original ‘Fences,’ and I remember seeing that production with James Earl Jones, who was so obviously this powerhouse. But I remember seeing this young man going toe to toe with him, and holding his own against this colossus. It really blew me away that the theater was a place where there were all these different forms of power, and each person can hold an audience’s attention and affection.”‘Stereophonic’Will Brill, Eli Gelb, Juliana Canfield, Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka“My parents took me to see ‘Peter Pan’ at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. I was 3, and I was sitting on my mom’s lap, and Captain Hook had Peter Pan tied up, and apparently I stood up on my mom’s lap, and I screamed, ‘You poo-poo head!’ at Captain Hook.” — Will Brill“I saw Mark Rylance play Olivia in ‘Twelfth Night.’ And I was so astonished by his tragic sense of humor. I had been planning on doing an Olivia monologue to audition for school, and I was like, ‘I can’t do it because he’s too brilliant.’ I changed my monologue.” — Juliana Canfield“I did three different productions of ‘Grease.’ I played Danny every time, at 12, 14, and then my senior year of high school. When I was Danny my senior year, all of a sudden the girls started to take notice.” — Tom Pecinka‘Cabaret’Eddie Redmayne“The first show I ever saw was ‘Cats,’ when I was about 7 years old. I was up in the circle, and a cat crawled out of a hole somewhere and gave me the fright of my life. I found it utterly terrifying and completely exhilarating.”‘Cabaret’Gayle Rankin“The thing that drew me to theater was, I was always fascinated by people. I was really quiet as a kid, and so people watching was like my TV. I remember sitting at a Starbucks in Glasgow when I was, like, 12, watching people for hours on end.”‘Cabaret’Bebe Neuwirth“It wasn’t until I saw ‘Pippin,’ when I was 13, that I decided that I was going to be a dancer on Broadway and do that guy’s choreography. I didn’t know I was talking about god [Bob Fosse]. I didn’t know anything. It just resonated so deeply for me — I could feel that movement in my body, and I knew that I was watching an aspect of myself when I saw that.”‘Cabaret’Steven Skybell“I did children’s theater in Lubbock, Tex. My first show was ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ I played [a] king — I was already character-typed as the older character even then. And from the time I was 10, I knew I wanted to be an actor. I’ve just slowly been pretending all along the way.”‘Hell’s Kitchen’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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      Jessica Lange and Paula Vogel on Breaking, and Keeping, the Family Contract

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      In the Tony-nominated “Mother Play,” the writer conjures warm memories and thorny ones, not to judge her mother, but to understand — and to forgive.It is one of life’s great strokes of luck to have an excellent mother. The playwright Paula Vogel didn’t get one. The actress Jessica Lange did: sweet and nurturing, accepting of her children, the kind of mom the other kids wished was theirs.“I had a perfect mother,” Lange, 75, said on a June afternoon in a lounge at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan, her tone making clear that she wasn’t boasting or being hyperbolic. She was simply stating a fact, one that she realizes is “beyond fortunate,” and sets her own warm familial dynamic apart from that of the characters in Vogel’s “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions.” At the drama’s center is a painfully less than ideal parent. Lange is up for a Tony Award for portraying her.To Vogel, 72, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “How I Learned to Drive,” a backward-spooling 1997 memory play inspired by her uncle, the scenario of a mother who doesn’t exactly throw herself into the job is as familiar as her personal past: autobiography spun into drama.“I’m the kid that found other friends’ mothers, and went home with them after school,” she recalled, perched across a high, round-topped table from Lange. “I remember once coming into a friend’s house drenched from the rain, and her mother brought me a bathrobe and said, ‘Take your clothes off in the bathroom. I’m drying your clothes.’ I’m like” — and here Vogel channeled a child’s voice, wonder-struck — “‘You are? You’d do that for me?’”Lange in “Mother Play” with Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays a younger, fictionalized version of Vogel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStill, “Mother Play,” a best-play Tony nominee, is not an exercise in demonization or revenge. Condemning Phyllis, the mother — who shares Vogel’s mother’s name — is not the point. Understanding her is.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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      All in the Details: Tony-Nominated Set Designers on Getting It Right

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      What are all those buttons for?That’s one of the many questions David Zinn is frequently asked about the sound console that spans nearly the length of the set he designed for “Stereophonic,” David Adjmi’s backstage drama about a band’s discordant recording sessions in the 1970s.“I think that,” he said, laughing. “What are all those buttons?”A music studio, a Harlem hair salon, a church sanctuary: These were a few of the worlds that Broadway audiences were whisked away to this season courtesy of the Tony Award nominees for best scenic design of a play. Zinn received two nominations, for “Stereophonic” and “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” Derek McLane was nominated for the revival of “Purlie Victorious.”In its second year working on Broadway, the design collective dots (Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, Andrew Moerdyk and Kimie Nishikawa) was nominated twice, for “Appropriate” and “An Enemy of the People.”Ahead of the Tony Awards on Sunday, the nominees talked about the inspirations and challenges of playmaking with make believe.‘Appropriate’The design collective dots aimed to create a “realistic feeling” of a plantation house in “Appropriate.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s a cliché to say a house is a character in a play. But that is eerily the case in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s dark comedy about the racist legacies of a white family and a grand plantation home that feels alive and haunted. Lived in too, but by a dark spirit with the power to make sure a photo album of lynching victims finds its way into the family’s hands.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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      A Times Reporter Visits the Latest Broadway Shows

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      What’s it like to attend twelve productions in nine days? Michael Paulson, the Times theater reporter, shared his sprint around Midtown Manhattan.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I’m the theater reporter at The New York Times, which means I see a lot of plays and musicals — about 100 a year. But I don’t often go to opening nights. Those evenings are celebratory, and audiences are filled with the productions’ friends and supporters. The press is generally invited to attend performances on the nights just before (those are called previews) or after the openings.This year was different. My colleagues and I noticed some months ago that April — always a busy time for Broadway as shows scramble to open by the deadline to be eligible for the Tony Awards — was shaping up to be more congested than usual. Twelve shows were opening in a nine-day stretch.Oprah Winfrey attends the opening night performance of “Hell’s Kitchen.”Landon Nordeman for The New York TimesThis is a tough time for Broadway. Production costs have risen and overall attendance has fallen since the pandemic. I suggested to the Culture desk’s editors that it might be interesting if we sent a reporter and photographer to every opening, chronicling these moments of hope at a time of challenge.As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.That’s how I wound up spending nine days with the photographer Landon Nordeman, lurching from show to show; watching as many performances as I could; hanging out on red (and yellow, and pink, and blue) carpets; listening to curtain call speeches; and even popping in to a few after-parties.I worked with two photo editors, Jolie Ruben and Amanda Webster; a visual storytelling editor, Josephine Sedgwick; the theater editor, Nicole Herrington; and the Arts & Leisure editor, Andrew LaVallee, to hash out a strategy. We asked ourselves: How would we differentiate the openings from one another? And how could we use the sea of events to help our readers, most of whom live far from Broadway, understand more about this industry and this art form?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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      Bebe Neuwirth on the Part of a Stage That Feels Like Home

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      “I love older theaters in particular,” said the actress, who is up for her third Tony for “Cabaret.” “The new ones don’t have as many ghosts.”Even when Bebe Neuwirth isn’t dancing, she’s dancing.“I am a dancer first,” she said in a phone interview from her apartment in Greenwich Village. “I’m a physical performer, and that impulse, that expression doesn’t go away even if I’m standing still and listening to someone.”Neuwirth, 65, is a Tony Award nominee for her performance as Fräulein Schneider in “Cabaret” and is already a two-time winner for her roles in “Sweet Charity” in 1986 and “Chicago” in 1997. She has also gained fans for her television work on the Julia Child dramedy “Julia” and the long-running sitcom “Cheers.” But it’s theater that keeps calling her back.“I’ve been onstage since I was 7,” she said. “It’s my home.”On a rainy afternoon, Neuwirth discussed her love for the city’s Art Deco buildings, why the Jersey Shore is magical in winter and where to find the best softball in Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Flea MarketsSome of my first flea markets were at the Rose Bowl, and now I seek them out wherever I am. I go down to the one under the Brooklyn Bridge sometimes. Most of my house is filled with things I’ve collected from flea markets, but I’m always looking.2Ceramics StudiosFor the last four years, off and on, I’ve been going to ceramics studios and throwing clay, hand building clay. I love spending time there. Friendships get made just like they do in ballet class.3Dog ParksI don’t have one — though I do have three cats — so I love walking through a dog park and watching them play and interact. I love big dogs — German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, huskies, Weimaraners. And I like small dogs who are really big dogs at heart. I love Pomeranians because those tiny little fluff balls are actually huge dogs on the inside — they crack me up!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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      Emcee Squared: Joel Grey and Eddie Redmayne on ‘Cabaret’

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      Eddie Redmayne had never seen “Cabaret” when, as a 15-year-old student at Eton, he was first cast as the Emcee, the indecorous impresario of the bawdy Berlin nightclub where the musical is set. So Redmayne did what anyone wondering about the character would do: He watched the 1972 film, and studied Joel Grey’s performance.Redmayne, 42, has played the Emcee three more times — at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe following high school; in London’s West End, winning an Olivier Award in 2022; and now on Broadway, where he has just picked up a Tony nomination.“Cabaret,” set in 1929 and 1930, is about an American writer who has a relationship with a British singer working at the Kit Kat Club; the queerness of some of that nightclub’s habitués and the Jewishness of some of its neighbors become risk factors as the Nazis gain power.Redmayne had never met Grey, who originated the role on Broadway in 1966 and who went on to win both Tony and Academy Awards as the Emcee. So I asked them to lunch, to talk about a character both have played several times, and about a musical that has continued to move audiences.We met at Le Bernardin — Grey’s choice — and for two hours they shared stories, Redmayne reverential and thoughtful, Grey puckish and supportive. At times, when words seemed insufficient, Grey reached out to clasp Redmayne’s hand.Joel Grey won a Tony Award in 1967 for playing the Emcee in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe 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