Uncle Vanya (Play)

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    Theater to Stream: ‘Yellow Face,’ Joaquina Kalukango and More

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    Watch the Tony nominee Daniel Dae Kim in David Henry Hwang’s comedy, and take in cabaret at 54 Below, all from your living room.‘Broadway’s Best’Watch on PBS, online or on the PBS app.At this year’s Tony Awards ceremony, on June 8, the PBS series “Great Performances” will be honored for excellence in theater. Its spring slate alone should remind everybody why “Great Performances” has been a theater gateway for so many people. Already available is a 2024 recording of the London premiere of the Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt musical “Next to Normal,” starring Caissie Levy as a woman whose bipolar disorder has a ripple effect on her family. The New York Times’ review praised Michael Longhurst’s production for giving the show “a renewed sting.”Next, you can catch the Roundabout Theater Company’s recent revival of the acidic David Henry Hwang comedy “Yellow Face,” starring Daniel Dae Kim and Francis Jue — both nominated for Tonys this year. The glorious Bob Dylan jukebox musical “Girl From the North Country,” set in 1934 Duluth, Minn., arrives May 23. A week later, American audiences can discover last year’s London production of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate” — a very funny twist on “The Taming of the Shrew” — with Stephanie J. Block as the fiery diva Lilli Vanessi and Adrian Dunbar (yes, Superintendent Hastings from the procedural “Line of Duty”) as her egotistical ex-husband, Fred Graham.‘The Other Place’ and ‘Vanya’Rent them on National Theater at Home.The National Theater at Home’s catalog is a veritable treasure trove, and a recent addition well worth checking out is “The Other Place” from the writer-director Alexander Zeldin (“Love”). Loosely based on the Greek tragedy “Antigone,” it is not driven by a high-concept staging like Simon Stone’s “Yerma” or Robert Icke’s “Enemy of the People,” which are also drastic reworkings of classics. Rather, Zeldin slowly builds a stifling sense of impending doom until an ending that hits as hard as it is quiet. Emma D’Arcy (“House of the Dragon”) appears haunted by bottled-up pain as the disrupter at a family reunion, while Tobias Menzies portrays a seemingly even-tempered uncle.Compared with that tragedy, Andrew Scott’s solo interpretation of “Uncle Vanya” feels almost cheery. If you missed the critically acclaimed, very sold-out recent run of “Vanya” in New York, you can watch an excellent capture of the original London version here. Sam Yates’s production offers not just a modernized take on the Chekhov classic but, as Jesse Green wrote in The New York Times, “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.”‘Friends and Romans’Stream it on Tubi.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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      My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

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      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

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      12 Plays and Musicals Across the U.S. to Brighten the Spring

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      On stages across the country, there is no shortage of adventurous work, including plays by Lauren Yee, Larissa FastHorse and Zora Howard.Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar.‘Here There Are Blueberries’A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project”). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film “The Zone of Interest,” fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, “Six million people didn’t murder themselves.” Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.)‘Mother Russia’This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee (“Cambodian Rock Band”) is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.)‘Sunny Afternoon’Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall (“The Constituent”), this retelling of the Kinks’ rise won the Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include “You Really Got Me,” “Lola” and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.)‘Uncle Vanya’The title role in Chekhov’s lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the “Paddington” movies or Bernie in “Notting Hill.” In Simon Godwin’s production of Conor McPherson’s adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.)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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      12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring

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      On stages across the country, there is no shortage of adventurous work, including plays by Lauren Yee, Larissa FastHorse and Zora Howard.Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar.‘Here There Are Blueberries’A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project”). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film “The Zone of Interest,” fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, “Six million people didn’t murder themselves.” Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.)‘Mother Russia’This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee (“Cambodian Rock Band”) is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.)‘Sunny Afternoon’Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall (“The Constituent”), this retelling of the Kinks’ rise won the Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include “You Really Got Me,” “Lola” and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.)‘Uncle Vanya’The title role in Chekhov’s lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the “Paddington” movies or Bernie in “Notting Hill.” In Simon Godwin’s production of Conor McPherson’s adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.)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: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’

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      In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.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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      Andrew Scott Will Perform One-Man ‘Vanya’ Off Broadway Next Spring

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      The Olivier Award-winning revival, in which the actor plays all of the parts, is to begin previews March 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater.Andrew Scott, the Irish actor who has parlayed his “Fleabag” hot-priest-ness into a thriving stage and screen career, will perform a one-man version of “Uncle Vanya” Off Broadway next spring.This will not be Scott’s first go at the Chekhov classic: He previously performed all the play’s parts in London’s West End last year; the critic Houman Barekat, writing in The New York Times, was underwhelmed, but critics for British outlets were far more positive, and the production won this year’s Olivier Award for best revival.The New York production is scheduled to begin previews on March 11 and to open on March 18 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. It is a commercial production, led by Wessex Grove, Gavin Kalin Productions and Kater Gordon.The original play was first staged in 1899, and is oft-revived; the most recent Broadway production, starring Steve Carell, closed just three months ago, and there was a small-scale Off Broadway production, staged in a loft, in 2023.This one-performer version was adapted by the playwright Simon Stephens, who also wrote the Tony-winning stage adaptation of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Stephens and Scott previously collaborated on “Sea Wall,” a short one-man play that Stephens wrote and Scott performed onstage (in Britain) and on film.The one-man “Vanya,” directed by Sam Yates, is scheduled to run just eight weeks.Scott, 47, who had his big breakthrough with “Fleabag” (where he played the “hot priest”), is also known for the British TV series “Sherlock,” the 2023 film “All of Us Strangers” and the recent streamer “Ripley.” He has appeared on Broadway once, in the 2006 play “The Vertical Hour.” More

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      Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.

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      Even at a challenging time for a pandemic-weakened industry, they found razzle-dazzle.Broadway Opened 12 Shows in 9 Days. Here’s What That Looked Like.Broadway is in the midst of a rolling celebration — of artistic expression, of audience enthusiasm, of song and dance and storytelling itself.The overlapping runs constitute a risky bet by producers and investors, who have staked tens of millions of dollars on their ability to sell seats. Even in the best of times, most Broadway shows fail, and these are not the best of times: Production costs have soared, and season-to-date attendance is 18 percent below prepandemic levels.But the shakeout comes later. First: fanfare and flowers, ovations and optimism.WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17‘The Wiz’Easing on down the road … to BroadwayDeborah Cox, left, who plays Glinda the good witch, and Nichelle Lewis, who plays Dorothy, at the opening night of “The Wiz.” Many of the 1,600 in attendance wore green for the Emerald City.A revival of a 1975 musical that reimagines “The Wizard of Oz” for an all-Black cast.Of course “The Wiz” was going to have a yellow carpet. The show’s recurring song is “Ease on Down the Road,” and that road is the yellow brick one — the path to Oz, but also, to self-discovery.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 Starry Cast Navigates ‘Uncle Vanya’ and ‘Every Emotion Under the Sun’

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      Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill and Anika Noni Rose discuss the new translation of Chekhov that brought them to the farm.Broadway shows usually come with a back story about the yearslong slog it took to get them there. Not so with Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which arrived at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater not even 12 months after its inception.Directed by Lila Neugebauer, it is Schreck’s first Broadway show since “What the Constitution Means to Me,” in 2019, and the ensemble is a starry one. Steve Carell is making his Broadway debut as Vanya, who believes he has wasted his life running a provincial estate and its farm alongside his niece, Sonia, played by Alison Pill, to support Sonia’s largely absentee father, portrayed by Alfred Molina.William Jackson Harper, best known for “The Good Place,” plays Astrov, the eco-nerd doctor whom Sonia loves. Anika Noni Rose, a Tony Award winner for “Caroline, or Change,” is the glamorous Elena, Sonia’s stepmother, for whom both Vanya and Astrov yearn.In mid-April, a week before the show’s opening on April 24, Schreck, Neugebauer, Carell, Harper, Pill and Rose gathered to talk over their dinner break in a room off the Beaumont lobby. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Along with Harper and Carell, both at left, the play also features Alfred Molina, Jayne Houdyshell and Mia Katigbak in supporting roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was your relationship to “Uncle Vanya” and Chekhov before this show?HEIDI SCHRECK I lived in Russia right out of college for two years. When I moved back to Seattle, I started this theater company with my husband, and there was this Russian company who would come and perform Russian plays. They invited me to be the translator. Basically I would do live interpretation.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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      ‘Mary Jane,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and More New Broadway Shows

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      This past week has been jam-packed with openings. Our reviewers think these new shows are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.critic’s pickA ‘heartbreaker for anyone human.’Rachel McAdams as a mother struggling with her own moral agony in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of “Mary Jane” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Richard Termine for The New York Times‘Mary Jane’Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in Amy Herzog’s play about an impossibly upbeat mother caring for a gravely ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system.From our review:[Herzog] is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.Through June 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA family drama that ‘feels like it’s a healing.’Jessica Lange, center, is the titular mother in “Mother Play,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, with Celia Keenan-Bolger, left, and Jim Parsons playing her children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Mother Play’Paula Vogel’s tragicomedy is a showcase for Jessica Lange, who plays a ferocious matriarch to a sister and brother played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons.From our review:Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, [Lange’s Phyllis] is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.critic’s pickA show that all the critics love.From left, Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka as members of an increasingly fractured 1970s band in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s rock drama, with songs by a real rocker (Will Butler), follows a 1970s band (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) on the cusp of fame through the prolonged, drug-fueled process of making a new album.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