Uncle Vanya (Play)

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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

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      Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

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      Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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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      Alfred Molina on the Museum He Never Misses When He’s in New York

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      “Every time I’m in the city, I make a visit,” said the actor, who is performing on Broadway in “Uncle Vanya.”After more than 30 years in Los Angeles, Alfred Molina is enjoying his newly minted status as an Upper West Sider.“My wife and I have bought an apartment here, and we’re slowly transitioning to New York,” he said last month at Lincoln Center Theater before a rehearsal for the Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya,” which opens on Broadway on Wednesday.Molina, 70, has been nominated for three Tony Awards, for “Art,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and, most recently, “Red,” in which he starred as the painter Mark Rothko in 2010. “Vanya,” in which he plays the pompous professor Alexander Serebryakov, is his return to a New York stage after nearly 15 years.The play is “a chance to work with some fantastic people,” he said of the cast, which includes Steve Carell as Vanya, Jayne Houdyshell as Vanya’s mother, and William Jackson Harper as the local doctor Astrov. It is directed by Lila Neugebauer, and after Molina saw two other plays she worked on this year, “Appropriate” and “The Ally,” he said, “they both just knocked me out, so it was a no-brainer.”Molina, who is originally from London, shared his favorite walk in New York, why he loves the subway, and a Jonathan Groff-inspired song lyric that he came up with seemingly on the spot. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Jazz in the MorningI like to start my day with something bright and fast, like Art Pepper or Dexter Gordon. I’ve listened to jazz since I was a teenager — I wasn’t good at sport or popular with the girls, but I loved music, particularly Black American music. I used to read the music papers — the weekly Melody Maker, the New Musical Express — and whenever a review of a band or album used the word “jazz,” I would try to listen to it.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