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    ‘A Face in the Crowd’ Isn’t About Trump. It Just Seems Like It.

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    Elvis Costello and Sarah Ruhl’s musical adaptation of the 1957 film, a satire about a hustler turned power-hungry TV personality, hits the London stage.Stop me if you think you have heard this one before: A man gains television fame on the strength of his purported connection to everyday Americans and their resentment of elites, and before long he converts that fame into political influence in a right-wing presidential campaign.That is the rough outline of the 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd,” which featured a pre-sitcom Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a wild-eyed, guitar-slinging hustler who is discovered in an Arkansas jail by an ambitious radio producer and becomes a national phenomenon — until a hot mic moment reveals his bottomless contempt for his fans and they abandon him. Written by Budd Schulberg, based on a short story he had written years earlier, and directed maximally by Elia Kazan, “A Face in the Crowd” was an outlandish but eerily plausible speculative satire about the dangerous seductions of mass media.Now it has been adapted as a musical with a book by Sarah Ruhl and songs by Elvis Costello, which is scheduled to open at the Young Vic in London on Sept. 20. Ruhl and Costello, talking amid rehearsals last month, took pains to stress that they don’t see their show as directly addressing the rise of Donald Trump, who turned television fame into political capital. But there is no escaping that, much as Schulberg’s original was partly responding to the hysteria of the McCarthy era, their musical version began gestating during Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, and a large part of it was written during that year.“We’ve been careful not to tie the thing directly to Trump,” said Ruhl, “partly because it’s all there — Budd Schulberg was so prescient. There have been lines I’ve had to take out because they seemed too on the nose. At one point, some of the merch that Lonesome was selling included steak, something that Trump was also pushing.”The story is “about what is within us that we can be persuaded to desire, and the fact that we desire it means it’s within us in the first place,” said Elvis Costello, right, with the show’s director, Kwame Kwei-Armah.Ellie KurtzCostello also brushed aside a narrowly timely interpretation. “I’m resistant to the notion that this is an analogy,” he said. “It’s right in the title: It’s ‘A Face in the Crowd,’ not ‘The Face of Lonesome.’ It’s about what is within us that we can be persuaded to desire, and the fact that we desire it means it’s within us in the first place, like original sin.”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 Collaboration’ Review: A Basquiat-Warhol Bromance in Bloom

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      Anthony McCarten’s biodrama about the artists’ work together lifts the curtain on their friendship, or at least it thinks it does.On the cover of the press script of “The Collaboration,” Anthony McCarten’s new bioplay about the Pop Art superstar Andy Warhol and the Neo-Expressionist phenom Jean-Michel Basquiat, the pair pose in Everlast boxing gloves and shorts, as if preparing to go 12 rounds with each other.It’s one of a series of promotional shots for a 1985 exhibit of 16 paintings that they made together, and surely one element of the photo’s endurance as a crystallizing image is that neither artist lived much longer. Warhol died at 58 in 1987 after gallbladder surgery, and Basquiat at just 27 in 1988, after a heroin overdose.Don’t judge a play by its cover and all that, but in this case, you wouldn’t be far off. “The Collaboration,” starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and a radiant Jeremy Pope as Basquiat, is fundamentally invested in pitting the two painters against each other: their styles, their philosophies, their musings on art and commerce. And their fluctuating cultural currency.Presented by Manhattan Theater Club and the Young Vic Theater, this transfer from London — whose opening night performance at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater was canceled on Tuesday because of a positive Covid case in the company — is considerably less curious about whatever lies behind each man’s public facade. But Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production would like you to think it’s lifting the curtain on exactly that as it tells the early-80s New York story of Warhol and Basquiat’s work on those 16 canvases, and the friendship that took root between them.“I am human, even if I don’t look it,” Warhol says in the opening scene, getting right to the crux of biodrama and its perennial appeal to audiences: the sense that it gives us an intimate, up-close glimpse at a public figure’s private life, with its complex messiness and struggle, inspiration and joy.All the better, naturally, if that public figure is played by a famous actor — like Bettany, so comically endearing last year as Vision in the Avengers television spinoff “WandaVision,” and so deeply creepy as the sociopathic Duke of Argyll in the mini-series “A Very British Scandal.”There is a frisson of celebrity in the air, then, when we first see Bettany as Warhol, peering at some Basquiat paintings at their art dealer’s gallery, looking displeased — and grumpier still when he hears that this 20-something commands higher prices than he does.So it’s rather lovely that Pope, a rising star, bests him as Basquiat. Not that this is a competition, let alone a boxing match. But if “The Collaboration” spurs you to spend time with paintings made by one of these artists, it’s going to be Basquiat.Pope summons not only his charm — a magnet for women, Basquiat dated Madonna — but also his brilliance, ache and depth. His paintings are layered and full, textured and emphatic; so is Pope’s performance. With his heart-melting dimpled smile, he plays the frenetic former graffiti artist as if he knows every pulse of Basquiat’s life that we don’t see onstage, and that McCarten’s blunt instrument of a script can’t convey.Bettany, though, barely locates more than two dimensions in Warhol, as if the task were to play an icon, not a human being. That could be deliberate. Funny, frail, effete, Bettany’s Warhol is as meticulously impersonal as his art, and my goodness he whines. And he does so in the particular way of characters who need to get some exposition out.Krysta Rodriguez as Maya, Basquiat’s girlfriend, with Bettany and Pope. The show covers the period Warhol and Basquiat created 16 paintings for a 1985 exhibit.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’ve never been the same since she shot me,” Warhol says, apropos of almost nothing in the first minutes of the play, referring to Valerie Solanas, whose 1968 attack nearly killed him. He mentions her several more times during the show, not terribly organically. And yet somehow, when Warhol at last nervously takes his shirt off in front of Basquiat, revealing his scarred and corseted torso, he has none of the vulnerability that Alice Neel captured in her poignant bare-chested portrait of Warhol — which you’d think he might have, live.For all the slenderness of McCarten’s script, it does feel padded, and even so it manages to skip from Warhol and Basquiat’s wary acquaintanceship at the end of Act I straight to an apparently solid friendship at the top of Act II. When their art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger (a wonderfully vivid Erik Jensen), finds a syringe in Basquiat’s couch, he asks Warhol to confront him.“You two are so close now,” Bruno says — which is news to the audience, especially anyone who might have popped out to the restroom at intermission instead of watching the wordless bromance video montage that played throughout, showing them learning to have fun together in the studio. (Projection design is by Duncan McLean.)Oddly, given how specific McCarten’s script is about the kind of period technology that Warhol uses when he films, the video the audience sees of them looks distractingly contemporary. But Anna Fleischle’s set is clever, particularly the large panel that hangs overhead, appearing sometimes like a skylight, sometimes like a Mondrian.McCarten, who made his Broadway debut this month as the book writer of “A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical,” knows the biodrama genre better than most. He built his career as the screenwriter of the movies “The Theory of Everything” (2014), about Stephen Hawking’s first marriage; “Darkest Hour” (2017), about Winston Churchill’s high-stakes start to leading Britain; “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), about the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury; and “The Two Popes” (2020), about Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. McCarten’s Whitney Houston biopic, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” is due out Friday, and a film adaptation of “The Collaboration” is in the wings.Onstage, though, “The Collaboration” feels emptily formulaic — less like an insider’s view of its famous subjects’ lives than a kind of biographical tourism that gets into serious gawking in its second half. It doesn’t bring us any insight into whatever closeness Warhol and Basquiat had.If a sense of these artists’ relationship is what you’re looking for, try the extensive, palpably personal exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” organized by his sisters and on view through Jan. 1 at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. There are touches of Warhol in it — mementos of the two men’s friendship, and of their creative kinship — and they’re very sweet.The CollaborationThrough Jan. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheaterclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      Wendell Pierce Steps Into ‘Death of a Salesman’

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      A Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” has a Black lead for the first time, giving Pierce a chance to step into a role he was “born to play.”“Are my best days behind me?” Wendell Pierce said as he put down his steak knife. “Was I ever any good? A man can’t go out the way he came in. A man has got to add up to something.” It was here that he began to cry.This was on a recent weekday evening at the Palm, an upscale steakhouse in the theater district, and Pierce was quoting, at least in part, from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” which is in previews now and will open on Broadway on Oct. 9, following a successful London run a few years ago. Pierce, 58, stars as Willy Loman, the decompensating salesman of the title. It is his first Broadway appearance in more than 30 years. And even though Pierce has enjoyed a robust career, which includes long stints on prestige television shows and an Obie award for sustained excellence of performance, the questions that obsess Willy — questions of attainment, opportunity, legacy — are questions that obsess him as well. So much that when asked to consider them, he found himself weeping into his surf and turf.“I want to make my mark, too,” he said. “I’m like Willy Loman.”Pierce grew up in Pontchartrain Park, a midcentury New Orleans suburb that attracted middle-class Black families. He graduated from an arts high school, then matriculated at Juilliard, graduating in 1985. For years he was a journeyman, filming an episode of television here, a movie there, then perhaps appearing in a play, like Caryl Churchill’s finance industry farce, “Serious Money,” which came to Broadway, briefly, in 1988. (He has helped to produce two other Broadway shows, but “Salesman” marks his return as an actor.)In 2001, he was cast as William Moreland, a detective nicknamed Bunk, on the HBO series “The Wire.” While Bunk’s partner, Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty, commanded the larger story lines, Bunk emerged as a character as richly drawn and portrayed as any. When the writer David Simon began to dream up his next series, “Treme,” created with Eric Overmyer, he built a role, that of the trombonist Antoine Batiste, with Pierce explicitly in mind.Sharon D Clarke as Linda Loman and Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” which opens Oct. 9 at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“He can play anything,” Simon explained in a recent phone conversation. “He can play belligerent, he can play vulnerable, wounded. The angles are all really acute.” Simon went on, calling Pierce an actor’s actor, a student of the human condition, a “total pro.”That evening, at the Palm, Pierce looked professional, dapper and gentlemanly in a well-cut suit and pinstriped shirt. He has a round face, like a moon that’s nearly full, streaks of silver in his beard and deep-set, observant eyes. His expression looks as if it ought to relax into a smile, but it doesn’t. If you have heard his voice, then you will know that it is rich and sonorous, barrel-aged, with cadences that border on the biblical. Had acting not worked out, he has the skill set to have made a great career as a preacher, which he seems to know.“Here endeth the sermon,” he joked at the close of one of his speeches. And then, self-consciously: “Actors, man.”Acting did, of course, work out. (Detours into entrepreneurship have met with perhaps less success.) But Pierce has rarely been a leading man and he’s aware of that, sometimes painfully. His résumé reveals a long career as an ensemble player, a sidekick, lately a dad, nearly always an actor who subsumes himself to the character. When I mentioned to friends that I would soon speak with him, there was often a pause while they scrambled to look up his credits, followed by a “Yes. Of course. That guy.”Simon has a theory about this. Two theories. One emphasizes the texture and realism of Pierce’s acting. “A lot of our culture is about everything is heightened. And nothing about Wendell Pierce’s performances are ever heightened,” he said. The other comes down to a question of prettiness. “Wendell has an everyman look,” Simon said. “He’s an attractive man. But he has an everyman look.”And yet, all of this — the everyman quality, the realism, the vexed relationship to his own success — makes him ideal for Willy. As Marianne Elliott, who co-directed the London production of “Salesman” put it in a recent conversation: “He was kind of born to play it. He’s so perfect for the part.” Perfect, but with one significant departure. Pierce is Black. And Willy, in America, has nearly always been played by white men.A few years ago, while directing “Angels in America,” Elliott had an idea for a “Death of a Salesman” with a Black family at its center. Together with her associate director, Miranda Cromwell, who is directing the Broadway production, and in conversation with Rebecca Miller, Arthur Miller’s daughter, Elliott put together a workshop as proof of concept. When they saw that this staging could work, with hardly any changes to the script, Elliott and Cromwell reached out to Pierce, seeking an actor of both stature and deep feeling.Willy Loman is a role that Pierce never anticipated having the opportunity to play and a role that yet felt uniquely personal.Nate Palmer for The New York Times“He’s an exceptionally classically trained, brilliant actor, but he has so much heart, so much warmth, so much charisma,” Cromwell explained in a recent interview. “There is a complication within him and a vulnerability.”“He is not afraid to share his personal lived experience,” Cromwell continued, “and really be vulnerable on that stage.”Pierce sprang at it. Because Willy Loman is a great role and a lead role, a role that he never anticipated having the opportunity to play and a role that yet felt uniquely personal, even though Pierce has the gift of making every role he plays feel personal.“Wendell acts the way he lives: With the deepest appreciation for where he’s from and an insatiable curiosity of where he can go,” said John Krasinski, Pierce’s co-star in the Amazon series “Jack Ryan.”REHEARSALS BEGAN in 2019 and the show, which co-starred Sharon D Clarke as Willy’s wife Linda, opened in June at the Young Vic in London before transferring to the West End that fall. In a glowing review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley noted that in Pierce’s hands, “what has often felt like a plodding walk to the grave in previous incarnations becomes a propulsive — and compulsively watchable — dance of death.”That wasn’t necessarily what I saw when I visited the New York rehearsal room in early September to watch the cast — all new, except for Pierce and Clarke — work through the first scene of “Death of a Salesman.” After the cast sang a spiritual, Pierce entered, plodding, through a stage door. “I’m tired to the death,” his Willy said. His overcoat seemed made of lead and he looked hunched, beaten down, a decade older easily.But this, he explained to me at dinner, is what he spends the rest of the play fighting against. Those sunken shoulders represent every obstacle that Willy encounters, the threats to his livelihood, his masculinity, his sense of himself as a self-made all-American man. In this production it also represents the racist behavior that Willy faces, the microaggressions and epithets.“I have to know and feel that lead coat, the heaviness and the weight of the world that is placed upon Willy so that I can fight with all the fire and exuberance,” he said.Clarke, the Tony-nominated actress who has worked with him for more than three years, noted the energy that Pierce had brought to the role and the sense of overpowering love that his Willy has for Linda and their children.Pierce, right, as Bunk Moreland in “The Wire,” with Dominic West, left, and Larry Gilliard Jr. David Lee/HBO“His Willy is so lovable,” she said in a recent interview. “He will make you laugh, he will make you feel joyous, which makes the heartbreak at the end all the more deep and all the more resonant.”Rendering the Loman family as Black aggravates that heartbreak. As Cromwell explained it, the play remains the same, but its themes hit even harder. “The play is still, I believe, about the American dream,” she said. “When we see that through the lens of a Black family, we really see how much further away that dream is.”Playing Willy has eluded the great Black actors of previous generations, if they dared to dream it at all. In considering the opportunity, Pierce listed off at least a dozen actors — James Earl Jones, Ossie Davis, Roscoe Lee Browne among them — whom he thinks of as his forebears, all of whom, he believes, would have made a magnificent Willy.“I am humbled to be here now for them, to honor them, to honor their desires,” he said. “I owe it to them to step up and do my part and make a contribution to the American theater and that’s a humbling and a beautiful honor to have.”That contribution may hit differently here than it did in London, when this distinctly American play has returned to an American stage and to America’s particular racial climate. Cromwell told me that the play felt changed already.“Because it is closer to home,” she said. “I really feel that it’s holding a mirror to itself. It’s a great classic play being seen through a lens that it hasn’t been seen through before. And it will be surprising and dangerous in that space.”That this lens centers a Black family has and will continue to make headlines. But Pierce brings much more than his race to Willy, and the role has brought him things in return, some of which he anticipated, some he didn’t. Willy’s mortality has made him conscious of his own. He has dreamed about death throughout the rehearsal process — his own death, those of his loved ones — and had been preoccupied with how much time he has left and if he has used his time well.Willy finds solace, however incomplete, in his family. Pierce has never married. He has no children. And yet, he relates to Willy in this way, too, as a man who has put his career above his personal life. “My disruption has been that personal aspect,” he said. “So now I’m trying to learn the lesson of not being blind to what’s there. That’s what the lesson of this play will be for me.”Well, it’s one lesson. Others help him to appreciate the work and the choices that have brought him here. People have told him that he shouldn’t think of himself as a journeyman actor, but he does. And that, he said, is what makes him so much like Willy. He was crying through this, too. And he asked me to write about it, so that a reader would understand how much all of this means to him.“I want people to know. I want people to know. I want them to know,” he said. “It’s close. It’s so close. I’m proud of that.” More

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      In London, a Twist on ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Oklahoma!’

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      The updated musical version of the popular film challenges preconceived notions about the protagonist’s appearance. A take on “Oklahoma!” similarly offers a twist on a classic.LONDON — Some well-known musicals are looking notably different on the London stage these days, and that’s a good thing.It might seem difficult to imagine the theatrical version of “Legally Blonde” featuring anyone but the familiar interpreters of Elle Woods onstage — the likes of Laura Bell Bundy on Broadway, and Sheridan Smith, who won an Olivier Award for her performance when the 2007 Broadway musical later came to the West End.But along comes the ever-adventurous Open Air Theater in Regent’s Park to refashion this popular title anew, in a revival on view through July 2. Directed by Lucy Moss, who won a Tony Award over the weekend with Toby Marlow for writing the hit musical “Six,” this Elle and her stage colleagues are a diverse assemblage who include a transgender nonbinary performer (Isaac Hesketh) in the high-spirited supporting role of Margot.This time, Elle is played by Courtney Bowman, who was Anne Boleyn in the West End production of “Six.” Bowman, who describes herself as Afro-European, has said that she was pleasantly surprised that she was even being considered for the role of the feisty, pink-clad Valley girl portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the 2001 film of the same name.Bowman, as might be expected, has embraced Moss’s willingness to break with preconceived notions of Elle and has responded to the challenge with a sweet and stirring performance that asks the audience to question what it means to be blonde. (Not everyone was so pleased: The show made headlines several times over when a Sunday Times of London review, critical of the casting, incurred the wrath of both the theater and Moss, who responded on the red carpet at the Tonys.)Not that Elle as a character is in any way changed. Here, as before, she is the shrewd and savvy outsider — a ditzy-seeming sorority girl in fact possessed of steel — who ends up making an indelible mark at Harvard Law School. And so what if the person playing her looks different from previous Elles?If anything, the casting of Bowman only amplifies the inclusive, can-do message of this collaboration between Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin (music and lyrics) and Heather Hach (book). This isn’t the first time that British theater has taken a less than conventional approach, and those wanting the “blonde” referred to in the title will still find it in Bowman’s braided wig. Laura Hopkins’s tiered set, for its part, includes a curtain that seems intended to complement Elle’s appearance at every turn.Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Courtney Bowman in “Legally Blonde.” Pamela RaithUpdated to the present, Moss’s take on “Legally Blonde” mentions the Kardashians and Timothée Chalamet, and Elle’s résumé is described as “interactive,” in keeping with technology that wasn’t available two decades ago. Sometimes, the tongue of the production is somewhat too firmly in its cheek: The role of Bruiser, Elle’s beloved Chihuahua — given to an actual pooch in previous productions — is played by Liam McEvoy, costumed much like a human “feline” from the film adaptation of “Cats.”Elsewhere, the narrative hasn’t aged well. After #MeToo, it’s difficult to believe that Callahan (Eugene McCoy), Elle’s predatory law professor, would have made it quite as far as he has, but at least the audience didn’t boo McCoy at the curtain call at a recent performance, as tends to happen in London musicals featuring a notable baddie. And at times, the show is too busy for its own good: You yearn for quieter, more reflective moments that put camp to one side and allow for the proper flowering of feeling between Elle and Emmett (the likable Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), the Harvard Law teaching assistant who soon displaces the callow Warner (Alistair Toovey) in Elle’s affections.Among the female supporting cast, Vanessa Fisher is in notably strong voice as Vivienne, Elle’s rival in love (and more) who is revealed to have a heart, and Nadine Higgin would raise the roof with her feisty, crowd-pleasing performance as Paulette, the randy hairdresser of bend-and-snap fame — if this alfresco venue had a roof to raise. (Oddly, her mock “Riverdance” moves don’t really land this time, perhaps because that cultural phenomenon no longer has the same prominence.)The other night, the cast as a whole sounded somewhat tinny, especially at the start, as if perhaps battling the intense amplification needed to counter the noise of helicopters overhead and the like. But an initial feeling of excess subsides as the evening continues toward a second half that gives Ellen Kane, the choreographer, a chance to let rip.“Whipped Into Shape” allows Lauren Drew’s Brooke her moment of stage glory as a murder suspect who turns out to be the fiercest of fitness trainers. And the ensemble number “Gay or European?” — a potentially provocative song that the cast treats with such cheerful absurdity that you can hardly imagine it causing offense — exists alongside a passing reference to Beyoncé, whose singular moves would seem to have inspired the company as a whole.Bowman charms throughout in a casting gamble that pays off. “I had to find my way,” Elle says at the end, and you have to commend a theater culture that has led this performer to this role, even if Bowman, too, has probably had to navigate unpleasantness in the process. As Elle could have told her, determination and talent, happily, can win the day.On another stage in this city, a second, even more time-tested musical is being viewed afresh. “Oklahoma!,” at the Young Vic through June 25, brings to London the startling reappraisal of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein classic that won a 2019 Tony for best revival. The London iteration is even more impressive than the performance I saw at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein, the production combines several members of the New York company with some welcome newcomers, both American and British, including the Broadway actress Marisha Wallace, who has a riotous time as the libidinous Ado Annie, the good-time gal who famously “cain’t say no.”From left, Greg Hicks, Marisha Wallace and James Davis in “Oklahoma!,” directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein at the Young Vic.Marc BrennerA particular revelation is the English actress-singer Anoushka Lucas as Laurey, the farm girl who catches the eye of both Curly (Arthur Darvill), the swaggering cowboy who opens the show with “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” and Jud Fry (a sad-eyed Patrick Vaill), the obsessive, desperately lovesick farmhand. Lucas brings a palpable anxiety to the role that emphasizes an underlying darkness to material we may first think of as buoyant. The story, as ever, relates who will get to take Laurey to the box social, but it exists within a more threatening context than we are used to from so traditionally upbeat a musical theater mainstay. (The jubilant exclamation point of the title isn’t there by accident.)You quickly note the guns in full view on the set, which in turn link up to a climactic act of violence not found in the time-honored plot: The rejiggered ending — not to be revealed here — connects with a United States now as ever in the woeful path of gunfire. The glorious songs are intact (Lucas, in particular, does her numbers proud), but the production is inseparable from the superlative Vaill’s indrawn and wounding presence.If you exit “Legally Blonde” cheered by its giddy finale, this “Oklahoma!,” to its credit, makes you question those worrying recesses of human behavior that are beyond the realm of punctuation.Legally Blonde. Directed by Lucy Moss. Open Air Theater, Regent’s Park, through July 2.Oklahoma! Directed by Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein. Young Vic, through June 25. More

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      Wendell Pierce to Star in ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway

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      The production, also starring Sharon D Clarke and featuring André De Shields, will arrive some time next season.Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.Now he’ll get that chance: A group of producers announced Monday that they would transfer the London production to Broadway next season.Pierce will once again star opposite Sharon D Clarke, a British actress who wowed critics and audiences in New York this season with her star turn in a revival of the musical “Caroline, or Change.” Pierce and Clarke played the husband and wife, Willy and Linda Loman, at the Young Vic in London, and then in the West End; Clarke won an Olivier Award as best actress.“I have waited for this moment for a long time — I’m so excited to do this classic American play and join the fraternity of artists who have brought it to life,” Pierce said in a telephone interview. He called the role “the American Hamlet,” and said he had seen many of the best-known performances — Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman onstage, as well as Fredric March and Lee J. Cobb on film. “It will challenge me, not just as an artist but as a man, to take the time to be self-reflective and consider all the themes in this play: Are my best days behind me? Where have I lost hope? What do I want to leave behind? That’s a worthwhile journey of self-reflection to go on.”“Death of a Salesman,” often regarded as one of the greatest American plays, is about a traveling salesman whose career, and mental state, are falling apart. The play, by Arthur Miller, opened on Broadway in 1949 and won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play; it has been revived on Broadway four times, winning a slew of Tony Awards over the years.This latest production, with the blessing of the Miller estate, offers a new take on the play’s inherent tensions by portraying the Loman family as African American and the other characters (co-workers, neighbors and a love interest) as white.André De Shields, who this month wraps up his Tony-winning run as Hermes in “Hadestown,” will join the cast as Willy’s deceased brother, Ben. And Khris Davis (“Sweat”) will play Biff, one of the Lomans’ two sons.The Broadway production will be directed by Miranda Cromwell, who in London directed it alongside Marianne Elliott. Elliott will remain with the show as a producer.Cromwell, in an interview, said “it’s the same production, but some things will shift as we refine it.” She also said that, as a mixed-race woman, “there are elements of my lived experience that I’ve brought to the production.”She added: “So many of the elements of the play are fundamentally questioning of the American dream, and when you put that through the perspective of the Black experience, that enriches it — the obstacles are harder, and the stakes become higher through this lens.”The revival will be produced by Cindy Tolan, best known as a casting director; Elliott & Harper Productions, which is Elliott’s production company with Chris Harper; and Kwame Kwei-Armah, who is the artistic director of the Young Vic.The producer Scott Rudin had previously been planning to bring a “Salesman” revival to Broadway starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf; he stopped working as a producer after being criticized for the way he treated others, and the team behind the London revival was able to pick up the rights to bring their production to Broadway. More

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      Review: Conversation and Conflict, as Warhol Meets Basquiat

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      Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as the odd couple artists in Anthony McCarten’s new play, “The Collaboration.”Jeremy Pope, left, and Paul Bettany will also star in the forthcoming film version of “The Collaboration.”Marc BrennerLONDON — Opposite art world titans attract in “The Collaboration,” a new play that opened Thursday at the Young Vic Theater here. Chronicling the creative partnership between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat during the 1980s, Anthony McCarten’s play offers bravura performances from Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope as the two cultural icons.And if the writing isn’t fully the equal of its star turns, well, a film version of this play is already planned. A movie should give McCarten the opportunity to sharpen a script that, as of now, only begins to deliver on its promise in the second act.This writer’s track record with biopics certainly bodes well for Bettany and Pope when they transfer to the screen: The movies McCarten wrote about Stephen Hawking (“The Theory of Everything”), Winston Churchill (“The Darkest Hour”) and Freddie Mercury (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) brought Oscar wins for each of their leading men. His 2019 film, “The Two Popes,” earned nominations for the co-stars Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins and is the closest of those movies in structure to “The Collaboration.”Like that film, with his new play McCarten imagines a duo’s conversations and conflicts. At the beginning, Bettany’s lean, languid Warhol isn’t sure about the commingling of talent that the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (an excitable Alec Newman) has in mind for him and Basquiat: a joint exhibition to decide which of the two is the world’s greatest artist. Bischofberger has an eye on publicity and regards painters, he says, as boxers.Bettany’s Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature.Marc Brenner“Gee,” Warhol objects to the gallerist, “you make it sound so macho, like a contest.” Pope’s initially indrawn, pouty Basquiat, 30 years Warhol’s junior, isn’t any more certain that he wants to be part of a double act: “He’s old hat. Does anyone really care about Warhol now?” One man traffics in brands and pop culture iconography (we see Warhol’s signature Marilyn Monroes on the walls of Anna Fleischle’s flexible, white-walled set), the other sees logos as the enemy. Art, Basquiat maintains, “has to have a purpose.”The material follows a dramatically predictable course from mutual wariness to admiration, leading eventually to love. In fact, that very word is voiced in the penultimate line. Dismissive of Warhol’s attraction to surfaces at the expense of substance, Basquiat comes to adore him as a protective rival turned father figure, of sorts.“I hope you don’t die, Jean,” Warhol cautions, insisting that the addiction-prone Basquiat clean up his act. The younger artist’s reply is to insist on his own immortality, unaware, of course, that both men would die not long after, within 18 months of each other. When they do actually collaborate — on a sequence of paintings — it’s given surprisingly little stage time; you miss the specific attention to the artistic process that fueled a play like John Logan’s Tony-winning “Red,” about Mark Rothko.The director Kwame Kwei-Armah gets up close and personal with Warhol and Basquiat as the duo move beyond some fairly labored exposition (like when Basquiat, on cue, details his Haitian-Puerto Rican parentage) to achieve real power. The two actors manage to find something primal beyond the boilerplate writing.As Basquait, Jeremy Pope is a springy, restless stage presence.Marc BrennerPope, an Emmy and two-time Tony Award nominee, fills with fury as we see Basquiat at work on “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart),” a painting created in response to the police brutality that resulted in the death of a young graffiti artist in 1983. The canvas inevitably chimes with the Black Lives Matter movement Basquiat never got to see, and lends “The Collaboration” a wrenching topicality.A springy, restless stage presence, that sweet-faced actor communicates the heightened edginess of a man hurtling toward disaster. It’s a shame, therefore, that the belated arrival into the play of Basquiat’s girlfriend Maya (Sofia Barclay) seems perfunctory, as if McCarten weren’t sure quite how to broaden the story beyond the artist duo.Bettany, in turn, is a marvel in his first stage role in several decades. The Englishman, a longtime U.S. resident, has starred in Marvel movies and recently impressed as a forbidding Duke of Argyll in the BBC TV show “A Very British Scandal,” which will come to the United States in April.A figure of white-wigged insouciance still reeling from having been shot by Valerie Solanas some years before the play starts, this Warhol reveals an insecurity and disgust that take the part well beyond caricature. Survival, you sense, is no less precarious for him than it is for Basquiat. The two legends are hellbent on self-laceration, reminding us that, no matter how great our cultural legacy, we’re all mortal.The Collaboration.Through April 2 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      Review: In ‘Best of Enemies,’ a TV Duel Becomes a Theater Gem

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      James Graham’s new play draws parallels between the bad-tempered 1968 debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal and the rancorous public arena of today.LONDON — History comes hurtling to life in “Best of Enemies,” the latest attempt from the prolific playwright James Graham (“Ink,” “Quiz”) to put flesh on the bare bones of the past. Chronicling a sequence of televised face-offs that transfixed the United States in 1968, Graham once again shows a gift for mining the annals of politics and journalism for real theatrical gems. The result, at the Young Vic through Jan. 22, is the most riveting play in London just now.It helps that the personalities involved in those 10 TV debates were William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, two richly articulate men of any dramatist’s dreams. On the one side was Buckley (played here by David Harewood), founder of The National Review and a conservative grandee; on the other was Vidal (Charles Edwards), the pleasure-seeking novelist and playwright with two homes in Italy and a withering disregard for the “Christian values” Buckley espoused.Ideological opposites, the pair were brought together by ABC to restore the flagging ratings of a network dryly referred to early in the play as the “almost broadcasting company.” Drawing inspiration from a 2015 film documentary of the same name, Graham sets their increasingly barbed exchanges against the backdrop of a tumultuous summer. We’re reminded, via Luke Halls’s video design, of the riots and protests that were tearing at America, just as Buckley and Vidal tore into one another. (Bunny Christie’s set is a horseshoe-shaped soundstage with screens perched above the action.)Luke Halls’s video design, on screens in a set designed by Bunny Christie, evokes the turbulent summer of 1968.Wasi DanijuGraham’s narrative begins at the end, with his opponents clearly disturbed by a shift in their discussion from which there is no turning back. Vidal has denounced Buckley on air during the Democratic convention in Chicago as “a crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley has retaliated by dismissing Vidal as “queer.” The play then rewinds and charts the course back to that on-air debacle, but we also seem to be witnessing a descent into ad hominem argument that has only gathered in intensity to this day.Graham’s obvious theatrical prototype is “Frost/Nixon,” Peter Morgan’s 2006 play, which Ron Howard later made into a film. But the stakes here seem higher and the context broader: Jeremy Herrin’s deft production brings in cameos by Aretha Franklin (Justina Kehinde) — “they know who I am,” she snaps when she is introduced — and Andy Warhol (Tom Godwin). The actor John Hodgkinson, doubling parts, plays Chicago’s bellicose mayor, Richard Daley, and the ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith, both of whom he does well.James Baldwin (Syrus Lowe, excellent), another onetime debating opponent of Buckley’s, is seen now and again, commenting on the personalities and the fallout between them: “Whatever the hate, wherever it comes from, it will always eventually destroy the one hating,” he tells us.From left: Emilio Doorgasingh, Kevin McMonagle, Syrus Lowe and John Hodgkinson.Wasi DanijuGraham sufficiently connects the vitriol between Buckley and Vidal with the contempt, and worse, that dominates the airwaves now, but you slightly recoil when someone belabors a point. “More and more, we’re divided into our own communities of concern,” a media analyst (Kehinde again) remarks near the end, bemoaning the way in which TV has increasingly carved up American life.Even then, the feral energy between the two leads proves irresistible. Vidal is a plum role, and the wonderful Edwards is suitably dapper and silver-tongued, not least when on the offensive: “Do you read?” he asks Buckley. “You could learn a great deal.” We clock Vidal’s predatory eye — “speaking of eating, hello” he remarks libidinously to a young man (Sam Otto) who will become his aide and bedmate — alongside his exhaustive breadth of historical knowledge.Buckley, far from being the straw man of the pair, is arguably the more complicated. Casually disdainful and airily patronizing, he is given tremendous gravitas by Harewood, a Black British actor cunningly cast against expectation as a white establishment figure who was taken to task for bigotry more than once.Speaking in a lower register than Buckley, Harewood requires that we listen afresh to Buckley, as we do to Vidal: both men at ease with their characters’ fast-talking fluency of thought. And if their shared fate was to cross the line that separates reasonable debate from rancor, well, welcome to the world today, and to the coarsening of the public arena that “Best of Enemies” brings stingingly to life.Best of EnemiesThrough Jan. 22, 2022 at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More

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      Three Stars, Three Ways, Three Classic Plays

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      On British stages, Saoirse Ronan, Cush Jumbo and Ian McKellen present contrasting approaches to Shakespeare and Chekhov. LONDON — Saoirse Ronan may be the main attraction of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” as Shakespeare’s play is billed at the Almeida Theater, where it will run through Nov. 27. Yet, not for the first time in the director Yaël Farber’s career, Farber rules every minute of this attenuated account of the famously short work. Running nearly an hour longer than many “Macbeths,” the production conjoins sound, lighting and design to conjure a haunting mood that does more for the play than any individual’s performance. The menace and foreboding are palpable before the three witches have spoken a word.Where, then, does this leave Ronan, the superb Irish film actress and four-time Oscar nominee, in her British stage debut? She sometimes seems a decorative accessory to an exercise in total theater in which Tim Lutkin’s scalding lighting design, for instance, shines as bright as any Hollywood star.Yes, Ronan is given more to do than many Lady Macbeths, to foreground the actress most audience members have come to see. She’s there for the slaughter of Lady Macduff (Akiya Henry) and her children, which in turn reduces Ronan’s initially demure purveyor of evil to an anxious, hysterical wreck.But even as James McArdle in the title role builds to a vocal frenzy, we’re drawn to the hazily lit stage, which fills with water at the end, so the play’s combatants can splash about. (Those seated near the front might want to bring ponchos just in case.) Farber’s actors work hard, and often well, but they’re subsidiary to the atmosphere of gloom and dread she creates. That stays with you long after the thrill of celebrity has worn off.There’s never any doubting the intense stage presence of Cush Jumbo, the blazing talent known to TV audiences from “The Good Fight” and “The Good Wife” and who, unlike Ronan, cut her teeth in the theater. Some years back, she played Mark Antony in an all-female London production of “Julius Caesar” that was later seen in New York.Cush Jumbo in “Hamlet,” directed by Greg Hersov at the Young Vic theater.Helen MurrayHer return to the stage here as Hamlet, at the Young Vic through Nov. 13, constitutes an event. It’s just a shame that the director Greg Hersov’s modern-dress production doesn’t more frequently rise to the level of a star who is also the rare Black British actress to take this iconic role.Now and again, you sense inspiration. I liked the idea of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as selfie-taking hipsters who try their best to engage with the prickly Danish prince. Tara Fitzgerald’s Gertrude is an emotionally reined-in fashionista who may never have had an honest emotion in her life — until it’s too late.Elsewhere, Adrian Dunbar is a surprisingly dull Claudius; Joseph Marcell’s twinkly Polonius plays to the house, as if milking the character’s self-satisfaction for laughs. (His murder is bewilderingly staged to minimal impact, which seems odd given its importance as an early indicator of Hamlet’s building rage.)Throughout an unevenly paced evening, the androgynous Jumbo sets Hamlet apart as surely the smartest person in the room, and also the most furious. “To be or not to be?” feels less like an existential rumination than like the angry outburst of someone who’s had enough. I’ve seen more moving Hamlets, yet Jumbo fully catches the edgy restlessness of a protean character. Purring “this likes me well” of the knife he will use in combat, Jumbo’s Hamlet separately refers to “the very witching time of night.” This got me thinking: If Jumbo is looking for more Shakespearean roles, as I hope she is, what about having a go at Macbeth or his lady — or both?It’s not long ago that I caught another unusual choice for Hamlet in the age-inappropriate Ian McKellen. At 82, the acting veteran is still onstage in Britain, this time in the starry company of Francesca Annis and Martin Shaw in “The Cherry Orchard.” This Chekhov revival, directed, as was McKellen’s “Hamlet,” by his longtime friend and colleague Sean Mathias, is on view through Nov. 13 in the riverside town of Windsor, and is worth the trip.Ian McKellen in Windsor, England, in July. He’s now appearing there in “The Cherry Orchard.”  Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesUnlike the two Shakespeares, Chekhov’s 1904 play is kept in period and brings to mind the name-heavy productions of the classics that used to be mainstays of the West End but aren’t so much anymore. In a vital new adaptation by the American playwright Martin Sherman (“Bent”), this “Cherry Orchard” even indulges in a little gender-bending, with the eccentric uncle, Gaev, played by a tearful Jenny Seagrove — last seen as Gertrude to McKellen’s Hamlet.The focus of the play remains Madame Ranevskaya, the financially heedless aristocrat newly returned from Paris to the ancestral Russian estate that will soon be sold out from under her. Annis, a onetime Juliet to McKellen’s Romeo, is perfectly cast in a role that capitalizes on her natural elegance and luxuriant voice. Shaw, too, is in terrific form as the wealthy Lopakhin, the peasant’s son made good whose warnings about the fate of the orchard go unheeded.Shuffling about with a cane, a long beard tumbling from his chin, McKellen seizes the role of the aging manservant, Firs, without stealing focus from his colleagues. “I’ve lived a long time,” Firs says at one point, to an appreciative chuckle from the audience.Like Hamlet, McKellen knows the play’s the thing. Sometimes a classic text, simply and clearly told, is all you want, or need.The Tragedy of Macbeth. Directed by Yaël Farber. Almeida Theater, to Nov. 27.Hamlet. Directed by Greg Hersov. Young Vic theater, to Nov. 13.The Cherry Orchard. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, to Nov. 13. More

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      Raging Prince and Simpering King: A Tale of Two Shakespeares

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      Livestreamed productions of “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” from London reflect the vital role directors have in redefining these classic characters.I’ve seen Hamlet cry. And pout. And waffle. And jest. And rave. But I haven’t seen Hamlet rage the way Cush Jumbo’s Hamlet does in a new production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Young Vic in London. It’s the kind of determinate rage that convincingly powers him through his revenge.Yet this production gets its spark from the politics of having a Black woman in the role, directing her anger at an injustice.What this “Hamlet” — and its fellow Shakespeare tragedy “Macbeth,” which is also onstage in London right now, at the Almeida Theater — reminds us of is the important role that a director can play in molding these central characters who are defined by their resolve, or lack thereof. Their choices may not only render a classic new again, but also make space for contemporary gender and racial politics.These plays, running in person and via livestream — which is how I saw them — show two different approaches to directing Shakespearean tragedies. Greg Hersov’s “Hamlet” has a compelling, well-defined protagonist inhabiting a not-quite polished production; while Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” is an appealing production with bland lead performances.Farber typically has a strong command of her stages; her productions are often dark, and hung with a polished, ornate melancholy. (Her gracefully haunting take on “Hamlet,” starring an electric Ruth Negga, felt stolen from the dreams of Edgar Allan Poe.) This “Macbeth” is bleak, spare and gritty. (Soutra Gilmour is the set designer.)The play opens with an overturned wheelbarrow full of soldiers’ boots and a man bathing in a bucket of blood. And yet it’s also delicate, with Tom Lane’s cello score (performed by Aoife Burke); and stately, with the three elder Weird Sisters (Diane Fletcher, Maureen Hibbert and Valerie Lilley) dressed in handsome gray suits that David Byrne would envy. (Joanna Scotcher designed the costumes.)Farber takes a political stance in her direction, making the war imagery brutal and heavy-handed. But the largest surprise, and slip-up, in this otherwise charismatically styled and beautifully filmed production is that the central couple, played by James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan, are rather conventional and unremarkably defined.James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan in Yaël Farber’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” at the Almeida Theater in London.Marc BrennerI say central couple, though Macbeth was never the most interesting part of the play; he is ambitious but irresolute. He must be goaded on by Lady Macbeth, one of the most fearsome, emasculating — and fascinating — women in English literature. Though undoubtedly a great performer with a gleam of Hollywood celebrity, Ronan feels miscast in the role. Even as a murderer, Ronan has a jejune, effervescent quality that’s at odds with the base evil of the character.Farber sometimes positions Lady Macbeth as a sexual figure, her body sprawled in bed or on the floor draped in gauzy cloth, and her legs wrapped around Macbeth’s waist in greeting. But Ronan and McArdle lack chemistry, and this Lady Macbeth is also presented as oddly virginal; Ronan, wearing a playful white-blond bob, and mostly white attire, is the brightest image in this gloomy production.This Lady Macbeth could also represent a certain dangerous white female power that comes at the expense of men and women of color; in one scene, Macduff’s wife (Akiya Henry) and children, who are all played by Black actors, are viciously murdered as Lady Macbeth guiltily stands to the side. It’s an overly violent scene, punctuated by Lady Macduff’s jagged screams, that drags on for an excruciatingly long time.As for McArdle, he gives a believably shocked and earnest portrayal of Macbeth, and, later in the production, manages to deliver a rabid version of the murderous Scottish king. But he bumbles through the steps in between. Ultimately, we’re left with a murderous couple that somehow manages to be forgettable.On the other hand, in Hersov’s “Hamlet,” the trappings of the production are less lively: The music and costumes have an early 1990s vibe, though the reason is unclear. The livestream is, impressively, very accessible. You can watch from various camera angles, and captions and British Sign Language are also provided. Still, the video and audio quality leaves more to be desired.Where Hersov does provides a decisive interpretation is in the melancholy prince — and his suicidal lover. This Hamlet is not the desperate, confused young man so many productions present, but a prince empowered by his feelings. Jumbo gives a fiery, vitriolic performance; this Hamlet’s grief passes through a sieve of righteous anger. His wit is barbed with sneers and eye rolls. Even his jokes are delivered with an acerbic bite.Norah Lopez Holden as Ophelia, with Jumbo as Hamlet, in the production that is streaming through Saturday.Helen MurrayThe decision at the heart of the play — “to be or not to be,” that famous meditation on living and dying — seems less of an open question in this production. Jumbo’s prince philosophizes almost for the sport of it; he always seems resolved to what he must do.Ophelia (Norah Lopez Holden), who so often is just a girlfriend tragically lost to hysterics, is here as clear and confident as Jumbo’s Hamlet. In her first scene, she seductively sways her hips while listening to music, and she fantasizes a sexy Latin dance with Hamlet before she’s jolted back to reality. She isn’t a receptacle of Hamlet’s desire, but a young woman with sexual agency and desires of her own. Holden’s Ophelia has attitude, telling off her elder brother for his hypocrisy and firing back at Hamlet when she’s had enough of his gibes and babble.And when she descends into madness, it does not seem like the insanity of a girl who’s heartbroken and grieving; it seems as much an act as Hamlet’s, and her suicide appears to be a rejection of the world she inhabits.For Ophelia to show such agency within the bounds of the character as written is quietly extraordinary. And to see a Black woman reframe Hamlet as confident and righteously enraged is a political take unusual for the play. Hersov’s “Hamlet” remakes its main man from the ground up. After all, what a piece of work is a man — or a Black woman — on a fresh stage.The Tragedy of MacbethThrough Nov. 27 (streaming through Saturday) at the Almeida Theater in London; almeida.co.uk.HamletThrough Nov. 13 (streaming through Saturday) at the Young Vic in London; youngvic.org. More