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    ‘Ragtime’ Crushed Brandon Uranowitz’s Dream. Now It’s Healing His Wounds.

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    Nearly 30 years after being let go from the Broadway-bound show, this Tony Award winner is taking a lead role in a new revival at City Center.In 1997, Brandon Uranowitz was a 10-year-old from West Orange, N.J., who dreamed of being on Broadway. He got one small foot in the door that year when he replaced Paul Dano as the wide-eyed little boy Edgar in the musical “Ragtime” during its premiere in Toronto.A year later, “Ragtime” opened on Broadway, and the musical — about three families navigating America at the turn of the 20th century, based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel — featured most of the Toronto cast, a powerhouse roster that included Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Peter Friedman, Marin Mazzie and Lea Michele. But Uranowitz wasn’t chosen to make the move. (Alex Strange was cast in the role instead.)That disappointment remains an “open wound,” Uranowitz, 38, said.“It was just, see ya, thanks for coming,” he added. “It felt unfinished.”Uranowitz, center, and other cast members during a rehearsal for the show, which begins performances on Wednesday.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesUranowitz eventually got to Broadway, making his debut in the short-lived musical “Baby It’s You!” and later appearing in “Falsettos,” “An American in Paris” and other shows. Last season, he won a Tony Award for his role in Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstat.”Starting Wednesday, Uranowitz hopes to finally close that open wound when “Ragtime” is revived, not on Broadway but at City Center, where Lear DeBessonet’s new production is to begin performances. And Uranowitz, returning to the show for the first time since his Toronto run, will play the Jewish immigrant father-protector Tateh, the role for which Friedman received a Tony nomination.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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      Saddling Up and Feeling Spry at Martha Graham

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      Under the banner “American Legacies,” the Martha Graham Dance Company dusted off a classic, “Rodeo,” premiered a companion piece and welcomed FKA twigs for a guest solo at City Center.The Martha Graham Dance Company won’t turn 100 until 2026, but evidently it’s not too early to start celebrating. The company is commemorating the milestone with not one, but three New York seasons, the first of which opened on Wednesday at New York City Center.“We couldn’t fit it into one year,” Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director, said in a curtain speech, adding, “We’re feeling pretty spry for our age.”Under the title “American Legacies,” the season includes a new production of Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” her 1942 ballet set on a ranch in the American Southwest; the New York premiere of “We the People,” choreographed by Jamar Roberts to music by Rhiannon Giddens; and Graham’s “The Rite of Spring” (1984), among other works.Some of this feels more dated or dutiful than spry, but one part of the gala program on Thursday really had the theater buzzing: a guest appearance by the British singer-songwriter FKA twigs. The company connected with her on Instagram last year after FKA twigs, who grew up training in a number of dance styles, including the Graham technique, shared one of its posts.In her interpretation of Graham’s brief comic solo “Satyric Festival Song” (1932), she held nothing back, imbuing its springy jumps, quizzical glances and whole-body shudders with both carefree self-assurance and reverent focus. She may not have the chiseled contractions of a lifelong Graham dancer, but she knows how to hold an audience’s attention. Introducing her, the longtime company dancer Lloyd Knight called FKA twigs “the newest member of the Martha Graham Dance Company family.”In her interpretation of Graham’s brief comic solo “Satyric Festival Song,” FKA twigs held nothing back.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Brooklyn Laundry,’ There’s No Ordering Off the Menu

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      John Patrick Shanley’s new play, starring Cecily Strong and David Zayas, is a romantic comedy with a penchant for the resolutely dismal.Fran and Owen have been chatting for only a few minutes, not all that companionably, when he asks her out. It’s a risky thing to do, since she’s a customer at the drop-off laundry he owns. To Owen, though, Fran resembles his ex-fiancée: “Smart, one inch from terrific, but gloomy,” he says.So bone-tired of being single that a casual insult from a guy she’s just met isn’t a deal breaker, Fran warily agrees to dinner.“But I don’t get why you want to, really,” she adds. “I’m not your old gloomy girlfriend. I’m somebody else.”Owen counters: “Well, whoever you think I am, I’m somebody else, too.”This is truer than he comprehends. Starring Cecily Strong as Fran and David Zayas as Owen, John Patrick Shanley’s enticingly cast, rather lumpy new play, “Brooklyn Laundry,” can get you thinking about warning labels — those heads-ups that we all ought to come with, so people know what they’re in for when they encounter us.Fran’s warning label would be long and convoluted, Owen’s even more so. Each of them would be surprised if they read their own. They realize that they’re a little bit broken, in need of repair. They just don’t understand quite how.Side note to Fran: While Owen seems potentially quite sweet (gruff adorability is Zayas’s bailiwick), he is way more hidebound and a whole lot more self-pitying than he lets on. Run, maybe?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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      ‘Once Upon a Mattress’ Review: Sutton Foster as a Perfectly Goofy Princess

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      The Encores! series returns with a concert staging of the 1959 musical, which also stars the very funny Harriet Harris and Michael Urie.Some casting choices are blindingly obvious. That does not make them lazy; it makes them right.Such is the case with Sutton Foster as the eccentric Princess Winnifred in the Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” which opened Wednesday at City Center. The central role in this broadly goofy musical was exuberantly, indelibly originated by Carol Burnett in 1959.While Foster has displayed range over the course of her musical-theater career — she’s stepping into Mrs. Lovett’s kitchen in “Sweeney Todd” on Feb. 9, five days after completing this show’s two-week run — many of Foster’s best roles, like Janet Van De Graaff in “The Drowsy Chaperone” and Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes,” are imprinted with an ebullient, joyful relish in the very act of performance. And Winnifred, described by another character as “a strangely energetic swamp girl,” is an ideal outlet for that sensibility.“Once Upon a Mattress” is nobody’s idea of a great musical, but it is many people’s idea of a fun one. Based on the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” this vaudevillian lark — which The New York Times described, possibly not in a good way, as “a child’s introduction to Broadway” in a review of a 1964 CBS telecast — is celebrated for helping to kick-start Burnett’s career and for being the composer Mary Rodgers’s sole Broadway hit.That last clearly represents a loss: Rodgers, paired with the lyricist Marshall Barer, demonstrates startling ease with musical-theater idioms and the late-1950s vernacular. (Winnifred’s “The Swamps of Home” works as both an earnest ballad and a sly spoof of the goopy nostalgic yearnings of some numbers by Richard Rodgers, Mary’s father, and Oscar Hammerstein II.)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?  More