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    Joel Grey: ‘Cabaret’ Was a Warning. It’s Time to Heed It.

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    This past week marked 58 years since the opening night for the Broadway premiere of “Cabaret” in 1966. At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote “Cabaret” in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era. The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.I played the Emcee — the Kit Kat Club’s master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that “Cabaret” held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle. “If You Could See Her,” which has the Emcee singing of his love for a gorilla — a thinly veiled commentary on antisemitic attitudes — ended with the lyric: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”When we first performed it, in Boston, audiences gasped and recoiled. It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. Producers fretted and the line was changed to “She isn’t a meeskite at all,” softening the blow, yes, but also the impact. I resented the change and would often, to the chagrin of stage management, “forget” to make the swap throughout that pre-Broadway run.I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of “Cabaret” that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort. On more than one occasion in the past two weeks — since the election — a small number of audience members have squealed with laughter at “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” In the late 1960s, we softened the line because the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.My initial assessment, when word first reached me about this unusual reaction, was that these must be the triumphant laughs of the complicit, suddenly drunk on power and unafraid to let their bigotry be known. Now I find myself considering other hypotheses. Are these the hollow, uneasy laughs of an audience that has retreated into the comfort of irony and detachment? Are these vocalized signals of acceptance? Audible white flags of surrender to the state of things? A collective shrug of indifference?I honestly don’t know which of these versions I find most ominous, but all of them should serve as a glaring reminder of how dangerously easy it is to accept bigotry when we are emotionally exhausted and politically overwhelmed.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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      ‘Glicked’ Fans Rejoice in Bloodshed and Broadway Songs

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      Swords clashing and blood curdling screams of gladiators emanate from one room. Across the hallway, witches belt out show tunes.That’s the sound of “Glicked.”Last year, moviegoers swarmed to see “Barbenheimer” — the combined name for “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — when the films opened on the same day. Now, there is a push from the casts and fans of “Gladiator II” and “Wicked” — which both opened across the country on Friday — to recreate that energy for another double feature with a blended name.Isabelle Deveaux and Emma Rabuano skipped out of theater six at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn at 2:38 p.m. on Friday, after watching “Gladiator II.”At 6:15 p.m., the pair, both 25, planned to return to the Alamo Drafthouse to see “Wicked.” The crossover, Ms. Deveaux said, “felt so specifically catered to our interests.”Diego Gasca of Los Angeles went with friends to the opening day of “Wicked” at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in Manhattan, but he said that he was not interested in seeing “Gladiator II.”Colin Clark for The New York TimesOn the surface, the two films, which have a combined running time of over five hours, appear vastly different. One is a family friendly musical prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” while the other is an R-rated epic sequel about murder, war and the Roman Empire. But Ms. Deveaux and Ms. Rabuano see some common ground in the films.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 Blood Quilt’ Review: An Elaborate Tapestry

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      Katori Hall’s new play about sisters gathering after their mother’s death features standout performances but an overabundance of themes.Quilting is about more than just fabric and stitches; it’s about blood, love, memory and trauma. That’s the premise at the center of Katori Hall’s “The Blood Quilt” at Lincoln Center, about four sisters gathering to complete a quilt three weeks after their mother’s death. The play itself a beautiful patchwork of themes and ideas that feel packed to the seams.It’s the first weekend of May, which means it’s time for the Jernigan sisters to convene at their family home at Kwemera, an island off the coast of Georgia where the Jernigan clan have lived for generations. But Kwemera isn’t what it used to be, and more change is imminent; there are plans for a bridge that will connect the mainland to the island, which means locals are being bought out by developers. Still, Clementine (Crystal Dickinson, with perfect gravitas), the eldest sister, remains staunchly a Kwemera woman, having lived her whole life there, where she nursed their mother in the last years of her illness.Clementine is the fierce guardian of family traditions, including the annual quilting ritual, so Gio (a riotous Adrienne C. Moore), the heavy drinking second oldest, has reported for duty, as has Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson, perfectly demure), who has brought her teenage daughter Zambia (Mirirai) for her first quilting circle. And there’s an unexpected guest — Amber (Lauren E. Banks), the youngest, who’s a successful entertainment lawyer in California and has been absent for the last few years.Quilting is a days long project, with each sister assigned her own separate duties. But the quilt isn’t the only reason for this reunion: there’s the matter of their inheritance, if any, and the financial loose ends remaining after their mother’s death. The money issues stir up the women, but it’s their contrary, complicated and self-contradictory ways of grieving, along with their long-held grudges against one another, that truly unleashes the storm of drama inside the home.The world of “The Blood Quilt,” which opened Thursday, is inviting: Hall’s characters are fully formed and clearly motivated, the family’s history is rich and Kwemera feels alive, in part thanks to the eclectic homespun set design by Adam Rigg. Quilts are draped everywhere in this tiny cabin, which is so close to the water that the front of the stage drops off into a grassy basin.Hall, who won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play “The Hot Wing King,” uses the same level of artistry and meticulousness in crafting a metaphor that the sisters do in crafting their quilts. Their roles and quilting preferences mirror their places within the family. Zambia, caught in the messy adolescent process of defining her identity, takes the role of stitching the centerpiece — an apt, if heavy-handed, representation of a younger generation taking the baton in a family tradition. And the quilts themselves embody memories and even a bit of magic. A Jernigan story about a family matriarch who gave a quilt square away to each of her children sold off to slavery isn’t just emotionally resonant; it proves that these quilts are literal scraps of history.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: In ‘Death Becomes Her,’ Spiking the Fountain of Youth

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      Hilarious star turns from Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard make the mostly unfunny 1992 film into an intermittently memorable Broadway musical.Not since Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne themselves performed there in 1958, leaving a trail of scrapes and bite marks in their wake, has Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater housed such equal-billing dragons as the ones Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard play in “Death Becomes Her.” The musical, which opened on Thursday, stars the two comic treasures as lifelong frenemies for whom the “lifelong” part is an understatement. Their animosity is eternal.That Hilty and Simard make it so jolly is a big relief and a big surprise. The 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie on which the show is based may be a queer camp classic, but its misogynistic ick factor is high. The leads — Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn — are shot leeringly yet unflatteringly, a queasy combo. The violence they do to each other is more vivid than the vanity at its root. What binds them, even in acrimony, goes largely unexplored. And, fatally, the film is not very funny.For its first 30 minutes, the musical is nothing but. When introduced, Hilty’s Madeline Ashford is a star of a certain age being hoisted by chorus boys in a creaky vehicle called “Me! Me! Me!” Its opening number, “For the Gaze,” establishes her epochal narcissism while also winking, in its title pun, to the material’s cult audience. The staging, by Christopher Gattelli, goes so breathtakingly over the top — costume changes, key changes, cameos by both Liza and Judy — that half the lyrics get lost in the laughs.Though best known for her vocal chops — fully exploited here in glossy songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey — Hilty is an inventive and beguiling comedian, putting a warm spin on even the meanest zingers. Indeed, one of the improvements in Marco Pennette’s book for the musical is that those zingers seem like love pinches, painful but titillating. They are often self-directed, too, and thus a kind of self-pleasure. When Simard’s Helen Sharp tells Madeline she’s stunning, the diva responds, with evident delight, “Well, thanks to my hair, makeup and neck team.” She also credits “that tapeworm diet.”Simard is simply brilliant. I say “simply” advisedly; it takes a lot of craft and homework to stand next to Hilty and not be outdone. Happily, her Helen is an astonishing creation of disappointment and disparagement: Dorothy Parker boiled down to a syrup, spitting takedowns like sour candies. “Love her like a twin,” she says of Madeline, in a voice of squeaky chalk. “Who stole my nutrients in the womb.”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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      Elf on Broadway Review: Grey Henson Is on the Nice List

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      The musical, starring Grey Henson, has gotten Buddy delightfully, entirely right. But he is trapped inside a creaky adaptation.Santa Clauses are pretty interchangeable. The real Santa’s close friend Buddy the elf would disagree, but it’s true: Put on the red costume, hide behind the glossy beard, manage a few ho, ho, hos and anyone will do.Buddy, though? That’s a much tougher role to cast — and not only because Will Ferrell made him such an indelibly adorable doofus in the 2003 movie “Elf.” In “Elf the Musical,” Buddy is the one character in whom we must absolutely believe: a full-grown man in a green elf suit with curl-toed boots, naïve and wonder-struck in the big city.Get it wrong and it’s a recipe for cringe. Get it right and you’ve cracked the code of all-ages comedy, the kind that will leave children and grown-ups equally helpless with laughter.In its latest Broadway outing, starring an exuberant Grey Henson in the title role, “Elf the Musical” has gotten Buddy delightfully, entirely right. From his first spoken line — the word Santa, cried joyously with what sounds like at least five exclamation points — he is enchanting in his silliness.He cartwheels across the stage because why wouldn’t he? A trusting, uninhibited goofball, he lives in his body the way children do, nearly bursting with eagerness. But Buddy is 30; he can show you how many that is on his fingers, flashing what look like boneless jazz hands.Directed by Philip Wm. McKinley, “Elf” is loaded with playful, energetic dance numbers.Sara Krulwich/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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      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Quiz: Test Your Knowledge of Plays and Movies

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      While “Hamlet” is the Shakespeare play with the most Broadway productions, “Romeo and Juliet,” whose 36th revival is currently on Broadway, has had a more pervasive influence over popular culture. Its enduring, ever-adaptable theme of lovers from warring families pops up repeatedly in films, songs, cartoons and skit shows. See if you spot the references. More

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      ‘King Lear’ Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Latest Finds the Wrong Tone

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      Kenneth Branagh’s production of the Shakespeare classic speeds through the material and can’t quite figure out its tone.Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear,” which opened Thursday night at the Shed, is a tragedy that doesn’t seem to know why it’s so tragic. The production’s fleet and feathery interpretation of how one man’s decline rains down misfortune on everyone around him undercuts the gravity of the classic, demoting it into a mere trifle.The play, as many may recall from high school English classes, opens with Lear (Branagh) offering to split his kingdom among his three daughters according to who will flatter him the most. While his two older daughters, Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber), comply, his favorite, Cordelia (Jessica Revell), refuses. Lear casts her off with nothing to her name. But the king, accompanied by his jester (also Revell) and a loyal disciple in disguise (Eleanor de Rohan), is eventually driven to madness as he receives what he sees as disloyal treatment at the hands of his sycophantic daughters. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan scheme against each other for power and for the hand of Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader), a wily creep willing to betray his own family for his advancement. Perhaps needless to say, most of these characters are dead by the final scene.Each new production of “Lear” offers its own take on whether the play’s tragedy branches from the titular royal’s psychosis, dementia or a broken ego. In Branagh’s production — he is a co-director with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skillbeck — the king doesn’t come across as feeble in any way. In fact, he’s fit as a fiddle. This Lear hops, crawls and gambols across the stage, even running off into the audience stands at the Griffin theater, meant to stand in for England in the New Stone Age. And despite Branagh’s cartoonish wails and babbles, this production never seems to believe Lear is ever truly ensnared by madness; there’s still a mild sense of cogency to Branagh’s performance throughout that colors him more as a wacky dad with hurt feelings than as a weakened ruler.The show’s breakneck pacing, too, makes it sometimes read more like a light comedy. All considerable five acts are indelicately stuffed into a speedy two hours, without intermission. Though I don’t begrudge a shorter “Lear” — the lengthy play does often meander its way to its protagonist’s demise — this production bolts mercilessly through the dialogue with a cadence that doesn’t allow much space for nuanced emoting, silences or scene transitions to let the story’s depths sink in.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 Wonderful World’ Review: Blowing Louis Armstrong’s Horn Isn’t Enough

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      The great jazz trumpeter and sandpaper vocalist gets the old jukebox treatment in a new Broadway musical starring James Monroe Iglehart.Who, having lived through 20th-century pop culture, could fail to recognize that voice like a truck without a muffler? That piercing trumpet and embracing spirit?Who could fail to recognize Louis Armstrong?Yet he is something of a blur in “A Wonderful World,” the Armstrong jukebox musical that opened Monday at Studio 54. Not for lack of a precise embodiment. In the leading role, James Monroe Iglehart has every Satchmo detail perfectly tuned: the rumble, the chortle, the hankie, the beam, the satchel-like cheeks that inspired the nickname. If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of.But with such a major figure we want something deeper. And though subtitled “The Louis Armstrong Musical,” the show, with a book by Aurin Squire, spends too little time exploring its subject’s interior life while plumping for his greatness as if the point were in doubt. The score, drawn from songs he performed but (with two exceptions) did not write, makes the case irrefutably already, encompassing the astonishing range of a man who grew up with the blues, changed the course of jazz, excelled at swing, perfected scat and won a Grammy for “Hello, Dolly!”To balance such a rich and varied artistic life, let alone a chaotic personal one, Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here. Offering little you would not learn from a good obituary, or from a visit to the terrific museum at his home in Queens, “A Wonderful World” compresses 60 years, from youth to death and even beyond, into four discrete chapters defined cleverly but overneatly by decade, locale and wife.The 1910s segment, set in Armstrong’s native New Orleans, introduces wife No. 1, Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a prostitute with a “Kiss of Fire.” After leaving her to join the jazz scene of Chicago in the 1920s, he falls for the pianist and arranger Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who polishes his musicianship along with his wardrobe. Nevertheless, he leaves her too; she and Daisy bring down the first act with a furious medley of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.”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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      Tony Todd, Prolific Actor Best Known for ‘Candyman,’ Dies at 69

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      Mr. Todd’s decades-long career spanned across mediums and genres, but he was largely associated with a scary figure summoned in front of a mirror.Tony Todd, a prolific actor whose more than 100 film and television credits included “Candyman” and “Final Destination,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 69.Jeffrey Goldberg, Mr. Todd’s manager, announced the death in a statement on Saturday morning. He did not specify the cause.Mr. Todd’s decades-long acting career spanned genres and mediums. He starred or had prominent roles in several films, including the 1990 remake of “Night of the Living Dead,” “The Crow,” “The Rock” and Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War movie, “Platoon.” His television credits include “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “24,” “The X-Files,” and many other shows. He also lent his rich voice to animation and video games.He was perhaps best known for his role as the titular demon in the 1992 movie “Candyman.” He told The New York Times in 2020 that he was proud of playing the terrifying figure with a hook for a hand, a Black man who had been wronged in life and is summoned from the beyond by people who call his name five times while looking in a mirror — unleashing vicious attacks in which the Candyman slices to death those who dared to disturb him. “If I had never done another horror film,” he said, “I could live with that, and I’d carry this character.”Mr. Todd reprised the role in the film’s 1995 and 1999 sequels and returned to it for the 2021 reboot, directed by Nia DaCosta and written by Jordan Peele.In the “Final Destination” franchise, Mr. Todd played the role of the mysterious funeral-home owner William Bludworth — the rare recurring character in a film series that famously killed off all of its new characters by the time the end credits rolled.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