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    Broadway Dreams Were Dashed, Then Rob Madge Knocked on Some Doors

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    The British performer is bringing “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” to City Center this week, after an earlier run was canceled.“Everybody needs a good setback in their life and gosh, 2024 did that for me.”That was Rob Madge, speaking on video last month from their London home. A theater maker who identifies as nonbinary, Madge smiled wide into the camera and, wearing a crisp white guayabera-style shirt that was mostly buttoned, looked as if they were on their way to a “White Lotus” resort happy hour.But Madge wasn’t talking about cocktails and island intrigue. They were recalling dashed Broadway dreams.In February 2024, the Broadway run of Madge’s autobiographical show “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” was postponed just weeks before it was to begin preview performances at the Lyceum Theater. There was talk of opening on Broadway the following season, but that never materialized.In a statement last month, the show’s producers, Tom Smedes and Heather Shields, said “the heartbreaking decision” to call off a Broadway run was because “the risks of launching and sustaining the production were simply too great” for the show’s “long-term health.”The actor in the production, which incorporates projected scenes from the “living room shows” that Madge performed as a kid.Mark SeniorMadge, 28, said having Broadway fall through prompted them to consider difficult and dueling questions, the likes of which plague any theater artist putting work into the world.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 Awards Unforgettable Looks: Cole Escola, Nicole Scherzinger, and More

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      On Sunday night, some of the biggest names in theater gathered at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan to celebrate the Tony Awards.From Hollywood royalty like George Clooney to Broadway legends like Audra McDonald — neither of whom won in their categories — there was no shortage of stars at this year’s awards.There was also no shortage of fashion. On the red carpet, there were sartorial references to past Tony winners and nods to current roles, all conveyed through cloth, beadwork and color.And, of course, it wouldn’t be live theater without at least a few costume changes.The event’s host, Cynthia Erivo, slipped in and out of at least a half-dozen outfits before the curtain closed as she belted out a parody version of a “Dreamgirls” song in a purple sequined number. That was another homage, lest you forget, as Ms. Erivo won a Tony in 2016 for her star turn in “The Color Purple.” Showbiz — it isn’t always subtle!Of all the stars who graced the seats of Radio City on Sunday, here are a dozen whose attire stood out among the ensemble cast.Cole Escola: Most ’90s Nostalgia!Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressWe 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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      Nicole Scherzinger and Other Tony Winners Party After the Awards

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      On Sunday night, after all the Tonys had been handed out, the comedian Alex Edelman took the stage during the official after-party at the Museum of Modern Art.“One day more,” he sang, waving his arms, trying to recruit others to join him behind the microphone in a rousing one-man rendition of a song from the musical “Les Misérables.”“Another day, another destiny … ”Mr. Edelman, who received a special Tony Award last year for his one-man show “Just for Us,” slowly gathered his army of fellow performers: Betsy Wolfe, Jessica Vosk and Casey Likes. Soon, more than half a dozen stars were belting not just their own parts, but every part.A cabaret moment is a familiar scene for any theater party, even on a night celebrating an unusual Broadway season. It has been a banner year on the district’s 41 stages, thanks in large part to a flurry of shows with screen stars on the marquee: “Good Night, and Good Luck” (George Clooney), “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Sarah Snook, who won a Tony Award for playing 26 different characters), “Othello” (Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal) and “Glengarry Glen Ross” (Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Kieran Culkin), among others.Many actors were making their Broadway debut.“I’m so lucky to get to do it,” Sadie Sink, best known for her role as the tomboy Max in Netflix’s science fiction drama series “Stranger Things,” said at the MoMA party, celebrating her first 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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      Cole Escola Wins the Tony for Best Actor in a Play

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      In “Oh, Mary!,” Escola plays a drunken, melodramatic Mary Todd Lincoln who yearns to return to cabaret.Cole Escola won the Tony for best actor in a play for their performance in the outlandish, ahistoric comedy “Oh, Mary!” This is Escola’s Broadway debut, and first Tony.Escola, who is nonbinary, plays a self-indulgent, scheming Mary Todd Lincoln, who aspires to become a chanteuse. As a result, her boredom — which includes pining to perform her “madcap medleys” of yesteryear — drives her to all kinds of antics. (With Cole prancing around in a hoop skirt, hilarity ensues.)The New York Times chief theater critic, Jesse Green, called “Oh, Mary!,” which Escola also wrote, “one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years.”Directed by Sam Pinkleton, the show opened at the Lyceum Theater last summer after a sold-out and twice-extended Off Broadway run. The play has also been extended multiple times since it transferred to Broadway. (It was the first show in the Lyceum’s 121-year history to gross more than $1 million in a single week.)Escola, known for their roles in Hulu’s “Difficult People,” TBS’s “Search Party” and sketches on YouTube, came up through New York’s cabaret and alt comedy scenes. The premise for “Oh, Mary!” began with an idea, which Escola sat on for more than 12 years: “What if Abraham Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd?”The Tony Awards, like the Oscars, use gendered categories for performers, and Escola agreed to be considered eligible for an award as an actor. Escola isn’t the first nonbinary actor to win a Tony Award.In 2023, J. Harrison Ghee became the first out nonbinary performer to win a Tony for best leading actor in a musical, for “Some Like It Hot,” and Alex Newell became the first out nonbinary performer to win for best featured actor in a musical for “Shucked.” More

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      Nicole Scherzinger Wins the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical

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      In “Sunset Boulevard,” Scherzinger plays Norma Desmond, a former screen star who descends into madness.Nicole Scherzinger won the Tony Award for best actress in a musical for her performance in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” a high-tech, minimal-scenery staging from Jamie Lloyd about a washed-up silent film star, Norma Desmond, who haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion. This is Scherzinger’s first nomination and win.This latest run of “Sunset Boulevard” — based on the 1950 film by Billy Wilder — is dramatically scaled back compared to previous revivals of the Andrew Lloyd Webber show. Instead, the show relies on technology to modernize it for a new audience. It is the type of show that demands vocal and choreographic athleticism, something that Scherzinger — the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls — takes on with confidence.It first opened in London in 2023, winning Scherzinger praise and an Olivier. It then moved to Broadway last fall, and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, wrote that Scherzinger delivered an “exciting yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance.”Speaking to The Times in 2023, Scherzinger described her turn as Norma as “grueling.”“But for many years I have been saying I am using a fraction of my potential, and now I feel I have really tapped into that,” she said.Before joining the show and after the Pussycat Dolls disbanded in 2010, Scherzinger pursued a solo career with modest success — dropping two solo albums and working as a judge on “The X Factor” and “The Masked Singer.”She later performed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (from Lloyd Webber’s “Evita”) as part of a TV special celebrating Lloyd Webber, who, along with the director Trevor Nunn, asked her to join the cast of the 2014 revival of “Cats” in the West End. More

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      Lin-Manuel Miranda and Original ‘Hamilton’ Cast Reunited for a Tonys Medley

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      Marking the 10th anniversary of the show’s opening, the creator and cast reunited to perform “My Shot,” “The Schuyler Sisters” and other notable songs.The cast of “Hamilton” on Sunday returned to the room where it happened, at least metaphorically.To mark the 10th anniversary of the show’s opening, 28 members of the original cast — the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with the other stars, ensemble members, swings and standbys — gathered onstage at Radio City Music Hall and performed a medley of some of the musical’s biggest songs: “Non-Stop,” “My Shot,” “The Schuyler Sisters,” “Guns and Ships,” “You’ll Be Back,” “Yorktown,” “The Room Where It Happens” and “History Has Its Eyes on You.”They dressed not in the show’s period costumes, but in an array of high-fashion evening wear — all black with a few character-driven accents (Lafayette got a Frenchman’s beret; Burr a dueler’s cape; and King George the one splash of color: royal red).They didn’t say a word, but Cynthia Erivo, this year’s Tony Awards host and in 2016 the only musical performer to win a Tony for any show other than “Hamilton,” hailed the production.“Hamilton reinvigorated the American theater and changed not just Broadway, but how Americans views their own history,” Erivo said, before adding wryly, “or so I’m told.”“Hamilton” opened on Broadway on Aug. 6, 2015. The following spring, it was nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards, and then, in a Tonys ceremony at the Beacon Theater, it won 11 prizes, including best musical. (The event was memorable for many reasons — among them, it took place hours after the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, which led the “Hamilton” cast to drop the use of muskets in its production number, and prompted Miranda to give his “love is love” acceptance speech.)The show quickly became the biggest phenomenon Broadway had seen in quite some time, and in the decade since, it has only gotten bigger, spinning off touring companies, streaming a live-capture film on Disney+, grossing about $3 billion in North America, and still going strong.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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      13 Off Broadway Shows to See in June

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      Reed Birney and Lisa Emery in a two-hander, Taylor Mac in a Molière riff and Jay Ellis in a romantic drama — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.In the crowded June theater calendar, Pride fare figures prominently, but there’s a lot more out there, too. Here are some of the notable productions this month across New York City.‘Not Not Jane’s’Mara Nelson-Greenberg, whose absurdist workplace comedy “Do You Feel Anger?” was an Off Broadway wow several seasons back, fills the middle spot in this year’s Clubbed Thumb Summerworks festival with this new play in which a young woman gets funding to start a community center, but with an asterisk: It’s at her mom’s house. The reliably fascinating Susannah Perkins is part of the cast in Joan Sergay’s production. (Through June 13, Wild Project)‘Blood, Sweat, and Queers’The early life of the Czech athlete Zdenek Koubek, a women’s track and field star of the 1930s who transitioned later that same decade, is the subject of this contemporary Czech play by Tomas Dianiska, translated by Edward Einhorn and Katarina Vizina, and starring Hennessy Winkler as Zdenek. Part of the Rehearsal for Truth International Theater Festival, it is directed by Einhorn, the festival’s artistic director. (Through June 15, Bohemian National Hall)‘Lunar Eclipse’Reed Birney plays George to Lisa Emery’s Em in this Thornton Wilder-inflected new play by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”), about a long-married couple moon-gazing in a field on their Kentucky farm. Keeping each other company through the summer night, they talk over fear and regret, mortality and memory, love and encroaching decline. Kate Whoriskey directs for Second Stage. (Through June 22, Pershing Square Signature Center)‘Prosperous Fools’Arching an eyebrow at philanthropy and its insincerities, Taylor Mac’s latter-day riff on Molière’s comedy-ballet “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” is set at a gala for a nonprofit dance company. With Mac leading a cast that also includes Sierra Boggess and Jason O’Connell, the Tony Award winner Darko Tresnjak (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) directs the world premiere for Theater for a New Audience — the final production in the 46-year tenure of Jeffrey Horowitz, its founding artistic director. (Through June 29, Polonsky Shakespeare Center)‘The Wash’From left, Bianca Laverne Jones, Margaret Odette, Kerry Warren and Alicia Pilgrim in “The Wash” at WP Theater.Hollis KingWe 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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      How the ‘Purpose’ Writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Cast Juggled Revisions

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      Ahead of the Tony Awards, the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the acclaimed ensemble reflected on the challenges of balancing the many script revisions.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Tony-nominated play “Purpose,” set in the Chicago home of a family of Black upper-class civil rights leaders, seems, at first, to be inspired by the political drama involving the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s clan. But those assumptions are upended by the play’s highly original take on the themes of sacrifice, succession, asexuality and spirituality.The family saga, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, showcases even more of the vivid language, spitfire dialogue and sweeping sense of American history that garnered Jacobs-Jenkins a Tony Award last year for “Appropriate.” And like that production, this play’s ensemble has been nominated for multiple acting awards — five in all.Originally staged in 2023 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, and directed by Phylicia Rashad, “Purpose” was revised, refined and expanded throughout its Broadway preview period. Jacobs-Jenkins readily admits that this process is not unusual for him, much less the writers he has studied intently, like August Wilson or Tennessee Williams. On a recent afternoon, however, a conversation about his collaboration with the cast turned lively with Jacobs-Jenkins calling it “family therapy.”We were sitting on the Helen Hayes Theater stage — at the dining-room table where the play’s most memorable fight plays out — with the show’s six cast members, Harry Lennix, who plays the patriarch and preacher Solomon Jasper; LaTanya Richardson Jackson, as the pragmatic and perspicacious matriarch Claudine Jasper; Jon Michael Hill, as the narrator and the monastic younger son, Nazareth; Glenn Davis, as the beguiling older son, Junior; Alana Arenas, as his windstorm of a wife, Morgan; and Kara Young, who plays Nazareth’s naïve friend Aziza. (Arenas, Davis and Hill are all the Steppenwolf members around whom Jacobs-Jenkins originally conceived of the play.)Purpose Broadway“This is so naked,” Jacobs-Jenkins said, “because I never had this conversation in front of you all before. I have all this in my individual journal.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      ‘Eurydice’ Review: Maya Hawke in the Underworld

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      The actress stars in Sarah Ruhl’s reimagining of this classic myth, with a focus on a daughter’s reunion with her beloved father after death.The young couple on the beach are coltishly enamored — snuggled up close, their long limbs entangled. When he ties a string around her left ring finger, to remind her of his love, she squeak-squeals with pleasure and agrees to marry him.She is Eurydice and he is Orpheus, legendary musician nonpareil, and the handed-down myth about them says their union will be short. She will die abruptly, he will be bereft, and it will not go well when he descends into the underworld and tries to lead her back to the land of the living.Their relationship does figure in “Eurydice,” Sarah Ruhl’s tear-dappled masterwork, yet the play’s primary grief is Eurydice’s own — for her dead father, a gaping, missing presence on the day she and Orpheus wed. In this poetic, heightened comedy of mourning and oblivion, the surest, most steadying love is between parent and grown child.Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival, which opened on Monday night at Signature Theater, stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too. Caleb Eberhardt plays Orpheus, gentle and determined, pouring his misery into music and writing to his dead wife.“I’ll give this letter to a worm,” he tells her, signing off. “I hope he finds you.”Waters’s breathtaking 2006 staging of “Eurydice” was my introduction to Ruhl’s slender play, which she and the composer Matthew Aucoin have more recently adapted into an opera. This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.Crucially, he has brought along two members of the crack creative team from that production: Scott Bradley, whose glamorous, slant-walled set is all watery blues and greens, part painted tiles, part forlorn grid of handwritten letters; and Bray Poor, whose often delicately musical sound design evokes the near-omnipresence of water in this very liquid play.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