Theater (Broadway)

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares14 Views

    Review: In a Musical Comedy Makeover, ‘Smash’ Lives Up to Its Name

    by

    En route to Broadway, the TV series about backstage shenanigans and Marilyn Monroe has been rejiggered, with the same great songs but a whole new plot.Great musical comedies are great mysteries, and not just because they’re so rare. They’re also mysteries in the way they operate. To succeed, they must keep far ahead of the audience, like thrillers with twists you can’t see coming. They are whodunits with songs instead of murders.“Smash,” which opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, is more of a who’ll-do-it, and when the big song comes, it’s a killer. But the effect is the same: It’s the great musical comedy no one saw coming.Or at least I didn’t. In 2012, I enjoyed the first season of the NBC television series, also called “Smash,” on which the musical is based. Its pilot, setting up a competition between two aspiring modern-day actresses to play Marilyn Monroe in a Broadway-bound musical, was terrific fun. But as the weeks wore on, the story becoming soapier and gloppier, the fizz fizzled out. Only the songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and the dances, by Joshua Bergasse, sparked highs.So I wasn’t sure what to make of the announcement that the material was being retooled for Broadway as a comedy instead of a melodrama. A video of “Let Me Be Your Star,” the thrillingly emotional duet that was the high point of the pilot, left me baffled. Rearranged as a solo at the start of the new show, it sounded all wrong: too cool, too light, with a Las Vegas leer. Was the creative team, led by the director Susan Stroman, planning to fix the property by trashing the few things the series got right?That turned out to be a brilliant feint.The Broadway “Smash” being the kind of mystery I mentioned, I’ll try to be careful about spoilers. But there’s so much to enjoy at the Imperial that I could give away 10, and there would still be 20. In any case, I spoil nothing to say that “Smash” remains the story of a Monroe musical called “Bombshell.” But in this version the actresses are not midlevel hopefuls; rather Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder) is already a star, and Karen Cartwright (Caroline Bowman) her longtime understudy. They are not in competition — at first.That changes dramatically when Ivy reads a book about Method acting. No longer content to play a “bubbly, sparkly” Monroe, she insists on giving her character more depth. Even though this is exactly what the creative team has been trying to avoid — a show that wallows in tawdry tragedy — she hires a coach from the Actors Studio, keepers of the Method flame. When this strange, forbidding coach arrives, pushing absurd ideas and amphetamines, “Bombshell” begins to crater.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

    More stories

    • 138 Shares40 Views

      in Elections

      Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Old Friends’ Review: A Broadway Party With 41 Songs

      by

      Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga lead the festivities in a new Broadway revue of the great musical dramatist’s work.Fast approaching the number of musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote is the number of revues written about him. The first, to my knowledge, was a 1973 fund-raiser held on the set of the original production of “A Little Night Music.” It featured so many stars, speeches and songs that even truncated, even then, its recording filled two LPs.I snapped that album up and wore it out. The cover alone was fascinating, with the titles of nine of his shows spelled out in intersecting Scrabble tiles. (Something like nine more shows were to come before his death in 2021 — and one after.) Threaded through those tiles like a secret theme was Sondheim’s name itself.I was younger then, a teenager, but that secret theme became part of my life’s music.How then to hear a new Sondheim revue with fresh ears and fresh heart? As the latest, “Old Friends,” says right in its name, we are already well acquainted.Whether onstage, online, in cabarets or, like “Old Friends,” on Broadway, all such compendiums play their own game of Sondheim Scrabble. Though there are many hundreds of songs in the catalog, compilers must pick from the same limited subset of favorites, arranging them in various concatenations and outcroppings. Occasionally a 10-point rarity turns up, but most of the choices are deeply familiar to those who have followed the man’s work.Peters and Jacob Dickey in the “Hello, Little Girl” number from “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Old Friends,” which opened on Tuesday at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is in that sense a lot like its predecessors. The 41 numbers it features come from the main pool, with an emphasis on songs from “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Company,” “Follies” and “Into the Woods.” Most of them were brilliant in their original context; many remain so outside it. Some are sung spectacularly by a bigger-than-usual cast of 17, led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga. Others are middling, a few are misfires.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

    • 150 Shares36 Views

      in Elections

      At James Earl Jones Memorial, Denzel Washington and Whoopi Goldberg Share Stories

      by

      At a gathering in the Broadway theater renamed to honor the star, speakers including Denzel Washington and Phylicia Rashad described Jones as an inspiration.Denzel Washington called him his “northern star.” Whoopi Goldberg said “getting to see him onstage was heaven.” Some of the most notable names in show business gathered in Times Square on Monday afternoon for a starry, and sometimes emotional, send-off for James Earl Jones, who died last year at the age of 93. He was remembered for his thunderous voice and his enviable acting chops, as well as for being a gentle guiding presence in the lives of young actors.For more than 90 minutes, at the Broadway theater that now bears his name on West 48th Street in Manhattan, a packed house laughed, cried and shared numerous personal stories that not only painted a bright picture of Jones, but cast him as an important figure who inspired fellow actors to reach their personal bests.“He was powerful, he was present, he was purposeful, he was humble,” Denzel Washington said of Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a short speech, Denzel Washington described Jones as having personified grace, power and dignity. Washington, who is currently starring in a Broadway revival of “Othello,” a role that Jones had made his own on Broadway more than six decades ago, said he hoped to be as good a stage actor as Jones. “He was powerful, he was present, he was purposeful, he was humble,” Washington said. “He is not only the greatest African American actor; in my opinion he is one of the greatest actors ever to be on a Broadway stage.”The actress Linda Powell recalled starring with Jones in a Broadway revival of “On Golden Pond,” which opened 20 years ago this week. She said Jones had pushed for her to be cast in the role of his daughter. “It was one of the best jobs of my life, one of the best experiences of my life, and his faith in me was a gift,” she said.Phylicia Rashad recalled seeing Jones perform when she was a young adult, and later performing as Big Mama to his Big Daddy in the 2008 Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”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

    • 125 Shares54 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Boop! The Musical’ Review: Betty Gets a Broadway Brand Extension

      by

      The It girl with the spit curl looks great for 100, but her Broadway musical, which feels like one big merch grab, is boop-boop-a-don’t.Some shows are “what?” shows, leaving you baffled. Perhaps they involve roller-skating trains or shrouds of Turin.Others are “how?” shows, as in: Dear God, how did that happen?But the most disappointing subgenre of musical, at least in terms of opportunity cost, is the “why?” show: a well-crafted, charmingly performed, highly professional production that nobody asked for. Its intentions are foggy and sometimes suspicious.“Boop! The Musical” — now playing at the Broadhurst Theater, in a production directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell — is a “why?” show par excellence.And excellence it has. As Betty, the flapper of early talkie cartoons, Jasmine Amy Rogers is immensely likable. She sings fabulously, sports a credible perma-smile, nails all the Boop mannerisms and has a fetching way with a tossed-off line. I can’t imagine anyone making more of the exhausting opportunity, let alone in a Broadway debut.She is ably supported by other young talent in featured roles, luxury-cast veterans doing their damnedest and a hard-working ensemble selling Mitchell’s insistent, imaginative, precision-drilled dances. When his pinwheel kick-lines hop in unison, not one foot among 26 is left on the floor.Or make that 27, because Pudgy, Betty’s pug, a marionette with a lolling pink tongue operated by the puppeteer Phillip Huber, sometimes shakes a leg too.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

    • 188 Shares62 Views

      in Elections

      ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

      by

      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.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

    • 150 Shares80 Views

      in Elections

      Review: ‘Picture of Dorian Gray,’ Starring Sarah Snook and 3 Million Pixels

      by

      The “Succession” actress plays all 26 roles in this Oscar Wilde classic reimagined as a video spectacle. If only there were less screen time and more IRL contact.An LED screen more than 16 feet tall. Four smaller ones drifting like clouds. Another that has a kind of walk-on cameo. Five camera operators with their electronic burdens. Nine people dashing every which way with wardrobe, wigs and whatnot. Three million pixels, in case you’re counting. Sixteen million colors. Two cellphones, at least on a recent glitchy night when the first malfunctioned. And one Sarah Snook.Or rather a multitude of Snooks.These are among the many wonders you’ll find onstage at the Music Box Theater, where a technologically spectacular adaptation of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with Snook playing 26 roles, opened on Thursday.What you won’t find is “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”The 1890 magazine story by Oscar Wilde, which he novelized in 1891, has proved irresistible to adapters, thanks to its nifty plot device: a portrait that ages instead of the sitter. The more the gorgeous Dorian Gray falls under the decadent influence of Lord Henry Wotton, the uglier the painting by Basil Hallward becomes.To get to that plot, though, adapters have to adapt out a lot because what Wilde wrote is less the psychological thriller they imagine than a perfumed treatise on aesthetic philosophy. Another thing usually sacrificed is the homosexual undercurrent, which, even after expurgation by the story’s first editors, was deep enough to drown in. Convicted of “gross indecency” in 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with hard labor, and died, just 46, in 1900. “Dorian Gray” was part of the evidence.Like the 1945 M-G-M movie, the current adaptation, written and directed by Kip Williams, downplays the treatise aspects. The queerness, though, is frank if complicated, in part because Snook, an Emmy-winning star of “Succession,” is still a woman while playing a man. Or not even a man. Her cherubic, shiny-cheeked Dorian is less the godlike 20-year-old of the novel than a barely pubescent boy.Snook provides specificity for each character: Her Wotton has a wonderful slouchy physicality, her Hallward nervous and twitchy, her Dorian (top of image) beamish.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

    • 63 Shares136 Views

      in Elections

      The Price of a Show

      by

      Tickets for the hottest Broadway plays are now out of reach for many. There’s a starry production of “Othello” opening on Broadway tonight. And if you’re among the many people who really, really want to see Denzel Washington as a jealous general, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a scheming Iago, it’s going to cost you: Most of the center orchestra seats, as well as a few rows in the mezzanine, are being sold for $921 apiece.The high prices for this Shakespeare classic are setting records. During its second week of previews, “Othello” grossed more at the box office than any other nonmusical play had ever grossed on Broadway.Tickets for the hottest Broadway shows are now out of reach for many. And the same is true for other sought-after live events, such as pop concerts (which now cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per ticket) and big sports games. (A few weeks before the Super Bowl, the cheapest available tickets were reselling for more than the average monthly mortgage payment.)In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how Broadway seats became so eye-poppingly pricey.Trying to break evenProducing Broadway shows has become more expensive since the pandemic, and a vast majority of them lose money. So producers have been staging more short runs of plays with stars in lead roles — the stars attract ticket buyers, and the short runs allow those stars to more quickly return to filmmaking, which pays better than Broadway. Limited runs also seem to incentivize potential ticket buyers, because people find the now-or-never aspect motivating.There is, of course, a tension between profitability and accessibility. These prices are preventing some potential theatergoers from seeing high-profile productions of important work.Investors who spend money to bring shows to Broadway embrace high ticket prices because they want at least a shot at recouping their expenses. But many theater lovers, as they reminded me in a rollicking comments thread on the story I wrote about this subject last week, find these prices upsetting, because they want to see the shows they want to see at price points they consider reasonable.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

    • 113 Shares143 Views

      in Elections

      8 New Shows Our Theater Critics Are Talking About

      by

      A British satirical comedy, a Tennessee Williams classic, a soundscape of Havana: These are productions worth knowing about.Critic’s PickAndrew Scott, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott …‘Vanya’Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, this one-man “Vanya” — in which Andrew Scott delivers a tour-de-force performance — arrives Off Broadway after a run in London, where it won an Olivier for best play revival. Though faithful to the original material, the production offers not just modern touches, but also “a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty,” our critic wrote.From Jesse Green’s review:What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours.Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe lush sounds of Havana.“Buena Vista Social Club” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater features choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Buena Vista Social Club’The joyous horns and full-bodied voices that make up the beloved 1997 album come alive in this Broadway musical, with a book by Marco Ramirez, direction by Saheem Ali and choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Though the show offers a fictional back story for these veteran Cuban musicians who shot to global fame after recording the album, the thrill here is the music, exuberant and expansive, which fills in the beats of Cuba’s history, both in sorrow and in revelry.From Elisabeth Vincentelli’s review:The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. … The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people. Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. Read the full review.A ferocious Paul Mescal in a Tennessee Williams classic.Downhill with no brakes: Patsy Ferran as Blanche and Paul Mescal as Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Streetcar Named Desire’Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran dance with violence and desire as Stanley and Blanche in Rebecca Frecknall’s gritty revival of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In the absence of beauty, brutality pervades in Frecknall’s darker production, which features a utilitarian set and exhilarating performances that ratchet up the fury. From Jesse Green’s review:Mescal is best known and deservedly praised for excruciatingly sensitive portrayals of hurting hunks who can barely acknowledge their pain. (I can’t speak for “Gladiator II,” but he is superb in “Normal People,” “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers.”) It was therefore not immediately evident that he could do justice to a character, first played by Marlon Brando, that Arthur Miller described as a “sexual terrorist.” I am sorry to report that he can.Through April 6 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe vicious nature of the truth.Andrew Barth Feldman (on the floor) with Joanna Gleason in “We Had a World.”Jeremy Daniel 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

    • 100 Shares165 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: The Stiff Who Saved Europe

      by

      A proudly silly British musical comedy about the “Trojan corpse” of World War II comes to Broadway.In 1943, in wartime England, a homeless person dies in the street after ingesting rat poison. Given a fake postmortem identity by British counterintelligence officers — no effort to find his family is made — he is dressed in a military uniform, sealed in a cooler, then ejected from a submarine near the coast of Spain. The papers planted on his corpse eventually make their way to Hitler, convincing him that the Allies will begin their invasion of Europe in Sardinia, when in fact they plan to do so in Sicily. As a result, Axis troops are diverted to the wrong Italian island.In short, Operation Mincemeat, as this real World War II operation was called, works.But is it funny?Whether “Operation Mincemeat,” the diverting if irksome musical comedy about the plan, works as well will depend a lot on your answer to that question. A hit in London, it has come to Broadway, where it opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, having paid close attention to differences in accent, dialect and usage between British and American audiences. (Public school there is private school here.) But neither the authors, a collective called SpitLip, nor the director, Robert Hastie, appear to have given sufficient thought to our different senses of humor.Theirs you will recognize. It combines Oxbridge snootiness with panto ribaldry to create a self-canceling middlebrow snark. You may detect in the show’s DNA elements of Monty Python, Benny Hill, “The Play That Goes Wrong” and the Hitchcock stage spoof “The 39 Steps.” But if those influences have made you laugh, even as much as they have made me, you may still experience diminishing returns in the nonstop tickling of “Operation Mincemeat.” The Pythons kept their satire sharp and their sketches quick.Not so here. At more than two-and-a-half hours, the show is hardly svelte. Nor, with its aim so scattershot, is it clear what it is satirizing.At first it seems to want to mock the public school toffs and blustery brass who populate MI5, the agency that developed the plan. They are offered as idiots, freaks and over-entitled snobs. In the show’s first song, “Born to Lead,” Ewen Montagu (Natasha Hodgson) explains that “fortune favors bravery and a fortune’s what I’ve got.” His colleague Charles Cholmondeley (David Cumming) is a nervous Nellie and an amateur entomologist with bugged-out eyes behind big round glasses that make him look like a cartoon click beetle. The predominant trait of their colonel, Johnny Bevan (Zoë Roberts), is that he despises figurative language.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