Theater (Broadway)

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    Jeffrey Seller Produced ‘Hamilton.’ Now, in ‘Theater Kid,’ He’s Telling His Story.

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    In “Theater Kid,” Jeffrey Seller reflects on his Broadway career.The Broadway producer Jeffrey Seller is, by any measure, enormously successful. He’s produced (always in collaboration with others) about 10 shows that have, collectively, grossed $4.74 billion, approximately one-third of which was profit for producers, investors and others.You’ve probably heard of several of those shows. His first big hit was “Rent.” His most recent: “Hamilton.” In between were “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” but also plenty of others that didn’t flourish.For a long time, Seller, now 60 and the winner of four best-musical Tony Awards, had complicated feelings about how he fit in. He was adopted as an infant and grew up in a downwardly mobile and fractious family in a Detroit suburb.Seller accepting the Tony Award for “Hamilton,” which won best musical in 2016.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTheater was where he found pleasure, and meaning — a way out, and a way up. Now he’s written a memoir, “Theater Kid,” that is being published on May 6. It is a combination coming-of-age and rags-to-riches story that is unsparing in its description of his colorfully challenged-and-challenging father, unabashed in its description of his sexual awakening, and packed with behind-the-scenes detail, especially about the birth of “Rent.”In an interview at his office in the theater district, Seller spoke about his life, his career and his book. These are edited excerpts from the interview.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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      ‘Ragtime’ Is Returning to Broadway

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      A revival of the sweeping musical will open at Lincoln Center Theater in October, starring Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy and Brandon Uranowitz.“Ragtime,” an epic musical that explores early 20th-century American aspirations through three fictional families whose lives intersect with historical figures and events, is returning to Broadway.The musical, based on a 1975 E.L. Doctorow novel and set mostly in New Rochelle and other locations in and around New York, first opened on Broadway in 1998, won Tony Awards for best score and best book, and ran for two years. There was a short-lived revival in 2009.This new production will be staged at Lincoln Center Theater, which is one of four nonprofit organizations that operate Broadway houses. It will be the first production during the tenure of Lear deBessonet, who is taking over as the nonprofit’s new artistic director; deBessonet will direct the production.This revival, scheduled to begin previews Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 16 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, began its life with a 12-day run last fall in a New York City Center gala presentation, also directed by deBessonet. The new production is scheduled to run for just 14 weeks.The Broadway production, like the City Center production, will star Joshua Henry as Coalhouse Walker Jr., an African American pianist; Caissie Levy as Mother, the matriarch of an affluent white family; and Brandon Uranowitz as Tateh, a Jewish immigrant. The intersection of those individuals and their communities, with each other and with the history of the United States, drives a complex plot of intertwined narratives that touch on North Pole exploration, early filmmaking, the labor movement, Houdini’s escapades, and, of course, ragtime music.The musical is among the best-known and most acclaimed works from the longtime collaborators Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the lyrics, and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the music. The book is by Terrence McNally, an acclaimed playwright who died in 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.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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      ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Review: This American (Immigrant) Life

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      On Broadway, the musical adaptation is a bouncy crowd pleaser about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s dreams.A brief scene in the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is as harrowing as anything in the most serious drama on Broadway: a group of terrified workers in a small Los Angeles dress factory, hiding in the dark as they listen to an immigration raid taking place next door.When the raid is over, the first sounds to break the quiet are soft weeping and breath laden with fear.It’s a jolt of somber realism in a show that opts, ultimately, to lean in a feel-good direction. Yet such is the balancing act of “Real Women Have Curves,” which opened on Sunday night at the James Earl Jones Theater.Based on Josefina López’s play of the same name, and on the 2002 HBO film adaptation starring America Ferrera, it is a bouncy, crowd-pleasing comedy about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s ambitions. It is also a tale of immigrant life in this country, and the dread woven into the fabric of daily existence for undocumented people and those closest to them.At 18, newly graduated from high school, Ana García (Tatianna Córdoba) is the only American citizen in her family, and the only one with legal status. An aspiring journalist, and the daughter of immigrants who came to California from Mexico, she is spending the summer of 1987 doing an unpaid internship at a neighborhood newspaper.Then the dress factory owned by her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), receives a huge order that needs to be turned around fast. Their fireball of a mother, Carmen (Justina Machado), ropes Ana in to work there, 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

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      ‘Just in Time’ Review: Jonathan Groff Channels Bobby Darin

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      Groff is sensational as the ’60s “nightclub animal” in a Broadway bio-musical jukebox that doesn’t live up to its star.When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means it.The admission comes near the start of “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened on Saturday at Circle in the Square. It’s a warning to the 22 audience members seated at cabaret tables in the middle of the action that they may want to don raincoats as he sings and dances, sweating and spitting, a-splishin’ and a-splashin’.But Groff is wet in another sense too: He’s a rushing pipeline, a body and voice that seem to have evolved with the specific goal of transporting feelings from the inside to the outside. A rarity among male musical theater stars, he is thrilling not just sonically but also emotionally, all in one breath.And Darin, the self-described “nightclub animal” who bounced from bopper to crooner to quester to recluse, is a great fit for him. Not because they are alike in temperament, other than a compulsion to entertain and be embraced by an audience. Nor do they sound alike: Groff’s voice is lovelier than Darin’s, rounder and healthier. But the Broadway and Brill Building songs Darin sang, some of which he wrote, offer the scale, the snap and the bravura opportunities that are more often, now as then, a diva’s birthright, not a divo’s.In other words, Groff is sensational.“Just in Time,” directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, at first seems like it will be too. Certainly the opening is a wonderful jolt. Making the smart choice to introduce Groff as himself, not as Darin, the show immediately breaks out of the jukebox box, liberating its songs from service as literal illustrations. My dread that oldies involving the word “heart” would be shoehorned into the story line about Darin’s rheumatic fever was temporarily tamped.Michele Pawk, left, as the maternal Polly and Emily Bergl as the sisterly Nina, indulging and fretting over the young Darin, a sickly boy not expected to live past 16.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesInstead, “Just in Time” begins as a straight-ahead floor show in the Las Vegas style, with Groff, in a perfectly cut suit by Catherine Zuber, buzzing between song and patter while seducing the audience. The set designer Derek McLane has converted Circle’s awkward oval into a sumptuous supper club, with silver Austrian draperies covering the walls and clinking glasses of booze at the cabaret tables. A bandstand at one end of the playing space, and banquettes surrounding a mini-stage at the other, suggest a blank showbiz canvas, with flashy gold-and-indigo lighting by Justin Townsend to color it in. Darin, it seems, will be merely a pretext.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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      ‘Floyd Collins’ Review: Trapped in a Cave and in a Media Circus

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      One of the wonders of this glorious-sounding new Broadway production is how far from claustrophobic this Kentucky cave saga feels.Headlines at the time called Floyd Collins a “cave captive,” a “prisoner of nature’s dungeon” — dramatic language, but accurate, and the American public was obsessed. In a nail-biting news saga that lasted just over two weeks in the winter of 1925, Collins, a cave explorer, was pinned deep under the cold Kentucky soil. Inside a narrow, precarious passageway, his left foot was snared by a rock.As one of the rescue team members says in “Floyd Collins,” the 1994 musical that Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) adapted from the story: “It’s a real chest compressor down there.”Yet one of the wonders of the show’s glorious-sounding new production, which opened on Monday night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a thoroughly winning Jeremy Jordan in the title role, is how far from claustrophobic it feels. Lincoln Center Theater’s vast and airy Broadway stage becomes an exalted evocation of the enormous cavern that Floyd discovers, delighting in its echoing acoustics, just before he gets into his ultimately fatal jam.Bit of a grim subject for a musical, though, isn’t it? Especially now, when so many headlines fuel anxiety. Even so, there is comfort in it, and not just for those of us who are always up for a tale involving a hero journalist. That would be the adorably named Skeets Miller (Taylor Trensch), a cub reporter from Louisville who is small enough, and bold enough, to reach Floyd and interview him while trying to dig him out.But neighbors and family are the first to come to the aid of the inquisitive, intrepid Floyd, who is forever landing in scrapes that he needs saving from. Eventually, even the governor becomes involved.Jordan, below, and Taylor Trensch.Richard Termine 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 ‘John Proctor Is the Villain,’ It’s the Girls vs. the Men

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      Kimberly Belflower’s play, on Broadway starring Sadie Sink, gives high school students a chance to prosecute a #MeToo case against “The Crucible.”The first word spoken in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a vital new play in a thrilling production at the Booth Theater on Broadway, is “sex.”Defining the word is part of a six-week sex education unit at a rural Georgia high school that doesn’t want to teach it. Just 10 minutes a day is all it gets, and those minutes consist mostly of reading a textbook aloud, in imperfect unison that makes it sound like mush.The 16- and 17-year-old girls in the class know all about sex anyway. Even in their conservative, one-stoplight community — one’s father is the preacher at the Baptist church most of the others attend — they’ve “done some stuff,” or at any rate have obsessed over Lorde and practiced Talmud on Taylor Swift.It is in this hormonal, repressive environment, in 2018, just a year since #MeToo acquired its hashtag, that the playwright, Kimberly Belflower, sets the action. But the girls who want to start a feminism club, which the school resists as “a tricky situation,” do not need hashtags to understand sexual predation. Some have already lived it. Raelynn, the preacher’s daughter, has a purity ring but also an ex-boyfriend who, trying to win her back, forces her to have what he later calls a “conversation.”“Do you mean like when you threw a desk on the ground and kiss-raped me?” she asks.Others have experienced worse.But even for those who have thought little about the subject, the world is about to change, as their lit teacher, the golden Mr. Smith, embarks on a unit about “The Crucible.” Excitedly he tells them that the Arthur Miller classic, an allegory of McCarthyite witch hunts set in 17th-century Salem, Mass., is “a great play about a great hero.” Once they start reading it, they beg to differ.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 a Musical Comedy Makeover, ‘Smash’ Lives Up to Its Name

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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