Theater (Broadway)

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      In ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Nicole Scherzinger Is 23 Feet Tall

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      A fascinating Broadway revival of the bombastic 1994 musical blows it up even further.Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declares in the film “Sunset Boulevard” that it’s not her but “the pictures that got small,” the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals especially, video and projections have grown ever more dominant. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability, then, that at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened on Sunday, the pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below.But alas, only almost.For despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it.Which isn’t praise. You will recall that Norma (Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls) is deluded: a washed-up silent film star who, in her 50-ish dotage, haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion with only her grim manservant and a recently dead chimpanzee for company. By 1949, when the musical starts, she has barely left the premises for decades, let alone made a movie; still, she believes that she, and the silents, could achieve a marvelous comeback if only Cecil B. DeMille would direct her in the epic version of “Salome” she has written.The rest is madness. She conscripts Joe Gillis, a hunky, seedy, unsuccessful screenwriter, to polish her draft and, soon enough, other things. Joe (Tom Francis) seesaws between his luxurious life as Norma’s kept man and the more idealistic promptings of Betty Schaefer, an ambitious studio underling he at first brushes off as “one of the message kids.” Still, when Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) urges Joe to adapt a story of his called “Dark Windows,” they fall in love, while the servant, Max von Mayerling (David Thaxton), offers a dark window of his own into Norma’s modus operandi with men. (Razor and gun included.) None of this ends well, or rather it does not begin well, as the tale is narrated postmortem by Joe’s corpse.The 1950 film, directed by Billy Wilder, stands at a wry remove from these tawdry proceedings, with a cool appreciation but no embrace for human pathos and the hysteria of Hollywood dreams. Norma is a drama queen, Joe a gigolo, Betty a simp and Max a goblin. We know nothing of their emotions beyond what their actions show us.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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      Sadie Sink to Star in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ on Broadway

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      Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for “The Outsiders.”Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from “Stranger Things,” will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading “The Crucible” while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction — plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.The play has nine characters — seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor — and explores how the students’ ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.“As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe,” said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read “The Crucible” in a high school English class.“Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, ‘I should reread “The Crucible”,’ and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it,” she said. “I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase ‘John Proctor is the villain.’”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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      ‘Suffs,’ the Tony-Winning Broadway Musical, Will Close Jan. 5

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      The musical, created by Shaina Taub, announced that it will play its final performance on Jan. 5 and start a national tour next fall.“Suffs,” a new musical about the American women’s suffrage movement, has a lot going for it: Its producers include Hillary Rodham Clinton and Malala Yousafzai, it won Tony Awards for its score and its book, and its audiences seemed energized by how the show’s themes resonated with the candidacy of Kamala Harris.But the show has struggled to sell enough tickets to defray its running costs, and on Friday night the producers announced that it would close on Jan. 5. At the time of its closing, it will have had 24 previews and 301 regular performances. The show announced plans for a national tour, which will begin in Seattle in September 2025.The musical, which takes place in the early 20th century, depicts two generations of women eager to win the right to vote, but divided over how best to do that. Shaina Taub, a singer-songwriter, wrote the book and score and stars as Alice Paul, an influential suffragist. It was directed by Leigh Silverman.The show began previews on March 26 and opened on April 18 at the Music Box Theater. A pre-Broadway production at the Public Theater received reviews that were mixed; the reviews of the Broadway production were somewhat better. Writing in The New York Times, the chief theater critic Jesse Green called it “a good show and good for the world” but said “to be great, a musical (like a great movement) must grab you by the throat. ‘Suffs’ too often settles for holding up signs.”The show’s grosses have been middling — during the week that ended Oct. 6, it grossed $679,589, which is generally not sufficient to sustain a large-cast musical.“Suffs” is the sixth musical to announce closing dates since early May, following “Lempicka,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” “The Who’s Tommy,” “The Notebook” and “Water for Elephants.” Broadway is always a difficult industry, and most shows fail, but the odds of success are particularly long now because production costs have risen, audience size has fallen, and a high volume of shows are competing for attention.“Suffs,” with Jill Furman and Rachel Sussman as lead producers, was capitalized for $19 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped. More

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      ‘Our Town,’ ‘McNeal’ and 4 More Shows Our Critics Are Talking About

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      The fall season is underway, and our reviewers think these productions are worth knowing about, even if you’re not planning to see them.Critic’s PickIdentity politics, funny at last.Daniel Dae Kim as the playwright David Henry Hwang’s stand-in in a revival of the play “Yellow Face” at the Todd Haimes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Yellow Face’David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire, directed by Leigh Silverman, arrives on Broadway starring Daniel Dae Kim as an Asian American playwright who protests yellowface casting only to inadvertently, and hilariously, cast a white actor as the Asian lead in his own play.From Jesse Green’s review:A smart thing about “Yellow Face,” aside from the authorial self-defamation, is that as it gets more hopelessly tangled and thus funny it also gets more serious and thus damning. The questions of identity considered as cultural matters in the first half become personal and political in the second.Through Nov. 24 at the Todd Haimes Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA brutal classic with an ideally shrewd Jim Parsons.Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Our Town’Kenny Leon directs Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and others in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic about two families whose ordinary life events, from birth to death, are consecrated by a kind of communal love.From Jesse Green’s review:In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal. The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.Through Jan. 19 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickAlive with the sound of music.Laura Donnelly, far left. Clockwise from top left: Nicola Turner, Nancy Allsop, Sophia Ally and Lara McDonnell as her daughters in the play “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Hills of California’In Jez Butterworth’s dying-parent drama, directed by Sam Mendes, four sisters trained by their determined mother (Laura Donnelly) to sing close harmony reunite 20 years later as acrimonious adults.From Jesse Green’s review: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: ‘Our Town’ Starring Jim Parsons Is Still Avant-Garde After 86 Years

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      The first act of “Our Town” takes place in Grover’s Corners on May 7, 1901. Nothing much happens in the fictional New Hampshire village that day, except that two local teenagers, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, fall in love completely unaware that they do so under the shadow of the granitic pillars of time.But we are aware. Even in an act entitled Daily Life, the playwright, Thornton Wilder, quietly batters us with the news that we are mortal. Immediately upon introducing George’s parents, he has his mouthpiece, the Stage Manager, convey as if it were part of their names a detail of their deaths: Doc Gibbs’s in 1930, his wife’s on a visit to Canton, Ohio. He blithely jumbles together, like their bones, the joining and splintering of human lives. “Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married,” he comments without comment.So if you think of the play as small, sweet or old-fashioned, and Grover’s Corners as a twin town to Bedford Falls or Hooterville, I respectfully offer that you have the soul of a rock. In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal.The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.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: Daniel Dae Kim as a Playwright Unmasked in ‘Yellow Face’

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      David Henry Hwang’s 2007 play, now in a fine Broadway revival, is a pointed critique of identity, masquerading as a mockumentary.To write yourself into your own play is to put on a very curious mask. If it’s flattering, is it honest? If it’s honest, why bother?Those questions, both as artistic choices and as problems of social identity, are powerfully and hilariously engaged in the revival of David Henry Hwang’s “Yellow Face” that opened on Tuesday at the Todd Haimes Theater. The answers are deliberately equivocal. On one hand, this Roundabout production, directed (as was the 2007 original) by Leigh Silverman, stars the exceedingly likable and handsome Daniel Dae Kim as Hwang’s stand-in, called DHH. On the other, this DHH is a worm.So too is the sinuous story, which requires a ton of exposition to get on its way. DHH, exactly like Hwang, won a 1988 Tony Award for his Broadway debut, “M. Butterfly.” His 1993 follow-up, “Face Value,” won only notoriety. Closing before its official New York opening, it earned the nickname “M. Turkey.”From left, Kevin Del Aguila, Kim, Shannon Tyo and Marinda Anderson. The supporting cast, mismatched to roles without regard to gender or race, are all wonderfully inventive, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Face Value” was Hwang’s theatrical response to the “Miss Saigon” controversy, in which the producer Cameron Mackintosh, importing that megamusical from London in 1991, sought to import its star, Jonathan Pryce, as well. But because Pryce is white, and his character is Eurasian, protests against the casting ensued. Nevertheless, the show went on — and on and on — with Mackintosh dismissing the dispute as “a storm in an Oriental teacup.”Hence “Face Value”: a broad farce, set in part at the “Imperialist Theater,” about the casting of a white actor in the title role of a musical called “The Real Fu Manchu.”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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      Musical Comedy ‘Operation Mincemeat’ to Open on Broadway Next Spring

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      The show is about a real World War II episode in which British intelligence planted disinformation on a dead body to fool the Germans.“Operation Mincemeat,” an improbably successful British musical comedy, already has a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality to it: It’s about a World War II military ruse in which British intelligence planted fake information on a dead body to (successfully) mislead the Germans.Now the producers of “Operation Mincemeat” are hoping for another hard-to-believe turn of events: Finding success on Broadway at a time when many other shows have big stars or big brands.The oddball show began its life in a tiny London theater and then this year won the Olivier Award — Britain’s equivalent to the Tonys — for best new musical. On Tuesday, the show’s producers announced that the musical’s first production outside Britain will open on Broadway next spring, with previews beginning on Feb. 15 and an opening slated for March 20 at the John Golden Theater.A lead producer, Jon Thoday, said in an interview that he was concerned about opening in a climate dominated by celebrities, but also inspired by the success of plays like “Stereophonic” and “Oh, Mary!” that demonstrate it is still possible for unknown shows with little-known casts to break through.“It’s daunting, because you come here and you look at one show after another with a giant Hollywood star in it, and we’re doing a show with people who had never written a musical before,” said Thoday, whose company, Avalon, is producing the show. “We’re going to see whether it works here or not. We’re hoping it will, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.”“Operation Mincemeat” is set in 1943 and based on a true story that is seemingly so crazy it has repeatedly been adapted and written about. The musical was written and composed by a comedy group called SpitLip — David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts — which bills itself as “makers of big, dumb musicals.” Their show, directed by Robert Hastie, had several small productions around London before arriving on the West End in early 2023.Powered by heart and humor, the show has had strong word-of-mouth — it has a passionate group of fans and repeat attenders who are affectionately known as mincefluencers — and has become profitable in the West End, where it continues to run. Thoday said he hopes that the original cast will come to New York, but that that depends on whether they are able to get visas.Thoday said he expected that the show would be capitalized for about $11.5 million.“Operation Mincemeat” is not the only show to announce Broadway plans this week. On Monday, the producers of a musical adaptation of the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” said their show would come to Broadway at an unspecified point next year. More

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      Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

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      The “Oppenheimer” star makes his Broadway debut in Ayad Akhtar’s timely new play about a literary lion who gets assistance from A.I.The Vivian Beaumont Theater has, over the years, been memorably transformed into many specific, even exotic, locales: a Maine carousel, a Thai palace, a South Pacific Seabee base. But never has it looked more exotically nowhere than it does right now, as the setting for Ayad Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a thought experiment about art and A.I. With its softly rounded edges, cool colors and shifting screens, the sleek, vast space is as much an Apple store as a stage.That’s only fitting for a story, set in “the very near future,” in which computer-mediated interactions — predictive chatbots, large language models, generative intelligence — are pitted against their analog forebears. What creative opportunities does such technology afford the artist? What human opportunities does it squander? Forget the sword: It’s the pen vs. the pixel.I’m afraid, alas, the pixel wins, because the play, which opened on Monday, in a stylish Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Bartlett Sher, works only as provocation. Timely but turgid, it rarely rises to drama; in a neat recapitulation of current fears about technology, its humans, hardly credible as such, have been almost entirely replaced by ideas.Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”Downey and Andrea Martin, who portrays a literary agent, in the new play by Ayad Akhtar.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