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      ‘Stereophonic’ Wins the Tony Award for Best New Play

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      “Stereophonic,” which eavesdrops on a folk-rock quintet whose members make up and break up as they lay down tracks for what will become a smash LP, won the Tony Award for best new play on Sunday. Its 13 Tony nominations are the most a play has ever received.It was the fifth award of the night for “Stereophonic.” Daniel Aukin won for best direction of a play; Will Brill, who plays the band’s bassist, for best featured actor in a play; David Zinn, for best scenic design of a play; and Ryan Rumery for best sound design of a play.A meditation on the joy and torture of creative collaboration, “Stereophonic” — written by David Adjmi and directed by Daniel Aukin, with songs by Will Butler — is a transporting work of naturalistic drama and a star-making break for its cast. Set over the course of a year, first in a recording studio in Sausalito, Calif., and later in Los Angeles, it embraces the technical aspects of recording.“I took that as a challenge,” Adjmi told The New York Times. “So much of it, the banality of the process, is part of what’s so beautiful about it, the granularity of it.”“Stereophonic,” which opened in April at the Golden Theater, is a critical hit. “The play is a staggering achievement and already feels like a must-see American classic,” Naveen Kumar wrote in a review for The Times.Remarkably, many of the cast members had barely played an instrument before rehearsals began. And none of them had played professionally. But after an unusually rigorous rehearsal period, they became a band, supporting one another even through bum notes and fitful tempo.“We all hit wrong notes all the time,” Sarah Pidgeon, a star of the show, said. “But it still works because it’s real.”The other nominees for best new play were “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” “Mary Jane,” “Mother Play” and “Prayer for the French Republic.” More

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      ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ Was a Flop in 1981. Now It’s a Tony Winner.

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      “Merrily We Roll Along,” long considered one of the most storied flops in Broadway history, found redemption on Sunday when it won the Tony Award for best musical revival, belatedly establishing it in the pantheon of Stephen Sondheim masterpieces.The award, although widely expected, nonetheless represents a miraculous rehabilitation for a troubled title. The original production, in 1981, closed just 12 days after opening, dogged by terrible reviews and reports of audience walkouts. The current production — which features a major movie star, Daniel Radcliffe, alongside two popular Broadway performers, Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez — has been a profitable hit met with near-universal acclaim, sold-out houses and high average ticket prices.“Merrily,” about the implosion of a three-way friendship over a 20-year period, features music and lyrics by Sondheim and a book by George Furth. It is based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and the original production was directed by Hal Prince. The debacle was notorious enough that it became the subject of a 2016 documentary, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.”But the show lived on and has been repeatedly reworked in the decades since because, despite its difficult birth, a cadre of passionate fans has long found it profound and, with a widely admired score, worthy of reconsideration.Much has changed, in addition to rewrites, to transform the show from failure to success. The show unfolds in reverse chronological order, a device that was less familiar to audiences in the early 1980s than it is now. To portray characters who start the show in their 40s and end it in their 20s, the original cast was made up of adolescents and young adults. Later productions have gone the other way, generally relying on actors who are older, which has proved more emotionally effective for theatergoers.The current production’s starry, appealing cast, who also performed in a 2022 Off Broadway run at New York Theater Workshop, helped make the show a must-see even before audiences discovered that they liked the story and the songs and found the show both affecting and artful.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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      Chita Rivera’s Life and Career Are Honored at the Tonys

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      Chita Rivera, who dazzled Broadway audiences for nearly seven decades, died in January at the age of 91. She “was a Broadway star as long as anyone — and maybe longer,” our chief theater critic, Jesse Green, wrote in an appraisal. Rivera, whose father was born in Puerto Rico, was best known for starring as Anita in “West Side Story” and Velma Kelly in “Chicago,” but had a long list of credits to her name. (She detailed her life in career in “Chita: A Memoir,” written with Patrick Pacheco, in 2023.)The New York Times has extensively covered Rivera’s life and career. Here is a look at some of our recent work remembering her. More

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      Daniel Radcliffe Conjures Up His First Tony

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      Daniel Radcliffe is one of the world’s most famous actors. But he’s never won a major award. Until now.Radcliffe won the Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical, for his work in the smash hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” The show is Radcliffe’s fifth on Broadway, but the first for which he was even nominated for a Tony, despite mostly admiring reviews all along the way.Radcliffe, 34, will forever be known as the actor who played the title wizard in all eight “Harry Potter” films. But even before shooting of those films concluded, he had begun making the adventurous choices — onstage and onscreen — that have helped him accomplish the rare transition from child star to respected adult actor.In “Merrily,” Radcliffe plays Charley Kringas, a lyricist-turned-playwright whose long friendship and collaboration with a talented composer (a character named Franklin Shepard, played by Jonathan Groff) has imploded.Radcliffe’s enormous star power is a significant factor in the success of this production, which promises to forever alter how “Merrily” is viewed because the show’s original production, in 1981, was a storied flop.Radcliffe has been with the production since 2022, when he played the same role, with the same co-stars, during an Off Broadway run at the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop. The Broadway production opened last October, and is scheduled to conclude on July 7.He has repeatedly shown a willingness to try new things. Radcliffe first arrived on Broadway in 2008, starring in a revival of “Equus” that required him to appear nude; his next role, in a 2011 revival of the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” required him to sing.He has since returned to Broadway to star in two more plays, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” in 2014 and “The Lifespan of a Fact” in 2018, and he also starred in an Off Broadway play, “Privacy,” in 2016 at the Public Theater.He has continued to make movies, many of them indie-ish projects including “Kill Your Darlings,” “Swiss Army Man” and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”In an interview last month, two days after being nominated for the Tony Award, Radcliffe said that he keeps returning to the stage “because I love it.”“There’s something thrilling about doing something that scares you, live, a bit, every night,” he said. “And just the connection with the audience — being in a room full of people and feeling them react to the story. We’re very lucky it’s such an emotional show: There’s a lot laughs, and there’s a lot of comedy, but you can also hear people being emotionally affected by it towards the end, and that’s a very rewarding thing to be a part of.” More

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren to Star in ‘Last Five Years’ on Broadway

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      Whitney White will direct the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s popular musical, which plans to open next spring.Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren are planning to star in a production of “The Last Five Years” on Broadway next spring.Jonas appeared in several Broadway shows as a child; his one starring role was in 2012, when he stepped into a production of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” and his most recent appearance on Broadway was for a Jonas Brothers concert stand last year.Warren is a Tony Award winner for playing the title role in “Tina.” She also had roles in Broadway productions of “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed” and “Bring It On.”“The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is about the breakup of a marriage. Critics have rarely warmed to it, but it has a huge fan base, and is widely staged. It has never been on Broadway, in part because it is so small — just two characters and one act. The show also has an unusual structure: the male protagonist, a novelist named Jamie, tells the story from beginning to end, while the female protagonist, an actress named Cathy, tells it in reverse chronological order.It was first staged in Illinois, at Northlight Theater, in 2001, with Norbert Leo Butz and Lauren Kennedy, and then had an Off Broadway run at the Minetta Lane Theater in 2002, with Butz and Sherie Rene Scott. In the decades since, there have been numerous national and international productions and adaptations. There was a film adaptation, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, in 2015. More recently, Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry starred in a concert version in 2016, and at the height of the pandemic Out of the Box Theatrics and Holmdel Theater Company staged a memorable streaming production filmed inside an apartment with Nicholas Edwards and Nasia Thomas. (The number of licensed productions of the show doubled during the pandemic because the small cast and idiosyncratic narrative structure made it conducive to social distancing.)The Broadway production, directed by Whitney White (a Tony nominee for “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”), will be produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific producing entity run by Greg Nobile; ATG Productions, a subsidiary of British theater owner ATG Entertainment; and the Season, which is the new producing entity of theater marketers Mike Karns and Steven Tartick. More

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      Broadway’s Pop Era

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      The Tonys are tonight. Many of the shows have a new sound.Tonight is the one night of the year when millions of Americans are focused on Broadway. That’s because it’s the annual Tony Awards, which, by virtue of being televised, are often the first way that many people learn about what’s new onstage.I write full time about theater, so I’m always thinking about what’s changing in that world, and this year I’ve been struck by the notion that the source of Broadway’s sound is shifting. More and more musicals are being written by artists who built their careers in pop music, and fewer by people trained in theater.I did the math, and here’s what I found: Just over half of the 15 new musicals that opened on Broadway during the 2023-24 season featured scores credited to artists whose primary credentials are in the music business. They include Alicia Keys, Barry Manilow and Britney Spears; Huey Lewis, Sufjan Stevens and David Byrne; Jamestown Revival and Ingrid Michaelson (whose song “My Days,” from “The Notebook,” is taking off on social media).Pop musicians are even helping to make plays. The leading contender for best play tonight is “Stereophonic,” a behind-the-music drama with bespoke song fragments by Will Butler, a former member of Arcade Fire, and this fall a Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet” will feature music by Jack Antonoff, a frequent collaborator of Taylor Swift.“Stereophonic,” features songs by a former member of Arcade Fire.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“We haven’t had this since Tin Pan Alley — folks who are trained at creating an entire world in four minutes, now creating pieces that are two and a half hours long,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton.” “I find it exciting,” he added. “I always think musical theater is more interesting when it’s in conversation with 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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      Listen to the Best Songs From 8 Tony-Nominated Shows

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      “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Stereophonic” and others are up for top prizes at Sunday’s ceremony. Our critic takes stock of their cast albums, all available now.Cast albums are both keepsakes and fantasies, preserving a show for those who have seen it and implying it for those who have not. At their best, they are also stand-alone works of musical-theater art. Listening to the recordings of the eight shows nominated for Tony Awards in the best musical and best score categories — all of which are now available — I was impressed by how often and how variously they reached that standard. Below, in chronological order by opening date on Broadway, a guide to the latest batch of future treasures.‘Here Lies Love’The first of the season’s best score nominees, this sung-through biography of Imelda Marcos was the only one not to release a cast recording. That’s a shame, but die-hards can seek out the 2014 Off Broadway version or the 2010 concept album, with its whacka-whacka disco-beat ditties by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Remastered in 2023, and with a very different collection of songs from the Broadway show, the concept album is naturally less theatrical; with each track featuring a different singer in a totally distinctive style — Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Natalie Merchant, Sia — character development is impossible. Instead, it offers hypnotic dance-floor euphoria, as in Cyndi Lauper’s take on Imelda’s “Eleven Days” of courtship.“Eleven Days”“Here Lies Love,” featuring Cyndi Lauper, from the 2010 concept album (Nonesuch)‘Days of Wine and Roses’A story of husband-and-wife alcoholics on diverging paths toward recovery and disaster is bound to be harrowing, but Adam Guettel’s score carefully balances the inevitable lows with the sometimes wild highs. The cast album brilliantly captures that full-spectrum range, especially in the edge-of-danger singing by Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James at their finest. Their quasi-operatic cries for relief and forgiveness effectively contrast (but do not contradict) the jazzy mania of songs like “Evanesce,” in which the snockered characters sound like xylophones and leap like dolphins, making you ache if not for drink then for these desperate drinkers.“Evanesce”“Days of Wine and Roses” (Nonesuch)‘Water for Elephants’Jessica Stone’s thrilling staging is a real eye-catcher in this circus-based musical at the Imperial Theater. But the cast album demonstrates how the songs, by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective, can grab you by the ears. Avoiding the rut of some Americana scores, PigPen, along with its arrangers and orchestrators, offers a wide variety of sounds and formats that suit the milieu and the action: bravura showstoppers for the ringmaster, soaring anthems for the hero, haunting ballads for the woman caught between them. One of those ballads is “Easy,” a heartbreaker even if you have no idea that it’s sung to a dying horse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Cave Explorer Died 99 Years Ago. Now His Story Is Broadway Bound.

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      “Floyd Collins,” a musical about a trapped spelunker and the media circus surrounding his failed rescue, had a brief Off Broadway run in 1996.In 1925, a spelunker named Floyd Collins got trapped in a Kentucky cave and the unsuccessful efforts to rescue him became a media sensation, with print and radio reporters breathlessly tracking the endeavor.Now a musical about the tragedy is heading to Broadway, three decades after it was first performed and a century after Collins’s death.Lincoln Center Theater, one of the four nonprofits with Broadway houses, said on Monday that it would stage a revival of “Floyd Collins” at its Vivian Beaumont Theater next spring, with previews beginning March 27 and an opening on April 21.The musical features a bluegrass score by Adam Guettel and a book, as well as additional lyrics, by Tina Landau, who will direct the production. No cast has been announced.The show debuted in Philadelphia in 1994, and then had a generally well-received Off Broadway production in 1996 at Playwrights Horizons; it won an Obie Award for music, has periodically been staged at theaters in the United States and Britain, and has fans thanks to an Off Broadway cast album.Guettel, a Tony winner for “The Light in the Piazza,” is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. He is a Tony nominee again this year, for “Days of Wine and Roses.” And next spring, in addition to “Floyd Collins,” his new musical “Millions,” adapted from the novel and film of the same name, will have an initial staging at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta.“Floyd Collins” will be one of two Broadway shows staged by Lincoln Center Theater this season, which is the final season of its longtime producing artistic director, André Bishop. The nonprofit previously announced that this fall it would stage a Broadway production of “McNeal,” a new play by Ayad Akhtar, starring Robert Downey Jr. as a novelist.The theater also announced on Monday that it would stage Off Broadway productions of “The Blood Quilt,” written by Katori Hall and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” revised by Mark O’Rowe and directed by Jack O’Brien.They join an already announced Off Off Broadway production of “Six Characters,” a new play by Phillip Howze, directed by Dustin Wills. As a fund-raiser in December, the theater is planning a one-night reunion concert of its Tony-winning 2008 revival of “South Pacific.” More