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      ‘Nobody Cares’ About Laura Benanti, but They Let Her Entertain Them

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      While poking fun at her own agreeable malleability, Benanti flexes her talents in a show that will be available on Audible, without the physical dimension.Laura Benanti’s show “Nobody Cares,” at the Minetta Lane Theater, is being recorded and will soon be available from the comfort of your home. Future audiences are likely to enjoy Benanti’s autobiographical romp through her family life, her romantic and professional travails, her insecurities (see the title) and her often overwhelming need to please. They will appreciate the handful of original songs, which she wrote with the music director Todd Almond — Benanti is a fabulous singer, with a Tony Award on her mantel for her sultry turn as Louise in “Gypsy.”But because the show will be on Audible, those audiences will be made up of listeners, and they will miss out on the physical comedy of a woman who can communicate more with one raised eyebrow than most actors can with a lengthy monologue. Benanti dramatically throws herself on the floor during the number “Give It to Me” before effortlessly slithering back up. This might be an exorcism of the time she broke her neck while doing a pratfall as Cinderella in the 2002 revival of “Into the Woods.”Did that accident make her change her reflexive compliance? Nope: “There wasn’t a strong enough neck brace in the world that could have kept me from nodding ‘yes’ to something I strongly disagreed with,” she says in the show.That Benanti is a terrific all-around comedienne won’t surprise those who have seen, say, the musical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” her impersonation of Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” or videos like the one in which she reimagined the obsessive Fosca from Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” as a Times Square mascot. Now she’s exploring new-ish terrain in an evening-length show, directed by Annie Tippe, that stands out from her past solo projects by relying more on narration and embracing a confessional mode. The general approach is a little reminiscent of Sherie Rene Scott’s “Everyday Rapture,” from 2009 (though that piece had more songs, and they were covers).After a beginning that feels stiffly self-conscious, Benanti loosens into her comedic rhythm and packs a lot into 90 minutes: a childhood as a theater nerd, three marriages, two daughters, perimenopause, shooting a nude scene in a recent prestige TV series. The production’s biggest missed opportunity might lie in how little Benanti interacts with Almond, who leads the five-piece band and occasionally pipes up with impeccably timed rejoinders, or with her backup singers, Barrie Lobo McLain and Chelsea Lee Williams.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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      Avett Brothers Musical, ‘Swept Away,’ to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The show, inspired by a 19th-century shipwreck, has had previous runs in Berkeley, Calif., and Washington.“Swept Away,” a new musical featuring songs by the Americana band the Avett Brothers, is planning to open on Broadway this fall, following productions in California and Washington.The musical is inspired by a once-famous shipwreck: In 1884, a British yacht called the Mignonette was wrecked at sea, and the four-man crew’s desperate efforts to survive, which included cannibalism, led to a protracted and influential legal battle. The details of the ordeal have been changed for “Swept Away,” which is set in 1888 on a whaling ship off the coast of New Bedford, Mass.Much of the musical’s score is drawn from “Mignonette,” a 2004 Avett Brothers album inspired by the shipwreck. But the score also includes songs from four other Avett Brothers albums and an original song the band wrote for the stage show.The band announced that the musical would be coming to Broadway during a concert on Friday night at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Some of the actors who have performed in previous iterations of the show joined them onstage.The musical features a book by John Logan, who won a Tony Award for writing “Red.” The director is Michael Mayer, who won a Tony for directing “Spring Awakening.”The show has had two previous productions, in 2022 at Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, and last winter at Arena Stage in Washington. Thomas Floyd, a critic for The Washington Post, called it “transfixing” and said “this morality tale launches with toe-tapping propulsion before anchoring for an intimate elegy on grief and guilt.”A spokesman said the musical would open this fall at a Shubert theater, but said the production was not ready to confirm the specific timing or location. The principal actors from the previous productions — John Gallagher Jr., Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall — joined the Avett Brothers onstage Friday night, and were introduced as “the cast of the soon-to-be-officially Broadway show.”The Broadway run will be produced by Matthew Masten, Sean Hudock, and Madison Wells Live (founded by Gigi Pritzker, a billionaire film producer). More

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      ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Review: Community Building One Dice Roll at a Time

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      Improv adds a theatrical dimension to the role-playing game, which has been undergoing a renaissance as it turns 50 this year.While familiarity with things like non-player characters and their degree of disposability is not strictly necessary to enjoy “Dungeons and Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern,” it certainly helps. At the very least, try tagging along with someone with an awareness of tabletop role-playing games.Indeed, hearing such jokes as “Be gentle — this NPC doesn’t have the ‘essential’ tag,” made me grateful for the quality hours I spent playing Chivalry & Sorcery in my 20s. And the raucous laughter that welcomed the line at a recent performance of this Chicago import, now at Stage 42, confirmed I was among folks who shared an understanding.This is less restrictive than it might sound in terms of potential audience because Dungeons & Dragons, which is turning 50 this year, has been undergoing a startling renaissance. People gather for regular sessions and the game maintains a strong pop-culture presence, from being a key component of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” to providing the framework for films like last year’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”But unlike that straightforward fantasy tale, “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” is basically a play session. This makes it closer to the wildly popular output of Critical Role Productions, which presents live role-playing campaigns on various platforms.Practically speaking, the show follows the basic steps of a D&D adventure. Three actors try to pull off a mission by reacting to prompts, solving riddles and, naturally, engaging in fights. This all happens under the direction of a dungeon master, played by DAGL (though his real name is David Andrew Laws), who created “The Twenty-Sided Tavern” with David Carpenter and Sarah Davis Reynolds (herself playing the watering hole’s keeper).Three of the actors can handle several characters within the same class: Madelyn Murphy can play three versions of a mage, Tyler Nowell Felix three versions of a fighter and Diego F. Salinas three types of rogue. The specific characters and their mission are assigned at the start of the show, the first of many narrative forks each performance can take. The audience can use their phones to participate via the browser-based platform Gamiotics. (My phone sometimes lagged, preventing me from casting votes I like to think would have been crucial, but most likely weren’t.)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: ‘Problems Between Sisters’ Puts a Spin on the Berserk Boys Club

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      Julia May Jonas turns the menacing male siblings of Sam Shepard’s “True West” into squabbling pregnant sisters in Vermont.When we first see Rory (Annie Fox) she is flaunting a septum piercing, cutoff jeans girdled by a rubber band, and a level of hygiene seemingly designed to repel anyone within her smell radius. She has hitchhiked her way to her aunt’s cozy cabin in Vermont, where her older sister, Jess (Stephanie Janssen), has been temporarily staying. Jess is also pregnant. And there the similarities ostensibly begin and end.Whereas Rory takes pride in being a “transient outsider, raw and untrained,” in Julia May Jonas’s “Problems Between Sisters,” Jess is an emotionally Spanxed up, expensively shampooed and educated visual artist preparing for her first solo show.Jess’s art dealer (Maya Jackson), visiting the cabin, is taken with Rory’s unorthodox “look” and, on the strength of zero pieces of original art, commissions a video from her. Rory, a lapsed multimedia artist, tries to rope her sister into helping her create a video “de-sainting the idea of the pregnant woman,” a project that may or may not involve nudity.Cortisol-spiking chaos ensues.Jonas’s play, directed by Sivan Battat at Studio Theater in Washington, was conceived as a “response” to Sam Shepard’s “True West.” “Problems Between Sisters” is one of five projected works in Jonas’s “All Long True American Stories” cycle, which reimagines canonical dramas by white male playwrights for “other people (mostly women).” Shepard’s 1980 play made hay of the fraternal rivalry between Austin, an Ivy-League-educated screenwriter, and Lee, a rough-hewed petty thief. After a producer greenlights an underbaked movie idea of Lee’s, the brothers attempt to write a passable script, only to dance a pas de doom.The sneaky brilliance of “Problems Between Sisters” is that it doesn’t simply ask, “What if the brothers were sisters?” but rather the more complex question: “What if the sisters gave themselves permission to act as men do?” More precisely, what if women ceded control to their inner art monsters? The question has special resonance for Jess, who has toiled for 20 years to get that solo show.Rory has a leg up on Jess in the chutzpah department and, as in “True West,” much of her badassery rubs off on her starchy sister over the course of the play’s fleet 100 minutes. A keyboard gets smashed, tables and chairs are overturned, food is spilled, weed is smoked and verbal hand grenades are hurled.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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      Line Outside Court in Trump Trial Is Packed, With Seats a Hot Commodity

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      The hottest ticket in New York City is not for a Broadway show, or even to see basketball star Caitlin Clark play against the New York Liberty. Rather it is to get a seat inside Courtroom 1530 to see the criminal trial of former president Donald J. Trump.Increasing numbers of people have traveled to downtown Manhattan in recent weeks to queue for one of roughly half a dozen seats on a wooden bench inside the courtroom. There are another two dozen reserved for the public in an overflow room otherwise packed with reporters.Admittance is free, but securing a good spot in line often comes with a hefty price tag.It did not start this way. Weeks ago, during jury selection, only a handful of people turned up and everyone got a seat. But with each consecutive day the lines have gotten increasingly longer. And people, it seems, are willing to brave any sort of weather. Thursday featured spitting rain.Michael D. Cohen, the central witness in this first criminal trial against an American president, has drawn the longest lines, even though showing up in hopes of seeing a certain witness is a bit of a crapshoot because prosecutors are not giving much notice of who their witnesses might be.People at the front of line say to ensure a seat in the courtroom they have to start lining up the day before.On Thursday morning, a woman who was 12th in line was asking $450 for her spot. Behind her was a lawyer who had paid for hundreds of dollars for line sitters so she and her friend could get into the overflow room. She ultimately paid another $500 for someone else’s spot and got a seat in the overflow room.(Yes, professional line sitters are a thing, and The New York Times has availed itself of their services in the lines reserved for reporters. There are companies that line sit for people. More often it is for concert tickets, not a spot in line at a criminal trial.)Things can get heated. People are, not surprisingly, territorial about their spots and do not take kindly to line jumpers. There have been a few. The crowd typically shames them but police have been hesitant to step in, so a few line jumpers have gotten into the overflow room.For those who do not make it there is a silver lining. There are seats for the public available at the nearby trial of Sen. Robert Menendez, who is charged in a vast international web of corruption. Opening arguments in that trial were on Wednesday. More

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      ‘Death Becomes Her’ Musical to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The musical comedy, which is now running in Chicago, stars Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. It is based on the 1992 film.“Death Becomes Her,” a musical comedy based on the zany 1992 film about two warring women who turn to a magical potion in their quests for eternal youth, will transfer to Broadway this fall.The musical is now in previews at the Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago, where it is scheduled to open on Sunday and to run until June 2.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 23 and to open Nov. 21 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where a revival of “Sweeney Todd” closed this month.The show stars two gifted musical theater comedians, Megan Hilty, best known for television’s “Smash,” opposite Jennifer Simard, last seen on Broadway in “Once Upon a One More Time.” They will play roles originated on film by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn.The stage production will also feature Christopher Sieber (whose comedy chemistry with Simard was last seen on Broadway in the 2021 revival of “Company”) as the man they both desire, and Michelle Williams (of Destiny’s Child) as the potion purveyor.The “Death Becomes Her” musical is being directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, who won a Tony Award for choreographing “Newsies”; the book is by Marco Pennette, who has written and produced television shows including “Ugly Betty”; and the score is by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, who have written and performed in a variety of comedy projects.The lead producer is Universal Theatrical Group, which is the stage division of the movie studio behind the “Death Becomes Her” film. More

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      Darren Criss to Return to Broadway as a Robot in Love

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      The actor will star in “Maybe Happy Ending,” an original musical set in a future Seoul. It will begin previews in September.Darren Criss, who parlayed a breakout role on “Glee” into a multifaceted career in television, theater and music, will return to Broadway this fall in a new musical that is nominally about robots but is also about life, love and loss.The show, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is a rarity for Broadway: a fully original musical — not adapted from a pre-existing story or song catalog. Criss will star alongside Helen J Shen and two other actors in the musical, which is set in Seoul in the late 21st century and is about two outmoded helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and forge a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence.The musical, by Will Aronson and Hue Park, had an initial Korean-language production in Seoul in 2016, and an English-language production in Atlanta, at the Alliance Theater, in 2020, where Jesse Green, a New York Times chief theater critic, called it “a charming, Broadway-ready new musical about robots in love.”The Broadway production, announced Tuesday, will be directed by Michael Arden, who also directed the Atlanta production, and who last year won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “Parade.” “Maybe Happy Ending” is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 18 and to open Oct. 17 at the Belasco Theater.“It’s a strange, futuristic look at love, with a beautiful score that feels quite classic,” Arden said in a telephone interview. “When I first read it I found it absolutely devastating and heartbreaking and beautiful — it was one of the most human stories I’d come across, even though our leads aren’t human.”Criss, an Emmy winner for “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” last appeared on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “American Buffalo”; he had previously starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”“Maybe Happy Ending” will be the first Broadway show for Shen, who is currently in “The Lonely Few” at Off Broadway’s MCC Theater. Criss and Shen will play the robots; the cast will also include Dez Duron, a onetime contestant on “The Voice.”“Maybe Happy Ending” is being capitalized for $18.25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The musical’s lead producers are Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, who on Friday announced that they are also among the producers of a new Off Broadway play, “N/A,” starring Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe. That play, written by Mario Correa and directed by Diane Paulus, is to begin previews June 11 and to open June 23 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. The play, described in a news release as inspired by real people and events, is about tensions between the first female speaker of the House and the youngest woman elected to Congress; the characters have parallels to Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. More

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      ‘Sally & Tom’ Frees Sally Hemings From Being a Mere Footnote

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      Suzan-Lori Parks’s play is the latest work by a Black writer seeking to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective to make her fully dimensional.Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know so little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Yet, Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts.In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character — and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, told me, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.)She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we can really imagine what it is for a 14-year-old to be looked at by a 41-year-old, and not just looked at but to engage in sexual exploitation with this man.”Parks’s fidelity to the history means she doesn’t alter Hemings’s fate. Instead, she experiments with the storytelling by plotting “Sally & Tom” as a backstager, or a play within a play, in which the main character, Luce (also played by Irving), is an African American dramatist who is writing a play about the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Luce is playing Hemings in her own play, which is called “The Pursuit of Happiness.”In fact, each cast member plays two parts: Luce’s partner, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is playing Tom in the production, and Alano Miller plays both Hemings’s older brother, James, and Kwame, a Hollywood actor who has returned to his old theater company. When the historical story and the present-day one collide, they often reveal the sometimes comical and often complicated reality that can arise when mounting a show dealing with race relations in the American theater today.Contemporary woes: Irving and Ebert as a modern couple struggling to produce a play (and overcome race relations in the American theater) in “Sally & Tom.”Jeenah Moon 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