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      ‘Like They Do in the Movies’ Review: Laurence Fishburne Widens His Lens

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      In his solo show, the screen and stage star shines a light into his formative dark corners and on the people who made an impression.When Laurence Fishburne wants to get closer to audiences of his one-man show, he lowers himself into a deep squat near the lip of the stage. Hands clasped and knees spread wide, the actor — who has become an avatar of inscrutability during his half-century screen and stage career — seems to be trying to shrink himself down to life-size.Fishburne’s indomitable presence is the muscle behind “Like They Do in the Movies,” which opened on Thursday night at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan. His vigor and gravitas are unwavering, even as Fishburne, the 62-year-old “Matrix” star, softens to reveal difficult details from his childhood and to portray others whose vulnerability made a personal impression.Part memoir and part ethnography, the show opens with Fishburne, who played a schemer in the 2022 Broadway revival of “American Buffalo” and a Supreme Court justice in the 2008 one-man play “Thurgood,” as you’ve likely never seen him before: draped in sequins (the flowing black robes are credited to Jimi Gureje). Addressing the audience in griot fashion, Fishburne briskly sketches his early years, introducing his mother, Hattie, a charm-school matron turned abusive stage mom. Using the refrain “but more on that later,” he indicates open questions he’ll return to, including how his father fits into the picture.These recollections have a clipped momentum, like listening to a celebrity narrate a tell-all at 1.5 speed. If the pacing makes him seem a bit guarded, it also serves a practical purpose: The production, written by Fishburne and crisply directed by Leonard Foglia, runs nearly two and half hours with an intermission. Greater economy would pack a more decisive punch, but the show rarely goes slack and Fishburne’s performance is thoroughly engrossing.That’s especially true as he slips into the more familiar territory of playing other people, in a series of vividly drawn monologues book ended by his own reflections. The play’s title may suggest a tour through Fishburne’s own Hollywood résumé, which includes an Oscar-nominated turn as Ike Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” But here, Fishburne plays a truck packer for The New York Daily News, a Hurricane Katrina survivor and a homeless man who washes cars, among others.Stalking Neil Patel’s sparse set — a stage with only a long table and a pair of chairs — Fishburne nimbly dons each persona with a keen and easy sensitivity. The assembly of character studies, mostly everyday New Yorker types, lacks an obvious sense of cohesiveness, though Fishburne himself emerges as the common thread.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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      ‘Water for Elephants’ Review: Beauty Under the Big Top

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      The circus-themed love story, already a novel and a movie, becomes a gorgeously imaginative Broadway musical.First come her ears, floating like ginkgo leaves. Then, from behind a screen, her shadow appears, followed by the marvelous sound of her trumpet. Next to arrive is her disembodied trunk, with a mind of its own, snuffling out friends and enemies and food. Finally, at the end of Act I of the new musical “Water for Elephants,” she is fully assembled: Rosie, the star of the circus, big as a bus and batting her pretty eyes.This gorgeous sequence, played out over perhaps 20 minutes, is emblematic of the many wonders awaiting audiences at the Imperial Theater, where “Water for Elephants” opened on Thursday. After all, Rosie is not a living creature potentially vulnerable to abuse. Nor is she a C.G.I. illusion. She is not really an illusion at all, in the sense of a trick; you can see the puppeteers operating and inhabiting her. Rather she is a product of the human imagination, including ours in the audience.What a pleasure it is to be treated that way by a brand-extension musical, a form usually characterized by craftlessness and cynicism. Indeed, at its best, “Water for Elephants” has more in common with the circus arts than it does with by-the-books Broadway. Sure, it features an eventful story and compelling characters, and apt, rousing music by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective. But in the director Jessica Stone’s stunning, emotional production, it leads with movement, eye candy and awe.That’s only appropriate, given the milieu. The musical’s book by Rick Elice, based not just on the 2011 movie but also on the 2006 novel by Sara Gruen, is set among the performers and roustabouts of a ramshackle circus at the depths of the Depression. Escaping an unhappiness we learn about only later, Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin) jumps onto a train heading (as his introductory song tells us) “Anywhere.” But really, because the train houses the failing Benzini Brothers troupe, it’s heading everywhere — downhill and fast.Elice has smartly sped up the action by eliminating one of the two introductory devices that kept the movie’s story at a distance. In the one he retains, a much older Jacob (Gregg Edelman) serves as the narrator of the long-ago events. With pride but also anguish he recalls how, as a young man trained as a veterinarian, he quickly established himself in the chaotic and sometimes violent company of the circus: a hunky James Herriot caring for the medical needs of the animals. Soon, though, he becomes involved in more complicated, dangerous ways.The complication comes in the form of Marlena, the circus’s star attraction, who performs on horseback. The danger comes from her husband, August, Benzini’s possibly bipolar owner and ringmaster.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: An Affair to Dismember, in the Gory Musical ‘Teeth’

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      A cult horror film about a teenage girl with a surprise set of chompers gets another surprise: the song-and-dance treatment.So unexpected, contrarian and maximalist are the musicals of Michael R. Jackson that I spend a lot of time between them wondering what he’ll do next. First came “A Strange Loop,” about a “fat, Black, queer” man stuck in a cycle of shame by his faith. Then came “White Girl in Danger,” about soap opera characters so privileged and confident they feel total freedom to do what they like.Now, in collaboration with Anna K. Jacobs, comes the remix, “Teeth,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. It too is a show about faith and shame, but as experienced by an alpha white girl in the most biting ways.Literally.“Teeth,” with music by Jacobs, lyrics by Jackson and a book by both, manifests all three elements of the Jackson formula. Based on the 2007 cult horror film by Mitchell Lichtenstein, it is a parable set in motion by a young woman’s discovery of vaginal incisors that spring shut when sexual violence is done to her. Living in a paternalistic faith community, where men believe (as one lyric has it) “the weaker sex has weakened us,” such violence is never far away — and so neither is dismemberment.Well, if you don’t want to see bloody amputated penises, why come to the theater?Perhaps for Jackson’s provocative mix of high-mindedness and low satire. Both are fully evident in Sarah Benson’s production, even if they never blend into a satisfying whole.The low satire, mostly in the setup, is the more successful tactic. It offers a winking subversiveness and plenty of laughs, especially in the catchy pop-rock tunes with their sharp, smutty rhymes. About the only ones I can repeat here are “gravity/cavity” and “zucchini/weenie.”But the elaborate ideological superstructure is also rewarding at first. It puts the tale in the context of current culture wars between those who seek to restore male dominance and the supposedly castrating women they call tools of the “feminocracy.”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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      ‘Illinoise,’ a Sufjan Stevens Dance Musical, Is Moving to Broadway

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      The production will make its transfer unusually fast, with an opening set for April 24, just 29 days after it wraps up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory.“Illinoise,” a dance-driven, dialogue-free musical adapted from a much-loved 2005 album by Sufjan Stevens, will transfer to Broadway next month.The show, which is a collaboration between the celebrated choreographer Justin Peck and the Pulitzer-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, is to open on April 24 at the St. James Theater; the run is to be limited, with a scheduled closing date of Aug. 10.“Illinoise” depicts a group of young creative people gathered around a campfire to share stories about their lives; it ultimately focuses on the life of a man who is finding his way while confronting grief. “A lot of the show is really about the catharsis of opening up to the community around oneself,” Peck, who is directing and choreographing the show, said in an interview.“Illinoise” joins a crowded spring season on Broadway, which has a heavy concentration of openings in late April, posing significant economic challenges for producers because costs have risen and audience numbers have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic.But the creators and backers of “Illinoise” want to capitalize on their show’s momentum: It is just wrapping up a sold-out run at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, and it also had successful runs earlier this year at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and last year at Bard College’s Fisher Center.The transfer will be unusually fast, with just 29 days between the end of the run at the Armory and the start of the run at the St. James. There will be a brief rehearsal period, but no previews; the first performance will also be the opening, which is uncommon for Broadway.“We have this kind of lightning in a bottle with this show that is not something that one can create intentionally,” Peck said. “We want to preserve the energy of the show, and the longer we wait between phases of this, the greater we risk losing what that energy is.”“Illinoise” is performed by a dozen acting dancers and a trio of vocalists, along with a live band.The show’s use of dance to drive a narrative is not unprecedented: The history of such so-called dansicals includes the Tony-winning “Contact,” which opened in 2000, as well as the 2002 production that most influenced Peck, “Movin’ Out,” which Twyla Tharp choreographed using the songs of Billy Joel.“The music and the story and the movement combine in your own mind, rather than being combined onstage in front of you,” Drury said in an interview. “And there’s something about that that feels really beautiful and exciting. It just allows the audience to really empathize and connect emotionally with what’s going on onstage.”The Broadway run is being produced by Orin Wolf, John Styles and David Binder, in association with Seaview. More

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      Review: Ibsen’s ‘Enemy of the People,’ Starring Jeremy Strong

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      The “Succession” star headlines a Broadway revival of Ibsen’s play about a lifesaving doctor and the town that hates him.Dissent is necessary to democracy, sure. But how much does it cost?That’s the fundamental question posed by Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” — and, in highly dramatic fashion, by the preview I attended of its latest Broadway revival.At that performance, on Thursday, just as the play reached its climax in a raucous town meeting — and as Jeremy Strong, as the town’s crusading doctor, was trying to warn his community about an environmental disaster — members of a climate protest group secreted in the audience at Circle in the Square interrupted the action with dissent of their own.What exactly were they dissenting from?Surely not the Ibsen, which aligns closely with their views and is a distant source of them. (The play was first performed, as “En Folkefiende,” in 1883.) Nor does it make sense that they would object to Sam Gold’s crackling and persuasive production, which drove those views home despite having to regroup once the protesters were ejected.After all, “An Enemy of the People,” adapted and sharpened by the playwright Amy Herzog, and starring Strong as Dr. Thomas Stockmann, is a protest already: a bitter satire of local politics that soon reveals itself as a slow-boil tragedy of human complacency.How the satire becomes the tragedy is central to the power of Ibsen’s dramatic construction, overriding its occasional plot contrivances. To emphasize the transition, Gold begins with the warmth of gaslight and candlelight camaraderie. (The superb and varied lighting is by Isabella Byrd.) Dr. Stockmann’s home (by the design collective called dots) looks like a low-walled barge on smooth water, decorated with Norwegian blue-plate patterns. Before anyone speaks, a folk song is sung and a maid sleeps at her sewing.With modesty and steadiness as the givens of this world, the doctor naturally does not expect to be heralded as a hero when he determines that the water supply to the town’s new spa is polluted with potentially fatal pathogens. But he does expect to be heeded.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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      ‘The Notebook’ Review: A Musical Tear-Jerker or Just All Wet?

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      The 2004 weepie comes to Broadway with songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a $5 box of tissues.Romantic musicals are as personal as romance itself. What makes you sigh and weep may leave the person next to you bored and stony.At “The Notebook,” I was the person next to you.You were sniffling even before anything much happened onstage. As the lights came up, an old man dozed while a teenage boy and girl frisked nearby in an unconvincing body of water. A wispy song called “Time” wafted over the footlights: “Time time time time/It was never mine mine mine.”But having seen (I’m guessing more than once) the 2004 movie on which “The Notebook” is based, and possibly having read the 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks, you perfectly well knew what was coming. That was the point of mounting the show, which opened on Thursday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, in the first place.It therefore cannot be a spoiler — and anyway this block of cheese is impervious — to reveal that over the course of the 54 years covered by the musical, the frisky boy, Noah, turns into the dozing man. And that Allie, the frisky girl, having overcome various impediments to their love, winds up his wife. Nor does it give anything away to add that Allie, now 70 and in a nursing home with dementia, will not remember Noah until he recites their story from a notebook she prepared long ago for that purpose.So there’s a reason the producers are selling teeny $5 “Notebook”-themed boxes of tissues in the lobby. Love is powerful. Dementia is sad. The result can be heartbreaking.Or maybe, seen with a cold eye, meretricious.The movie, a super-slick Hollywood affair, did everything it could to keep the eye warm. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, as the young couple, could not have been glowier. The soundtrack relied on precision-crafted standards like “I’ll Be Seeing You” to yank at your tear ducts. The production design, like a montage of greeting cards come to life, celebrated valentine passion, anniversary tenderness and golden sympathy, releasing flocks of trained geese into a technicolor sunset to symbolize lifelong pair bonding.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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      Michael Culver, ‘Star Wars’ Actor and Victim of Darth Vader, Dies at 85

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      Mr. Culver, who was best known for his demise as Captain Needa in “The Empire Strikes Back,” was also a familiar actor on British TV and in theater.Michael Culver, the British actor best known for one of the memorable death scenes in the Star Wars franchise, died on February 27. He was 85.Mr. Culver’s death was confirmed by Alliance Agents, which posted a statement to social media on Tuesday, and his agent, Thomas Bowington. The agency did not give a cause of death, though Mr. Bowington said Mr. Culver had had cancer for several years.He had a long acting career onscreen and stage that spanned over 50 years and included roles in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” on TV and the 1984 film “A Passage to India.”But his most lasting impact on popular culture came in 1980, with his brief role as Captain Needa in the second “Star Wars” film, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Needa, after losing track of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, apologizes to Darth Vader, who promptly chokes him to death telepathically.“Apology accepted, Captain Needa,” Vader says, walking around the captain’s body and motioning for others to take him away.Mr. Culver also appeared in two “James Bond” films with the actor Sean Connery, “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball.”Michael John Edward Culver was born on June 16, 1938, in London to Daphne Rye, a theater casting director, and Ronald Culver, an actor, according to Mr. Bowington.Mr. Culver performed in several Shakespeare plays and worked regularly with the British director Anthony Page, his agent said.Mr. Culver is survived by his second wife, Amanda Ward Culver, and his children, Roderic, Sue and Justin Culver.His son, Roderic Culver, also became an actor, Mr. Bowington said.Later in his life, Mr. Culver mostly gave up acting to focus on politics and would have likely pursued a political career had he not been an actor, Mr. Bowington said.He still visited Star Wars fan events, notably one in Chicago in 2019, his agency said in its statement.“He was lost for words,” it said, “when he saw his queue line with nearly 200 people waiting to see him.” More

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      ‘The Effect’ Review: Dissecting the Science of Desire

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      In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Lucy Prebble’s play, Paapa Essiedu and Taylor Russell are a couple who fall in love during a pharmaceutical trial.A white plastic bucket sits on a spare stage at the Shed, where the director Jamie Lloyd’s stark, riveting production of “The Effect” opened on Wednesday night. By the time its content — a human brain — is revealed, Lucy Prebble’s heady and scintillating drama is already interrogating the biology of desire.What begins as the drug trial of an antidepressant shifts into more slippery territory when a flirtation develops between two of the participants. As they circle each other, neurons blazing, questions swirl about whether their attraction has been chemically engineered — and if love controls the mind or the other way around.The simplicity of a brain plopped in a pail for scientific research becomes something of a mordant sight gag.Previously staged Off Broadway in 2016, “The Effect” digs into what one of the study’s architects calls “nothing short of a revolution in medicine”: drug intervention that considers the psyche a plastic aspect of the self. Lloyd’s production, which premiered in August at the National Theater in London, poses the play’s philosophical inquiries on a stark and minimal plane that feels both cosmic and atomically intimate.During the experiment’s intake, we learn that Connie (Taylor Russell) gets sad but isn’t depressed (“when I’m sad, I’m sad,” she says) and that Tristan (Paapa Essiedu) has a playful swagger, half-flirting with the study’s administrator, Dr. Lorna James (a game and frank Michele Austin), while she asks about his medical history.Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, left, and Austin (with Essiedu and Russell seated onstage), portray the two psychiatrists running the pharmaceutical trial. 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