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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

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      Review: ‘The Hills of California,’ Alive With the Sound of Music

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      In Jez Butterworth’s compelling new play, four girls trained to sing close harmony wind up as acrimonious adults.Two sounds greet you at the start of “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s relentlessly entertaining new play: the crashing of waves on the beaches of Blackpool and the tinkling of a tinny piano being tuned.Both are plot points: The story concerns a musical family operating a rundown resort on the west coast of England. “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are among the marvelous oldies you’ll hear sung during the course of the action.But the crashing and tuning are thematic points, too. Though frequently funny and, even at nearly three hours, swift, “The Hills of California,” which opened on Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater, drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song.It does so within a familiar stage format — familiar in life, alas, as well: the dying-parent drama. In 1976, the four Webb sisters reunite at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse (which is neither luxurious nor within sight of the sea) as their mother, Veronica, who ran the place for decades, under several desperate versions of the name, expires upstairs.Jillian, the youngest, has failed to thrive; she’s a 32-year-old virgin who lives at home, chatters nervously and secretly smokes. The others have run as far from Blackpool as they could: Ruby and Gloria into unhappy marriages hours away; Joan, the oldest, toward a dream of fame in California. Whether she has achieved that dream is an open question; she has not been back home since she left at 15, and only Jillian believes she will return even now.All this is efficiently established in the play’s opening scene, which is so sharply and subtly directed by Sam Mendes, and so vividly performed by the cast, you hardly notice all the information you’re being fed: tics, conflicts, personalities, pecking order. Then, just as you’ve finally attached everyone’s names to their faces, Butterworth rewinds to 1955, when the sisters, played by a new set of actors, are teenagers and Veronica is a terror.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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      ‘Titaníque’ Was Her Big Hit. Is ‘Big Gay Jamboree’ Really Her Swan Song?

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      Two years after debuting the “Titanic” parody, Marla Mindelle says her new show, with Margot Robbie as a producer, may be her last as an actor.There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.The cast of “The Big Gay Jamboree” at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village.James Estrin/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: What’s Eating Trump? The Singing ‘Ghost of John McCain’

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      The former senator haunts the former president, or vice versa, in this sophomoric musical satire.Usually, critics wait until a show is running to slam it, but Meghan McCain broke the embargo. By more than five months.“This is trash,” she posted on social media on April 2. “Nothing more than a gross cash grab by mediocre desperate people. I hope it bombs.”Perhaps she can be forgiven her haste for distaste. “Ghost of John McCain,” the show she was pre-emptively attacking, is about her father, who died in 2018. A musical satire that pictures him in purgatory — bedeviled by Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton and a pole-dancing Lindsey Graham in a studded pink dog collar — probably seemed unlikely to be reverent.If only irreverence were the problem! But the show that opened on Tuesday at SoHo Playhouse turns out to be, in its muddled way, something of a love letter. It’s just a bad one.Start with the title, which promises a posthumous haunting of America by the former Arizona senator but mostly delivers a familiar and unfunny indictment of Trump. McCain and the other characters are figments of 45’s fevered imagination, imprisoned in his brain (depicted as a three-star hotel) until they admit that he is “the greatest president who’s ever lived.” For McCain that means abandoning what he considers his legacy as a principled politician and maverick Republican.This baroque and entirely internal conflict puts the title character in a dramaturgical purgatory even worse than the theological one. He’s essentially stuck playing Trump’s game, with no agency of his own. It’s Trump who thus scores the few smart zingers in Scott Elmegreen’s unruly book: “You started Trumpism,” he tells McCain. “When you picked Sarah Palin.” Palin, McCain’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election, then shows up shooting an already dead wolf at close range with a shotgun.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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      ‘Forbidden Broadway’ Review: Let Them Somewhat Entertain You

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      From its perch way Off Broadway, the long-running satire slings its affectionate arrows at Patti, Audra and the rest.At its best, topical satire, which is what the “Forbidden Broadway” franchise has been slinging for 42 years, is both timely and well targeted. The timeliness means that audience members know the material being ribbed; the targeting makes sure they know why.Admittedly, timeliness is a vague concept when your subject is Broadway, where the targets recur at regular intervals. It’s thus not a big problem that many of the songs in the show’s latest edition — which opened on Thursday at Theater 555 in the far west reaches of Hell’s Kitchen — send up musicals and performers that Gerard Alessandrini, who created, writes and directs the series, has sent up before.But the targeting in this outing, subtitled “Merrily We Stole a Song” in a nod to the flood of Sondheim revivals, including “Merrily We Roll Along,” is too often hazy. The opening number, repurposing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” from “Guys and Dolls” as “Sit Down, You’re Blocking the Aisle,” feels like a title that went looking for a topic. (It’s about rude patrons.) A segment about the upcoming “Gypsy” revival posits the unlikely idea that Audra McDonald is haunted by the ghosts of previous Roses. (“Merman’s gotta let go!”) Having to admit that Lincoln Center’s revival of “South Pacific” was terrific (even if its “Camelot” was “horrific”) turns a Tchaikovsky-themed takedown of that institution into a shrug.To be sure, those numbers, and most of the others, are performed well by the four-person company, if rarely as well as they would be if performed by the people they are parodying. That’s a built-in problem when satire has little to satirize; if the worst snipe you can take at McDonald is that she’s a glorious soprano and Merman wasn’t, you’re not going to be able to throw much shade.Punching wild is also a problem here. Instead of using relevant songs to make his points, Alessandrini sometimes conscripts baffling outliers into service. A takeoff called “Great Gatsby for Dummies,” featuring a wicked Jeremy Jordan impersonation by Danny Hayward, is paired with the irrelevant song “Good Morning” from a 1939 movie. And a running gag in which Doc Brown and Marty McFly visit Broadway past and future, with a young Sondheim strangely in tow, is so in the weeds it has ticks. (It does, however, offer a glimpse of the 23rd century’s Ozempic Theater.)Punches perfectly thrown at the ripest subjects provide the evening’s better moments, even if some of the low blows are mere sideswipes. Of Ariana DeBose’s recent award show hosting, Alessandrini writes: “A girl like that/Could kill the Tonys.” Chris Collins-Pisano does a deadly Ben Platt channeling Liza at the Palace in his recent run there: “Everybody loves charisma/So nobody loves me.” And a rewrite of “The Ladies Who Lunch” provides Jenny Lee Stern, a longtime “Forbidden Broadway” standout, with the opportunity for a pithy comment on Patti LuPone’s extreme mannerisms in the 2021 “Company” revival: “I’ll sink to that.”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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      ‘You’re Basically on a Broadway Stage, With New Friends’

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      At the touring dance party Broadway Rave, the playlist is all show tunes. But don’t worry, no house remixes of “I Dreamed a Dream” here.Julia Cochrane drove for four hours, to New York from Boston, so she could spend last Saturday night immersed in all things Broadway. But not in Manhattan.Instead, she headed to Huntington, Long Island. There, over 100 people packed into Spotlight at the Paramount, a small bar attached to a concert hall, for a touring dance party called Broadway Rave, at which theater kids turned theater adults dance and sing onstage in between shots of tequila.“People who love this, they just want to come together,” said Cochrane, 22, who attended with her friend Hannah Opisso, 23, a Long Island resident who learned about the dance party via Instagram. “It’s like you’re basically on a Broadway stage, with new friends.”“You see these folks get onstage and have the courage to be up there,” said Ethan Maccoby, whose company presents Broadway Rave.Ye Fan for The New York TimesCochrane and Opisso met as students at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh, where Broadway cast albums were their pregame music of choice. Last weekend, Broadway musicals brought them together again, and at one point they took the stage to sing “Meet the Plastics” from the “Mean Girls” musical.Attendees don’t have microphones — this isn’t karaoke — but they are encouraged to rush the stage to sing and dance when their favorite songs come on. And the term “rave” is a misnomer: The playlist is mostly uncut cast album material — though last weekend those theater fans may have caught the remix flair at the beginning of “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats.” Other songs that night included “Out Tonight” (“Rent”), “Popular” (“Wicked”), “Sincerely Me” (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and a few tracks from “Hamilton,” including “The Schuyler Sisters” and “Wait for It.”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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      ‘Counting and Cracking’ Review: One Family’s Tale Fit for an Epic

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      No theatrical wizardry is needed for this compelling drama about a woman’s journey to Australia from war-torn Sri Lanka and the generations that follow.Some shows use an extended running time to challenge the audience and its perceptions. Pulling viewers into a trance state and testing their endurance is the ultimate artistic gambit.Then there are the shows that are long simply because they have a lot to tell.Such is the case with “Counting and Cracking,” which fills its three and a half hours with an absorbing tale of family ties and national strife, from Sri Lanka to Australia, across almost five decades. When the first of two intermissions arrived, I had barely recovered from a head-spinning plot twist. And the production, which is at N.Y.U. Skirball in partnership with the Public Theater, had more in store. It’s that kind of good yarn.Written by S. Shakthidharan, who drew from his own family history and is also credited with associate direction, “Counting and Cracking” starts in 2004 Sydney. The show opens with Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera) briskly instructing her son, the 21-year-old Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar), to disperse his grandmother’s ashes in the Georges River, and then immerse himself in the water, as required by tradition.“In Tamil we don’t say goodbye,” Radha tells Siddhartha. “Only, I will go and come back.”As the show progresses, we gradually realize what these words really mean to her, and to her family and community. In 1983, when she was pregnant and living in her home country of Sri Lanka, Radha was told that her husband, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), had been killed in the budding civil war between the minority Tamil and the majority Sinhala. She fled the violence and settled in Australia, where she gave birth to a child who would grow up largely unaware of his heritage.At a steady clip, Shakthidharan and the director Eamon Flack (also credited with associate writing) hopscotch between Sydney and Sri Lanka, from the 1950s — when the South Asian nation was still known as Ceylon — to the 1980s and 2000s and back again. Even the language is in constant movement as the 16 actors juggle English, Sinhala and Tamil, providing instant translation when necessary.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: Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow Clean Up in ‘The Roommate’

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      A Bronx grifter and an Iowa homebody share a house and eventually learn from each other in this Broadway star vehicle.“Expansion is progress,” Sharon says sweetly, parroting a phrase from a business journal for the benefit of her new roommate, Robyn.A ditsy 65-year-old divorcée, Sharon is a convert to the virtues of new ventures — even illegal ones — after years of a life in which options for growth seemed few.But Robyn, who encouraged the experimentation from the minute she arrived to rent a room in Sharon’s Iowa City home, is alarmed by the change from meek to monster. A plate of pot brownies for the book club ladies is one thing; larceny is another. “Sustaining and expanding,” she warns, “are two different activities.”Because Robyn is played by the surgically funny Patti LuPone, that line, not especially amusing in itself, gets a big laugh. And because Sharon is played by the preternaturally sympathetic Mia Farrow, her every hiccup and dither evokes a sigh.Most of what either woman says in “The Roommate,” which opened Thursday at the Booth Theater, is greeted by one or the other response. The two actors, old friends and old hands, play beautifully off each other, expertly riding the seesaw of a play, by Jen Silverman, that throws a Bronx grifter looking to reform herself into an unlikely alliance with a flyover frump looking to ditch her flannel ways. The actors’ intense focus and extreme contrast multiply the material exponentially, sending it way past the footlights to the back of the Booth.But as we’ve learned, sustaining and expanding are two different activities. Indeed, the Broadway supersizing of “The Roommate,” which has been produced regionally since 2015, does not necessarily represent progress, even as it no doubt reaps profit.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