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      Review: It’s No Sunday in the Park With ‘Lempicka’

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      A musical about the groundbreaking Art Deco painter is vocally thrilling but historically a blur.Having dismissed her work as merely decorative, a fierce Italian gives harsh advice to an ambitious young painter: “You need to be a monster,” he brays. “Or a machine.”The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the advice in real life because it was never given. But “Lempicka,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, certainly did, and then some. It’s a monster and a machine.A machine because it argues, with streamlined efficiency, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and ’30s, Lempicka forever changed the representation of women in art, and thus changed women themselves. The volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead breasts that so titillated Jazz Age Paris became, the show suggests, today’s template for glamazonian feminism.As for “monster,” well, efficiency is not always pretty. Among the values compromised in the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historical precision. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, and later a fascist. But the scene in which Lempicka studies art with him is, like many others, made up.Does that matter in a musical that admits it is “inspired” by life, not faithful to it? Are there perhaps greater values than truth in play?Natalie Joy Johnson, left, as Suzy Solidor and Iman as Rafaela in “Lempicka,” directed by Rachel Chavkin.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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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More

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      Review: In ‘The Outsiders,’ a New Song for the Young Misfits

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      The classic coming-of-age novel has become a compelling, if imperfect, musical about have-not teenagers in a have-it-all world.For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with eyewitness authority to teenage alienation. Even if its poor “greasers” and rich “socs” (the book’s shorthand for society types) now seem like exhibits in a midcentury angst museum, their inchoate yearning has not aged, nor has Hinton’s faith that there is poetry in every soul.These tender qualities argue against stage adaptation, as does Francis Ford Coppola’s choppy, murky 1983 movie. (It introduced a lot of young stars, but it’s a mess.) The material doesn’t want sophisticated adults mucking about in it or, worse, gentling its hard edges for commercial consumption. Harshness tempered with naïveté is central to its style and argument. To turn the novel into a Broadway musical, with the gloss of song and dance that entails, would thus seem a category error worse even than the film’s.And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened on Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see.Also key to the show’s power is the director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.Some of those sobs came from teenagers, who can’t have seen in recent musicals many serious attempts at capturing the confusions of youth. Though witches, princesses and leaping newsboys can be entertaining, their tales are escapes from reality, not portraits of it. From the start, “The Outsiders” is gritty — literally. (The stage is covered with synthetic rubber granules that kick up with each fight and footfall.) There is no sugarcoating the facts as Hinton found them: Her Tulsa, Okla., is an apartheid town, the greasers subject to brutal violence if they dare step into the socs’ territory or, worse, lay eyes on their girls.But the unavoidable cross-clan romance — between the 14-year-old greaser Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and the soc Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) — is something of a MacGuffin here. The score, by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, gives them just two songs, neither really about love.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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      Nonprofit Theaters Are in Trouble. Lawmakers Are Proposing Help.

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      Proposed legislation would allocate $1 billion annually for an industry coping with rising expenses and smaller audiences.The financial crisis facing nonprofit theaters in America has captured the attention of Congress, where a group of Democratic lawmakers is introducing legislation that would direct $1 billion annually to the struggling industry for five years.That money could be used for payroll and workforce development, as well as other expenses like rent, set-building and marketing. But the legislation, which lawmakers plan to introduce on Tuesday, faces long odds at a time when a divided Congress — where Republicans control the House and Democrats lead the Senate — has had trouble agreeing on anything.Nonprofit theaters around the country have reduced their programming and laid off workers to cope with rising expenses and smaller audiences since the coronavirus pandemic began. There are exceptions — some nonprofit theaters say they are thriving — but several companies, including New Repertory Theater in suburban Boston, Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, and Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, have ceased or suspended operations in response to the crisis.“It hasn’t been a recovery for the nonprofits — they’re really lagging compared to many other sectors in the economy, and it’s for a lot of reasons,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one of the legislation’s sponsors, said in an interview. “So they do need help.”Mr. Welch argued that the organizations merit government assistance because they strengthen communities and benefit local economies.The legislation, which is called the Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act of 2024, is also being sponsored by Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon is sponsoring it in the House.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the majority leader and who led the fight to win government aid for performing arts organizations during the pandemic, is supportive of the proposed legislation and is also open to other ways to assist nonprofit theaters, according to a spokesman.The pandemic aid package that Mr. Schumer championed serves as a precedent: In 2020, Congress passed the Save Our Stages Act, which led to a $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that made money available to a wide array of commercial and nonprofit performing arts organizations.Mr. Welch said the earlier aid program succeeded despite initial skepticism.“With everything else that was going on, the expectation was this would die on the vine, but it didn’t — as this started getting momentum, there was excitement about being about to do something concrete,” he said.The new legislation is narrower, benefiting only professional nonprofit theaters, and only those that have either seen a decline in revenues or that primarily serve historically underserved communities.“This is a beginning,” Mr. Welch said. “There are obstacles, but let the effort begin.” More

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      Rachel McAdams Is Not Afraid of the Dark

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      The actress makes her Broadway debut in “Mary Jane” as the single mother of a seriously ill child. She views her acting choices as expanding her orbit.From the outside, you wouldn’t know that Rachel McAdams, the thoughtfully charming star of blockbuster rom-coms, rom-drams, a Marvel franchise and the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” has been wondering about death.Maybe it has to do with the therapist who said that her indecisiveness and deep curiosity about seeing through someone else’s eyes, which she’s harbored since childhood, could be chalked up to something called “death anxiety.”McAdams had long viewed her acting choices as expanding her orbit. “It’s been a way to live a lot of lives in one,” she said. If that was about a fear of dying — well, it didn’t rattle her.Instead, characteristically, she embraced it. “We don’t have a lot of great coping mechanisms for death in our culture,” she said. “So, yeah, I kind of welcome the opportunity to lean into that — earlier rather than later. Let’s get cozy with it. Let’s get cozy with that next adventure.”Death hovers like a specter around her latest role, as the single mother of a seriously ill child, in the play “Mary Jane.” McAdams hasn’t done theater since college; she makes her Broadway debut as the title character in this Manhattan Theater Club production, which began previews April 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It’s by the busy playwright Amy Herzog, who also adapted Broadway’s show of the moment, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”“Mary Jane” is the first of her own deceptively spare plays to appear on Broadway, after a celebrated run in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop. Dotted (surprisingly) with laugh lines, it’s about the daily muck and lasting profundity of caregiving, a nitty-gritty subject that’s rarely dramatized. “A heartbreaker for anyone human,” Jesse Green wrote in his New York Times 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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      Christopher Durang, Playwright Who Mixed High Art and Low Humor, Dies at 75

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      In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown.Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.An acid, impish writer, Mr. Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.“He’s so scaldingly funny,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. “You laugh with horror at what’s going on and your sheer inability to do anything about it.”But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was often a strong undertow of melancholy.Mark Alhadeff and Cynthia Darlow in a 2014 production of Mr. Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” at the Actors Company Theater in New York.Marielle SolanWe 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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      Christopher Durang, the Surrealist of Snark

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      In works like “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” the playwright would force you to laugh, not to dull the pain but to hone it.Pickpocketing Chekhov for dramatic capital is almost a rite of passage among playwrights, but only Christopher Durang invested the loot in beefcake.In his play “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” Vanya and Sonia are more-or-less familiar transplants from the Russian hinterlands to Bucks County, Pa., dithering so much about the purpose of life that they neglect to have one. Masha, though a movie star, is a Chekhov type, too: endlessly fascinating, especially to herself.But you will not find Spike anywhere in the canon; a jovial, amoral, ab-tastic himbo, he is apparently unfamiliar with the function of clothes. They keep coming off.Durang, who died on Tuesday night at 75, was likewise a stripper, peeling the pants off serious theater, both to admire and ridicule what it was packing beneath. When “Vanya” won the Tony Award for best play in 2013, it was the culmination of a writing life spent remaking the respectable precedents and characters of the past in the snarky image of his own times. Drama became comedy, but then — surprise! — swung back toward drama, then swung back again, never quite settling. In making us laugh and then demanding a retraction, Durang became an absurdist Neil Simon for a post-great generation.Billy Magnussen as Spike, with Genevieve Angelson as Nina, in Lincoln Center Theater’s 2012 production of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOften enough, the laughing was of the can’t-catch-your-breath variety, further dizzying the ambivalence of the culturati by punching both high and low. I didn’t see any of the plays and sketches he wrote while a student at the Yale School of Drama in the early 1970s, often collaborating with pals like Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep, Albert Innaurato and Wendy Wasserstein, but the titles tell you a lot: “Better Dead Than Sorry,” “The Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor,” “When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth,” “The Idiots Karamazov.”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 Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

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      Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.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