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      Lincoln Center Theater Chooses Lear deBessonet as Artistic Director

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      DeBessonet, currently the artistic director of Encores!, will work alongside Bartlett Sher, who will serve as executive producer.Lincoln Center Theater, a leading nonprofit theater with a long track record of producing luxe Broadway musical revivals as well as contemporary plays, has chosen new leadership for the first time in more than three decades.The theater’s next artistic director will be Lear deBessonet, 44, a stage director who specializes in musical revivals as the artistic director of the Encores! program at New York City Center. DeBessonet will succeed André Bishop, who has led Lincoln Center Theater since 1992, most recently with the title of producing artistic director; he is retiring in June.DeBessonet will work with Bartlett Sher, 65, a Tony-winning director who is a resident director at the organization, and who will now assume the title of executive producer. DeBessonet will select and oversee the theater’s shows and its day-to-day operations; Sher will focus on strategic planning, fund-raising and global partnerships. They will both report to the board’s chairman, Kewsong Lee.In an interview, DeBessonet said that “there is no greater job I can imagine” than running Lincoln Center Theater. “The American theater is the great passion of my life,” she said. “I’ve wanted to be a director and to run a theater since I was a 5-year-old in Baton Rouge.”The changes come amid a tidal wave of turnover throughout the American theater, prompted by a variety of factors, including the retirements of many regional and Off Broadway theater pioneers, as well as the ousters of some leaders who lost support. Across the industry, leaders are facing a new reality: These jobs have become increasingly challenging as nonprofits face rising costs, dwindled audiences, pressures to feature programming that advances social justice but also sells tickets, and changing entertainment consumption habits.Bartlett Sher, who has been directing at Lincoln Center Theater for two decades, will become the nonprofit’s executive producer. Cindy Ord/Getty Images For Tony Awards ProWe 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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      John Mulaney to Star in a Broadway Comedy About Love and Marriage

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      “All In: Comedy About Love,” a new play by Simon Rich, includes a celebrity cast taking on the roles of pirates, dogs and other zany characters.John Mulaney is coming back to Broadway.The comedian will star in a new play, “All In: Comedy About Love,” staged as vignettes about relationships, marriage and heartbreak and written by the humorist Simon Rich, Mulaney’s former “Saturday Night Live” collaborator.The production, set to feature a rotating group of actors, will be directed by Alex Timbers, who helmed Mulaney’s most recent Netflix special, “Baby J,” as well as his Broadway debut, the 2016 comedy “Oh, Hello on Broadway.”“It’s a weird fantasy camp of things I always wanted to do with my very good friends,” Mulaney said in a video interview.The comedian, who has two Emmy Awards for his stand-up specials “Kid Gorgeous” and “Baby J,” will lead an ensemble cast of four actors portraying pirates, the Elephant Man, dogs looking for love and other characters: Initially, Mulaney will be joined by Richard Kind (“Spin City,” “Mad About You”), Renée Elise Goldsberry (“Hamilton,” “Girls5eva”) and the “S.N.L.” alum Fred Armisen.“We jump around between eras and countries and species, but they’re all love stories,” said Rich, a former “S.N.L.” writer who is making his Broadway debut with the play, which is adapted largely from tales that have previously been published in his 10 short story collections and in The New Yorker.The idea for the show, which will also feature songs from the indie band the Magnetic Fields, came about when Timbers approached Rich about adapting some of his short stories for the stage. And once Mulaney, who first met Rich when they were writing partners on “S.N.L.” from 2008-11, was on board, the built-in rapport between the two proved irresistible, Timbers said.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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      Kara Young Is Charming in Rom-Com ‘Table 17’ Following Her Tony Win

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      The Tony winner leads a top-notch cast in Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production of Douglas Lyons’s hopeful new play.There are certain anxieties you learn to live with as an avid follower of New York theater, and one of them is this: the most extraordinary artists making work for the stage might at any second be whisked off to the more lucrative world of TV and film, never to return.I have had this simmering worry about Kara Young for a few years, and ever since she won a Tony Award in June for her impeccable comic performance in “Purlie Victorious,” the threat level has seemed high. As the fall season begins, though, we are still in luck.Off Broadway, at MCC Theater, Young is channeling her extraordinary charm, and her silent-screen-star expressiveness, into a new romantic comedy, Douglas Lyons’s “Table 17.” An 85-minute romp, it wears its belief in true love — and in theater — rather fetchingly on its archly posed sleeve.Young plays the restlessly single Jada, who tossed her therapist’s cautious advice about her former fiancé out the window the instant he called and invited her to dinner. It’s been seven years since they met at a nightclub and two years since their painful split. Of course she doesn’t want him back — unless he admits to wanting her back, in which case she would be willing to concede, eventually, that the longing is intensely mutual.“From our first silly night on the dance floor, he had me,” she reminisces to the audience as she tries on one possible outfit for their reunion. “And I just knew I had found my person.”Disclaimer to rom-com haters: “Table 17” is not for you. It is, however, for a lot of us — fans of the genre and anyone to whom theater of late has felt more arduous than entertaining. This is a play that wants you to have an amusing, untaxing evening out, and everything about Zhailon Levingston’s alluringly designed production, with its top-notch cast of three, is calibrated in service of that aim.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’ Will End Its Broadway Run in December. A Tour Is Next.

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      The show, nominated for three Tony Awards, opened March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. It will go on a national tour starting next September.“The Notebook,” a musical adapted from the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks, will end its Broadway run on Dec. 15 after struggling to find sufficient ticket buyers during a competitive spring and summer.But this is not the end of the road for the musical. The producers, who announced the closing on Friday, said they plan a national tour of the show starting next September at Playhouse Square in Cleveland; some musicals, particularly those with well-known titles, fare better on tour than in New York.The musical, like the 1996 book and a 2004 film adaptation, is the story of a lifelong romance, told from the point of view of an older couple, one of whom has Alzheimer’s disease. Featuring songs by Ingrid Michaelson and a book by Bekah Brunstetter, “The Notebook” is directed by Michael Greif and Schele Williams.The show began previews Feb. 10 and opened March 14 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. A pre-Broadway production at Chicago Shakespeare Theater had been well-received, but in New York, reviews were mixed; The New York Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, called it “meretricious” (look it up: It’s not a compliment).Onstage, three pairs of actors play the lead characters at different stages of their lives; the musical is set in a coastal mid-Atlantic town in the 1960s, the 1970s and the present day. “The Notebook” was nominated for three Tony Awards but won none.It is the fourth musical to announce earlier-than-hoped-for closing dates since May, following “Lempicka,” “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and “The Who’s Tommy.” Broadway is always a difficult industry, and most shows fail financially, but the odds of success are particularly long now because production costs have risen, audience size has fallen, and there is a high volume of shows competing for attention. At the time of its closing, “The Notebook” will have played 35 previews and 317 regular performances.“The Notebook,” with Kevin McCollum and Kurt Deutsch as lead producers, was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped. More

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      At Edinburgh Festival, Sometimes Simpler is Better

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      The event’s best theater production avoided the gimmicks of other shows in favor of well-drawn characters and well-written dialogue.If you say “Edinburgh Festival” to most people, they’ll probably think of the Fringe. But the Fringe — primarily a showcase of up-and-coming acts from English-speaking countries — is actually an offshoot of the more global, highbrow and judiciously curated Edinburgh International Festival, and the two events run side-by-side.The theater offerings in this year’s International Festival showcase the brightest Scottish talent alongside shows from around the world and fall into two categories: While the international plays are overtly political, encompassing disability rights, antiracism and ecology, the homegrown works explored the more personal terrain of addiction, recovery and self-care.One of the most eye-catching items on the bill was a metafictional spin on “Hamlet” by the Peruvian company Teatro La Plaza, which ran at the Royal Lyceum Theater Edinburgh earlier this month. This production, performed by eight young actors with Down syndrome, charts the journey of a similar, but fictional, group as it prepares to put on a production of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. The actors perform snatches of “Hamlet” — there’s a murdered father, a ghost, a play within a play — and try to connect its story line to disability: Polonius’s protectiveness toward Ophelia, we are told, echoes society’s tendency to infantilize people with Down syndrome.But there isn’t much thematic overlap, and this “Hamlet” is mainly a cipher for the power of storytelling. In a key scene, Álvaro (Álvaro Toledo) sees Jaime (Jaime Cruz) trying to replicate Laurence Olivier’s famous performance in the 1948 film adaptation, which plays on the screen behind him. Álvaro upbraids Jamie for trying to play the part “like a statue.” The message, that people with Down’s must carve out their own paths rather than assimilating to normative expectations, is later reiterated in a defiant punk rock routine.Jaime Cruz in Teatro La Plaza’s “Hamlet.”Jess ShurteThe cast appears in casual rehearsal attire, but a dazzling selection of spotlights (by Jesús Reyes) injects a sense of magic. The actors are capable and immensely charismatic, and there are a number of funny moments including a fake Skype chat with Ian McKellen. But Chela De Ferrari’s script fades toward the end as the concept drowns out the story and the play lapses into a cloying mushiness that sits uneasily with its anti-condescension message.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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      At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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      In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.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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      Sydney Lemmon Puts the Twisted Humanity Behind Tech on Broadway

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      After a small part in “Succession,” the actor has a breakout role in “Job,” in which she plays a content moderator having a mental breakdown.Jane is a young professional living in the Bay Area whom you might find at SoulCycle. The actor Sydney Lemmon has taken that description of her character in “Job” with a grain of salt.The young woman she is presenting to Broadway audiences is not a stereotypical millennial. Instead, Lemmon’s Jane is a formidable vessel of reckless passion, someone who has been shaped by the corporate grind of a Silicon Valley job monitoring the heinous acts that people upload onto social media. She is a self-described “Xanax girlie” white knuckling her way through a mandated therapy session meant to determine whether she is ready to return to work after a psychological breakdown that went viral.Oh, and Jane has a gun, too.“She loves her job,” Lemmon said last week during an interview in her dressing room at the Helen Hayes Theater in Midtown Manhattan. “But the thing that most people seem to connect with when I talk to them at the stage door is her feeling of isolation.”Lemmon has played the character for more than a year, charting an unlikely path in a hit commercial production nearly seven years after she first appeared on Broadway, following her graduation from the Yale School of Drama. Smaller roles in film and television — including a short run on the acclaimed HBO series “Succession” — helped raise her profile within the industry; theater, however, is where she has developed a cult following.Lemmon and Peter Friedman in “Job,” which is running through Oct. 27 at the Helen Hayes Theater.Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times“All of the show was crafted around Sydney,” said Michael Herwitz, the production’s director.“When we cast her, she was absolutely not what we thought we wanted,” he recalled. “We thought Jane was going to be someone demure, a petite white woman who graduated college two years ago and wouldn’t necessarily pose a physical threat.”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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      Tony Winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Returns to Broadway With ‘Purpose’

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      Branden Jacobs-Jenkins had Broadway success this year with a drama starring Sarah Paulson. In February, he’ll return with a new play directed by Phylicia Rashad.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won a Tony Award in June for the Broadway production of “Appropriate,” his blistering play about a white Southern family grappling with some serious baggage.This season, Jacobs-Jenkins will return to Broadway, now with “Purpose,” a stormy play about a Black Midwestern family wrestling with its own legacy.“Purpose,” which had a well-received run earlier this year at Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, is to begin previews Feb. 25 and to open in mid-March at the Helen Hayes Theater. The Broadway production is being directed by Phylicia Rashad, who also directed the play at Steppenwolf; Rashad, best known for “The Cosby Show,” has won two Tony Awards as an actor, for “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Skeleton Crew”; this will be her first time directing on Broadway.Set in contemporary Chicago, “Purpose” is about the Jaspers, a civically engaged family of preachers and politicians. There are some parallels to Jesse Jackson’s family, but the story is fictional.In the play, the family gathers at the home of its patriarch — a civil rights activist and preacher who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — to welcome the eldest son, a politician, home from prison as his wife prepares to serve her own sentence. The gathering is complicated by the presence of the younger son, a divinity school dropout, who shows up with an unexpected friend.The critic Chris Jones, writing in The Chicago Tribune, called it an “absolutely not-to-be-missed” play.Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, with the Tony for best revival of a play for “Appropriate.”Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressPhylicia Rashad, with her Tony for best actress in a play for “Skeleton Crew” in 2022. This will be her Broadway directorial debut.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJacobs-Jenkins, 39, has for a decade been touted as among the nation’s most important young playwrights. He is a two-time Pulitzer finalist (for “Gloria” and “Everybody”), but “Appropriate” was his first play on Broadway. It took so long for it to get there that the production, which starred Sarah Paulson, was deemed a revival and won the Tony Award in that category. Now, Jacobs-Jenkins is working on a musical adaptation of Prince’s “Purple Rain” that will have an initial production in Minneapolis next spring, while also preparing to return to Broadway with “Purpose.” (And before then, he has a new Off Broadway show this fall: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!” at Soho Rep.)“I’m shocked, honored, surprised, confused, nervous,” Jacobs-Jenkins said in a phone interview, referring to having two Broadway plays in a row. “I definitely feel like there’s some kind of turnover: In this post-recovery period, lots of surprising things are happening.”“I feel like suddenly my cohort is stepping into some new space that wasn’t available to us before,” he added.And are “Appropriate” and “Purpose” related? “Not really,” Jacobs-Jenkins said. “But it wouldn’t be ridiculous to read them against each other.”Though the nonprofit Second Stage Theater owns the Helen Hayes Theater, this will be a commercial production. The lead producers include David Stone and Marc Platt, who are the lead producers of “Wicked”; the film producer Debra Martin Chase; the actress LaChanze; and Rashad V. Chambers, Aaron Glick and Steppenwolf. More