Latest news with #MinettaLaneTheatre
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Hugh Jackman seen SMILING in public after ex Deborra-Lee Furness' shock divorce statement
Hugh Jackman has been spotted in public for the first time since his ex Deborra-Lee Furness filed for divorce, and he didn't seem bothered as he brushed off the drama. The 56-year-old actor exited his off-Broadway play 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes' around 5pm on Friday to greet fans who stood outside New York City 's Minetta Lane Theatre eager to catch a glimpse of him. witnessed the actor in high spirits and was all smiles as he signed his autograph, took photos with adoring fans and even gave some a hug. The Deadpool and Wolverine star, who changed into comfy shorts and a T-shirt, didn't seem bothered by his divorce playing out in the news as he was focused on making the fans happy since they had waited outside over half an hour since the play had ended. He told the crowd, 'Thanks for waiting,' and made sure to thank them for coming, even asking some fans how they were doing. As he made his way to a nearby Citi bike rack, fans continued to approach him and he made sure to give each and every one attention. A few minutes after socializing with fans, he hopped on his Citi bike and rode away. Before Hugh exited the theater, his costar Ella Beatty - Warren Beatty and Annette Bening's 25-year-old daughter - left the theater separately and also took the time to greet fans and sign autographs. When asked about working alongside Hugh, who she has steamy kisses with onstage, she told 'I love Hugh. He's the most wonderful person.' She refused, however, to comment on how he's holding up amid his ex's divorce filing. Instead of responding, she kept quiet and continued to greet fans. revealed earlier this week that the 69-year-old Australian producer had filed a petition for divorce in New York on May 23, nearly two years after they announced their separation. In fact, everything between the couple had been ironed out behind the scenes since multiple court documents on behalf of Furness' attorney were also filed, including the settlement, a proposed judgment of divorce, and certificate of dissolution. All that needs to be done now is for the judge to sign off on the judgment. Furness shocked fans by releasing a statement using the word 'betrayal' when speaking about her 'traumatic journey.' In a statement sent to Deborra-Lee said, 'My heart and compassion goes out to everyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It's a profound wound that cuts deep, however I believe in a higher power and that God/the universe, whatever you relate to as your guidance, is always working FOR us.' She continued, 'This belief has helped me navigate the breakdown of an almost three-decade marriage. I have gained much knowledge and wisdom through this experience. Even when we are presented with apparent adversity, it is leading us to our greatest good, our true purpose. 'It can hurt, but in the long run, returning to yourself and living within your own integrity, values and boundaries is liberation and freedom.' She concluded her statement with the 'one thing' that she has learned, which is 'that none of this is personal,' adding, 'We are all on our individual journeys and I believe that the relationships in our lives are not random. 'We are drawn to people, we invite them in, in order to learn our lessons and to recognize and heal the broken parts of ourselves...I remain grateful.' After Furness' shock statement, a source had revealed exclusively to Jackman's 'bitter reaction' to her statement. Jackman was blindsided by her words, the source spilled, as he believed they had an 'understanding' they would not publicly trash one another after having a 'secret agreement.' 'Hugh was extremely disappointed after reading what his ex had said,' the insider explained. 'There was no stipulation that she could not address this but there was an unwritten understanding that she would not trash him to the press. 'She got around this by not naming him - instead focusing on how she felt.' The couple had been married for 27 years and have two adopted children together - their son Oscar, 24, and a daughter Ava, 19. Furness has received a 'handsome spousal support payment,' according to an insider who spoke to which she is 'pleased with.' 'There was some back and forth regarding this financial agreement but, in the end, she got what she believed she deserved,' the source added. 'Both are coming out of this financially secure.' A separate source said the divorce is 'non contested,' meaning there was not a major disagreement between the couple divorcing. 'They have worked out the details in advance and everything is ironed out in terms of a settlement, alimony and the expenses for the future of their children,' they said. 'They are amicable and they are both fully committed to being the best parents that they can be.' Jackman, who is dating Sutton Foster and was seen walking hand-in-hand with her days before the filing, is 'looking forward to the future and not looking back.'
Wall Street Journal
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Creditors' Review: Liev Schreiber's Master Manipulator
New York The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was long dead before the term passive-aggressive was first coined during World War II, subsequently to become so ubiquitous as to be rendered almost meaningless. But his 1889 play 'Creditors,' being revived off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre in a sharp and stimulating production, offers a master class in the psychological manipulation the term loosely describes.
Chicago Tribune
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Dead Outlaw' on Broadway is an unlikely musical with a lot of life
NEW YORK — Most great Broadway musicals are about mortality. From 'Les Misérables' to 'The Lion King,' they preach that we don't die but live on in another form. But very few Broadway musicals are about corpses. Actually, I'd venture that's a genre of precisely one musical (well, arguably two if you include 'Fun Home,' set partly in a funeral home). Now landing in the dog days of the 2024-25 Broadway season, 'Dead Outlaw' is a deliciously sardonic little tuner from the cheerfully nihilistic, ever anti-sentimental, ever macabre team of David Yazbek (music, here alongside Erik Della Penna), Itamar Moses (book) and David Cromer (direction). Cromer has turned his Broadway attention from the Hollywood superstar George Clooney in 'Good Night, and Good Luck' to a mummified dude in a matter of days and coaxed decent if understated performances from both. Marketers for 'Dead Outlaw,' a decidedly unlikely Broadway attraction that has moved uptown from the Minetta Lane Theatre with original cast intact, have focused on the novelty value of a musical about a dead body, but that really doesn't tell you much, even if the first titled number in the show goes, helpfully, by 'Dead.' (Investing in this show sure took some guts.) The singing corpse in question here is that of real-life outlaw, a man vividly named Elmer McCurdy, born in Maine in 1880 and variously a plumber, lead miner and boozer who decided that robbing banks and trains was a more lucrative way to pay for his whiskey. In 1911, following his holding up a Katy Train, or what McCurdy thought was a Katy Train, he got himself shot dead by a sheriff's posse. Dead, but not buried until 65 years later. Luckily for Andrew Durand, who plays McCurdy, we see some of the story of the living McCurdy, as musically narrated by the macho Jeb Brown, leading a fiery on-stage country-rock band. We watch Elmer rob and drink and see his failed relationship with a young woman (quirkily but plaintively played by the terrific Julia Knitel). But most of 'Dead Outlaw' is about dead Elmer's body, which for a variety of amazing-but-true reasons does not actually make into the ground for decades, instead being profitably embalmed, mummified and exploited by a variety of hucksters, carnies, businessmen and believe-it-or-not entrepreneurs until the actual living history of the corpse had been forgotten (there's a sting in the show's tail I won't reveal). As he sings, looking and acting like the late Brian Dennehy, only with a better voice, Brown keeps reminding us, dryly, that we're watching a true story. For good reason. It's that improbable. Along the way, there is some comedy so dark only a mortician could fully appreciate the gags; indeed, one coroner (played with giddy abandon by Thom Sesma) has one of Yazbek's most enjoyable tunes to sing, a self-actualizing number that you imagine is pent up inside every buttoned-down medical examiner. Of course, the setup here requires Durand to play dead for great swaths of the show. Sans visible breath, he twitches not a stitch, even twisting his digits into the kind of weird position one imagines comes easily to a corpse. At one point, Cromer and his gifted Chicago-based lighting designer, Heather Gilbert, combine for what must be the best lighting cue of the entire Broadway season as a pinhole spot lands on Durand's face for what feels like several minutes as the audience holds its breath, not knowing whether the corpse will speak, stay dead or break into song, the show fully understanding the possibilities posed by the magic of theater. It's consummate Cromer and indicative of a highly unusual and highly skilled performance by a very game actor who also sings beautifully while his character is alive. This craziness apparently was Yazbek's idea. He and Della Penna (best known as Natalie Merchant's guitarist) have a lot of fun with their internal rhymes and by contrasting gorgeous music of romantic longing with characters who have no actual access to their own feelings. But when combined with Moses's very shrewdly toned book, the show does explore substantial themes, beyond its immediate purpose of persuading an audience not just to confront the certainty of their own death (always fun on a Saturday night) but their own corporal decay. The show notes that nothing ever was truly sacred or revered on the American frontier, the living and the dead all attracting their price, all susceptible to transactional exploitation. The notion lingers that not so much has changed. I've no idea how the modestly scaled, 100-minute 'Dead Outlaw' will fare in the Midtown marketplace, or if enough of the touristically curious will eschew the familiar and abandon the reliably living for a gander at the truly distinctive. If you choose the one with the corpse, know that this weird show is very much alive.
Los Angeles Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Dead Outlaw,' a musical about a famous corpse discovered in Long Beach, makes its way to Broadway
NEW YORK — 'Dead Outlaw,' the offbeat musical from the team behind the Tony-winning musical 'The Band's Visit,' isn't mincing words with the title. The show, which had its official opening Sunday at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, tells the story of the unsuccessful career of a real-life bandit, who achieved more fame as a corpse than as a man. Born in 1880, Elmer McCurdy, a crook whose ambition exceeded his criminal skill, died in a shoot-out with the police after another botched train robbery in 1911. But his story didn't end there. His preserved body had an eventful afterlife all its own. 'Dead Outlaw,' a critics' darling when it premiered last year at Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre, may be the only musical to make the disposition of a body an occasion for singing and dancing. David Yazbek, who conceived the idea of turning this stranger-than-fiction tale into a musical, wrote the score with Erik Della Penna. Itamar Moses, no stranger to unlikely dramatic subjects, compressed the epic saga into a compact yet labyrinthine book. Director David Cromer, whose sensibility gravitates between stark and dark, endows the staging with macabre elegance. Yet Yazbek, Moses and Cromer aren't repeating themselves. If anything, they've set themselves a steeper challenge. 'Dead Outlaw' is more unyielding as a musical subject than 'The Band's Visit,' which is to say it's less emotionally accessible. It's not easy to make a musical about a crook with a volatile temper, an unslakable thirst for booze and a record of fumbled heists. It's even harder to make one out of a dead body that went on exhibition at traveling carnivals and freak shows before ending up on display in a Long Beach fun house, where the mummified remains were accidentally discovered by a prop man while working on an episode of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' in 1976. Stephen Sondheim might have enjoyed the challenge of creating a musical from such an outlandish premise. 'Dead Outlaw' evokes at moments the droll perversity of 'Sweeney Todd,' the cold-hearted glee of 'Assassins' and the Brechtian skewering of 'Road Show' — Sondheim musicals that fly in the face of conventional musical theater wisdom. As tight as a well thought-out jam-session,'Dead Outlaw' also recalls 'Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,' the Michael Friedman-Alex Timbers musical that created a satiric historical rock show around a most problematic president. And the show's unabashed quirkiness had my theater companion drawing comparisons with 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch.' Andrew Durand, who plays Elmer, has just the right bad-boy frontman vibe. The hard-driving presence of bandleader and narrator Jeb Brown suffuses the production with Americana authenticity, vibrantly maintained by music director Rebekah Bruce and music supervisor Dean Sharenow. Elmer moves through the world like an open razor, as the title character of Georg Büchner's 'Woyzeck' is aptly described in that play. A précis of Elmer's early life in Maine is run through by members of the eight-person cast in the bouncy, no-nonsense manner of a graphic novel. The character's criminal path is tracked with similar briskness — a fateful series of colorful encounters and escapades as Elmer, a turbulent young man on the move, looks for his big opportunity in Kansas and Oklahoma. Destined for trouble, he finds it unfailingly wherever he goes. Elmer routinely overestimates himself. Having acquired some training with nitroglycerin in the Army, he wrongly convinces himself that he has the know-how to effectively blow up a safe. He's like a broke gambler who believes his next risky bet will bring him that long-awaited jackpot. One advantage of dying young is that he never has to confront his abject ineptitude. Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design turns the production into a fun-house exhibit. The band is prominently arrayed on the box-like set, pounding out country-rock numbers that know a thing or two about hard living. The music can sneak up on you, especially when a character gives voice to feelings that they can't quite get a handle on. Durand can't communicate emotions that Elmer doesn't possess, but he's able to sharply convey the disquiet rumbling through the character's short life. There's a gruff lyricism to the performance that's entrancing even when Elmer is standing up in a coffin. But I wish there were more intriguing depth to the character. Elmer is a historical curiosity, to be sure. And he reveals something about the American moneymaking ethos, which holds not even a dead body sacred. But as a man he's flat and a bit of a bore. And the creators are perhaps too enthralled by the oddity of his tale. The show is an eccentric wallow through the morgue of history. It's exhilarating stylistically, less so as a critique of the dark side of the American dream. Julia Knitel has a voice that breaks up the monochromatic maleness of the score. As Maggie, Elmer's love interest for a brief moment, she returns later in the show to reflect on the stranger with the 'broken disposition' who left her life with the same defiant mystery that he entered it. I wish Knitel had more opportunity to interweave Maggie's ruminations. The unassuming beauty of her singing adds much needed tonal variety. The musical takes an amusing leap into Vegas parody when coroner Thomas Noguchi (an electric Thom Sesma) is allowed to strut his medical examiner stuff. Ani Taj's choreography, like every element of the production, makes the most of its minimalist means. Wanderingly weird, 'Dead Outlaw' retains its off-Broadway cred at the Longacre. It's a small show that creeps up on you, like a bizarre dream that's hard to shake.
