Latest news with #PhoenixTheatre
Business Recorder
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Business Recorder
‘Stranger Things' play wins Tony Awards, setting stage for TV series finale
NEW YORK: With bloody body contortions, booming blasts and brooding high school angst, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow,' based on the 12-time Emmy-winning Netflix science fiction series 'Stranger Things,' took home Tony Awards on Sunday for best scenic design, lighting design and sound design of a play along with a special award for its illusions and technical effects. Miriam Buether, the scenic designer for 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' reflected on the journey of creating frightening moments on stage. 'We love scaring people,' she said backstage at the ceremony hosted by 'Wicked' film star Cynthia Erivo. The play, directed by Stephen Daldry, was nominated for five Tony Awards in total, including best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play for Louis McCartney for his performance as Henry Creel, the younger version of the main antagonist of the 'Stranger Things' series who is later called Vecna. 'Stranger Things: First Shadow' is one of the expansions of the 'Stranger Things' universe created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, who announced the launch of Upside Down Pictures in 2022, marking an overall deal with Netflix that will also include a live-action Stranger Things spin-off series. The series has spawned video games, cosplay, in-person immersive experiences and merchandise licensing deals, including the January 2025 deal with the company behind the popular Squishmallow plush toys. Last month, at Netflix's globally livestreamed fan event called 'Tudum Live,' it was announced that the 'Stranger Things' TV series would have a fifth and final season split into three parts, with part one on November 26, 2025, part two on December 25, 2025 and the series finale on December 31, 2025. The final season of 'Stranger Things' was delayed by dual Hollywood strikes in 2023. Trump-inspired Cantonese opera in Hong Kong aims to bring love and peace 'Stranger Things,' the story of a group of adolescent friends in rural Indiana in the 1980s who battle creatures from an alternate dimension called the 'Upside Down,' premiered on Netflix in 2016 and became a smash hit created by the Duffer brothers for the streaming platform. The play, produced by the Duffer brothers, takes audiences back in time to 1959, two decades before the period explored in the TV show. Jim Hopper and Joyce Maldonado - adult characters in the TV show - are seen as high school classmates with normal teen concerns about cars and classes until a new student named Henry arrives. Henry Creel is an odd and troubled boy that holds the future of the small town of Hawkins, Indiana in his hands. The New York cast includes 'Harlem' actor Burke Swanson as Jim Hopper, 'Shameless' actor Alison Jaye as Joyce Maldonado and McCartney as Henry Creel, who reprised his role after being in the London production. The monster-filled play debuted in London in 2023 at the Phoenix Theatre and made its New York Broadway debut in March 2025 at the Marquis Theatre.
TimesLIVE
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
‘Stranger Things' play wins Tony Awards, setting stage for TV series finale
With bloody body contortions, booming blasts and brooding high school angst, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, based on the 12-time Emmy-winning Netflix science fiction series Stranger Things, took home Tony Awards on Sunday for best scenic design, lighting design and sound design of a play along with a special award for its illusions and technical effects. Miriam Buether, scenic designer for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, reflected on the journey of creating frightening moments on stage. "We love scaring people," she said backstage at the ceremony hosted by Wicked film star Cynthia Erivo. The play, directed by Stephen Daldry, was nominated for five Tony Awards, including best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play for Louis McCartney for his performance as Henry Creel, the younger version of the main antagonist of the Stranger Things series who is later called Vecna. Stranger Things: First Shadow is one of the expansions of the Stranger Thing s universe created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, who announced the launch of Upside Down Pictures in 2022, marking an overall deal with Netflix that will also include a live-action Stranger Things spin-off series. The series has spawned video games, cosplay, in-person immersive experiences and merchandise licensing deals, including the January 2025 deal with the company behind the popular Squishmallow plush toys. Last month, at Netflix's globally livestreamed fan event called 'Tudum Live', it was announced the Stranger Things TV series would have a fifth and final season split into three parts, with part one on November 26 2025, part two on December 25 2025 and the series finale on December 31 2025. The final season of Stranger Things was delayed by dual Hollywood strikes in 2023. Stranger Things, the story of a group of adolescent friends in rural Indiana in the 1980s who battle creatures from an alternate dimension called the "Upside Down", premiered on Netflix in 2016 and became a smash hit created by the Duffer brothers for the streaming platform. The play, produced by the Duffer brothers, takes audiences back in time to 1959, two decades before the time explored in the TV show. Jim Hopper and Joyce Maldonado, adult characters in the TV show, are seen as high school classmates with normal teen concerns about cars and classes until a new student named Henry arrives. Henry Creel is an odd and troubled boy who holds the future of the small town of Hawkins, Indiana in his hands. The New York cast includes Harlem actor Burke Swanson as Jim Hopper, Shameless actor Alison Jaye as Joyce Maldonado and McCartney as Henry Creel, who reprised his role after being in the London production. The monster-filled play debuted in London in 2023 at the Phoenix Theatre and made its New York Broadway debut in March 2025 at the Marquis Theatre.
STV News
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- STV News
Calls to save Aberdeen Arts Centre as £660,000 needed to plug funding gap
Aberdeen Arts Centre needs to raise more than half a million pounds to keep its doors open, after a surge in running costs caused a funding gap. For more than six decades, the beloved venue has been popular with dancers, actors, musicians and artists who have tread the boards at the theatre on King Street. Home to over 35 local groups, Aberdeen Arts Centre is seeped in the rich history and culture the city has to offer. But now it's future looks uncertain. Eve Nicol from Aberdeen Arts Centre told STV News: 'We'll probably have to look at pulling back some of our really crucial services that people are relying on to bring that joy and breath of fresh air to their week, whether that's coming to see stuff on the stage or taking part in our weekly drama and art classes. 'If we're having to reduce the stuff that we're able to do, that's just a little light going out in people's lives and what we're really here to do is to shine a spotlight on Aberdeen's creative community.' STV News Eve Nicol from Aberdeen Arts Centre Around £660,000 will need to be raised over the next three years – with an initial target of £180,000 by July. The appeal has already been backed by many famous faces, such as Call the Midwife actress Laura Main. Campaigners say the venue is vital for the next generation of performers. Clare Haggart from Phoenix Theatre said: 'It's a very, very special place. The size of the venue is important, because it means so many local companies, dance schools, performing groups, musicians, anything like that can perform here. It's affordable but it's a lovely venue, you can sit anywhere in the auditorium and you'll have a great view of what's happening on stage.' STV News Numerous theatre groups perform at Aberdeen Arts Centre At the heart of Aberdeen Arts Centre is the people, giving local performers and artists opportunities to learn their craft and shine on stage. But those behind the organisation say rising costs have caused a funding gap and without urgent support, they may be forced to close their doors. Campaigners have only a few weeks to raise thousands of pounds – but they're determined to keep the curtain up and the spotlight shining. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Vecna on Vecna: How two actors inhabit the big bad of ‘Stranger Things'
Jamie Campbell Bower was smoking outside London's Phoenix Theatre in late 2023, during intermission of the stage play 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow,' when director Stephen Daldry spotted the English actor and made an unconventional ask: Could Bower — who was there as a uniquely invested theatergoer — step onstage during the curtain call and take a bow?
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carey Harrison, son of Rex, offbeat writer of avant-garde plays and champion goat breeder
Carey Harrison, who has died aged 80, was the son of the actor Sir Rex Harrison and made his own mark on stage and screen as a playwright; he was also an undercover anti-apartheid activist and champion goat breeder. A Daily Telegraph interviewer in 1990 found Harrison 'tall, bearded and attractive in a rather rumpled way', and recognisable as the son of Sir Rex by 'the familiar crinkle around the grey eyes' and his 'palpably charming, slightly hesitant manner'. He ploughed an artistic furrow very different from that of his matinée idol father, however. Whereas his half-brother Noel Harrison made use of their father's contacts to pursue a career as a singer and television actor, Carey puzzled his family – 'they felt I was an alien in their midst' – by becoming an avant-garde dramatist. 'I grew up with extraordinary people around our dinner table: Noël Coward (who told me I was the reincarnated version of himself), Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and John Gielgud,' he told the Telegraph in 2013. 'They were very sweet to me, but at the same time I think they put me off the pursuit of fame because it never seemed to make them happy.' His first play, an offbeat literary comedy called Dante Kaputt!, was staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1966. Among more than 40 subsequent stage plays were Twenty-Six Efforts at Pornography (1968), Madcap (a Pirandello adaptation, 1976) and Midget in a Catsuit Reciting Spinoza (2011); many were premiered at the Byrdcliffe Theatre, an arts venue in Woodstock, New York. To subsidise his theatrical work he wrote episodes of popular television series such as Take Three Girls, Nanny, By the Sword Divided and the 1990s reboot of Doctor Finlay. His outstanding TV venture was the BBC's six-hour biographical mini-series Freud (1984), starring David Suchet; Harrison subsequently turned his script into a novel. He also wrote dozens of radio plays, including Harrison's Bigwigs (1995), a series of portraits of 17th-century notables, with a cast including Gielgud and the author himself. In 2005 the Telegraph's radio critic Gillian Reynolds named Hitler in Therapy, Harrison's play for the World Service, as 'the best listening experience of the year'. He was born Rex Carey Alfred Harrison, in London, on February 19 1944. His mother was the German film star Lilli Palmer, the second of Sir Rex Harrison's six wives. Rex (né Reginald Carey) Harrison did not find his newborn son prepossessing, declaring on first sight: 'Darling, he's ours and we love him, but don't let's show him to anyone.' After the war Carey lived with his parents in Hollywood and later in New York, in a grand house with a pool; Esther Williams taught him to swim. Lilli Palmer told an interviewer in 1951 that she had promised him 'a wonderful childhood … in return [for] complete obedience' with the result that 'at seven, Carey's a highly civilised little human being'. With his parents often away working, however, he was essentially raised by governesses. He was educated at the Lycée Français in New York before being sent back to England to board at Sunningdale and Harrow, spending alternate holidays with his mother and father after they divorced in 1957. He went on to read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he met his lifelong friend Eric Idle, whose son Carey was named in his honour. In his memoirs, Idle recalled Harrison as 'a polymath' in their student days: 'I watched him on the train home [from a trip to the Dordogne] carry on four simultaneous conversations – with a Frenchwoman in French, an Italian businessman in Italian, a German traveller in German, and me in demotic English – in his deeply rich Harrovian voice.' Harrison trained as a theatre director in Leicester, where his early plays were staged, and went on to work for the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier. His first television play, In a Cottage Hospital, was broadcast by ABC in 1969. Active in Left-wing causes, in 1972 he was recruited by exiled ANC members to join a secret network nicknamed the London Recruits. Harrison and his wife, the writer Mary Chamberlain, arrived in Cape Town in the guise of migrants in search of a new life; in fact their aim was to distribute subversive literature, secreted inside false bottoms in their luggage. Aware that the mission was dangerous – they were warned, Mary Chamberlain recalled, that 'inciting resistance by force would carry a hefty sentence, preceded undoubtedly by torture' – they spent several months in Cape Town, travelling all over the city in order to purchase some 7,000 stamps, in small batches to avoid suspicion. They then posted the 7,000 books they had smuggled – Harrison driving around Cape Town, his wife dashing out of the car to place the parcels in postboxes a few at a time – to selected addresses. By the time they returned to Britain they had done much to demonstrate to journalists and other professionals that the ANC, despite its leaders having been imprisoned or driven abroad, was still a going concern. Harrison's politics were a puzzle to his vehemently Right-wing father, and they never really connected. 'I had a great fondness and admiration for him, but was wary of giving too much of myself to him, because he didn't have much time for his children,' he recalled after Sir Rex's death in 1990. For several years Harrison lived in East Anglia while lecturing at the University of Essex and raising goats. 'I was a sort of hippy, except that in my half-German soul there's an organised and regimented competitive side. That led to me showing my goats and winning rosettes: something no good hippy would allow himself to do.' For several years he was editor of the British Goat Society Year Book. In 1990 he decided to 'explore the German part of me' by means of Richard's Feet, a 650-page novel about an English lawyer who fakes his death and sets up as a pornographer in postwar Hamburg. Described by the Telegraph's Patrick Skene Catling as a 'brilliant, appalling, gigantic novel', it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and followed by three vivid sequels, all attempting to get to the bottom of how Germany had produced 'the best philosophers, the best music, [and] also … the death camps'. For the last 25 years of his life Harrison found a berth as Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. As well as staging his plays in New York he began to act in them, including the role of his own father in his 2013 drama Rex and Rex. Twice divorced, Carey Harrison is survived by his third wife, Claire Lambe, whom he married in 1992, and by three daughters and a son. Carey Harrison, born February 19 1944, died January 22 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
