Latest news with #Streetcar
Vogue
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Patsy Ferran Is Riding High
She's also been the Blanche DuBois to Paul Mescal's Stanley Kowalski in Rebecca Frecknall's revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, and turned up in the latest installment of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, playing an AI assistant in one of the anthology series' more emotional, meditative episodes. The Spanish-British actor says she felt apprehensive going into Streetcar's recent stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (before that, it had been a hit in the West End). 'We were taking one of the most-loved American plays of all time to New York as a bunch of Brits with quite an unconventional take on it,' she recalls. 'I was truly anticipating potential rejection from an American audience. I knew about going to New York for a year and a half, so I had a year and a half to mentally prepare for a panning.' Eventually, however, Ferran let herself see the experience 'as an experiment.' She explains: 'I thought, Let's just offer something with an open mind and an open heart and see what happens—and if they don't like it, that's totally okay! Cut to preview one, and the New York audience was so vocally generous.' The six-week run quickly sold out as reviewers raved about Ferran's revelatory take on the Southern belle. 'I remember after that first show, we were all staring at each other, wide-eyed on stage, thinking, Oh my God, I think they're loving this!' Ferran goes on. 'Being an actor is a strange thing, because you are presenting yourself as part of the art—you're collectively telling a story, but you're so personally involved. When something doesn't work, I can't help but take it a little personally. It's your face, your body, brain, and soul that's part of the story.' Streetcar is an intense play on its own, but to exit the stage door every night and be confronted with high-octane New York City, too, made the period perhaps the most feverish six weeks of her life. 'Thankfully, my body is very obedient when I have a job to do—and when the writing is so good, and your company of actors are so talented and generous, the job is easier... and dare I say it, fun,' Ferran says. 'But I couldn't have done another show [afterward]! I needed to lie down and not move.'
New York Times
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Works of Art
If you sit close enough to the front of the theater for 'A Streetcar Named Desire' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, you can see Paul Mescal spit and sweat as he stalks the stage as Stanley Kowalski, an artist doing his work in real time and space. It had been a while since I'd seen live theater when I went to see 'Streetcar' a few weeks ago, and I found myself in awe of the very liveness of it. I've grown so accustomed to experiencing culture through screens that I forgot how exciting it is to be in the room where the art is happening, to witness the effort and passion and bodily exertion that go into it. It's not just movies and TV, of course — we're all aghast at how much time we spend on devices, consuming content , whatever that means. Reading and watching and posting and shopping, always shopping for things and ideas and comfort and distraction. Surely this endless marketplace will turn up something that satisfies us at some point! I complained to a friend that I had the blues recently and her advice surprised me in its specificity and simplicity: 'Engage with things that someone put a lot of work into.' This wisdom seemed to cut through a lot of the bargaining I do with myself about how I spend my time. 'Well, it's OK that I spent the last 45 minutes reading the NYCBike subreddit because I learned about how they're ticketing cyclists who run red lights on Second Avenue, which is useful to me as someone who frequently cycles down Second Avenue,' I might rationalize. But if I am determined to engage only with things that someone put a lot of work into, idly reading Reddit is out. So is my habit of scrolling through Instagram Reels of senior dogs. No more using ChatGPT as a therapist — there isn't even a 'someone' in that equation. I had thought my online hygiene was unimpeachable, that I'd skirted many of the mental-health hazards of social media by using it only as a source of impersonal pleasure (no looking at friends' envy-inducing vacation photos, no posting, just the aforementioned old dogs, some fashion stuff, maybe some inspiring quotes from interviews with famous authors). But once I started cutting stuff out and noticed my mood improving, I realized that it wasn't the nature of the content that was making me sad, but the volume. If I sometimes feel like my hard drive is full, then it doesn't matter if what I'm adding to the drive is, on its face, soothing. It's just more stuff, more data, more things to process. By adopting my friend's elevated standard for what's allowed in, I decreased the number of inputs, the number of demands for thought and work and reaction I was requesting of my brain. Of course, there are complications that arise with this rule. 'A lot of work' is a subjective measurement, and often the things that entail a lot of work are expensive, only available to those who can afford them, which risks creating a pretty boring, exclusionary selection for cultural consumption. 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.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kansas City Council approves $2.5 billion budget for 2025-26
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On Thursday, the Kansas City Council approved the $2.5 billion fiscal year 2025-26 city budget. City leaders note the budget prioritizes housing and community development, public safety, public health, and infrastructure improvements while strengthening the city's fund balance to maintain Kansas City's strong economic standing and credit rating. Shawnee man identified in fatal skiing accident in Colorado The budget allocates $341.4 million toward infrastructure and accessibility—a $17.5 million increase from last year, according to the city. This includes: $71 million for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA), with an additional $6.8 million from a budget amendment to support KCATA and $3 million for Vision Zero safety initiatives $2.6 million for operation and maintenance of the Streetcar and its expansion Enhanced funding for snow removal and sidewalk improvements $5 million for Blue Ridge Streetscape and Southwest Boulevard projects Lucas is also sponsoring an ordinance to ensure the maintenance of KCATA's services. During a Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee meeting earlier this week, city council members complained that the KCATA hasn't been transparent with them on what routes they're planning to cut or what their deficit was. 'This $2.5 billion budget reflects our values as a community and addresses the priorities we've heard directly from our residents. By increasing our investment in housing to over $314 million, dedicating nearly $700 million to public safety, and advancing transformative infrastructure projects, we're not just maintaining services—we're enhancing them. This budget delivers on our promises to make Kansas City more accessible, more affordable, and more equitable for everyone who calls it home,' Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a news release Thursday. The city said housing remains a top priority with $314.5 million allocated to support initiatives across the city, a $13.2 million increase from the previous year. This funding will support: Emergency rental assistance programs Expanded emergency shelter services The ZeroKC initiative to end homelessness World Cup Legacy projects The Housing Trust Fund Additionally, $1 million will be direction toward implementing the city's small business strategic plan to prepare Kansas City to fully capitalize on hosting the 2026 World Cup, according to the city. Nearly $700 million will go towards public safety, an increase of over $70 million from the previous year, according to the city, with over $340 million for the Kansas City Police Department and over $320 million for the Kansas City Fire Department. Download the FOX4 News app on iPhone and Android Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
No American Drama Is as Haunted by Ghosts of Actors Past as ‘Streetcar'
'John Garfield should be doing this part, not me.' This declaration of self-doubt was muttered by a scruffy, largely untried 23-year-old actor at the first table read for a new work by a fast-rising young American playwright. The year was 1947; the setting, a rooftop rehearsal space on West 42nd Street; and the play, after some vacillation on what the title should be, 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' Its author: Tennessee Williams. As for that seemingly unsure young actor, who had heard that his role had already been refused by the go-to working-class film favorite John Garfield? His name was Marlon Brando. His raw, eloquently inarticulate subsequent portrayal of a sexually magnetic blue-collar lout named Stanley Kowalski — the role he was reading that day — would not only make him a star but also help to change the very nature of American acting. Brando may have once felt he was trapped in the brooding shadow of Garfield. But that was nothing compared to the shadow Brando's performance — captured for eternity in the 1951 film adaptation of 'Streetcar,' which, like the play, was directed by Elia Kazan — would cast over every actor who dared to portray Stanley Kowalski in the years to come. The latest of this courageous breed is Paul Mescal, who has donned Stanley's historic T-shirt for the director Rebecca Frecknall's London-born production of 'Streetcar,' which runs through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Initially, some doubts were expressed among star watchers about the casting of Mescal, who had become an international heartthrob after he appeared in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney's 'Normal People.' Wasn't he too sensitive, too slender, too young to play Stanley? (Never mind that he was in fact a bit older than Brando had been on Broadway.) But when this latest 'Streetcar' opened in London, critics heaved a gratified sigh of relief. The interpretation by Frecknall, known for her high-concept approaches to classics (including the 'Cabaret' now on Broadway), was unorthodox but persuasive, they said. So was the casting of Patsy Ferran, a last-minute substitute for an injured actress, as the play's heroine, Blanche DuBois, whose fragile illusions are crushed by Stanley, her brutish brother-in-law. The general reaction to Mescal was summed up by Andrzej Lukowski's review in London's Time Out: 'He's good! Actually very good. (Also: stacked.)' (While admiring the play's stars, Jesse Green in his New York Times review, was less enthused about the production in Brooklyn.) Surely, no American drama is as haunted by ghosts of actors past as 'Streetcar.' By that I mean not only Brando, but also Vivien Leigh in the film as Blanche (a part originated onstage by Jessica Tandy). Leigh's interpretation was described by Pauline Kael as 'one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke pity and terror.' By the way, the image of Brando, in his torn T-shirt, caterwauling 'Stellllla!' (the name of Stanley's wife), may have become a meme before there were memes. But it's the Blanches who have generally received the bulk of praise and analysis from critics. In Brooks Atkinson's 1947 review in The Times, it was Tandy to whom he devoted a long paragraph of lyric description. (Brando was cited as one of three cast members who 'act not only with color and style but with insight.') It was Tandy who won a Tony Award the next year, while Brando wasn't even nominated. Leigh, but not Brando, won an Oscar for the movie. Though 'Streetcar' is regarded by many (including me) as the greatest of all American dramas, revivals of it were scant for several decades, perhaps because of the film's continuing hold on the public imagination. (There were two very brief engagements at New York City Center in the 1950s.) Then in 1973, 'Streetcar' received a Broadway revival, starring Rosemary Harris and James Farentino, that reminded New York audiences of its uncommon craft and power. After that, new productions arrived quickly, with a shining assortment of stars enacting the war between Blanche, the fluttering fantasist, and Stanley, the harsh pragmatist, in a shabby New Orleans apartment with their ever-shifting balances of power, between both the characters and the performers. What follows is an annotated list of some of the Blanches and Stanleys who gave life to what Williams, in a letter to his agent before the play opened, described as 'a tragedy of misunderstandings.' Faye Dunaway and Jon Voight Dunaway was said to be an unusually glamorous Blanche, but also 'riveting, original' and unexpectedly funny, Stephen Farber wrote in The Times. Her co-star got off less easily: 'To imitate Brando would be hopeless, but Voight's studious attempt to underplay the role is almost as disastrous.' Blythe Danner and Aidan Quinn Though The Times's Frank Rich felt Danner should have been a natural for Blanche, he wrote that she lapsed all too often into a 'fey eccentricity' more appropriate to Noël Coward. He added that Danner and Quinn, 'both erotic figures in other circumstances, shed no sparks here.' Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin In this case, it was Kowalski triumphant, according to Rich, who wrote of Baldwin, 'His Stanley is the first I've seen that doesn't leave one longing for Mr. Brando,' while filling the play with 'the America of big-shouldered urban industrialism.' Of Lange, Rich wrote, 'The real problem with her Blanche is less a matter of deficient stage experience than emotional timidity.' Elizabeth Marvel and Bruce McKenzie In the first 'Streetcar' I reviewed for The Times, the theatrical demolitionist Ivo van Hove set much of his experimental take on the play in a bathtub. Everyone got naked, everyone got drenched — presumably with the aim of stripping away poses and pretensions. McKenzie's 'scrawny, charisma-free' Stanley didn't survive the immersion, I wrote. (Though it was kind of a hoot to hear an immortal line delivered as 'Stella! … glug, glug, glug … Stella!') But even sopping wet, Marvel delivered 'a performance of remarkable poise and stamina that also locates the tragic, self-defeating conflict in Blanche.' Glenn Close and Iain Glen Close brought an 'uncommon vigor' and 'gymnastic strength' to Blanche, I wrote at the time, while the lithe-bodied Glen appeared merely 'to be impersonating coarseness.' When Stanley wrestled Blanche to the bed in the play's infamous rape scene, 'It's hard to understand why she doesn't just deck him.' Patricia Clarkson and Adam Rothenberg The beguilingly sophisticated Clarkson brought her trademark wit and wryness to Blanche, who emerged here as a calculating strategist and put-down artist instead of a tragic heroine. Rothenberg was an unexpectedly juvenile Stanley. 'While you might think that a boyish Stanley would be the perfect match for Ms. Clarkson's chicken-hawkish Blanche,' I observed, 'there is only a weak sexual current between them.' Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly A profound disappointment. After winning a Tony as the life-bruised, sexually voracious Sally Bowles in 'Cabaret,' Richardson felt like an exciting choice for Blanche. But for the most part, she seemed aglow with good health and confidence here, and rarely vulnerable. Of Reilly, my review noted, 'You sense a real mensch beneath the bluster. Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in 'The Honeymooners.'' Cate Blanchett and Joel Edgerton A pinnacle of my theatergoing life. Liv Ullmann's production firmly restored Blanche to the center of 'Streetcar,' and Blanchett — an actress who always seems to contain multitudes — found every conflicted element of her role's fractured self, as well as a burning vitality. 'What Ms. Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal instinct that keeps her on her feet long after she has been buffeted by blows that would level a heavyweight boxer.' This turned her encounter with Edgerton's Stanley, a figure of fierce and youthful strength, into a mesmerizing prize fight. Rachel Weisz and Elliot Cowan I deeply regret having missed Weisz's Olivier Award-winning Blanche, who was agreed to be a figure of ravishing, melting contradictions. Writing in The Times, Matt Wolf said, 'She is unique among the Blanches I have encountered in communicating afresh the full weight of the delusional Mississippian's need to put on a performance.' Cowan was evidently just fine as Stanley, barring some mush-mouthed difficulties with his Polish/Southern accent. Blair Underwood and Nicole Ari Parker The first all-Black 'Streetcar' to be staged on Broadway, Blanche emerged here for me as 'a lively, self-assured gal, accustomed to manipulating others with her feminine wiles,' while Underwood's Stanley 'comes across as your average overworked husband, understandably testy with that sister-in-law of his always hogging the bathroom.' They exuded 'the ease you associate with actors in long-running television series, for whom banter has become second nature.' Gillian Anderson and Ben Foster Benedict Andrews's stark, cold-eyed, modernized production presented the war between the in-laws as a brutal Darwinian struggle, which brought out the proto-feminist elements in Williams's play. Though the approach largely stripped the play of its poetry, for me, it was highly effective. 'Ms. Anderson endows Blanche with a self-preserving skepticism that is starting to lose its edge,' I wrote, 'and a calculatedly feminine, shrilly Southern persona that feels thoroughly of the moment.' As for Foster's 'effortlessly natural Stanley,' he summoned 'the working-class guy who says he's voting for Donald Trump because he wants America to be strong and virile again.' As I compiled this list, I became newly aware of how carefully weighted the balance between Blanche and Stanley must be if the play is to engage us fully. For a 'Streetcar' to have any dramatic suspense, it requires both erotic chemistry between its leads and a feeling that, until the end, its outcome isn't predetermined — that its combatants are, for a while at least, evenly matched. It's a testament to the mysteries of casting that so many of the stars featured here who didn't make the grade looked so good on paper. As for Brando himself, in his autobiography he writes that in the Broadway production of 'Streetcar,' he felt 'Jessica and I were miscast, and between us we threw the play out of balance.' And as for the role with which he will forever be identified, he said, 'I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski. I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse.'
Los Angeles Times
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran deliver ‘A Streetcar Named Desire' for the ages
New York — Theater lovers undaunted by astronomical ticket prices are flocking to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater to see Paul Mescal as Stanley Kowalski in the Almeida Theatre Company's production of Tennessee Williams' 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' The 29-year-old Irish actor, who shot to fame with the TV adaptation of 'Normal People,' earned an Oscar nomination for his stunning work in 'Aftersun' and became a global megastar with 'Gladiator 2,' flashes his acting chops along with his abs in a revival that reignites Williams' classic. Marlon Brando's watershed performance has seemingly set up all subsequent Stanleys for failure. A few have sneaked in a success, most notably Joel Edgerton, who starred opposite Cate Blanchett's Blanche in the Liv Ullmann production that came to BAM in 2009. But Brando's ghost has a way of hovering over productions of 'Streetcar.' No actor could vanquish the memory preserved for posterity in Elia Kazan's film. Comparisons are inevitable as soon as Stanley starts bellowing his wife's name as though his guts were pouring out of him. Mescal, shrewdly, doesn't even try to compete. He gives us a Stanley preoccupied with his buddies. The women are accessories to a life lived first and foremost among men. The factory plant, the bowling alley and poker night are, along with the bedroom, the main points of his existence. He can't live without Stella but he knows he has a hold on her when the lights are off. The social context that formed Stanley's character is rendered visible in Mescal's performance. 'Streetcar' presents a portrait of postwar America in which masculinity was testing how far it could outrun the determinations of class. Mescal's Stanley is incontestably the leader of his pack, but he's content to fade chummily into the background — a baseball star who's happiest when surrounded by his team. As a result, the balance of theatrical power shifts decidedly to Blanche's advantage. Patsy Ferran, who plays Blanche, is the true revelation in the cast. Her performance restores her character's centrality, so that not even Mescal at his roaring, shirtless best can threaten her standing. Rebecca Frecknall, who directed the recent Broadway revival of 'Cabaret' that made a choppy Atlantic crossing, has brought to Brooklyn the best revival of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' of my lifetime. The production had two touted West Ends runs, but I didn't expect to hear Williams' play as if for the first time. Lines that I could recite alongside the actors resonated in ways that I never expected. The great majority of them are spoken by Ferran, who triumphs where such incandescent talents as Jessica Lange, Blanchett and Natasha Richardson could find only sporadic magic. Until Ferran, the Blanche who left the most potent impression on me was Elizabeth Marvel in Ivo van Hove's 1999 off-Broadway production at New York Theatre Workshop. That was an auteur take on the play that nearly drowned Marvel's Blanche in a bathtub, but her performance was galvanized by the deconstructive assault. What sets Ferran apart is the way she balances the play's poetry and realism, moving with lightning reflexes from crushing naturalism to bold expressionism. Heralded for her Olivier-winning performance as Alma in Williams' 'Summer and Smoke,' Ferran, a Spanish British actress, is completely fluent in the playwright's grand, streetwise lyricism. Accent and idiom are firmly in command as she transitions from Southern Gothic to surrealist horror, never losing sight of a character who's as fragile as she is formidable. Ferran's ragged butterfly Blanche looks at first glance as if she might be blown to smithereens with one gust of Stanley's ferocious lung power. But don't let the wispiness fool you. Pound for theatrical pound, she pushes Mescal's Stanley to the ropes, an apt metaphor for a production that takes place on a raised platform resembling a boxing ring. Like Blanche, Frecknall doesn't want banal realism. A percussionist (Tom Penn, who also plays the doctor in the play's final stretch) and a singer (Gabriela García, who takes on the roles of the nurse and the flower seller) infuse the production with Angus Macrae's moody, jazz-inflected compositions. The music endows the revival with a fluidity that is made all the more haunting by the otherworldly echoes of Peter Rice's sound design. Set pieces are minimal. Chairs are moved around by actors to create new geometric patterns in Madeleine Girling's scenic design. A bottle of booze taunts Blanche on a stage that doesn't give the characters (or the actors) any place to hide. The cast is unshackled from literal realism. At the start of the production, when Blanche arrives at her sister's dumpy apartment, a lithe young man (Jabez Sykes) contorts himself in abstract choreography. It's the ghost of Blanche's husband, who shot himself after she shamed him for his dalliance with another man. This interpolation of Blanche's traumatic memory is one of Frecknall's heavier-handed liberties. But the figure vanishes with the same dreamlike alacrity with which he arrives. In an encounter I had last fall with 'The Streetcar Project,' a bare-bones production of Williams' play, the dramatic poetry was undermined by an exacting TV realism that only threw into relief the weirdness of the story. Frecknall's synchronized ensemble, by contrast, respects the manifold variety of Williams' playwriting. Allegory and brute fact coexist o stage. The characters are grounded in recognizable emotions even as their conflicts are raised to a mythic level. Anjana Vasan's Stella doesn't hold back when she tells Blanche about her sexual connection with Stanley. She boldly celebrates the Dionysian dimension of her marital bond. Yet Stella's pregnancy isn't merely a symbolic plot point. Vasan, who is as supple as she is solid, is costumed to accentuate the physical reality of a woman about to give birth. (Merle Hensel's costume designs take inspiration from the play's stylistic freedom.) Dwane Walcott's 'Mitch,' as he is known to friends, has a diffidence that in Blanche's eyes makes him seem almost gentlemanly among Stanley's boorish friends. She's desperate to find a refuge for herself, 'a cleft in the rock of the world' that she could hide in, as she tells him after her secrets have been exposed. Walcott doesn't play Mitch as a slab of granite. He's soft, easily confused, Oedipally arrested and no saint himself. His masculinity, though less volatile, is as stunted as Stanley's. When Blanche levels with Mitch about her sordid past, Ferran drops the façade in a way I've never seen done before. Here, at BAM, it seems painfully true that the death of Blanche's husband really did drive her to intimacies with strangers. She's not just making excuses to hitch a husband. 'I never lied in my heart,' she tells Mitch, in words that seem plucked from Williams' own soul. Mitch's cloddish rejection of her is all the more devastating after all that she has courageously bared to him. The clash with Stanley that topples Blanche's mind after Stella has gone into labor is just as freshly conceived. Ferran's Blanche puts up a vicious fight, but Mescal's Stanley relishes the roughhousing. He crouches on all fours in his silk pajamas like a panther ready to pounce. No broken bottle is going to keep him from ravaging his prey. The rape scene marks the point of no return in Blanche's tragedy. Her famous parting words as the doctor leads her away, 'Whoever you are — I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,' scalds anew. They are a sighed indictment of a broken world. Ferran, whose theatrical octave range is nothing short of astonishing, earns the sentiment in a way that I wasn't sure was possible at this stage of the play's existence. Stella's admission that she couldn't believe Blanche's 'story' and continue to live with Stanley constitutes an epic betrayal. This self-serving denial, Frecknall's revival suggests, doesn't bode well for Stella's own future. Those carnal delights hardly seem worth it given the violence and mendacity Stanley has shown himself capable of. 'Streetcar' is a domestic drama but also a national one. At BAM, Williams' most famous play is once again diagnosing our spiritual rot.
