Latest news with #theater
New York Times
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
John Conklin, Designer of Fantastical Opera Sets, Dies at 88
John Conklin, a celebrated designer of scenery for opera and theater, who tapped a boundless knowledge of music and art history, as well as an instinct for disruption, to create memorable sets for New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera and, most notably, the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York, died on June 24 in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was 88. His death was confirmed in a statement by Glimmerglass, the nonprofit summer opera company in Cooperstown. Mr. Conklin designed the scenery — and, in some cases, the costumes — for more than 40 Glimmerglass productions, starting in 1991. He remained active with the company even after his retirement in 2008, and he served as the scenic designer for all four shows of this summer's season: 'Tosca,' 'Sunday in the Park With George,' 'The House on Mango Street' and 'The Rake's Progress.' The term 'prodigy' rarely applies to set designers, but Mr. Conklin's instincts were on full display in his youth. Growing up in Hartford, Conn., he attended symphonies and operas with his family, and by 10, he was building his own models, based on photographs he found perusing the magazine Opera News. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Like a rolling stone, the marvellous Girl From The North Country has rocked back up at the Old Vic theatre...and 8 years on, it's even better than the first time round, says Georgina Brown
Girl From The North Country (Old Vic, London) Verdict: Knocking on Heaven's Door Rating: Conor McPherson's play set in 1930's depression era America is thrice blessed: by McPherson's extraordinary talent as a writer and director for creating a mood; by a remarkable ensemble of actors-singers-dancers playing the failures, fugitives and afflicted who inhabit his play; and by a soundtrack of 23 of Bob Dylan 's songs. He is the only playwright whom Dylan has favoured with such an opportunity. Beautifully integrated and transformed by Simon Hale's bewitching arrangements, the music seems to express the near inexpressible emotions of lost souls blowing in the wind. Revived at the Old Vic, where it started life in 2017, it is even more potent this time round. Back then, we wondered if it would work. Now we know it's a work of wonder. McPherson gathers his misfits in a run-down boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota. Best known for his haunting play, The Weir, he has a feel for lives trailed by the ghosts of dreams turned to dust. On Rae Smith's sepia-toned set, hotelier Nick (Colin Connor) is preparing stew for his guests, all in a rut or on the run. Dementia has robbed his wife Elizabeth of all inhibitions. An outstanding Katy Brayben sings like an angel, stamps like a rock star and dances like a whirling dervish. Meanwhile, Nick is failing to persuade his teenage pregnant black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde, marvellous) to accept a 70-year-old widower's offer of marriage. His wannabe-writer son Gene is drowning in rejection slips and drink. His widowed mistress (sparkling Maria Omakinwa) is plotting a way out. The respectable couple with a simple son are hiding something. There's nothing godly about Eugene McCoy's Bible-seller - but there's a true gentleness about Sifiso Mazibuko's once award-winning boxer. The first half finishes with a beautiful, heart-chilling, choral rendition of Like A Rolling Stone but this time, unlike the original production, the evening ends with a redemptive Moving On. Special, and not to be missed. Girl From The North Country is at the Old Vic until August 23. Nye (Olivier, National Theatre) Verdict: The end is Nye Rating: The end is Nye for Rufus Norris as Artistic Director of the National Theatre. His legacy show is a relaunch of last year's play by Tim Price starring Welsh superman Michael Sheen as the Welsh Labour politician Aneurin Bevan — the man who pushed through the foundation of the NHS after the Second World War. It commemorates his life, by recreating key scenes from it, while Nye hallucinates on morphine following surgery for a peptic ulcer in 1959. (The surgery revealed that he was actually dying of cancer.) Price has tweaked the play somewhat but it remains a two-hour 40-minute piece of high-spirited political hagiography. We learn of early experience fighting a speech impediment in an 'I am Spartacus' moment of school room collective action. You could even call it class war. But Nye really finds his voice in Tredegar Council, before becoming the Member for Ebbw Vale in Parliament and getting up the nose of both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. At one point, the ghost of his father takes him down the mines to show him how to bring down the most coal by 'striking' in the right place. With Sheen wearing pyjamas throughout, and the huge green hospital curtains of Vicki Mortimer's stage design acting as veils of consciousness, Norris's production is certainly ingenious. Yet its invention masks a deeply nostalgic and deferential attitude. What could have been a coruscating indictment of today's low-alcohol left feels more like an obsequious and sentimental epitaph. National Theatre, London, until August 16; Wales Millennium Centre August 22-30.
Times
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Poor Clare review — a Bridgerton star turns a saint into a Valley girl
The American writer Chiara Atik's award-winning drama about Clare of Assisi has something of the tongue-in-cheek energy of a Saturday Night Live skit. Here's the idea: Clare may be a 13th-century noblewoman but her speech and thoughts are those of a Valley girl in a high school comedy. Like, totally. The best jokes land well in Blanche McIntyre's production at the Orange Tree, that in-the-round venue where, if you sit in the front row, you're only inches from the actors. Arsema Thomas, one of the stars of Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story makes an assured stage debut in the title role. When she swaps her sumptuous gown (full marks to the designer, Eleanor Bull) for the kind of simple garment worn by her mentor Francis, there's no mistaking her idealism.
National Post
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- National Post
After 200 film and TV roles, Hiro Kanagawa embraces his cultural identity at Stratford
Of the more than 200 film and TV roles Hiro Kanagawa has had in his storied career, he's played about 38 doctors, 32 detectives and eight people with the common Japanese surname Tanaka. Article content But the actor and award-winning playwright, who wrote the stage adaptation of Mark Sakamoto's memoir Forgiveness and has two roles in the production currently at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, said for the most part he's avoided work related to his Japanese-Canadian identity. Article content Article content 'In some ways, Forgiveness is a return or entry into it,' Kanagawa said in a Zoom call from the Stratford Festival where the play runs through to Sept. 27. Article content The play tells the story of Sakamoto's maternal grandfather Ralph MacLean, who was a prisoner of war in Japan in the Second World War, and his paternal grandmother Mitsue Sakamoto, who was sent to an internment camp in Alberta, and what ensues later when their children fall in love and the families learn to forgive. Article content Article content 'The play is absolutely relevant now,' Kanagawa said, reflecting on deportations in the United States and divisions in society. Article content And for Kanagawa, who was born in Sapporo, about 1,170 kilometres north of Tokyo, being surrounded by other Japanese-Canadian artists in the production has been both healing and inspiring. Article content Kanagawa's early life was peripatetic, more of which later, but he ultimately settled in Vancouver in 1990 and did a master's of fine arts in interdisciplinary studies at Simon Fraser University. That's where he wrote his first full-length play. Article content 'The theatre department seemed like the place to make my home during that period, so that's really how I began my career as a playwright,' he said. 'Around that same time, the film and TV industry was really kicking into gear in Vancouver and I very quickly started getting work … Article content 'I woke up one day and there I was — I'd made a living and raised a family and had a career,' the 61-year-old, who has two children with Tasha Faye Evans, said modestly. Article content He's had roles in everything from The X-Files to Altered Carbon. His screenwriting credits include story editing on the critically-acclaimed Canadian series da Vinci's Inquest and Blackstone. His plays, Tiger of Malaya and The Patron Saint of Stanley Park have been performed across the country and Indian Arm scored him the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for Drama. Article content 'A lot of it was not by design, I kind of just went with the flow to some extent,' he said.
New York Times
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Did the Indie Film Studio A24 Buy an Off Broadway Theater?
In the two years since A24, the artistically ambitious film and television studio, purchased Manhattan's Cherry Lane Theater, the historic West Village building has been dark, at least from the outside. But inside, the company behind 'Moonlight,' 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' and 'Euphoria' has been quietly overhauling the facility, and in September Cherry Lane will reopen as the first live performance venue run by the indie powerhouse. The company says it plans a wide-ranging slate of programming, prioritizing theater — Cherry Lane describes itself as the birthplace of the Off Broadway movement — but also featuring comedy, music and film. Another attraction: food. A24 has enlisted the Frenchette Group, which runs several lauded eateries in Manhattan (including Frenchette, Le Rock and Le Veau d'Or), to open a small restaurant and bar at Cherry Lane. The restaurant, called Wild Cherry in a nod to the theater's name, will be Frenchette's second collaboration with a downtown cultural institution — it also operates a bakery cafe inside the Whitney Museum. Among the initial programming highlights will be a Sunday film series curated by Sofia Coppola (first film: Adrian Lyne's 'Foxes' from 1980) and a five-week run of 'Weer,' a one-woman show from the clowning comedian Natalie Palamides (each half of her body plays a different partner in a romantic couple). There will also be a week of opening events, starting Sept. 8, that includes comedy, music, a play reading and a block party. The venue does not plan to announce a season, or to have subscribers — it wants the nimbleness to extend or add events as it goes. 'First and foremost, we really want this to be a place where people can be sure they'll see a great, good quality piece of live performance,' said Dani Rait, who spent a decade at 'Saturday Night Live,' helping to book hosts and musical guests, before A24 hired her to head programming at Cherry Lane. 'And it's an opportunity for discovery — for artists to have a stage and connect with audiences in a really intimate way.' A24 has built a staff of 30 to run the Cherry Lane — some of the employees retained from the theater's previous incarnation. This summer, A24 has been holding a series of private events at the theater to see how it works with audiences in the seats and artists on the stage. There has been comedy by Ramy Youssef, a staged reading of a new play called 'Fabulous Pasta Salad,' and film screenings. Last month, I attended a Cherry Lane album listening event featuring the band Haim. Over the course of an evening the three Haim sisters showed music videos, played audio tracks from their new album, talked about how some of the songs came about and performed one song live. They also made several jokes about hoping A24 would hire them for movie projects (all of them were featured in the film 'Licorice Pizza'). A24's takeover of the 167-seat theater comes at a time of significant commercial investment in an Off Broadway scene long dominated by nonprofits. Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, now operates the Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village; Seaview Productions, a company half-owned by Sony Music Masterworks, is leasing the former Tony Kiser Theater in Midtown, and No Guarantees Productions, backed by Christine Schwarzman, is taking over Astor Place Theater in NoHo, where the Blue Man Group splattered paint and devoured Twinkies for 34 years. A24 is preserving some of the nonprofit programs known as Cherry Lane Alternative, including a playwright mentoring program. And Rait said ticket prices will vary by show, but that 'we're really cognizant of having accessible, not-too-expensive tickets.' Cherry Lane, at 38 Commerce Street, has a long history — it was built in 1836 as a brewery, and in the years since has been a box factory and a gay bar. It has been used for theater since 1924; an adolescent Barbra Streisand had a backstage job there in the 1950s, and she has recorded an audio message welcoming patrons to the reopened theater. Among the theater's other past highlights: Alex Edelman's 'Just For Us' and Nick Kroll and John Mulaney's 'Oh, Hello!', both of which later transferred to Broadway. A24 purchased Cherry Lane in 2023 for $10 million in a partnership with Taurus Investment Holdings. According to a March filing with the New York City Department of Buildings, the company expected to spend $2.3 million renovating the building. The theater is part of the Greenwich Village Historic District, and its exterior has been preserved, along with the signature red doors. Inside, a space previously used as a black box theater and rehearsal area has been converted into the restaurant, with a titanium bar top and green-upholstered booths; there are also a new concession area for food and merchandise in the lobby and additional bathroom facilities. But otherwise, the changes are mostly aesthetic and technological — new lighting and sound systems; new seats and spiffy new carpeting; projection equipment and a retractable movie screen; upgraded dressing rooms; wall curtains for when the auditorium is used in 'cinema mode.' (Rait said she expected occasionally, but not exclusively, to screen A24 films.) The company is not requiring the theater to program work by artists who make films or television programs with A24, and is not looking to the theater to develop stories for film or television adaptation, although both of those things are likely to happen from time to time. And the company is not planning to use the theater for film premieres — it's too small — although there could be special events with film tie-ins. A24 executives have made a practice of not talking to reporters on the record, but a company official, speaking on background, said that the studio had been considering the possibility of a live performance venture for about a year before Cherry Lane came on the market. The company, which is headquartered in New York and has distributed or produced more than 200 films and television shows in the 13 years since its founding, had already expanded from film into television, following the interests of its artists, and thought a physical space might have similar appeal, both for film and television artists interested in live storytelling, and for A24 fans looking for new ways to connect to the brand. (The company already has a membership program, backs a beauty brand and has partnered with a talent management company.) The official said the company is not expecting to make significant money at Cherry Lane, given the small seating capacity, but that it would like the venture to become self-supporting over time. 'We're first and foremost trying to make this a live destination in New York, and have the space be where people come to enjoy great live performance,' Rait said. 'There's an opportunity for this to be a discovery hub for A24, and our ecosystem of artists that have worked with A24 is really excited about this endeavor, but it really stands on its own and is its own thing.'
