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☆ ‘Mean Girls’ Review: ‘Get in, Loser,’ Regina George Is Back
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-11 | by ( Manohla Dargis | More About Manohla Dargis | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Can a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a film comedy that in turn was based on a parenting book be any good? Sure — if only because the writer-producer Tina Fey and the producer Lorne Michaels have made sure that little has changed in their money-printing property since the first movie hit theaters in 2004. It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact. There, she meets nerds and jocks, alphas and betas, and attracts the notice of the queen bee, the aptly named Regina (Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway). Flanked by her vassals, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Regina reigns supreme at school where, as the student body’s most attentively studied subject, she is feared, desired and loathed, at times simultaneously.

Persons: Tina Fey, Lorne Michaels, Elvis Mitchell, Mark Waters, Lindsay Lohan, Ben Brantley, It’s, ingratiating, Fey, Cady, Reneé Rapp, Gretchen, Bebe Wood, Regina Organizations: New York Times Locations: Kenya, Regina

☆ Stephen Sondheim Doesn’t Want to Be Your Savior - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-25 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It should be noted that, when he was alive, Mr. Sondheim was aware of and amused by rampant tendencies to deify him. Consider this sardonic ditty from a show called “Sondheim on Sondheim,” a 2010 Broadway revue commemorating his 80th birthday. He wrote the song in response to a 1994 headline in New York magazine that asked, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” His musical answer: “You have to have something to believe in. There’s a half-voiced fear among musical acolytes, understandable in a time in which theater itself is newly under siege, that on some level Stephen Sondheim represents the end of the line for a once-flourishing art form. Yet none, with the qualified exception of Mr. Miranda, seem likely to engender the kind of enduring, passionate cult that Mr. Sondheim has inspired.

Persons: Shakespeare, Auden’s, Yeats, Mr, Sondheim, ”, “, Stephen Sondheim God, I, Stephen Sondheim, Lin, Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Michael R, Jackson, Jeanine Tesori, Miranda, Sondheim’s Locations: ”, New York, There’s

☆ Revisiting ‘The Light in the Piazza’ Through an Asian American Lens
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-18 | by ( Matt Stevens | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Miles was at the top of the Encores! list for the role of Margaret. She recalled learning English while growing up in Hawaii as her Korean language skills diminished and becoming frustrated with her mother’s stubborn accent and lack of concern, unlike her friends’ parents, about things like having nice clothes. Over time, she said she even developed a sort of bitterness toward her mother. “And so I carry all of these stories and these ideas with me when we’re building Margaret,” she said.

Persons: Miles, Margaret, Ben Brantley, Miles “, ” Ramos, Tony, “ Sweeney Todd, ” Organizations: Broadway Locations: United States, South Korea, Hawaii

☆ Glenda Jackson, an Unnervingly Energizing Presence at Every Age
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-15 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

She didn’t so much enter the restaurant as erupt into it, a fast-burning blaze of psychic exasperation that seemed to set the silverware rattling. Glenda Jackson was five minutes late for our meeting, and she looked ferociously disgusted with herself, with the universe, with the “bloody” London transit system and, most likely, with the prospect of having to talk about herself. Such was my first in-the-flesh encounter with Jackson, who died Thursday at the age of 87 and who had seared herself into my teenage consciousness decades earlier as an uncompromisingly modern, sui generis movie star. Waiting for her five years ago in the restaurant of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, I had been prepared to be awed, intimidated, even terrified. What I hadn’t anticipated was how unnervingly energizing the presence of this 81-year-old woman would be.

Persons: Glenda Jackson, Jackson, seared, Edward Albee’s “, Ken Russell’s “, ”, John Schlesinger’s, — Organizations: Broadway Locations: London, Trafalgar

☆ The Cathartic Value of Dame Edna’s Extravaganzas of Ego
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Or Surreal Housewife, if you prefer. Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself. Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia.

☆ Glenda Jackson on Quitting Parliament, Playing Lear and Returning to Broadway
▼ + stars: | 2018-02-20 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

(Her father was a bricklayer; her mother cleaned houses and worked in shops.) When she began to audition professionally, she was told she could expect only character parts. (Their son, Dan, would grow up to become a political columnist; Ms. Jackson now lives in the basement flat of the house he shares with his wife and son.) In 1963, she was invited to audition for a Royal Shakespeare Company season devoted to the Theater of Cruelty. It was just calling on so many things that I hadn’t realized were possible in acting.”

Persons: “, ”, Glenda Jackson, Roy Hodges, Dan, Jackson, Peter Brook, Brook, Christine Keeler, Jackie Kennedy Organizations: Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Royal Shakespeare Company, Theater, Cruelty Locations: Cheshire, Northern England, London

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