In his first term, President Trump took issue with some actors, arts funding and the media. In his second, he has hit the accelerator. Changing what Americans see and hear at their national museums, their performance spaces and on television is now at the core of his agenda. Mr. Trump views it as an effort to return to a lost visio...

When an obscure play called “The Kholops” opened in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2024, many Russians raced to see it, fearful that the authorities would quickly shut down the production. The play’s exploration of a censored and repressive society resonated deeply with those living in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, and the production see...

On a recent night in Midtown Manhattan, about 60 people dressed in suits, shimmering white, black and silver ball gowns, and masks were ushered into a dimly lit upstairs room.Inside, more than a dozen actors in colorful cloaks and towering headpieces took them by the hand, danced with them and murmured in their ears, plunging them...

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

See how many novels you can connect with phrases from the plays of William Shakespeare.

Choreography is not the same as directing, but every great choreographer has a director’s sixth sense. That sense steers dancers, trained or not, to commit to movement with crystalline conviction, and it can see the big picture with the body as narrator.Dance places a frame around what is ephemeral; it shows the mind how bodies can...

LiberationBess Wohl’s bittersweet comic memory play, an Off Broadway hit early last year, slips between the present and 1970, when, in the basement of an Ohio recreation center, the playwright’s mother meets with her feminist consciousness-raising group to try to change the world. Whitney White directs the original cast, led by Sus...

Over 2,100 yards of blue, white and gold silk cascaded from the ceiling of the Grand Theater of the City of Luxembourg recently, flowing to the floor like a waterfall. Performers thrashed underneath a vast silken sheet that looked like a stormy sea. Cannons shot balls of the lustrous fabric that unfurled midair before landing to le...

Sometimes plays aren’t just ripped from the headlines, they are happening in real time alongside them. So it is with Matthew Libby’s “Data,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, in which a brilliant young computer programmer, Maneesh (Karan Brar), finds himself at the center of one of the most contentious issues of the moment — immigration —...

A lot of dreams have come true for Marc Shaiman, Broadway songwriter, soundtrack savant, Jewish Eeyore and human Spotify. (Go ahead, ask him: He knows every song.) And yet each fruition seems to have prompted an equal and opposite karmic blowback. In 2012, after bragging to his mother that he’d “rehearsed with Billy Crystal all day...

Finally, some good news for the Broadway musical. “The Outsiders,” a roots-rock-fueled show that makes stage magic out of adolescent rivalries, has become profitable.The production, which opened in April 2024 and won the Tony Award for best new musical two months later, has recouped its $22 million capitalization costs, one of the...

Robert Heide, who began his career as a playwright and ended it granting interviews to historians and becoming part of countless anecdotes in books and articles about the cultural life of downtown Manhattan, died on Dec. 17. He was 91.His death, at a Manhattan nursing home, was caused by complications of dementia, his spouse, John...

“I try not to write dystopia,” the playwright Jordan Harrison said. “Because it’s boring. I like to sit in an ambivalent place.”This was on a recent Monday, Harrison’s day off, and he was sitting in an airy and uncrowded Brooklyn cafe. A lunchtime utopia, it was also a teasingly analog place to discuss Harrison’s recent work, sweet...

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On a recent afternoon at The New York Times’s studio kitchen, the actors Finn Wolfhard and Natalia Dyer, who play siblings on Netflix’s megahit horror series “Stranger Things,” surveyed a smorgasbord of u...

In our era of hyperpolarization, much of our art this year seemed to agree on one thing: The best vantage for exploring our times was from the political middle.It was a thought that grew as I saw works of film, stage and TV that explored ideas of racial injustice become some of this year’s biggest critical and commercial successes....

“The Queen of Versailles,” the biggest-budget production to open on Broadway this fall and the only large-scale new musical, aspired to be a cautionary tale about consumption and greed. Instead, it wound up as a cautionary tale about Broadway.The show, based on a 2012 documentary about a couple seeking to build America’s largest pr...

On a gold-tinged morning at Appleyard College, a senior named Miranda wakes singing a foreboding melody. Her heartbeat is hammering, and she’s caught somewhere “between lost and free.”There’s perhaps no better metaphor to encapsulate “Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Musical,” a psychedelic show based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel. That...

The musical was already one of theater’s biggest success stories. Then came Hollywood.

Roald Dahl probably didn’t have stage adaptation in mind when he published his much-loved children’s story “The BFG” in 1982. The titular “big friendly giant” — an endearingly inarticulate vegetarian who spends his nights dispensing happy dreams to sleeping children through a magical “dream blower” — is 30 feet tall. And his antago...

ArtThis genteel comedy by the French playwright Yasmina Reza (“God of Carnage”) has always been a magnet for boldface-name casts, and this revival is no exception. Neil Patrick Harris plays Serge, a dermatologist whose purchase of an exorbitantly expensive white-on-white painting becomes a point of conflict among him and his old fr...

On a recent night at the Savoy Theater in London, the 1,100-capacity audience burst into applause when a crowd of actors rushed into the wings, leaving a tiny figure alone onstage.It was a 4-foot-tall bear from Peru with a sign around his neck asking someone to “please look after” him.As the set behind him transformed into a bustli...

“Beaches,” the tearjerking 1980s novel-turned-movie about female friendship, will be staged on Broadway next spring, when the long-in-development musical arrives for a limited run before going on tour.The show, attempting an unusual strategy in response to the difficult economics of Broadway, plans to run just under 24 weeks in New...

Six women of various ages sit, awkwardly, on metal folding chairs placed in a semicircle on the dimly lit basketball court of a local rec center. They are completely naked, clearly uncomfortable, and talking haltingly about what they like and don’t like about their bodies.“I hate my nostrils,” says one.“I do love my brain,” says an...

“Titaníque” started as a drunken idea: What if Celine Dion not only sang the theme song in James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic,” but also claimed to be a survivor of the ship’s sinking?Ridiculous, right? But, also, funny. That idea, bandied about by a group of friends in a Los Angeles bar a decade ago, led to a spoof musical that w...

America’s regional theaters are facing difficult times: staging fewer shows, employing fewer workers, and running deficits more frequently than before the pandemic.But not all of them are struggling. Some are booming.In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Repertory Theater has finished the first phase of an $80 million renovation of its three-the...

‘A Christmas Carol’Stream it at Summoners Ensemble Theater in New York City and the Alley Theater in Houston.In New York, an immersive production of the holiday classic from London’s Old Vic offers storytelling and song-singing to audiences at the Perelman Performing Arts Center. And the annual, intimate staging returns at the Merc...

In an era of niche culture, algorithmic bubbles and online echo chambers, it’s harder than ever to have broad appeal, but these 10 performers managed to turn heads by being bold, breaking away from the pack.TelevisionOwen CooperImageIn an episode of “Adolescence,” Jamie squares off against a psychologist (Erin Doherty, who won an E...

At the very first rehearsal of the new Off Broadway play “This World of Tomorrow” our director, Kenny Leon, stopped us after two minutes — two minutes. “I don’t want to hear how you are saying the lines,” he told us actors. “I want to hear what you are saying.”We may have been focused on our dialects, but he was listening for the l...

They didn’t have fog like this back on the farm in Minnesota, and Anna Christopherson adores it. At nighttime on the deck of the barge her father captains, anchored off Provincetown, Mass., she soaks it in: the enveloping stillness, and the romance.Life on the water is brand new to her, but it feels like what she’d been seeking all...

In 2010, the French director Olivier Py was rehearsing an opera in Amsterdam when another show caught his eye. Playing across the street was a Dutch production of “La Cage aux Folles,” the 1983 Broadway musical about a same-sex couple who work in a drag cabaret. Py immediately got a ticket, and the performance left him “overwhelmed...

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Elisabeth Vincentelli, a contributing writer for the Culture section at The New York Times, never considered herself an expert on holiday films. She grew up in France, where Christmas just wasn’t as big a...

The authorities in Japan said on Thursday that Jeremy O. Harris, the Tony-nominated playwright and actor, was arrested last month on suspicion of attempting to smuggle in illegal drugs.Mr. Harris, 36, has been in custody in Japan since Nov. 16, when he flew into Okinawa, the southern Japanese island, and customs officers at Naha Ai...

Chloé Zhao had always thought of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet” as a revenge play.But her understanding of the work was upended when she began working on a movie chronicling events that shaped the play’s creation — adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 historical fiction novel “Hamnet,” which follows Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes,...

D.L. Coburn, whose play “The Gin Game,” about two prickly residents of a retirement home baring their souls over hands of cards, won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for drama, ran for 517 performances on Broadway and has been performed around the world — but who struggled ever after to have new plays reach the stage — died on Dec. 3 in Dal...

“Little Bear Ridge Road,” a new and well-reviewed American family drama starring Laurie Metcalf as a tough Idaho nurse whose determined isolation is punctured when an estranged nephew comes to town, will close on Dec. 21, eight weeks earlier than scheduled.The play is notable as the first produced by Scott Rudin since he stepped aw...

There are no happy endings in life — only endless confusion, regret and recrimination. This take-home message from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 musical, “Into the Woods,” doesn’t exactly scream festive cheer.But the method of delivery is too delightfully silly to resist, and a new revival of “Into the Woods,” at the Bri...

On an afternoon last month at La Jolla Playhouse, the director Christopher Ashley was everywhere — at the lip of the stage, on the stage, then at a desk balanced across a row of seats in the darkened auditorium, then crowded around a piano in a rehearsal room, helping an actress learn a new version of a song. He whispered with acto...

In some ways, Jack Thorne’s version of “A Christmas Carol” feels like its own Ghost of Christmas Past. It first played in New York on Broadway — having premiered at London’s Old Vic Theater — in late 2019, just before Covid led to an 18-month shutdown of Broadway. That production was praised for restoring the story’s social conscie...

Long before he became an unlikely political force, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was just another 20-something trying to squeeze a laugh out of his Saturday improv class in Manhattan.“I went to Magnet Theater for Improv Level One,” Mamdani said of that winter in 2017, when his eight-week course at the Chelsea theater ended in a studen...

The Japanese authorities said on Tuesday that Jeremy O. Harris, the Tony-nominated playwright and actor, had been released after spending three weeks in custody on suspicion of attempting to smuggle illegal drugs into the country.Mr. Harris, 36, was arrested and taken into custody on Nov. 16 when he flew into Okinawa, the southern...

Juan Quiroz believes that nearly any dog can be a circus dog. “Dogs, they are smart,” he said. “They find a way.” Not every dog can do every trick, and breeding matters. The short-legged, long-bodied dachshund, for example, will never execute a backflip. But a good trainer, like Quiroz believes himself to be, can teach most any dog...

Not much has changed about “Marjorie Prime” since its Off Broadway run in 2015. Yes, the play’s Broadway premiere — it opened Monday night in a Second Stage Theater production at the Helen Hayes Theater — has a new cast, now headed by June Squibb instead of Lois Smith. But the playwright Jordan Harrison made only light tweaks to hi...

It sounds so charming: Benedict Nightingale, the esteemed London theater critic, trying to make a Christmas Eve tradition of reading Charles Dickens’s ghostly novella “A Christmas Carol” to his small children by the fire. The only trouble being, his son Christopher said, that the tradition, several decades ago, didn’t catch on.“It...

Some of this year’s most inspired moments fit nicely into a few themes: once-overlooked actors given bigger spotlights, acclaimed stars impressing us anew, and directorial flourishes that heighten our experiences. Here, we revisit some of the stage moments that especially stood out.— Nicole HerringtonLaura Collins-HughesA Charge in...

The thing about Michael Chernus is that you’ve seen that guy somewhere. It could be on several episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” or opposite Rachel Weisz in “Dead Ringers.” Or, more recently, as John Wayne Gacy in the 2025 Peacock series “Devil in Disguise” and as Ricken Hale on “Severance.” (No, he doesn’t know when they’ll st...

Dance‘Times Four’Wally Cardona’s reconstruction of this David Gordon duet from 1975 was both an act of devotion to, and evocation of, the ghosts of New York past — not just of Gordon and his wife and duet partner, Valda Setterfield, its original dancers; but to the whole ethos of downtown dance in its 1970s heyday, with its intimat...

Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home i...

On a sticky August day in London 23 years ago, I walked into the Royal National Theater with glazed eyes, a heavy tread and what felt like an unconquerable weariness. I was fresh — or rather stale — off a plane from New York, and before me lay nine-plus hours of people with unpronounceable names talking about Russian history.A pict...

When the writer Larry Mitchell showed his friend Ned Asta his latest manuscript in 1976, it didn’t take long for her to question Mitchell’s hopes for publishing it as a children’s book. The two had been living blissfully in a queer commune near Ithaca, N.Y., for some years, but outside reality was still something to consider. As Mi...

“Merrily We Roll Along” is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.The history of “Merrily” is perhaps better-known than the play itself. When it opened on Broadway in 1981, the show about a gifted composer who sell...

Intimidating and charming, and often both at once, Tom Stoppard, whose death was announced on Saturday, was a treasured collaborator to the hundreds of actors, directors and producers who worked on his plays. Here, 13 of them (plus Mick Jagger) try to find words for the man who always had the right ones.Glenn CloseThe actress won h...

Tom Stoppard, the playwright and screenwriter who died on Saturday at 88, set plays in imperial Britain, czarist Russia and Communist Czechoslovakia. He wrote movie lines for characters who included William Shakespeare and Indiana Jones. His work concerned love and divorce, poetry and rock ‘n’ roll.Yet, entering his ninth decade, S...

Tom Stoppard, the playwright and screenwriter who died on Saturday at 88, set plays in imperial Britain, czarist Russia and Communist Czechoslovakia. He wrote movie lines for characters who included William Shakespeare and Indiana Jones. His work concerned love and divorce, poetry and rock ‘n’ roll.Yet, entering his ninth decade, S...

NINETEEN-NINETY-FOUR WAS THE year I graduated from high school, and the year Kurt Cobain died. I remember coming home from school in suburban Illinois on that April afternoon, turning on the TV and seeing the MTV News anchor Kurt Loder report that the 27-year-old lead singer and guitarist for Nirvana had been found dead by suicide...

It is common nowadays for playwrights to go back and forth between stage and screen assignments, but Tom Stoppard, whose death at 88 was announced on Saturday, was an early adopter of the practice, with TV credits going back to the early 1960s.Some entries in his impressively lengthy collection of screenplays were originals, but he...

It was around 2 a.m. on a Saturday when a hoarse voice from a fast car called me a faggot.It was 1998, and I was walking home alone after making heart eyes at go-go boys at the Lucky Horseshoe on Halsted Street, Chicago’s main gay strip. The car didn’t slow down. I did, cold with fear but hot from shame for being clocked as not jus...

What a difference a star can make. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is experiencing a remarkable surge in sales this fall thanks to the clever casting of Tom Felton as an adult version of the character he played in the films: Draco Malfoy.The play’s producers said Monday that the show grossed $2.973 million last week, which is m...

On Tuesday evening, more than 400 actors, directors and designers circulated under soft purple lighting inside the Shed, a performing arts center in Midtown Manhattan, to toast Tom Hanks and his new Off Broadway show, “This World of Tomorrow.” “It’s the greatest thrill of my life,” Mr. Hanks, the 69-year-old veteran film star, said...

It can now be hard to remember that colorblind casting was once an inflammatory proposition. Discussing a 1989 production of “The Winter’s Tale,” the white critic John Simon decreed that Black actresses like Alfre Woodard, who played Paulina, “do not belong in parts for white actresses, unless they can pass for white. That’s wrong...

At a certain level of enduring fame, it becomes difficult for an actor to be taken seriously in a new artistic sphere. By the time someone is both a beloved global star and an avatar of the American good guy — yes, I do mean Tom Hanks — this rule has long since been in force. That didn’t stop Hanks from publishing “Uncommon Type,”...

Sharply dressed in service uniform, the actor Patrick Page steps in front of a giant map of Central Europe, ready to outline his attack plan, and you’re ready to fight. In this New York premiere of Rajiv Joseph’s 2017 play, “Archduke,” Page’s command of language — his absolute certainty — makes whatever he’s saying irresistible. Ne...