Thanks to an abundance of film adaptations of stage productions, theater-centric books and a spate of newly released cast albums, there’s enough theater to go around from the comfort of home. (There’s also lot to see on and Off Broadway, and you can read our reviews here and additional theater coverage here.)
Films to Stream
‘The Piano Lesson’
The film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play tells of an African American family’s multigenerational trauma through a piano, which was once owned by the man who had enslaved their family members. The strong cast includes John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler, Samuel L. Jackson and Ray Fisher.
From our review:
When you’re working with Wilson’s material, there’s an inherent richness, and the questions this film raises have never been more potent. What do we do with our past? What does it mean to face the future? And when every ordinary day in a nation is littered with reminders of a history that’s never been resolved, how do we live?
Watch on Netflix. Read the full review.
‘Janet Planet’
The playwright Annie Baker, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her 2013 drama “The Flick,” is known for her use of pauses and silence. “Janet Planet,” her directorial film debut, starring Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler, is a gently funny coming-of-age story that creates the dreamy world of a misfit mother-daughter duo.
From our review:
The genius of “Janet Planet” … is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. … It’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.
Watch on Max. Read the full review.
‘Ghostlight’
In this tragic drama, whose title comes from the theater tradition of leaving a single light on after all other lights are switched off, a family is roiled by the death of a teenage son, and brought together by a local production of “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s theater as therapy — well-trodden ground for the writer Kelly O’Sullivan, who directed the film with Alex Thompson.
From our review:
It’s a gentle story, full of tender moments, and knowing that the parents and daughter in the main cast are a family in real life increases the warmth. There’s a complexity to their conversations, the way their interactions are never one-note (as parents and teens often are in films), that you can sense has its roots in real life.
Watch on Amazon Prime Video. Read the full review.
‘Mean Girls’
For fans of cliquey drama (and foes of Regina George), “Mean Girls” the movie musical delivers plenty of side eye. The nerds, jocks and villains of the Tina Fey high school universe are back, and theater devotees may recognize the actors in two supporting roles: Jaquel Spivey, a Tony Award nominee for “A Strange Loop,” and Auli’i Cravalho, now starring as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.” And both the film adaptation and the Broadway musical feature Reneé Rapp as queen bee.
From our review:
It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact. … [As Regina George, Reneé Rapp, who also starred in the stage musical] gives the character oomph and swagger (the dominatrix-lite get-up helps), and when Regina howls “I don’t care who you are,” you readily believe her.
Watch on Paramount+ . Read the full review.
‘Emilia Pérez’
Jacques Audiard’s new movie musical features Karla Sofía Gascón as a trans Mexican drug lord who is seeking gender-affirming surgery and a little help cleaning up some business-related conflicts. It also stars Zoe Saldaña as a singing-and-dancing lawyer.
From our review:
The song-and-dance numbers — the score and songs are by Clément Ducol and Camille, and the choreography is by Damien Jalet — range from the intimate to the outsized, and are integrated throughout. … From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect.
Watch on Netflix. Read the full review.
Also …
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention “Wicked,” though you’ll have to go to a movie theater to see it. (You could also read our extensive coverage, including Michael Paulson and Alexis Soloski’s delightful interviews with Shiz University graduates.)
Or you could catch up on some of the movies that have inspired stage productions: “Sunset Boulevard,” whose current revival is on Broadway, can be streamed free on Pluto TV; “Death Becomes Her,” now a Broadway musical, is available on demand and on various streaming platforms; and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” whose stage production comes to Broadway this spring, can be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube and other platforms. “Our Town” is on Broadway now, and various productions are available for streaming free online including on Tubi and on YouTube (which has the 2002 Broadway revival with Paul Newman as the Stage Manager). Lastly, David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” being revived this spring, can be streamed on free platforms (Sling TV and Pluto TV) and a subscription-based one (Amazon Prime Video); and “Smash,” whose stage adaptation is now a reality, can be streamed on BroadwayHD, Peacock and other platforms.
Books
‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life’
Richard Schoch’s essay collection is an incisive examination of the extraordinary career of Stephen Sondheim, the master of the musical. In chapters on “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd, for example, Schoch delivers a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon.
From our review:
Schoch is a professor of drama at Queen’s University Belfast and a former New York theater director who approaches Sondheim from the inside out, that is, as someone who has wrestled with how to perform and direct him. And what a joy the author’s take on it all is. I was happy simply to be in Schoch’s company, wallowing in Sondheim trivia and enjoying a series of smart, close reads that sent me down at least one YouTube wormhole per chapter.
‘The Playbook’
James Shapiro, whose previous books include “Shakespeare in a Divided America” (2020), returns with “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.” Here he lays out the history of the Federal Theater Project, a Depression-era program that gave work to writers and actors until politics took center stage.
From our review:
James Shapiro’s piquant and resonant history … is about how messy and compromised the situation can get for artists when Congress is signing the checks, how cynical the politics can be and how familiar — how Trumpian — some of the muddying tactics deployed in the 1930s now seem.
‘The Hypocrite’
Jo Hamya’s second novel follows a famous English novelist as he watches his daughter’s new play in London. When the lights go down, the novelist soon realizes that the play is about him, and his very bad behavior that his daughter, Sophia, witnessed when they were on vacation a decade earlier.
From our review:
Thankfully, nobody in this appropriately claustrophobic story emerges the clear hero. No one is that doomed L-word, likable. Hamya bats our sympathies between characters: Sophia, the neglected child who craves both her father’s approval and his artistic toppling; her father, who seems baffled by how quickly he’s encountered irrelevance; and Sophia’s mother, who is justifiably fed up after loving two self-engrossed yet profoundly un-self-aware writers.
Listen to our Book Review podcast discussion about the book here.
‘Death at the Sign of the Rook’
Kate Atkinson’s sixth entry in her series featuring the private investigator Jackson Brodie involves a murder mystery weekend and a ridiculous theater troupe. “It’s a really cozy way to get a dose of theater,” the critic Laura Collins-Hughes recently wrote in an email response to a request seeking recommendations for this list.
From our review:
This time, Atkinson turns [Brodie] loose at a “Murder Mystery Weekend” at an opulent Downton Abbey-esque country house. Guests are solving a fictional murder when a real one occurs. As always, Atkinson takes the mystery genre seriously, and her writing sparkles. But I was as baffled as Brodie was about his presence, and whether readers needed to revisit him through a much-overused plot trope.
Listen to our Book Review podcast discussion about the book here.
‘Glorious Exploits’
In Ferdia Lennon’s “breezy, winning debut,” Athenian prisoners stage Euripides for their foul-mouthed captors. Though the novel is set in ancient Syracuse, it was written in the language of contemporary Ireland. And a large portion reads like a buddy comedy.
From our review:
Lennon’s vernacular gives the novel a shambolic charm, a story told in a Dublin bar by a drunk lurching between poetry and obscenity — your best friend tonight even if he might not remember you tomorrow. … This is all fun — I first read the novel in one happy sitting, on a plane — but Lennon attempts to go deeper, with mixed success.
Music
Lin-Manuel Miranda collaborated with Eisa Davis to make a “Warriors” concept album inspired by the 1979 movie about a group of gang members fighting their way home. The album is brimming with starry names, including Colman Domingo, Lauryn Hill, Busta Rhymes and Billy Porter.
Listen here. Read an interview with Miranda and Davis.
‘A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical’
The musical of the pioneering trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, now on Broadway, tells his story in four chapters across the country, and features almost 30 songs. The show’s creative team gathered in a lounge at Studio 54 to discuss the music at the heart of the show, and Armstrong’s career.
Listen to our playlist. Read the full review.
‘Suffs’
For fans of politics-embroidered musical theater, this musical about the fight for women’s suffrage has a cast album that lays out a clear sense of the show, even if you haven’t seen it. Our critic called “Let Mother Vote,” the opening number, “a charming tune wittily introducing the nonconfrontational strategy that the early generation of suffragists employed, and that the show’s younger ones are about to explode.”
Listen to the track in our roundup, or the full album on Spotify. Read the full review.
‘Stereophonic’
“Stereophonic,” the most Tony-nominated play in history, is set entirely within the fiery mini universe of a recording studio as a suddenly famous band tries to make a new album (despite some robust infighting). It makes sense, then, that the show’s cast album — which our critic said resembles “a raw ‘secret tapes’ album released decades later” — would reflect the yearning, the romantic dramas, the angst and the addictions of its band members in a set of very listenable, radio-ready tracks. Fans of California rock will appreciate the 1970s influences and nods to Fleetwood Mac.
Listen here. Read the full review.
Also …
Ahead of the Tony Awards last June, Jesse Green, the chief theater critic, highlighted eight notable tracks from the nominated shows. At their best, he wrote, cast albums are “stand-alone works of musical-theater art,” and he was impressed by how often last season’s batch of recordings reached that standard.
Bonus: Below is a roundup of some of the multimedia journalism produced by our reporters and editors this year. Among the many joys: exploring the worlds of “Oh, Mary!” or a Las Vegas “Discoshow” and listening to how Alicia Keys reimagined her hit song “Fallin’” for her Broadway musical, “Hell’s Kitchen.”
The post 21 Movies, Books and Albums With a Theater Focus to Consume During the Holidays appeared first on New York Times.
