Latest news with #ADoll'sHouse
New York Post
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Multiple theater fans ‘fall ill' waiting in heat to watch Rachel Zegler perform ‘Evita' balcony scene amid backlash: report
Multiple theater fans received medical help after they 'fell ill' while standing in sweltering temperatures to see Rachel Zegler perform from an outdoor balcony during the hit West End production of 'Evita.' Over 200 excited fans waited outside the London Palladium for hours in nearly 90-degree heat on Thursday to see Zegler, known for starring in Disney's live-action flop 'Snow White,' sing 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' for free as part of the musical, according to The Sun. But not everyone made it to the show's most famous number, which served as the Act II opener. 5 Rachel Zegler performed 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' from the balcony of the London Palladium.'We were called at 8:16 p.m. (sic) yesterday to reports of a person unwell in Argyll Street, central London,' a London Ambulance Service told the outlet. Two ambulance crews responded to the theater, where Zegler made her West End debut in the Jamie Lloyd's production just days earlier. 'While treating the patient, our crews were called to help a second person who was unwell nearby,' the spokesperson added. 'One patient was taken to [the] hospital and the second was given medical advice and discharged at the scene.' Zegler reshared a series of Instagram posts from paid ticketholders who praised her performance on Thursday night — but has not publicly commented about the fans who got sick while waiting to see her sing outside. 'Crowd control is bad enough on the public street but with the heat it's becoming really dangerous,' a source told the outlet. The Post has reached out to the Zelger's team for comment. 5 Hundreds waited outside the venue to see Zegler perform the most popular song in 'Evita' on Thursday. Ian West/PA Images/INSTARimages 5 Two people fell ill while waiting to see the actress perform in sweltering temperatures. Invision The scare is just the latest controversy attached to the production. At the start of Act II, Zegler, playing Eva Perón, the former First Lady of Argentina, walks out on the balcony overlooking the street outside the venue and sings 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' to unpaid audiences outside the theater while ticketholders inside watch via live stream. The uncommon creative decision angered fans who paid hundreds of dollars to see Zegler in the show directed by Lloyd, who is known for his unconventional staging in shows like Broadway's 2023 revival of 'A Doll's House' and 2024 revival of 'Sunset Boulevard.' 5 The West End revival of 'Evita' opens July 1. Brett D. Cove / 5 The musical will have a 12-week limited engagement in London. Invision One fan called the livestream decision 'a bit of a rip off' to ticket holders inside. 'If I paid for a theater ticket, I wouldn't be so thrilled that I couldn't see all of the performance in person,' one person commented on X. But some theater fans promote the decision to have her sing on the balcony. 'The show is about Eva Peron giving power to the people,' a social media user on TikTok wrote. 'Singing this song on the balcony to the people who can't afford tickets makes so much sense.' The musical debuted on Broadway in 1979 with book and lyrics by Tim Rice and music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. London's revival of the seven-time Tony Award-winning musical officially opens July 1 and is scheduled for a 12-week limited engagement.
The Citizen
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Amato's ‘Doll's House 2' asks tough questions
Rubin called the play a gloves-off debate, both personal and political. Imagine walking out on your husband, three children and a society that thinks it knows better than you do, only to return 15 years later and find the door still open but nothing else quite the same. Theatre on The Square puts this notion forward in a new production A Doll's House 2 A Doll's House 2 picks up the story where the first play left off. The first instalment, A Doll's House, looked at the fate of main character Nora Helmer as a married woman. There were no real opportunities for her to gain any kind of self-fulfilment in a male dominated world. In short, it was probably the world's first feminist play, written by Norwegian playwright Hendik Ibsen and first performed in 1879. Back then, the idea of a woman abandoning her family to find herself was unthinkable. The final moment of that play, a single door closing behind Nora, echoed far beyond the theatre. It was not just scandalous; it caused quite a stir and has been doing so for well over a century and a half. In fact, in 2006 it was one of the world's most performed plays. Everyone wanted to know what happened next And yet, while Ibsen never wrote a sequel. Everyone wanted to know what happened next. This second episode, now on stage at Theatre On The Square in Sandton, completes the circle. It was penned by American playwright Lucas Hnath. The show stars veteran actor Zane Meas and led by highly-pedigreed South African performer Bianca Amato. 'You really do not need to have seen part one to get into this,' Amato said. 'It is a completely fresh take, with its own bite. The premise is simple. Nora returns because she discovers she is still legally married. She needs a divorce to finish what she started. But of course, nothing is simple.' ALSO READ: TV's 'The Four Seasons' makes you think Nora is no longer a housewife. She has made a name for herself in her worn right, openly criticising the institution of marriage. But her return sets off a chain of uncomfortable and often hilarious confrontations, said Amato. The play throws four characters into a single room and lets the sparks fly. No one is let off the hook. 'It's feisty, funny, moving and thought provoking' 'It is a really feisty, funny, moving and thought-provoking piece,' said Amato. 'You will probably change your mind several times during the show. That is what makes it exciting. No one has all the answers. Everyone is flawed. And the arguments are compelling on all sides.' The dialogue is modern, despite the period setting. The questions it raises are very much for today. Is marriage outdated? Can people change? Is it selfish to put your own growth before your obligations to others? 'It is incredibly relevant,' said director Barbara Rubin. 'When I was preparing for this production, Kamala Harris was running for president in the United States. The backlash she faced as a qualified female candidate was brutal. It reminded me just how far we still must go. 'Spending time with Nora, who has become wiser and stronger, was a kind of comfort during that time.' A gloves-off debate Rubin called the play a gloves-off debate, both personal and political. 'It is about how much has changed, and how much has not,' she said. 'It is smart, but also very funny. That is what makes it work.' Amato is loving the show. 'We are all bringing our best to this,' said Amato. 'The production design is meticulous. The performances are sharp. The story is gripping. It is not some dusty drama. It is a lively, entertaining night out.' NOW READ: Partner habits that drive you crazy
Irish Independent
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Frank McGuinness: ‘I fell in love with Elizabeth Bennet and Huck Finn – they are brilliant, defiant and good for the exercise of body and mind'
Frank McGuinness was born in Co Donegal in 1953 and now lives in Dublin. He has written 16 plays including Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Carthaginians and Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, and 20 adaptations of European classics. His version of Ibsen's A Doll's House won a Tony award.
Los Angeles Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Ibsen's 1879 play left audiences shocked. Now in Pasadena, the door opens to ‘A Doll's House, Part 2'
In 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' playwright Lucas Hnath cheekily proposes an answer to a question that has haunted the theater for more than a century: Whatever happened to Nora after she walked out on her marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 drama, 'A Doll's House'? The door slam that concludes Ibsen's play ushered in a revolution in modern drama. After Nora's exit, anything was possible on the stages of respectable European playhouses. Conventional morality was no longer a choke hold on dramatic characters, who were allowed to set dangerous new precedents for audiences that may have been easily shocked but were by no means easily deterred. 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' which opened Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse under the direction of Jennifer Chang, is a sequel with a puckish difference. Although ostensibly set 15 years after Nora stormed out on Torvald and her three children, the play takes place in a theatrical present that has one antique-looking shoe in the late 19th century and one whimsical sneaker in the early 21st. The hybrid nature of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' isn't just reflected in the costume design. The language of the play moves freely from the declamatory to the profane, with some of its funniest moments occurring when fury impels a character to unleash some naughty modern vernacular. More crucially, comedy and tragedy are allowed to coexist as parallel realities. Hnath has constructed 'A Doll's House, Part 2' as a modern comedy of ideas, divided into a series of confrontations in which characters get to thrash out different perspectives on their shared history. Chang stages the play like a courtroom drama, with a portion of the audience seated on the stage like a jury. The spare (if too dour) set by Wilson Chin, featuring the door that Nora made famous and a couple of rearranged chairs, allows for the brisk transit of testimony in a drama that lets all four characters have their say. Nora (played with a touch too much comic affectation by Elizabeth Reaser) has become a successful author of controversial women's books espousing radical ideas about the trap of conventional marriage. She has returned to the scene of her domestic crime out of necessity. Torvald (portrayed with compelling inwardness by Jason Butler Harner), her stolid former husband, never filed the divorce papers. She's now in legal jeopardy, having conducted business as an unmarried woman. And her militant feminist views have won her enemies who would like nothing more than to send her to prison. Nora needs Torvald to do what he was supposed to have done years ago: officially end their marriage. But not knowing how he might react to her reemergence, she makes arrangements to strategize privately with Anne Marie (Kimberly Scott), the old nanny who raised Nora's children in her absence and isn't particularly inclined to do her any favors. After Torvald and Anne Marie both refuse to cooperate with her, Nora has no choice but to turn to her daughter, Emmy (crisply played by Kahyun Kim). Recently engaged to a young banker, Emmy has chosen the road that her mother abandoned, a distressing realization for Nora, who had hoped that her example would have inaugurated a new era of possibility for women. Hnath works out the puzzle of Nora's dilemma as though it were a dramatic Rubik's Cube. The play hasn't any ax to grind. If there's one prevailing truth, it's that relationships are murkier and messier than ideological arguments. Nora restates why she left her marriage and explains as best she can the reasons she stayed away from her children all these years. But her actions, however necessary, left behind a tonnage of human wreckage. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' offers a complex moral accounting. As each character's forcefully held view is added to the ledger sheet, suspense builds over how the playwright will balance the books. Each new production of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' works out the math in a slightly different way. The play had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2017 in an elegant production that was somewhat more somber than the Broadway production that opened shortly after and earned Laurie Metcalf a well-deserved Tony for her performance. The play found its voice through the Broadway developmental process, and Metcalf's imprint is unmistakable in the rhythms of Nora's whirligig monologues and bracing retorts. Metcalf is the rare actor who can lunge after comedy without sacrificing the raw poignancy of her character. Reaser adopts a humorous mode but it feels forced. More damagingly, it doesn't seem as if Hnath's Nora has evolved all that much from the skittishly coquettish wife of Ibsen's play. The intellectual arc of 'A Doll's House, Part 2' suffers from the mincing way Reaser introduces the character, with little conviction for Nora's feminist principles and only a superficial sense of the long, exhausting road of being born before your time. The early moments with Scott's Anne Marie are unsteady. Reaser's Nora comes off as a shallow woman oblivious of her privilege, which is true but only partly so. Scott has a wonderful earthy quality, but I missed the impeccable timing of Jayne Houdyshell's Anne Marie, who could stop the show with an anachronistic F-bomb. Chang's staging initially seems like a work-in-progress. The production is galvanized by the excellent performances of Harner and Kim. Harner reveals a Torvald changed by time and self-doubt. Years of solitude, sharpened by intimations of mortality, have cracked the banker's sense of certainty. He blames Nora for the hurt he'll never get over, but he doesn't want to go down as the paragon of bad husbands. He too would like a chance to redeem himself, even if (as Harner's canny performance illustrates) character is not infinitely malleable. Bad habits endure. Kim's Emmy holds her own against Nora even as her proposed solution to her mother's dilemma involves some questionable ethics. Nora may be disappointed that her daughter is making such conformist choices, but Emmy sees no reason why the mother she never knew should feel entitled to shape her life. The brusquely controlled way Kim's Emmy speaks to Nora hints at the ocean of unresolved feelings between them. The production is somewhat hampered by Anthony Tran's cumbersome costumes and Chin's grimly rational scenic design. Elizabeth Harper's lighting enlivens the dull palette, but I missed the surreal notes of the South Coast Repertory and Broadway stagings. Hnath creates his own universe, and the design choices should reflect this wonderland quality to a jauntier degree. But Chang realizes the play's full power in the final scene between Nora and Torvald. Reaser poignantly plunges the depths of her character, as estranged husband and wife share what the last 15 years have been like for them. 'A Doll's House' was considered in its time to be politically incendiary. Hnath's sequel, without squelching the politics, picks up the forgotten human story of Ibsen's indelible classic.
Los Angeles Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘A Doll's House, Part 2' at Pasadena Playhouse: A woman walks out on her husband and child, and then ...
Mom walks out on husband and child, and then ... Actors Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner have known each other since a chance meeting at the edge of a softball field in Central Park in the late '90s. She was at Juilliard, and he was in graduate school at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. The pair stood by a fence watching their fellow students play, having no intention of joining the game themselves. Harner recalls Reaser was a particularly potent combination of funny, irreverent, self-effacing and beautiful. As they chatted he thought, 'Oh, this is gonna be fun!' More than two decades later, they are working together for the first time, playing estranged Victorian couple Nora and Torvald in Lucas Hnath's 'A Doll's House, Part 2,' opening Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse. Director Jennifer Chang toyed with the idea of casting an actual married couple in the roles, but once she witnessed the chemistry between Reaser and Harner, she knew she had made the correct choice. It may sound counterintuitive — because the play is a drama tackling themes of class, feminism and parental and filial obligations — but Reaser and Harner's superpower is their ability to laugh together. 'It's fun to work with Jason because he's hysterically funny, and I'm a whore for anyone who's funny,' Reaser says with a wide smile. 'You could be the meanest person on the planet, but if you're funny, I don't care. This is my failing as a human being.' Reaser's laugh erupts without warning, big and loud like a thunderclap; Harner's is equally boisterous. During a recent morning rehearsal the two laughed often and the result was infectious. There was a lightness to the proceedings that belied the seriousness of the issues arising as they practiced the play's final scene. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' picks up 15 years after the events of Henrik Ibsen's 1879 classic. Ibsen's revolutionary script ends with the wife, Nora, walking out on her husband, Torvald, and their daughter in order to discover her full potential as a human being. Hnath's sequel begins with Nora's return. The audience learns what she's been up to all those years, and also what she plans to do now. The razor-sharp dialogue is rapid-fire, and proper delivery requires a keen understanding of the nature and nuance of language. Reaser and Harner have the lines mostly down pat. What they are working on during this particular rehearsal is the minutiae of the blocking. Detailed discussions unfold with Chang about an overturned chair, the placement of a booklet onstage, and when and how Nora grabs her purse off a side table by the door. After an intense back-and-forth between the couple while they are seated on the floor, Chang asks Harner, 'Should you help her up?' 'I thought about it, but then I thought she wouldn't like that,' Harner says of Nora, who is very much her own woman at this point. She is, however, going to be wearing uncomfortable shoes, a large skirt and a corset, Chang offers. 'Maybe we can make a moment of it?' she adds. Harner considers this, twisting the hair behind his right ear with his right hand as he talks. They discuss the meaning behind Nora's words at that particular beat in the script — and their impact on Torvald. Eventually it is decided that Harner will offer her his hand, and she will hesitantly take it. They practice the scene over and over again — each time with a different effect. It's a master class in the specificity of acting for the stage. Harner revels in this work, having started his career onstage before achieving success as a screen actor — most notably as FBI Special Agent Roy Petty in 'Ozark,' as well as in 'Fringe,' 'The Walking Dead' and 'The Handmaid's Tale.' 'I literally could start crying right now, because I miss the theater so much,' Harner says during an interview in Pasadena Playhouse's cozy subterranean greenroom. 'It's important to me. I feel like I'm a better actor when I work onstage.' Reaser has an equally impressive screen résumé, including the 'Twilight' films as well as 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'The Good Wife' and 'The Haunting of Hill House.' Her stage experience is not as deep as Harner's, and for the longest time she thought she couldn't possibly do another play, calling the process 'too psychotic.' Nonetheless, she recently told her husband that she thought she was ready and that she'd particularly like to work at Pasadena Playhouse. Three months later she got 'this random call out of nowhere.' It was meant to be. Harner soon texted her, writing cheekily, 'We're too young, right?' Reaser didn't know Harner had been cast as Torvald. 'I was like, 'Well, who's playing the Nora?' Because if you don't have a good Nora, I don't want to do it,' Harner says. 'A Doll's House, Part 2' opened on Broadway in 2017, notes Chang — before a global pandemic, the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the beginning of President Trump's second term. In some ways, she says, the play is more relevant than ever. 'Reading it now, I was like, 'Oh, my goodness, this is not the play that I remembered,'' she says, adding that context is everything when it comes to interacting with art. 'I'm probably not the person now that I was then.' Reaser and Harner are similarly primed to deliver the show in the context of regional Los Angeles theater in 2025. 'The original play is still revolutionary,' says Reaser. 'The idea of leaving your children is still a shocking, radical thing.' What Hnath did in picking up and reexamining this source material, Harner says, was a remarkable act of harnessing that complexity. 'It's about patriarchy and misogyny, and obviously, primarily, about a woman discovering her voice,' he says. 'But it's also about two people — a couple — who, in one version of themselves, really did love each other.'
