Everything you need to know about 'A Doll's House' on Broadway, starring Jessica Chastain

Table Of Content

• Post Malone’s all-star Stagecoach set includes Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam
• Some Critics Don’t Understand the ‘Cabaret’ Broadway Revival. Young Women Do. (Guest Column)
• Review: Laurie Metcalf in ‘Doll’s House, Part 2’: An acting marvel in one of the year’s best plays
• Arian Moayed
• Awards
• 'Challengers' Heats Up: How Zendaya's Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession

Haddad, who has cerebral palsy and uses a walking frame, makes it absolutely clear at the outset that he is nobody’s victim. The show is not a “poor-me” listicle, but Haddad, Hearts, who is Deaf, and Ospina, who has cerebral palsy and uses a motorized wheelchair, reveal to the audience a panoply of situations the trip have faced—from sex to daily life and public transport—that present challenges. Jordan Fein’s direction and dots’ design are both playful and simple; and the way the play is staged (with Artistic Sign Language, captioning, and audio description) underlines not just its own carefully crafted narratives and messages, but also its proudly energized spirit.

Post Malone’s all-star Stagecoach set includes Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam

In 1873, Laura married a Danish schoolteacher by the name of Victor Kieler. Soon after their wedding, Victor contracted tuberculosis, a then life-threatening condition. Doctors ordered that Victor should be relocated, suggesting that the couple move to Italy due to its inexpensive living standard and warmer climate.

Some Critics Don’t Understand the ‘Cabaret’ Broadway Revival. Young Women Do. (Guest Column)

For the rest of the women in the audience, though, one hopes we’re a little farther along. Jessica Chastain returns to Broadway in a new version of Ibsen's classic.

Review: Laurie Metcalf in ‘Doll’s House, Part 2’: An acting marvel in one of the year’s best plays

Sometimes the feeling is fey; other times the literalization of song ideas flirts with corniness. But the intensity of the dancer’s relationship to the material speaks volumes. Other dancers hold illuminated orbs around Henry, reminding him of his spiritual presence.

Arian Moayed

Turns out that, like most women of her time (if, in fact, we’re still in the 19th century), Nora’s ideas have been formed by others — in particular, controlling men — starting with her father when she was a child. This pull, this force, has Nora in its grip up until this night, on this empty stage, when even an audience facing in her direction doesn’t notice her. There are no props in director Jamie Lloyd’s version of Henrik Ibsen’s drama “A Doll’s House” — no sets, no costumes (just plain contemporary clothing in dark blue), not even a curtain. There’s no dress to be mended, no mailbox, no letter to be read, no cigar to be lit, no children.

Okieriete Onaodowan

Where Did All the Broadway Sets Go? - The New York Times

Where Did All the Broadway Sets Go?.

Posted: Tue, 08 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Those final moments are in stark contrast to the main body of the play. When characters put on dresses, have parties, freak out over letters, and—most infamously in Nora’s case—slam the door on the family home, there are none of those things. The characters say they are doing things, but they are just speaking to each other. The Helmer children, Ivar, Bob, and Emmy are mentioned, they are played with and chided—but they are not seen.

Despite the obvious parallels between their stories, Ibsen made one crucial change to the narrative. In Ibsen's telling, Kieler's tragic fate was not replicated, with the playwright instead opting to have his heroine leave her family of her own volition. When the secret of her financial impropriety was eventually revealed, Victor treated the wife who had gone to such lengths to save his life as a criminal. He swiftly divorced Laura and barred her from their children, vowing that she should never see them again.

'Challengers' Heats Up: How Zendaya's Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession

But after speaking with director Jamie Lloyd, she rallied and decided it was important for the audience. New York (AP) — Jessica Chastain counts her performance as Nora in the current Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House” to be one of the “hardest things” she has ever done. This Nora is more traditionally restrained in her actions than Chastain’s Nora of moments before. And then… well, other reviews may reveal what happens at the end of this production of A Doll’s House.

The change is by turns energizing and slightly irritating, clarifying and a touch diminishing. What was somewhat awkward about the play in California — the contrived setup, the smattering of anachronistic cursing, the fuzziness of Nora’s emotional truth — now seems less problematic in the more explicitly comic context. But some dramatic strength is sacrificed in the quest to wring as many laughs from Broadway theatergoers as possible. Sam Gold’s production resembles in its tasteful austerity Shelley Butler’s slightly more posh West Coast staging. There’s the same looming door that Nora slammed at the end of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” leaving behind her husband and three small children. There’s the same vacated sitting room, equipped with just a few elegant chairs that can be shuffled around in the unlikely event anyone pays a social call to what looks like a domestic crime scene of a very cold case.

Whether facing the audience, the back wall or anywhere in between, every position suggests something larger about each character’s relation to the others. Only once, late in the play, do Nora and Torvald sit side by side, their physical closeness reflecting a breakthrough in candor if not romance. The Hudson Theatre is a dollhouse come spring, when Henrik Ibsen's groundbreaking play A Doll’s House gets its latest Broadway revival starring Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain.

Anne Marie, in a scene that unleashes Houdyshell’s marvelous proletariat thunder, faults Nora for not recognizing her economic privilege. Torvald turns Nora’s criticism of him on its head by saying she never cared a whit for his own humanity. And Emmy, whom Rashad portrays with a mix of steely smiles and subterranean sorrow, abruptly cuts her long absent mother off when she presumes to understand her.

Jessica Chastain Talks 'A Doll's House' Audience Eye Contact - Vulture

Jessica Chastain Talks 'A Doll's House' Audience Eye Contact.

Posted: Fri, 02 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring famously caused riots when it premiered in Paris in 1913; four years later, Marcel Duchamp's sly, disruptive Fountain upended the idea of what a museum piece could be. Both are indisputable markers in our shared cultural history; stripped of their context, they are also, respectively, a heavy-mettle concerto and an autographed toilet. The Oscar winner takes on a bare-bones modernization of Henrik Ibsen's classic play, to mixed results. For the 2023 revival of A Doll’s House, Amy Herzog has adapted Ibsen's script. Herzog is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play 4000 Miles, and her other plays include Belleville, The Great God Pan, and After the Revolution. Before opening night on March 9, A Doll’s House plays Monday through Saturday, with no performances on Sunday.

Herzog adapts Ibsen's script for this A Doll's House Broadway revival. She's best known for the play 4000 Miles, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013 and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play in 2012. Her version of A Doll's House is described as “freshly relevant” for today, but further details have yet to be revealed. Dark Disabled Stories isn’t a great show because it makes you think; it’s a great show because it’s funny, moving, enraging, and intelligent—and it reminds you how to see, listen, understand, and empathize with others.

When moments of virtuosity explode, as happen when Byron Tittle unleashes a spectacular display of Olympian tap, the effect is a victory of spirit as much as it is of mortal flesh. If Henry’s story were elaborated in dialogue, it would have trouble escaping sentimentality. But it’s the universal pattern, the way Henry’s experience echoes our own, that transcends the handling of specific plot points. Personally, I was relieved not to bear witness to another forced marriage between script and score. When the book musical works — as it does gloriously this season in the revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — there’s nothing more satisfying.

Kieler also recounted her conflicted relationship with Ibsen in the introduction to one of her later works, a novel titled Silhouetter. In her later career, Kieler withdrew from penning narratives drawn from life, instead placing her focus on historical and religious texts. Some years later, with Victor's health restored and the couple having started a family of their own, creditors came calling for repayment on the loan. With no financial means to speak of and in hopes of concealing her secret from Victor, Laura wrote to Ibsen, whom she considered a dear friend, informing the playwright of her predicament. In her letter, she appealed to Ibsen to recommend her work to his publisher, hoping that sales of her book could generate enough capital to repay the debt. Feeling unable or unwilling to help- and much to Laura's detriment, as he would soon come to find- Ibsen refused, compelling the young woman to forge a check for the money.

He is known for modern stagings of classic works, with minimalist and experimental staging — most recently, he brought such a revival of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring James McAvoy, off Broadway in 2022. A Doll's House shattered norms in its time, and now, Tony-nominated director Jamie Lloyd and Pulitzer-nominated playwright Amy Herzog reinvent the story with a daring twist, cracking open A Doll's House for a new generation. On the Hudson Theatre’s bare stage, Jessica Chastain is sitting on a chair, revolving on a spinning section of it. She gazes out at the Broadway audience impassively, a ghost of a smile on her face, dressed in modern, modish black. Slowly, other characters in this modern adaptation of Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House (booking through June 10)—adapted by Amy Herzog, and directed by Jamie Lloyd—sit on seats on the stage, like satellites of Chastain, as she continues to spin. A Doll’s House hasn't received quite as many film adaptations as stage productions, but there's still a great many movie versions.