Uncle Vanya

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

The young Anton Chekhov searches for his voice

From our UK edition

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia? In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881).

Thursday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Spring’s hottest theatrical openings on Broadway

Since closing its doors during the pandemic in 2020, Broadway has struggled. The Phantom of the Opera lowered the curtain in April last year after more than thirty-five years. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical, Bad Cinderella, shut in June, less than three months after it opened, and other musicals, such as the tortuously-named Britney Spears-inspired Once Upon a One More Time, have fared little better. Meanwhile, productions are still scrambling to get butts on seats: audience numbers are down 17 percent from their pre-pandemic highs. And yet, for theater aficionados, there is hope.

theater