If you’re at all familiar with The Wiz, elements of Charlie Smalls’s score hit with Pavlovian precision. There’s the groove of “Ease on Down the Road,” the seductive slickness of “Slide Some Oil to Me,” and of course that triumphal, transporting lilt that kicks off “Home.” When that tune peeks out, early on in Dorothy’s journey to Oz, you can feel a collective ahhh from the audience at this revival.

Emily Henry cracked the modern romance novel. Emily Henry at home. Photo: Holly Andres Emily Henry at home. Photo: Holly Andres Emily Henry at home. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Soon after Emily Henry left Hope College, a small, Christian-values-lite school in a tiny town in Michigan, she found herself living back in Cincinnati, trapped in her first postcollege job doing technical writing for the city’s phone-and-cable company.

Kylie Minogue in Rush red. Pride Month has indisputable powers. Who knows how it happened (probably gay witches made a potion comprising a vodka soda, Rush, one of Liza Minnelli’s hairs, and a drop of the lighter fluid Angela Bassett poured in Waiting to Exhale), but a Kylie Minogue song has its grip on the world. “Padam Padam,” the new single from the Aussie superstar, released on May 18, has become a bit of a viral sensation, leading her to perform a surprise live performance of the track at Capital’s Summertime Ball in the U.

Cher, still not nominated. This week, the Hall announced its slate of nominees for induction in 2023. Like every year, the list includes the previously nominated (Kate Bush, Rage Against the Machine) as well as some first-time nominees (Cyndi Lauper, the White Stripes). Over the next few months, there will be no scarcity of discussion (online at least) of these acts, and even more so for the handful that eventually get voted in for induction.

You’ll remember Anaita Wali Zada’s eyes. As Donya, an Afghan refugee in the wry and wistful Fremont, the first-time actor is a steadily building wave, a maelstrom of intention and purpose. At times, she does nothing but look or listen as someone offers unsolicited advice, but through her coiled tension, watching and waiting are not passive acts. Take a scene at an Afghan restaurant, where the owner urges Donya to watch a soap opera with him.

The X Factor Boot Camp #2 Season 2 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 2 stars ** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » The X Factor Boot Camp #2 Season 2 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 2 stars ** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » It’s day two of boot camp, and only 60 acts remain, and that’s still way too many.

From Coriolanus, at the Delacorte in Central Park. Coriolanus is not training-wheels Shakespeare. At almost 4,000 lines, it’s the second-longest play in the canon, beat out only by its far more popular younger brother Hamlet. It’s a late play, thorny and tough in both its language and its content, and its near-perpetual stream of invective and argument can start to feel numbing — one round of railing after another.

David Oyelowo as Othello, at NYTW. As befits its all-or-nothing love story, Othello is Shakespeare’s most intense play, in part because it eschews his usual ADHD dramaturgy. The tragedy of the Moorish general who becomes a hero in his adopted land, who marries the pearl of its gentry, Desdemona, and is then gulled by his ensign, Iago, into murdering her in a jealous rage, is barely interrupted by the typical sideshows.

Sophie Okonedo, Denzel Washington, and Anika Noni Rose in A Raisin in the Sun.* Everyone’s moaning about Denzel Washington’s age: How can a man who’s 59 play the 35-year-old Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun, a character whose very name suggests the drama of coming into manhood? And if Walter’s that old, how can his mother, Lena, be played by an actress — LaTanya Richardson Jackson — who is just 64?

Michael Urie in Buyer & Cellar. Among the first things the actor Michael Urie admits as he addresses the audience at the start of Jonathan Tolins’s Buyer & Cellar is that the premise of the 90-minute one-man play is “preposterous”: “What I’m going to tell you could not possibly have happened with a person as famous, talented, and litigious as Barbra Streisand.” I hope that stipulation is sufficient to keep the lawyers at bay, because the story that follows is too hilarious, and oddly loving, to shut down.