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An Imaginative Treat for ‘Adventure Time’ Fans

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From the creator of that series comes “Mystery Cuddlers,” on Adult Swim, about a retired couple who have taken up private investigating.Today for your viewing pleasure: two Adult Swim one-offs, one newly birthed, the other sadly dead but still glorious. To be a TV fan is to know that sometimes 22 minutes is all you get.The new cartoon “Mystery Cuddlers,” available on the Adult Swim website and YouTube, follows a loving couple, Arthur and June Cuddler (voiced by Randall Park and Pam Grier), who’ve taken up private investigating in their retirement. “Cuddlers” has a bright, appealing oddness and fun character names like Helvetica Deathgurgle, but perhaps its biggest draw is its lineage: It was created by Pendleton Ward, the creator of “Adventure Time,” and Jack Pendarvis, an “Adventure Time” collaborator. “Adventure Time” and its spinoffs are among the most enchanting, dynamic shows of the 2000s, so even a glimmer of its greatness here is an exciting development. Adult Swim often posts pilots, many of which go no further, but in trying times, it’s good to practice hope. (The creators have called the cartoon a “pilot,” but a spokesperson for Adult Swim said it was a “special.”)As we turn our gaze to the future, we also honor those pilots that fared less well. “I’m the Mayor of Bimmi Gardens,” now on YouTube, was made in 2021 but not picked up. It’s a shame because “Bimmi” is filled with an ecstatic strangeness not currently present on television. (I’ll miss you forever, “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”) The show was created by and stars the comedian Chris Fleming and is set in the magical city of Bimmi Gardens, an island off the coast of Florida but technically “a territory of Maine,” whose primary crop is boba.“The boba crop grows when men stay virginal of mind and body,” the mayor reminds us. “Every year people have the same irrational fear: that the men of Bimmi Gardens will become horny and the moon will punish us by preventing our precious boba bushes from fruiting.”The mayor’s assistant (Victoria Pedretti, of “You”) is named RossandRachel, and the evil, alternative crop to boba is mojito, which the mayor fears will turn Bimmi into the worst imaginable place: Miami. Maybe it’s not that surprising that a pastel boba fantasia did not capture the hearts of TV executives, but that stinks for the rest of us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    An Imaginative Treat for ‘Adventure Time’ Fans

    From the creator of that series comes “Mystery Cuddlers,” on Adult Swim, about a retired couple who have taken up private investigating.Today for your viewing pleasure: two Adult Swim one-offs, one newly birthed, the other sadly dead but still glorious. To be a TV fan is to know that sometimes 22 minutes is all you get.The new cartoon “Mystery Cuddlers,” available on the Adult Swim website and YouTube, follows a loving couple, Arthur and June Cuddler (voiced by Randall Park and Pam Grier), who’ve taken up private investigating in their retirement. “Cuddlers” has a bright, appealing oddness and fun character names like Helvetica Deathgurgle, but perhaps its biggest draw is its lineage: It was created by Pendleton Ward, the creator of “Adventure Time,” and Jack Pendarvis, an “Adventure Time” collaborator. “Adventure Time” and its spinoffs are among the most enchanting, dynamic shows of the 2000s, so even a glimmer of its greatness here is an exciting development. Adult Swim often posts pilots, many of which go no further, but in trying times, it’s good to practice hope. (The creators have called the cartoon a “pilot,” but a spokesperson for Adult Swim said it was a “special.”)As we turn our gaze to the future, we also honor those pilots that fared less well. “I’m the Mayor of Bimmi Gardens,” now on YouTube, was made in 2021 but not picked up. It’s a shame because “Bimmi” is filled with an ecstatic strangeness not currently present on television. (I’ll miss you forever, “At Home With Amy Sedaris.”) The show was created by and stars the comedian Chris Fleming and is set in the magical city of Bimmi Gardens, an island off the coast of Florida but technically “a territory of Maine,” whose primary crop is boba.“The boba crop grows when men stay virginal of mind and body,” the mayor reminds us. “Every year people have the same irrational fear: that the men of Bimmi Gardens will become horny and the moon will punish us by preventing our precious boba bushes from fruiting.”The mayor’s assistant (Victoria Pedretti, of “You”) is named RossandRachel, and the evil, alternative crop to boba is mojito, which the mayor fears will turn Bimmi into the worst imaginable place: Miami. Maybe it’s not that surprising that a pastel boba fantasia did not capture the hearts of TV executives, but that stinks for the rest of us.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘How Did I Get Here?’: 7 Days in the Life of a Busy Arts Programmer

    Jay Wegman runs from rehearsals to lunches to shows for his job at N.Y.U. Skirball, then home for a “What We Do in the Shadows” episode or two.Jay Wegman, the artistic director of the N.Y.U. Skirball performing-arts center, likes to say that he lives in three time zones: “the present, a year from now and two years from now.”As far as the present is concerned, he monitors Skirball’s programming, with shows that in November included the Civilians docu-play “Sex Variants of 1941 — A Study of Homosexual Patterns” and “No President,” a wild experiment by Nature Theater of Oklahoma set to “The Nutcracker.”At the same time, Wegman, who moved from the Abrons Art Center to the N.Y.U. position in 2016, works out logistics for the following months and plans for events much farther in the future — a lead time of two or three years is not uncommon when bringing over the international productions that have become one of Skirball’s calling cards.Wegman, 60, kept a diary of his cultural diet during a late October/early November week. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.Wegman joined Skirball as artistic director in 2016 from the Abron Arts Center.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesMonday: The 2 Best Shows on TV?I spent most of the day on emails. We were trying to nail down travel plans for Isabelle Huppert, who is doing “Mary Said What She Said” in February. I went out to dinner with her and Robert Wilson in May, and it freaked me out because I was so aware that I was sitting there with those people. It just was like, “How did I get here?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jon Stewart Thinks Biden Could Have Timed That Pardon Better

    “Normally, you drop a controversial pardon like the way you buy porn at a gas station: in a flurry of other distracting purchases,” the “Late Night” host said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Hypocrisy Isn’t Illegal’As Thanksgiving weekend drew to a close, President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, despite having repeatedly pledged not to do so. It was the talk of late night on Monday.On “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart questioned the president’s timing.“Normally, you drop a controversial pardon like the way you buy porn at a gas station: in a flurry of other distracting purchases.” — JON STEWART“Thanksgiving! I knew it! Perhaps I can explain the way this pardon went down in my new one-man show, ‘Can You Get Hunter to Stop Looking at Me Like That?’” — JON STEWART“He’s an 82-year-old man — he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life visiting his son in prison.” — JON STEWART“Hypocrisy isn’t illegal, nor is it particularly unusual in politics. It’s not like he’s ever going to run again, so why not take care of your kid, even if you said you weren’t going to? I respect it. I don’t have a problem with it. The problem is, the rest of the Democrats made Biden’s pledge to not pardon Hunter the foundation of their defense of America.” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (World’s Greatest Dad Edition)“Yeah, it was a big shopping weekend, and millions of people got great deals, but nobody got a better deal than Hunter Biden.” — JIMMY FALLON“Christmas came early for this guy.” — TYRUS, guest host of “Gutfeld!”“The Biden presidency has now entered the ‘Grandpa doesn’t give a damn about what you think’ phase.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And, yes, Joe Biden did say he wasn’t going to pardon Hunter. But, to be fair, there’s a very good chance he doesn’t remember saying that.” — JIMMY KIMMELWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jason Laks Named President of Broadway League

    The Broadway League, an industry trade organization, named Jason Laks as its new president. “I think our mission has to be more than to make it 2019 again,” Laks said.The Broadway League, the trade organization that represents commercial theater producers and the industry’s powerful theater owners, has chosen Jason Laks, a longtime official at the organization, to be its next president at a time when the sector is still struggling to recover its prepandemic financial strength.Laks, 52, is a lawyer who has been with the League off and on since 2012, primarily as the director of labor relations in charge of negotiating contracts with 14 unions representing the Broadway work force. Laks has been serving as the League’s interim president since February, when its longtime leader, Charlotte St. Martin, stepped down.The League’s most well-known role is as a co-presenter, alongside the American Theater Wing, of the annual Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway. The organization represents commercial producers in labor negotiations, handles government relations for the industry, works with organizations seeking to diversify the American theater and oversees the Jimmy Awards, a national high school musical theater competition.The League’s board of governors voted on Monday to approve Laks’s appointment.The organization, with a $12 million annual budget and a 33-person staff, has 830 members who include not only the owners and operators of the 41 Broadway houses, but also presenters of touring Broadway shows around the country, as well as general managers, vendors and suppliers.Broadway, which had been booming in the years preceding the coronavirus pandemic, has not fully recovered from a roughly 18-month shutdown; pre-Thanksgiving audiences this season were about 5 percent below prepandemic levels. Even as domestic and international tourism is rebounding, there has been a decline in theater attendance by New York-area suburbanites that is associated with the rise of hybrid work, a shift toward home-based entertainment consumption and concerns about costs, crime and congestion.“I think we are doing a remarkable job of coming back postpandemic, but it’s an important moment for the industry — we’re not back to where we were in 2019, but I think our mission has to be more than to make it 2019 again,” Laks said. “We need to continue to work to grow and diversify our audiences and get people into the city to see our shows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ One Look Wasn’t Enough

    A bare-bones revival of the Broadway musical grew on me with subsequent viewings, and the additional details I noticed bolstered my reporting.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Something I wish I had the chance to do more often as a reporter is to see shows multiple times, deeper into their runs — the “Notre Dame de Paris” musical, which I’ve seen seven times, and “The Phantom of the Opera,” which I’ve seen six times, come to mind.The first time I saw “Sunset Boulevard” in London last year, I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, the British minimalist, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical had no sets, all-black costumes and almost no props.I had seen neither the original 1993 musical, nor the 1950 black-and-white Billy Wilder film on which it is based. This is not an approach I would recommend for a Jamie Lloyd show; the experience was akin to watching a gender-swapped Shakespeare production with no concept of the original.But one thing did grab me: The outrageously ambitious title number, which is filmed live every night. In a six-minute sequence that begins backstage before spilling out onto the street, the screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis) contemplates the circumstances that led to him becoming the plaything of Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger).“There’s no way that’s live,” someone sitting next to me said, as the audience watched the street sequence unfold on a towering screen at the front of the stage.But the actor had grabbed an umbrella as he headed outside — it was raining that night in London, as it often does — which seemed to give it all away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Book Review: ‘How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,’ by Richard Schoch

    An incisive new book, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” examines the extraordinary career of the master of the musical.HOW SONDHEIM CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE, by Richard SchochIn the early 1980s, the librettist and director James Lapine asked the composer Stephen Sondheim what sort of musical he wanted to write. The pair were in the early stages of creating “Sunday in the Park With George,” their first collaboration of many, and the response given by the older to the younger man was very Sondheimish indeed. “Theme and variation,” said Sondheim, or as Richard Schoch puts it in his heartwarming essay collection, “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” “not, then, a story to be told, but a perspective to be taken.”The Sondheim perspective is the subject of 11 essays by Schoch, a show-by-show analysis that seeks, at least notionally, to extract usable takeaways from the Sondheim canon. The chapter on “Merrily We Roll Along” is subtitled “How to Grow Up”; the one on “Sweeney Todd” promises to teach us “How (Not) to Deal With Injustice”; “Gypsy” unlocks “How to Be Who You Are,” and so on through the Sondheim playlist. This conceit of art as self-help is common enough — Jane Austen has come in for a lot of it, as have Shakespeare and the 19th-century Russian novelists — as to practically be a subgenre at this point, in which publishers take a subject they are nervous may be too nerdy or niche for a general audience and try to reframe it in more popular terms. It rarely works, trying to turn apples into bananas — there are lots of helpful things you can take from Sondheim, but they don’t map onto “life lessons” in quite the way the book suggests — but it doesn’t matter. Beyond the headings and the odd memoirish aside, the author largely ignores the premise of the title to quickly and mercifully move on to other things.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. Schoch reminds us that Sondheim wrote “Send In the Clowns” for Glynis Johns, who had “a modest octave and a bit in range” that required “short phrases firmly closed off with consonants.” This is why Judi Dench — not a singer, either — performed the number so piercingly in the National Theater’s 1995 revival of “A Little Night Music,” and why Catherine Zeta-Jones, in Trevor Nunn’s 2009 Broadway revival, did not. (On hearing the opening bars, I recall, Zeta-Jones assumed a stricken Torch Song expression as if something terrible was about to happen — which, of course, it was.)Laurence Guittard and Judi Dench in the 1995 London production of “A Little Night Music.”Donald Cooper/Alamy Stock PhotoStritch! Schoch writes about Elaine Stritch being sent home, abject, self-loathing, from the cast recording of “Company” after her ninth flubbed take of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” reminding us that Sondheim favored cranky, brilliant leading ladies who drove everyone mad until they hit their mark. He takes us on a tour of Sondheim’s major themes, writing in relation to Gypsy Rose Lee, “She possesses the truest talent of all: the talent of being yourself.” The use of artifice in the search for authenticity is a recurring theme of Sondheim’s, raising questions of where in his characters the composer resides. That Sondheim, a gay man who by his own account didn’t have his first serious relationship until he was 60, became one of the great chroniclers of straight marriage remains curious. But while Schoch uses the example of the Baker’s Wife in “Into the Woods” to write movingly of his own coming out in his 30s, he doesn’t get into Sondheim’s life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Momma Rose’s Many Faces, From Ethel Merman to Audra McDonald

    To those who worship at the church of the American musical, it was a holy night. For on a Thursday in late November in the city of New York, the faithful had assembled to witness what might be described as the Sixth Coming.Momma Rose was being reborn once again.The occasion was the first preview of the fifth Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” directed by George C. Wolfe at the newly restored Majestic Theater, which had last been the home of the longest-running musical on Broadway, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Rose was being played — deep breath, please — by the record-breaking, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. The house was packed, the crowd aflutter, and expectations stratospheric.For the uninitiated, let me explain that Momma Rose — as she is somehow commonly known, though she is never called that in the show — is widely perceived by theater cognoscenti as the greatest character ever to inhabit a musical comedy. First portrayed by Ethel Merman, she is to that genre’s actresses what Hamlet and Lear are to Shakespearean actors, a sky-scraping, Himalayan peak. As Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s book, described her, she is “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerizing mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose.”The title character of this 1959 musical is in fact the stripper deluxe Gypsy Rose Lee. But it’s her mother, Rose, who is the show’s very (very) dominating central figure, a human bulldozer who drags her two young daughters through the shabby vaudeville circuit of the Great Depression in the hope of making one of them a star. Written by the sacred trinity of Laurents, Jule Styne (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), “Gypsy” is regarded by many (including me) as the great book musical and the most probing musical about performing itself. For all its surface brightness and buoyancy, “Gypsy” thrums darkly with the ravenous hunger for attention that lies in the deepest heart of showbiz.McDonald with Joy Woods and Danny Burstein in the new production, directed by George C. Wolfe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Christmas Specials, Plus 4 Things to Watch on TV This Week

    Get in the holiday spirit with Sabrina Carpenter, Jimmy Fallon or a Christmas tree lighting. Catch up on reality television and heists.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are available live or streaming this week, Dec. 2 to Dec. 8. Details and times are subject to change.Cozy Up With Holiday SpecialsThough you may still be snacking on Thanksgiving leftovers as we enter December, it’s officially time to get into the holiday spirit. And it shouldn’t be too hard, TV-wise at least.For the 15th year in a row, Christmas heads to Nashville with a celebration of all things holiday and all things country on “CMA Country Christmas,” hosted by Amy Grant and Trisha Yearwood. Performers including Jon Pardi, CeCe Winans and For King + Country will sing festive favorites like “Joy to the World.” Yee-haw and happy holidays! Tuesday at 8 p.m. on ABC.The 2023 Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center.Seth Wenig/Associated PressA quintessential Rockefeller Center Christmas tree — a Norway spruce — has made the yearly voyage to the big city, from its home in West Stockbridge, Mass., about 130 miles from Midtown Manhattan. Since its arrival, it has been adorned with 50,000 LED lights and a 900-pound Swarovski crystal star, and now is finally ready for its close-up. The 92nd Annual Christmas in Rockefeller Center lighting ceremony will be hosted by Kelly Clarkson, with the Radio City Rockettes, the Backstreet Boys and Jennifer Hudson scheduled to perform. Wednesday at 8 p.m. on NBC.Immediately after the tree lighting, “Jimmy Fallon’s Holiday Seasoning Spectacular” is set to celebrate Fallon’s new star-studded album, “Holiday Seasoning,” which dropped on Nov. 1 and features songs with the Jonas Brothers, Justin Timberlake and Dolly Parton. Expect them and others to celebrate with Fallon. Wednesday at 10 p.m. on NBC.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More