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    ‘The Weir’ Review: A Few Pints to Help the Ghost Stories Go Down Easy

    Conor McPherson’s eerie 1997 drama, set in a rural Ireland of near-empty pubs and howling winds, returns to Irish Rep in top form.There’s hardly a better escape from the city’s heat right now than the Irish Repertory Theater’s excellent staging of “The Weir,” its fourth since 2013. The company’s intimate Chelsea space is blissfully air-conditioned, and Conor McPherson’s eerie 1997 drama, set in a rural Ireland of near-empty pubs and howling winds, is appropriately chilly.The production’s entire creative team, along with some of the cast, are return players, but there’s not a whiff of trotting out the same old. Instead, they render the play’s talkative yarns as heartily as a few rounds with old friends. That sense of familiarity (and the awareness that they are such close-knit revivers) even helps the play, which is essentially a hangout piece with a hazy supernatural charge.Its tight 90 minutes track an evening at a pub owned by the 30-something Brendan (Johnny Hopkins), and frequented by the older Jack (Dan Butler) and Jim (John Keating). How regular are their visits? Jack’s first move onstage, one he often repeats, is to breeze behind the bar to pour himself a pint.Unlike his also-unmarried patrons, and as played by Hopkins with homey charm, Brendan seems content with his mundane lot but is not yet resigned to it. There’s a kinship, then, with the recently arrived Valerie (Sarah Street), who’s being shown around town by Finbar (Sean Gormley), an older gent with a self-conscious Ian Fleming style.The men’s hospitality, as they fill Valerie in on the area’s lore, gradually turns into a series of ghost tales. Through offhand conversational cues (“What was the story with…?” or “Where was that?”), McPherson is skilled at making reminiscences’ jump into communal folklore feel both inevitable and necessary.It’s typical campfire fodder — frightened widows and apparitions — and each story can be waved away, chalked up to nerves or having had one too many. But neither McPherson, nor the director Ciarán O’Reilly, leans on obvious spooks, though the production’s lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) and sound design (by Drew Levy) supply the requisite dimming lights and stormy hums.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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    The Moves That Make ‘Chicago’ and ‘A Chorus Line’ So Special

    Fifty years ago, when director-choreographer giants still walked the earth, two of the biggest — Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett — created highly influential shows that have attained legendary status and lasted: “Chicago” and “A Chorus Line.”These were musicals with dancing at the center. The showbiz-cynical attitude of “Chicago,” a tale of 1920s murderers who go into vaudeville, was inseparable from its choreographic style. “A Chorus Line” was about Broadway dancers, built from their real-life stories and framed as an audition.To celebrate the golden anniversaries of these shows, The New York Times invited Robyn Hurder, who has performed in productions of both over the past two decades (and recently received a Tony nomination for her performance in “Smash”), to demonstrate and discuss what makes the choreography so special. To coach her, direct-lineage experts were on hand.Robyn Hurder performs part of “One,” a signature song of “A Chorus Line.”For “A Chorus Line,” Hurder could turn to Baayork Lee, an original cast member who has been staging and directing the show ever since. (She’s directing an anniversary benefit performance on July 27.) For “Chicago,” Verdon Fosse Legacy — an organization dedicated to preserving and reconstructing the choreography of Fosse and his chief collaborator, Gwen Verdon — sent Dana Moore, who worked with Fosse in his 1978 “Dancin’” and his 1986 revival of “Sweet Charity.” She also danced in the 1996 “Chicago” revival and in revivals of “A Chorus Line,” too.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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    ‘Washington Black’ Is a Defiantly Joyful Fable

    Adapted from the Esi Edugyan novel, this Hulu series follows a child who escapes slavery and embarks on a life of swashbuckling adventure.As the opening scenes of “Washington Black” come into view, the narrator Sterling K. Brown tells viewers that what’s about to unfold is “the story of a boy brave enough to change the world.”In the sweeping 19th-century adventure that follows, the wide-eyed, kindhearted George Washington Black, a.k.a. Wash, escapes the Barbados sugar plantation where he has been enslaved since birth, finds freedom and romance in Canada and uses his keen intellect to make marvelous scientific breakthroughs.The eight-part series, based on Esi Edugyan’s acclaimed 2018 novel of the same name, debuts Wednesday on Hulu.As the saga bounces back and forth in time, Wash (played by Eddie Karanja) as a boy and by Ernest Kingsley Jr. as a young man) hones his prodigious artistic talents with help from Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), a white scientist who facilitates the boy’s escape from bondage. Wash learns crucial lessons about the world — and his socially precarious place in it — as he soars through the air in a fantastical flying machine, sails the Caribbean Sea with pirates, rides a dog sled through the Arctic tundra and dodges a relentless bounty hunter hired by his former enslaver.Brown’s production company, Indian Meadows Productions, secured the rights to the novel in 2019 and the show’s creator, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, set about transforming the transcontinental coming-of-age tale for the screen.Tom Ellis plays a scientist who facilitates the boy’s escape from bondage.Lilja Jonsdottir/DisneyWe 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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    Alt Comedy Is Dead. Long Live Alt Comedy!

    The term has fallen out of fashion, but the experimental spirit of the genre lives on in the refreshingly off-kilter Brent Weinbach and Eddie Pepitone.If Nathan Fielder performed stand-up comedy, he might look something like Brent Weinbach.It’s not only that Weinbach maintains an impenetrable deadpan or seeks out awkward silence (“Round of applause if there are any gay people in the closet here tonight”) or builds jokes around overly elaborate setups. His new special, “Popular Culture” (YouTube), also exploits the central conceit of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal,” including several bits where Weinbach prepares for a future event with a practice run. To get ready for fatherhood, for instance, he acts out responses to discovering his daughter smoking marijuana. Things get weird.Weinbach’s hour, a very funny collection of eccentric impressions, oddball advice and flights of fancy, would have once been quickly classified as alternative comedy. So would the new special from Eddie Pepitone, “The Collapse” (Veeps). That term has fallen out of fashion in part because it became too vague, and yet I increasingly find myself missing it. All genre designations rely on simplifications, but they provide a useful shorthand that helps audiences navigate a vast culture.Alternative comedy meant theatrical novelty to some, indulgence to others. But for a couple of decades starting in the 1990s, it signaled something more specific. Weinbach and Pepitone, both Los Angeles-based comedians, are wildly different in sensibility, not to mention volume. Weinbach’s equanimity evokes that of a TV weatherman; Pepitone projects the chaotic energy of a thunderstorm. But they share the spirit of classic alt comedy: experimental, self-aware, at odds with conventional style and notions of success.Weinbach’s first special, which closed with his pitch-perfect impression of generic stand-up, was called “Appealing to the Mainstream” (2017). Pepitone made “For the Masses” three years later. These titles are tongue-in-cheek, pointedly.“I’m not a mainstream guy,” Pepitone says more directly in his new special, later adding that people ask him if he has seen the new Marvel movie and he balks: “I only watch extremely independent movies from places with no drinkable water.”There’s a touch of the professional wrestling heel in Eddie Pepitone’s comedy.Peter BonnelloWe 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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    ‘A Chorus Line’ and ‘Chicago’ at 50: Who Won?

    Just two musicals open on Broadway during the summer of 1975. “Chicago,” in June, is received warily, like a stranger at the door. It’s “a very sleek show,” writes Walter Kerr in The New York Times. “It just seems to be the wrong one.” But “A Chorus Line,” in July, elicits unthrottled raves. “The conservative word” for it, writes Kerr’s colleague Clive Barnes, “might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific.”Yet the musicals have more in common than their initial reception reveals. Both shows are about performers: “Chicago” featuring 1920s vaudevillians with a sideline in murder; “A Chorus Line,” contemporary Broadway dancers. Both are masterminded by director-choreographers of acknowledged (and self-acknowledged) brilliance: “Chicago” by Bob Fosse; “A Chorus Line” by Michael Bennett. Both are seen, regardless of reviews, as exemplars of style-meets-content storytelling in a period of confusing change in musical theater. And both shows remain touchstones today, albeit of very different things.Donna McKechnie (center, in red) and the cast of the original Broadway production of “A Chorus Line.”Indeed, their differences now seem more salient than their similarities, and fate has been funny with their reputations. For 50 years, “A Chorus Line” and “Chicago” have tussled for primacy like Jacob and Esau, at least in the eyes and ears of Broadway fans. Which show is “the wrong one” now?To answer that, you might look uncharitably at their faults. “A Chorus Line” is shaggy and gooped up with psychobabble. “Chicago” is mechanical, a big hammer pounding one nail. But both are so well crafted for performance that those faults fade in any good production. For me, having seen each many times, the highlights are more telling.Jerry Orbach and the cast of the 1977-78 national tour of “Chicago.”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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    ‘Shari & Lamb Chop’: A Singular Talent Gets Her Due

    Shari Lewis’s pioneering role in children’s television becomes clear in a new film that can be perfunctory about her life.I was a PBS-watching child, and one of the shows I loved was “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” with a theme song I could still sing for you today and an infinitely earwormy outro, “The Song That Doesn’t End.” (Sorry.) I was a little old for the show when it started airing in 1992 — I watched with my brother, who would have been a toddler around then — but no matter. The mechanics of the puppetry and ventriloquism were entrancing, and they all revolved around a curly-haired woman named Shari Lewis and her puppet friends, especially the lightly sardonic and always funny Lamb Chop.My mother told me she used to watch Shari and Lamb Chop on TV, too. But it wasn’t till I was older that I realized what a trailblazer Lewis, who died in 1998, had been over her long career. She’s the subject of Lisa D’Apolito’s light and nostalgic new documentary, “Shari & Lamb Chop” (in theaters), which is full of archival footage stretching from Lewis’s early days on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the CBS variety show that provided her big break, through the children’s shows she hosted single-handedly (so to speak) with her puppets from the mid-1950s to 1960s, including “Facts N’ Fun,” “Shariland” and “The Shari Lewis Show.”The film explores her work in the years after “The Shari Lewis Show” was canceled, including nightclub acts, variety shows, telethons, county fairs and guest turns on various TV shows. And it chronicles her triumphant return to TV in the 1990s with “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” as well as her emergence as an advocate for children’s educational television.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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    Stephen Colbert Laments the End of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS

    CBS “will be ending ‘The Late Show’ in May,” Colbert told his audience on Thursday. He kept the announcement brief and light.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.End of an EraAt the top of Thursday’s “Late Night,” Stephen Colbert announced that CBS will bring the show to an end in May.The network says the cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” but there’s speculation that Colbert’s recent criticism of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was a factor. Colbert kept the announcement brief and light. When the audience booed the news, he responded with a smile, “Yeah, I share your feelings. It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”“I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners. I’m so grateful to the Tiffany network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home. And of course I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. I’m grateful to share the stage with this band, these artists over here every night. And I am extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“We get to do this show — we get to do this show for each other every day, all day, and I’ve had the pleasure and the responsibility of sharing what we do every day with you in front of this camera for the last 10 years. And let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it. And it’s a job that I’m looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months. It’s going to be fun. Y’all ready?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Epstein Edition)“Well, guys, President Trump’s handling of the Epstein files continues to dominate the news. Yeah, I wonder if we’re ever going to see the Epstein files. At this point, our best chance is if Coldplay shows them on the Jumbotron.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, the Epstein files won’t go away. Trump is so stressed, he’s like, ‘I need a vacation. What was the name of that fun island I used to go to?’” — JIMMY FALLON“President Trump said yesterday that he would rather talk about the success of his administration than the Jeffrey Epstein files. Yeah, I’m sure you would. That’s like Diddy saying he’d rather talk about his V.M.A.s — you don’t get to pick.” — SETH MEYERSWe 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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    Fans React to Colbert ‘Late Show’ Cancellation With Puzzlement and Anger

    Many questioned the timing of and motivation for the announcement, noting that Mr. Colbert hosted the most-watched show in late night television.The first people to hear that CBS was canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” reacted to the news loudly, and viscerally, with a chorus of “No!” that turned into a sustained round of boos.They were sitting in the audience in the Ed Sullivan Theater in Midtown Manhattan when an emotional Mr. Colbert announced the decision at the conclusion of the taping of his Thursday night show.Among those who were watching was Claire DeSantis, 29, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. After the show concluded, she said, Mr. Colbert told the audience there would be an alternate taping of the cold open.“I thought it was going to be a fun surprise,” she said.Instead, Mr. Colbert stumbled a few times on the opening line — “Oh hey, everybody!” — before delivering the announcement about the cancellation in a single take. Ms. DeSantis, who does not regularly watch the show and wanted to go for the experience, said she cried, but not everyone in the audience was in tears as they left the theater. She called her mother and roommate to tell them what had happened.“I thought this was a legacy show,” Ms. DeSantis said. “I was just really surprised that it’s just going away completely.”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