Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
“Ranta Claus got up bright and early to post 165 venomous words about yours truly,” Kimmel said on Donald Trump’s day off from his criminal trial on Wednesday.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.Old NewsDonald Trump had the day off from his criminal trial on Wednesday. He spent part of it criticizing Jimmy Kimmel’s hosting of the Oscars several weeks ago, though he apparently conflated him with Al Pacino, who announced a major award there.Trump wrote, in part: “Stupid Jimmy Kimmel, who still hasn’t recovered from his horrendous performance and big ratings drop as Host of The Academy Awards, especially when he showed he suffered from TDS, commonly known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, to the entire World by reading on air my TRUTH about how bad a job he was doing that night, right before he stumbled through announcing the biggest award of all, ‘Picture of the Year.’”“This was five weeks ago,” Kimmel said of the Oscars. “My parents don’t even care anymore!”“Today, he had a day off, and how did he spend that? Brunch with Melania? No. Maybe a catch with Barron in the yard? No, no. Ranta Claus got up bright and early to post 165 venomous words about yours truly!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right — in the middle of a presidential campaign and countless federal indictments, he’s obsessed with the Academy Awards from five weeks ago. I look forward to his new campaign slogan: ‘Trump 2024: They Gave It to ‘Green Book’?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I did not present the award for Best Picture. I am not Al Pacino. Maybe you dreamed this during one of your courtroom siestas?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s Al Pacino, I’m me. You’d think he would know that because I’m pretty sure ‘Say hello to my little friend’ is what he said to Stormy Daniels that got him in all this trouble.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Also, you keep my friend Jimmy Kimmel’s name out of your weird little wet mouth, OK? Jimmy Kimmel is my podcast brother from Strike Force 5, and I have vowed — I have vowed to defend him until my death — or until the next ad for Mint Mobile.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fascinating and Mysterious Edition)“Yesterday was a surprisingly productive court session because they picked seven jurors. I was not one of them. And while their identities will be kept secret, we’ve learned a little about who it is, like Juror No. 4, who said of the ex-president, ‘I find him fascinating and mysterious. [imitating juror] Like when he says he wants to shoot protesters and jail his opponents, what does he mean? I can fix him.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe 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
Almost 50 years after it debuted, this classic Black take on “The Wizard of Oz” tries to update its original formula.Let me start with a confession: I’ve never liked “The Wizard of Oz.” But give me a retelling with, say, a Black Dorothy and Black Oz, and I’m immediately clicking my heels.When “The Wiz” debuted on Broadway in 1975, it was a colorful exclamation of Blackness on the stage. That’s to say a Black score, by Charlie Smalls, including gospel and R&B; a Black cast; and Black audiences at the forefront.Then three years later the beloved Motown film adaptation, starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor, pulled a Black Dorothy from her home, not in Kansas but in Harlem, and the New York City boroughs were cleverly transmogrified into the stylish, futuristic Oz.Now “The Wiz” returns to Broadway in a revival directed by Schele Williams and an updated book by Amber Ruffin, with the aim of creating a take “through the Blackest of Black lenses.” This new production, which opened at the Marquis Theater on Tuesday, showcases creative visuals and some standout performances, but stops short of bringing modern Blackness to Broadway.Here, Dorothy (Nichelle Lewis, in her Broadway debut) is a city girl who’s moved to Kansas to live with her Aunt Em (Melody A. Betts, who later doubles as the deliciously brass-throated witch Evillene). But Dorothy doesn’t feel at home and is being bullied by her classmates. A sudden meteorological anomaly flies Dorothy to Oz, where she seeks the counsel of the great and powerful Wiz (Wayne Brady) on how to get back home. Along the way she’s joined by a scarecrow (Avery Wilson) in need of a brain, a tinman (Phillip Johnson Richardson) wanting a heart and a lion (Kyle Ramar Freeman) desperate for some courage. (Sorry dog-lovers, there’s no Toto.)There’s plenty of gold to be found along this yellow brick road. Deborah Cox’s Glinda, the good witch, in a shimmering gold gown, looks like a jewel and sounds like one, too, with her crystalline voice switching from jazzy scatting to a sparkling falsetto in “He’s the Wiz” and later offering a triumphant performance of “Believe in Yourself.”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
She pivoted from painting to lighting exhibitions, performance art, graphic design and minimalist music, performed with her husband, the composer La Monte Young.In avant-garde New York, one of the most pilgrimaged sites has been the “Dream House,” a sensory environment that since 1993 has occupied the third story of a walk-up on Church Street in Lower Manhattan.From the ceiling of that small, carpeted room, theater lights treated with red and blue filters combine to throw auras of deep magenta on opposing walls. Four split discs of aluminum hang from the ceiling at torqued angles. As visitors enter and lie down, these mobiles spin slowly, catching light and casting morphing shadows of cursive E’s and wishbones.Instead of being absences of light, the shadows are positives: The lights are angled so that as one mobile shines red, its corresponding shadow speaks in blue, and vice versa.Behind this novel optical inversion was the artist and musician Marian Zazeela, who died in her sleep on March 28 after an illness, said her longtime student Jung Hee Choi, who did not specify a cause. Ms. Zazeela was 83.Ms. Zazeela never gained the renown of James Turrell or Dan Flavin, light artists who equaled her curiosity about altering optical perception in controlled environments. That oversight may have owed less to the ephemeral nature of her works than to the fact that hers were exclusively collaborative.Ms. Zazeela, right, with her husband, the musician and composer La Monte Young, and her longtime student Jung Hee Choi in New York City in 2009. The couple married in 1963.Will Ragozzino/Patrick McMullan, via Getty ImagesWe 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
In “Staff Meal,” in previews at Playwrights Horizons, a restaurant becomes a refuge as the world ends.Abe Koogler didn’t grow up going to many restaurants. He was raised on Vashon Island, Wash. — sparse and bucolic with an artsy populace, a few miles southwest of Seattle — in a house without a TV, where meals were mostly eaten at home, his free time spent fashioning handmade puppets onto chopsticks.So when he moved to New York, a city with restaurants on virtually every corner, he found the hustle and bustle of Manhattan’s highbrow establishments fascinating.“Living in New York, you walk by all these highly curated, beautiful, warm spaces where people are in the middle of this intense culinary experience,” Koogler said on a rainy afternoon in Midtown Manhattan. “And I like looking at these windows and imagining what it’s like for the people inside.”“A lot of it is being fascinated and not knowing why,” he added.Koogler, 39, is known for his darkly comedic plays about labor-intensive jobs in, for example, package inventory centers and slaughterhouses. Works about work. His latest, “Staff Meal,” about a beloved restaurant with a mysterious owner, has a similar setting (much of the story takes place in the prepping of food and serving of drinks) but with a notable diversion from his previous productions: Here is a job where the employees enjoy their work. In fact, they revere it.The restaurant’s culture of veneration for food, wine and care-taking nods to Danny Meyer’s hospitality manifesto, “Setting the Table,” and though the play, which opens on April 28 at Playwrights Horizons, begins as a familiar meet-cute, it “progressively gets weirder and weirder,” said the show’s director, Morgan Green.After first reading the script, she wondered, “How the hell do you stage it?”“I was really excited about this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling,” she said, and about mapping out “that trajectory.”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
“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.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
In an interview, the actor discusses the most recent episode of the FX drama and how her Lady Mariko “wants to fulfill her purpose.”This interview includes spoilers for the ninth episode of “Shogun.”Her character on “Shogun” has just died, but Anna Sawai doesn’t seem to mind much. If anything, she’s glad we’ve hit the sweeping period drama’s high point. “The last two episodes are very special,” she said, smiling, during a video chat earlier this week. “The men have been physically fighting. The women are fighting their own battles.” Sawai’s character, Lady Mariko, has just fought her last.As a vassal of the powerful Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), Lady Mariko serves as the translator for Toranaga’s unlikely ally, the shipwrecked English navigator John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis). But her reputation has been in tatters ever since her father violated Japanese feudal law and slew the tyrant he was sworn to serve.When she is held captive by the scheming Lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira), Lady Mariko threatens ritual suicide — demanded by tradition, yet an anathema for a devout Catholic such as herself — until her release is granted. When assassins intervene, she makes one last defiant protest, calling herself by her father’s name and blocking a door rigged with explosives. It’s the moment to which the series, and Mariko’s entire life, has built.This explains Sawai’s fondness for such a dark moment. “We get to see Mariko transform,” said the actor, who also currently stars in the generational family drama “Pachinko” and the Godzilla spinoff series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.” “She really makes a difference.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In her dying declaration, Lady Mariko refers to herself using her father’s surname, Akechi, for the first time in the series. Why was now the moment?In the book, it was “Toda Mariko” — Toda is [her husband] Buntaro’s last name — but we really wanted to feel the presence of her father in why she was doing this. She’d learned that her father wanted her to continue the journey he could not live to do. Until then, she doesn’t really realize what that is.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
