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    Martin Benson, Regional Theater Impresario, Dies at 87

    South Coast Repertory, which he founded with a partner, was a major force in Southern California theater. He directed more than 100 of its productions.Martin Benson, a founder and longtime artistic director of South Coast Repertory, a nationally renowned regional theater in Southern California that won a Tony Award in 1988, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Huntington Beach, Calif. He was 87.Justin Krumb, his stepson, said the cause was probably a heart attack.Mr. Benson and David Emmes, friends and former theater students at San Francisco State College (now University), started South Coast Repertory in 1964 and developed it as a home for classic works and newly commissioned plays and musicals. As Orange County’s first professional theater, it filled a void.“We’ve always been a theater of literature,” Mr. Benson told The New York Times in 1988. “Shaw, Synge, Wilde and new playwrights.”South Coast’s many world premieres included Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wit,” Donald Margulies’s “Sight Unseen,” Craig Lucas’s “Prelude to a Kiss” and Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” — all of which went on to Off Broadway and Broadway runs. Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with Ed Harris and John Ashton, made its Southern California premiere in 1981. Ten of Mr. Greenberg’s plays were commissioned by South Coast and had their premieres there.Mr. Benson directed 119 productions and won seven Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards: three for plays by George Bernard Shaw, whose works he specialized in, and the others for “Wit,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” and Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days.”Mr. Benson, left, in an undated photo with David Emmes, with whom he founded South Coast Repertory, and Jerry Patch, the company’s resident dramaturg.Glenn Koenig/Los Angeles Times, 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

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    Raygun Shuts Down Musical Inspired by Her Jeered Olympic Breaking

    The comedian behind the parody about the Australian breaker who became a summer celebrity said she was willing to make some changes to avoid legal drama.A performance of “Breaking: The Musical,” a parody exploring the journey of the Australian breaker known as B-girl Raygun, whose unusual routines at the Paris Olympics this summer led to mockery and memes, was shut down after a cease-and-desist letter.Steph Broadbridge, the show’s creator and star, said she was willing to make changes so the show could move forward, but not at the expense of art. She said the show in Sydney was designed to be intimate enough that she could receive feedback from friends and other comedians with the goal of having it fully ready by May.“I was trying to get notes and bump up the jokes and make it funnier,” she said.The breaker, Dr. Rachael Gunn, a professor with a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Macquarie University who has a background as a ballroom, jazz and tap dancer, became an unlikely Olympic celebrity after losing all three of her head-to-head battles with routines that featured her thrashing about on her side and hopping around like a kangaroo.The one-hour show was supposed to feature a dozen actors and songs like “You May Be a B-Girl, But You’ll Always Be an A-Girl to Me,” “I’m Breaking Down” and “I Would Have Won but I Pulled a Muscle,” according to an Eventbrite listing.Broadbridge, 42, said in a video posted to her Instagram account that Gunn’s lawyers had said that the musical could damage the dancer’s brand and that she was not allowed to perform any of Raygun’s signature moves.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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    Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie Revisit ‘The Simple Life’

    The celebutantes-turned-businesswomen are rebooting the show that provided a blueprint for the past 20 years of reality TV.How would two troubled Los Angeles heiresses manage as members of the Bible Belt working class?The answer helped revolutionize reality TV and legitimized the careers of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. In 2003, the pair of 22-year-olds debuted in Fox’s “The Simple Life,” which documented their move to Altus, Ark., to live with a family on their farm and try out blue collar jobs.Hilton and Richie brought rich-girl haughtiness and high jinks to mundane tasks like cleaning hotel rooms and, in one memorable episode, serving burgers at a Sonic Drive-In. The result was a quotable megahit — with heart. “Their fish-out-of-water ineptitude serves as a social leveler that gives them their comeuppance and preserves the dignity of their rural hosts,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in a review for The New York Times. Unlike the other popular reality programs of the time, like “Big Brother” and “Survivor,” the allure of “The Simple Life” didn’t come from a wild premise or shocking competition: The personalities of and friendship between Hilton and Richie were the drawing card. That recipe has been built upon in subsequent reality franchises like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives.”More than two decades later, the two are appearing in “Paris & Nicole: Encore,” a three-part reboot which is primarily set in L.A. and involves activities and outings a bit closer to home. It will air on Peacock beginning Thursday. Though the show centers on the pair’s staging of an opera based on “sanasa,” a made-up word which fans might remember as a mainstay joke on the original, Hilton and Richie also revisit Altus, Sonic and the friendship that made their show riveting TV.“There was nothing really to compare it to,” Hilton said of “The Simple Life.” “So we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.”Jerod Harris/Getty Images for VultureAhead of the “Encore” premiere, we talked to Hilton and Richie about how reality TV has changed since “The Simple Life,” the impact of social media on the genre and the shows they’re enjoying now.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.You were some of the first reality TV stars, and now it is an oversaturated industry. How do you think the landscape has changed since “The Simple Life” first aired?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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    Adam Lambert Is Finding the Fun, and the Fear, in ‘Cabaret’

    Making his Broadway debut as the show’s Emcee, the singer is reveling in what he calls “a thinking piece of musical theater.”Over at the Kit Kat Club, the change in “Cabaret” is apparent in the show’s first moments. The Emcee, as played by the singer-songwriter Adam Lambert, is nothing like the Emcee as played by the film star Eddie Redmayne, who opened the current Broadway revival last spring after it transferred from London.Lambert, in his Broadway debut, turns out to have theatrical chops: He’s lending his Emcee not only vocal shapeliness but also puckish warmth. The alienation so central to Redmayne’s interpretation has been replaced by humanity.To Rebecca Frecknall, the show’s director, Lambert’s rock-star charisma was part of his appeal.“What I didn’t anticipate was how naughty and funny he was going to be and how much he was going to enjoy that relationship with the audience,” she said by phone. “There’s also just something brilliant about what he brings of his personal identity to the role — having a queer, Jewish artist step into that space with that material.”Lambert and ensemble members in the show’s latest revival at the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan.Julieta CervantesSet in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, “Cabaret” starts out light and decadent and grows steadily, stealthily darker, with gut-punch songs like “If You Could See Her,” a satire of antisemitism. There’s also the ballad “I Don’t Care Much” — recently released as a single — which Lambert describes as “a real emotional moment” of “struggle with indifference” for the Emcee.“They were so kind to raise the key to make it more of a torch song for me,” Lambert said.With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, “Cabaret” became a hit with its original Broadway production in 1966. Lambert, 42, has known the musical ever since he was a theater kid growing up in San Diego, when his voice teacher showed him the movie adaptation.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 ‘Our Town,’ the Characters Are Fictional. The Smells Are Real.

    The curtain had just come down on a recent Wednesday matinee of the Broadway revival of “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play set in a small New Hampshire town. But cast and crew members were already in the basement of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, lining up to assemble BLTs.The fixings were arrayed on a table: hot bacon, romaine hearts and tomato slices, white toast, mayonnaise (traditional and vegan) and, for iconoclasts, honey mustard and avocado. There were noisy debates about whether crispy or chewy bacon makes a superior sandwich.There was consensus on one matter. “What’s better than bacon?” barked Julie Halston, one of the show’s 28 actors. “Nothing.”This was not a catered meal or a special occasion. It was a BLT Wednesday, and the bacon had been fried up in the wings, just steps away from the actors as they performed the play’s final stretch. To add a sense memory, two pounds of bacon are fried at every performance.The “Our Town” cast members (from left) Heather Ayers, Hagan Oliveras and Greg Wood assembled BLTs after a recent Wednesday matinee.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesKenny Leon, who directed the show, said he was inspired by David Cromer’s 2009 Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which featured the onstage cooking of bacon during the same third-act scene, when the ghost of Emily, a leading character, visits her childhood home at breakfast time.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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    Jimmy Kimmel: America’s ‘Going Nuts’ Over a Murder Suspect’s Abs

    Kimmel applauded people for “moving away from nonstop election coverage” to instead obsess over the looks of Luigi Mangione, who was charged with killing a C.E.O.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.‘Time’s sexiest’On Monday, Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare.Late night hosts commented Tuesday about the attention over Mangione’s looks, with Jimmy Kimmel calling him “Time’s sexiest alleged murderer of the year” and “the hottest coldblooded killer in America.”“I’m not sure what this says about us, but ever since these photos of him came out from his holding cell, from his mug shot — someone found his abs somewhere online.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ryan Murphy right now is flying to Netflix headquarters in a jetpack.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So many women and so many men are going nuts over how good-looking this killer is. And there’s a huge wave of horny washing over us right now.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“My question is, is he really even that hot? I mean, take away the hair, and the abs, the face, the arms, that easy smile, the way his eyes light up — wait, I’m sorry, what were we talking about? Syria? What are we talking about? Oh, yeah, we’re talking about the guy with the incredible abs.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“But I have to say, it does feel kind of good — we’re moving away from nonstop election coverage and back to drooling over a coldblooded murderer’s eyebrows and abs. I think that might be progress. Maybe not, I don’t know.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (McFingered Edition)“For the last few days, there’s been a killer on the loose in America. Well, there’s actually tons of killers on the loose in America, but this one killed someone important, so they were really looking for him.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“The assassin’s name is Luigi Mangione? Did they find him hiding in a big pipe?” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Mangione has become something of an internet celebrity, and people are not thrilled with the Altoona McDonald’s employees who McFingered him. Several nasty Google reviews have been left of the Altoona location, including ‘They got rats behind the counter. Do not recommend,’ while many others simply left one-star reviews, citing bad service and so-called ‘snitches.’ You know what they say: Snitches get Filet-O-Fishes.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s surprising that he comes from such a privileged background. He’s not really the kind of guy you expect to become a murderer. I mean, I expect him to crash the housing market, but not kill a guy.” — MICHAEL KOSTAWe 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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    Michael Cole, ‘Mod Squad’ Actor, Dies at 84

    Mr. Cole, who played the wealthy Pete Cochran, had been the last of the show’s three stars still living.Michael Cole, the actor best known as Pete Cochran, the last of three actors who played hip, young undercover police officers on ABC’s hit show “The Mod Squad,” died on Tuesday. He was 84.A cause of death was not given. His death was confirmed by Christy Clark of the Stewart Talent Agency, which represented Mr. Cole.Mr. Cole was a young, struggling actor when he achieved overnight success on the police crime drama “The Mod Squad,” which ran on ABC from 1968 to 1973 and co-starred Peggy Lipton and Clarence Williams III.“The Mod Squad” was one of the first prime-time series to acknowledge the hippie counterculture and an early example of multiracial casting. It centered on three hippies in trouble with the law, who avoid jail time by joining the police department and working undercover. Mr. Cole was cast as Pete Cochran, a wealthy kid who was kicked out of his parents’ house for stealing a car. Mr. Williams played Linc Hayes, and Ms. Lipton played Julie Barnes.The trio gave the show one of its taglines: “One black, one white, one blonde.”The show became a runaway hit, tackling racism, abortion, the Vietnam War and drug abuse. It launched Mr. Cole, whose Hollywood résumé was thin, to fame.Clarence Williams III, Michael Cole and Peggy Lipton while shooting “Mod Squad” outside the Los Angeles County Museum.Bettmann — 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

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    Jamie Foxx’s ‘What Happened Was…’ and Other Comedy Specials to Watch

    The show is both an act of gratitude and a stand-up special. It’s one of four new comedy hours worth checking out.The latest batch of comedy specials worth watching starts with a much anticipated one from Jamie Foxx and includes hours from Matthew Broussard, Anthony Jeselnik and Fortune Feimster.Jamie Foxx ‘What Had Happened Was …’(Stream it on Netflix)In April 2023, news broke that Jamie Foxx had been hospitalized in Atlanta with what his daughter described on Instagram as a “medical complication.” Not much else was revealed, and in the vacuum of information, rumors spread. When a photo of Foxx appeared online, some conspiracy-minded types called it a clone. Katt Williams even jokingly questioned and made fun of his “mysterious illness.”Now Foxx says he wants to set the record straight. Speaking in a theater a few hundred yards from the hospital where he says his life was saved, Foxx enters wearing sunglasses but takes them off quickly to wipe away tears. He says he experienced a brain bleed, suffered a stroke, temporarily lost the ability to walk and doesn’t remember 20 days of his life. It’s a moving performance that feels like part of a growing trend of how comics deal with medical catastrophe.Tig Notaro did a famous hour about flirting with death not long after she got a cancer diagnosis. Keith Robinson also turned his two strokes into irreverent comedy. Foxx’s special is a much more polished production and sentimental affair. He tells a few jokes, pays tribute to his family repeatedly (he brings two daughters onstage) and preaches the virtues of prayer and comedy (“If I could stay funny, I could stay alive”). His most amusing moments involve his gift for impressions, including a riotous imagining of Denzel Washington if he, like Foxx, needed help going to the bathroom in a hospital. Foxx also does an excellent Katt Williams. But this isn’t a stand-up special so much as a celebration, an act of gratitude and the kind of emotive video often posted on Instagram.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