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    How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

    When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.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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    Ronny Chieng on Trump’s Nobel Nomination: Consider the Source

    An endorsement from Benjamin Netanyahu for the Nobel Peace Prize is like “a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson,” the “Daily Show” 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.More War Than PeaceDuring a dinner on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented President Donald Trump with his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng referred to Netanyahu as “kosher Thanos.” Among world leaders who meet with President Trump and want to “butter him up with a special surprise — well, Bibi went all out,” Chieng said.“Yes, a Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu is very meaningful — right up there with a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson.” — RONNY CHIENG“But Mr. Netanyahu, let me tell you something: If you think you can get Trump to keep sending military aid to Israel by sucking up to him, well, guess what? You can expect that money in your bank account by close of business.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Vacation From the Vatican Edition)“Now, this is the time of year when everyone’s on summer break, and that includes the Pope. Yes, for real. Pope Leo is reportedly taking a six-week vacation. Yes. Hold on, he’s taking six weeks off? Who the hell does he think he is, Jimmy Kimmel?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“Seriously. The dude wears robes and slippers all day. He’s got no wife, no kids — his whole goddamn life is a vacation. Oh, excuse me, Father. Your whole damn life is a vacation.” — ANTHONY ANDERSON“And, by the way, Father, starting Friday, I will be available if you need someone to guest-pope.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” The New Yorker’s executive editor, Michael Luo, spoke with Ronny Chieng about the hidden history of Chinese Americans, detailed in his new book, “Strangers in the Land.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe WNBA superstar Candace Parker will discuss her new book, “The Can-Do Mindset,” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMs. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesThe Amplifier revisited Janet Jackson’s lover-girl era with six of her most sensual songs. More

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    Richard Greenberg, Playwright Whose ‘Take Me Out’ Won a Tony, Dies at 67

    More than 30 of his plays were produced on Broadway and off. Many of them dealt with the manners and mores of New York’s upper middle class.Richard Greenberg, who won frequent praise as the American Noël Coward for his sharp-witted plays about the manners and mores of urbane, sometimes smug New Yorkers, and who received a Tony Award in 2003 for “Take Me Out,” his play about a gay baseball player, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 67.His sister-in-law, Janet Kain Greenberg, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was cancer.A child of the middle-class Long Island suburbs, Mr. Greenberg rose to theater fame in the 1980s with a string of scripts that delved into the interior lives of the people he knew best: young, upwardly mobile urban professionals — yuppies, in the parlance of the time.Works like “Eastern Standard” (1987) and “The American Plan” (1990), two of his first major plays, were incisive and biting, but never cruel. His goal was to examine the bourgeoisie, but never to épater them.From left, Kieran Campion, Lily Rabe, Brenda Pressley, Mercedes Ruehl and Austin Lysy in the Broadway revival of Mr. Greenberg’s “The American Plan” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHaving once aspired to be an architect himself, he used that profession as both an identity for many of his characters and an unspoken metaphor in his plays: How do the relationships we build on love and family and friendship bear up over time and under the stress of imperfect, if caustically funny, partners?“We’re always trying to make a cogent story out of our existence,” Mr. Greenberg told Princeton Alumni Weekly in 2016, “and people in my plays often feel they have the story, but almost invariably they’re wrong.”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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    ‘Such Brave Girls’ Is an Audacious and Hilarious British Comedy

    For fans of “Peep Show” and Sharon Horgan, this warped series about a dysfunctional family is in some ways a satire of the trauma comedy.The blistering British comedy “Such Brave Girls,” on Hulu, centers on a dysfunctional family and features many of the archetypes one sees in a sadcom. But instead of slow poignancy and personal growth, “Brave” is all about feral, filthy awfulness. It’s hilarious and electrified, perfectly deranged.Kat Sadler created and stars in the show as Josie, the suicidal, closeted-but-also-not older sister whose biggest turn-on is being fawned over for how damaged she is. Billie (Lizzie Davidson, Sadler’s real-life sister) is the boy-crazy — craaaaazy — golden child who sexts during her abortion. Josie and Billie always seem to get what the other wants: Josie has no use for the doting, useless man who pledges his love to her, whereas Billie would give anything to have her dirtbag show her a molecule of loyalty. Josie can barely interact with women she crushes on while Billie is unfazed by a brief fling with her doppelgänger and romantic rival. Their mom, Deb (Louise Brealey), openly loathes Josie when she isn’t too busy fawning over her weird widower boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely). Family!The show is not for the prudish. But the vulgarity is part of the fun, part of the show’s amped-up id. The characters here do and say cartoonishly monstrous things, especially about sex and intimacy, but there is truth inside their savagery. The desperation to be loved and understood can indeed outpace reason, so while the behaviors here are outlandish, they’re not nonsense. The naughtiness is rich and coherent.In some ways, “Brave” is a satire of the trauma comedy, and it uses similar beats and moments but does so in festive, warped ways. A doomed family camping trip goes, of course, poorly, and a tiff leads to Deb kicking a tree and screaming: “We! Do! Not! Need! Catharsis!” The sisters gas each other up but with some of the worst advice imaginable, and the self-actualization moments come out tangled and grotesque.The raunch and audacity remind me of “Peep Show” and of the Sharon Horgan comedy “Pulling.” And “Brave” shares with “Fleabag” that “Oh dang, this show is really going for it!” dazzle. To its huge credit, “Brave” tenaciously resists sweetness, and yet its fallen world and all of its ostensibly unlikable characters add up to something pretty easy to love.Both six-episode seasons are available now. More

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    ‘Memnon’ Review: To Fight or Not to Fight?

    In Will Power’s play for the Classical Theater of Harlem, Eric Berryman stars as an Ethiopian king drawn into the Trojan War.The trappings of royalty don’t always send the intended signals. Take the gilded crown of laurels gleaming expensively atop the head of Priam, the king of Troy. He means the jewelry to underline his status, to augment his gravitas, but no such luck. Even gussied up, he is unmistakably a twit.His nephew Memnon, though? That man has majesty. As embodied by a gripping Eric Berryman in “Memnon,” Will Power’s Trojan War verse play at the Classical Theater of Harlem, he radiates the charisma, integrity and serious-mindedness of a leader. He has a sense of family duty, too.Not to be confused with Agamemnon (same war, different king, opposite side), Memnon has traveled all the way from Ethiopia, where he is king, to answer his uncle’s call for help. A great warrior, he is uncertain that he wants to join the battle, though Troy is a decade deep in combat and in danger of imminent defeat.Memnon has not forgotten the painful slights he has endured for being Trojan only on his father’s side: treated as “not fully Trojan, kin and not kin,” he says. Is a society that has always regarded him that way, led by a king who also sees him that way, worth risking his own life for?His moral wrestling is at the heart of the play, his blend of affection and alienation speaking to the present with bracing clarity.“It makes no sense, to fight for that which has proven time and time again that you will forever be other,” he says. “And yet, golden moments do I have. Good memories in Troy.”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: ‘Bring the House Down,’ by Charlotte Runcie

    Drawing on her own experience as an arts journalist, Charlotte Runcie comically skewers bad men, bad faith and (unforgivably) bad theater.BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, by Charlotte RuncieHow cruel may a critic be? I ask for a friend.David Niven was once dismissed as “tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.” (He hung the review in his bathroom.) John Simon described Barbra Streisand’s nose in “A Star Is Born” as “a ziggurat made of meat” bisecting the screen like “a bolt of fleshy lightning.”Having never gone further than calling an actor confused or miscast, I find such put-downs shocking. But they pale in comparison to Alex Lyons’s review of Hayley Sinclair in a one-woman Edinburgh Festival Fringe production called “Climate Emergence-She.” After disemboweling the script, Lyons turns his attention to its author and star. “Hayley herself is so tedious, and so derivative,” he writes, “that after you’ve endured the first 10 minutes of what the venue is loosely calling ‘a show,’ you’ll be begging for the world to end much sooner than scheduled.”Should Lyons, the lead critic at a major British newspaper, be canceled for that? How about if, in the hours between writing the pan and its publication, he picks up Sinclair at a bar and sleeps with her? She reads her one-star review in the morning, not knowing until then that the man she spent the night with was its author.And does it change the moral calculus if Lyons was right? The show sounds truly dreadful.Those are the questions heating up Charlotte Runcie’s debut novel, “Bring the House Down,” which enjoyably pours fuel on both his and her sides of the dispute. Lyons is basically a #MeToo straw man, so grossly cavalier and indifferent to the sensitivity of other people, especially women, that you’d want to cancel him just for existing.Nor does Runcie make Sinclair a shining heroine. In a canny and commercial act of revenge, the character instantly revamps “Climate Emergence-She” as “The Alex Lyons Experience,” dredging up the history of the critic’s indiscretions and releasing the monster of internet rage. With its parade of guest star exes and its bonus semi-nudity, the new show is the hit the old one could never be.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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    ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Returns to New York, Fueled by a Devoted Fandom

    When the pitch-black comedy “Heathers” came out in 1989, a review in The New York Times said it was “as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited.” An early scene was said to have “the air of a demonic sitcom.” This may explain why the composer Laurence O’Keefe initially had reservations about working on a musical adaptation.“I thought it was too nihilistic,” O’Keefe said of the movie, in which a frustrated senior (Winona Ryder) and her murderous boyfriend (Christian Slater) dispatch members of their high school’s bullying elite with theatrical violence. “This material is in some ways more despairing than ‘Sweeney Todd.’”Yet O’Keefe still thought there was a way to make the story palatable for the stage. He was right: These days, “Heathers: The Musical,” the adaptation he created with the writer Kevin Murphy and the director Andy Fickman, is gaining cult-classic status in its own right.It took a decade, but in December the Off Broadway production’s cast album, from 2014, went gold. Packed with a mercilessly catchy mix of bangers (“Candy Store”) and ballads (“Seventeen”), the recording was instrumental in fueling a “Heathers” craze in Britain, where the show has had several West End runs and tours, which were further immortalized in a second cast album and a live capture.From left, Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty starred in the pitch-black high school comedy “Heathers.”Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoNow “Heathers: The Musical” has returned to New World Stages, where it had its original New York engagement back in 2014. This version incorporates changes, including new songs, made to the show in the intervening decade. It will open on July 10 with a sterling cast list led by Lorna Courtney (“& Juliet”) as the arty senior Veronica; Casey Likes (last seen on Broadway in “Back to the Future: The Musical”) as the vengeful J.D.; and McKenzie Kurtz, Elizabeth Teeter and Olivia Hardy as the school’s queen bees, all named Heather.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 Congress Is Basically Pro Wrestling Without the Fun

    The “Daily Show” host said the drama around President Trump’s big policy bill was about as authentic as a World Wrestling Entertainment match.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.ShenanigansPresident Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” became law last week while most late-night hosts were off for the holiday.On Monday’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart dismissed the drama around the domestic policy bill as Washington theater. He accused lawmakers and the news media of “fake narrative shenanigans and hypocrisies and fecklessness,” comparing the Republicans who denounced the bill (before voting for it) to pro wrestlers: “The only difference between that vote and wrestling is that wrestling is fun and takes actual courage.”“Ooh! It surprisingly got through! Like every other [expletive] thing Trump has wanted, from Qatari jet bribes to Epstein file secrecy to extorted media conglomerate protection money.” — JON STEWART“Now, there’s a lot of ways that we can walk through this tax and spending bill and how this bill encapsulates a ton of general Washington [expletive]. For instance, political hypocrisy. This bill was 970 pages. They jammed it through with barely any time to read it.” — JON STEWART“When it happens to them, it’s ‘shoving it down their throat. It’s an outrage!’ But when it’s for Republicans, it’s just, ‘Come on, America, relax the glottis, breathe through your nose.’” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (July 4 Edition)“Joe Biden was seen struggling to set up a beach chair on July 4 weekend. It’s not his fault — he’s not used to a seat without a hole in the center of it.” — GREG GUTFELD“On the Fourth of July, Kamala Harris posted ‘Things are probably going to get worse before they get better.’ That’s also how she starts her speaking engagements.” — GREG GUTFELD“Yes, U.F.C., which stands for ‘U [Expletive] Crazy’?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” on Trump wanting a July 4 U.F.C. fight at the White House next year“I actually agree with the president. There should be a U.F.C. fight at the White House, between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Right? It’ll be Golf Clubber Lang versus the Ketamine Machine.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingBlack Americans were asked to share the whitest thing about themselves on Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightCedric the Entertainer will reunite with Anthony Anderson on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutOzzy Osbourne onstage in Birmingham, England, on Saturday.Ross HalfinAt 76, Ozzy Osbourne officially retired from Black Sabbath with a farewell performance in his hometown. More