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    Ron Simons, Who Brought Black Stories to Broadway, Dies at 63

    He left a career in tech and found success as a producer, winning four Tonys. His mission: staging productions about underrepresented communities.Ron Simons, who left his job as an executive at Microsoft to pursue his dream of acting but later found his métier as a theatrical producer — one of the relatively few Black ones on Broadway — and won four Tony Awards, died on June 12. He was 63.His death was announced by Simonsays Entertainment, his production company. A spokesman declined to say where he died or provide the cause of death.Mr. Simons had been acting for about a decade, but was unhappy with the roles he was being offered, when he started producing in 2009. He believed that his experience as an actor and businessman would serve him well as a producer.“I’ve found that many businesspeople can handle the question of financial viability but can’t judge a good story, so as an artist I also have that area of expertise,” he told DC Theater Arts in 2020. “Plus, even if it’s a good story, it has to be crafted to take it to the stage, so the leadership must understand how to get it there.”Success came quickly. He was a producer of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” starring Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis, which won the Tony for best revival of a musical in 2012. Mr. Simons won a second Tony a year later for best play for “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a comedy by Christopher Durang about three middle-aged siblings.Audra McDonald, center, in the musical “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” which Mr. Simons produced.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFrom left David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen and Sigourney Weaver in the Tony-winning “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.”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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    Anjana Vasan Just Wants Stanley Tucci to Cook for Her

    “Maybe I can engineer it where I work with him, and then he makes me a drink and a bowl of pasta,” the “We Are Lady Parts” actress said.The past three years have been good to Amina, the introverted scientist in London with rock-star dreams played by Anjana Vasan on the Peacock series “We Are Lady Parts.”Amina completed her Ph.D. in microbiology. She landed a job in stem-cell research. And she underwent a glow-up befitting the lead guitarist of an indie punk band made up of five Muslim women.Farewell, shrinking violet. Amina is in her “villain era” now.“She’s found this confidence, and it’s almost like a new pair of shoes that she’s breaking in,” Vasan, 37, said in a video interview. “She hasn’t quite found her landing yet.”The sitcom’s three-year hiatus was also good for Vasan — born in India, raised in Singapore and now living in London — who won a Olivier Award in 2023 for her performance as Stella in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”“We were determined for a show like this not to just be this anomaly, that the show with five women of color at the helm had to have another iteration — it had to go even deeper,” she said before explaining her fascination with YouTube wormholes, “Veep” on repeat, Townes Van Zandt’s music and the stationery she assembles before taking on a new job.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1The Art of Zarina HashmiZarina was the first time I’d seen someone’s art and gone, “Oh, wow, I love this.” Then I realized she was of Indian heritage herself. So much of her art is about borders and home and memory and place. There was something about a simple piece of art that spoke to me in a really visceral way.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 ‘Couples Therapy’ Gets People to Go There

    The Showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. Its couples are still navigating the aftermath.One night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, Josh Perez was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone.He was searching for contacts for the producers behind “Couples Therapy,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. The show, which follows real couples in the New York area as they undergo about five months of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. Perez hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more.Months later, Perez and his fiancée, Natasha Marks, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Across from them, on a TV set built to look like a therapist’s office, was Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Couples Therapy.”“I guess if I was to sum up why we’re here,” Marks said, searching Perez’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.”Across the show’s four seasons — the latest was recently released on Paramount Plus with Showtime — a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that Marks shared for the dissection of Guralnik and, by extension, a national TV audience. Online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. The attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Couples Therapy.”Paramount+ with ShowtimeWe 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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    ‘Doctor Who’ Finale Recap: Answers Through the Tears

    Ncuti’s Gatwa’s first season as the Doctor closes with a typically ambitious episode.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Empire of Death’If Ncuti Gatwa’s first full run of episodes manning the TARDIS has been characterized by anything, it’s big swings.Over the course of this season, the “Doctor Who” showrunner Russell T Davies has explored racism, queer love, the threat posed by technology and even fandom itself, with episodes ranging from the abstruse (“73 Yards”) to the strangely saccharine (“Space Babies,” which I have largely advised friends skip).The season has, at times, felt overstuffed, but it’s been the overhaul “Doctor Who” needed after losing some momentum under its previous showrunner, Chris Chibnall. Davies’s ambition is undeniable, and the penultimate episode — in which the evil god Sutekh returned after nearly 50 years — was one of the boldest, scariest “Doctor Who” episodes in years.While the finale doesn’t quite maintain the tension, “Empire of Death” is still an effective and satisfying end to the season. The episode opens with several loose ends to tie up: Sutekh needs to be stopped, and we still need to discover the identities of Ruby’s mothe and her neighbor Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson).The action picks back up in medias res, with Sutekh’s hollow-faced, red-eyed servants Susan (Susan Twist) and Harriet (Genesis Lynea) uncurling their palms and blowing out a brown dust that turns everyone it touches to ash. Kate (Jemma Redgrave) and her team at UNIT, Britain’s supersecret extraterrestrial task force, are quickly destroyed.Kate, played by Jemma Redgrave, and her team at UNIT run Britain’s supersecret extraterrestrial task force.Bad Wolf/BBC StudiosWe 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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    Taylor Wily, ‘Hawaii Five-0’ and ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ Actor, Dies at 56

    He spent his early career as a professional sumo wrestler.Taylor Wily, who played a shrimp truck vendor and police informant on the television reboot of “Hawaii Five-0,” and who in his earlier years was an acclaimed professional sumo wrestler, died on Thursday. He was 56.Paul Almond, a legal representative for Mr. Wily, confirmed his death. A location and cause of death were not immediately available.Mr. Wily starred as Kamekona in more than 170 episodes of “Hawaii Five-0,” a reimagining of the 1970s crime drama that followed the escapades of state police officers on the island. His character became a fan favorite, gradually morphing into the show’s resident entrepreneur, running a shaved ice business and a helicopter tour company alongside his shrimp venture.“‘Hawaii Five-0’ could become ‘Kamekona Five-0,’” Masi Oka, who played Dr. Max Bergman on the series, said in a 2012 interview with CBS.The series, which ran from 2010 to 2020, followed a fictional state police unit that seemed to routinely crave shrimp. Mr. Wily’s character was a warm and comedic presence onscreen that resonated with fans across the world as well as with residents in Hawaii.Peter Lenkov, a producer of the series, said on social media that he was drawn to Mr. Wily from his first audition, and that he was impressed enough with Mr. Wily to write in his character as a recurring role.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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    DeSantis Vetoes All Arts Grants in Florida

    Gov. Ron DeSantis gave no explanation for zeroing out the $32 million in grants that were approved by state lawmakers.For the past 10 days, Richard Russell has been rattled, poring over budgets and working the phones in an attempt to limit the consequences of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto pen.Mr. Russell, the general director of the Sarasota Opera on Florida’s Gulf Coast, had expected his nonprofit organization to receive a state grant of about $70,000 once Mr. DeSantis signed a budget that state lawmakers had approved in March.But in a move that stunned arts and culture organizations, Mr. DeSantis vetoed the entirety of their grant funding — about $32 million — on June 12, leaving them scrambling to figure out how to offset the shortfall.“It’s not going to close us,” Mr. Russell said. “But it is a gap that I am going to have to figure out how to make up, and if I don’t find alternate sources of funding, that could be someone’s job.”Leaders of arts organizations in Florida, many of whom have worked in the state for decades, cannot remember a governor ever eliminating all of their grant funding. Even in the lean years of the Great Recession, at least a nominal amount — say, 5 percent of the recommended total — was approved.Established arts organizations usually know better than to overly rely on nonrecurring state dollars subject to the discretion of politicians, said Michael Tomor, executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art. But to cut funding at a time when arts organizations are still struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic sends a concerning message “that taxpayer dollars should not be used in support of arts and culture,” he added.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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    Review: ‘Orphan Black: Echoes’ Revisits a Sci-Fi Favorite

    The new sequel to “Orphan Black” raises interesting questions about the nature of memory but misses the charm of that show’s star, Tatiana Maslany.Congratulations to the ominous vat of goo community and its ever-expanding sci-fi reign. Where else might human-seeming characters emerge if not from an ominous vat of goo? They gasp and look around frantically. Ah yes, a star covered in goo — that’s how you know the bad guys are up to something.“Orphan Black: Echoes,” premiering Sunday on AMC and BBC America, includes a few goo-births among other familiar sci-fi moments. The show is a sequel to the mesmerizing drama “Orphan Black,” in which Sarah (Tatiana Maslany) discovers she is a clone and sets out to find the other versions of herself — and to figure out her origins. “Echoes” is an apt title; the shows are similar, but this one is fainter and less original.Our anchor is Lucy (Krysten Ritter), who doesn’t know who she is, where she came from or how she got to this fake living room in a vast warehouse. She just has to get out of there. Wait — is that a vat of goo? The early action of the show follows the life Lucy cobbles together for herself, with a medic boyfriend and his deaf daughter, who, sadly, are not interesting.Lucy eventually discovers that she is a “printout,” a copy of a person — if not a clone exactly, then at least clone-adjacent. Like Sarah, she sets out to get to the bottom of … whatever is happening, and along the way she encounters mad scientists, a woman with dementia, a surly teen, a scheming billionaire.“Echoes” is set mostly in 2052, and it wears its futurism lightly. Cellphones and computers are marginally sleeker, and phone booths have made a comeback, but teens are still explaining the limits of a gender binary to their baffled parents. People still smoke cigarettes and drive regular cars; guns are still abundant, and guest rooms are still decorated with fast-furniture from Amazon.Early on, this ordinariness grates. It can feel like the whole show is in a bad mood, clomping around and resenting everything along with its characters. In “Echoes,” hostility and secrecy go hand in hand; everything seems menacing, but often it’s just obfuscated. A broad iciness makes the first few episodes dull and remote, but eventually, as the superficial mysteries are solved and the deeper mysteries emerge, the show’s more intriguing, tricky self arrives. Better late than never.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 Folger Library Wants to Reintroduce You to Shakespeare

    After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.Social media is awash with pictures of jaw-dropping libraries, elaborately styled home bookshelves and all manner of drool-worthy Library Porn. But for understated dazzle, it’s hard to compete with a wall in the new basement galleries of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.For decades, the library’s 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio — the largest collection in the world — were locked away in a vault, with access granted only to select scholars. But now, anyone can enter the public galleries and see them displayed in a special wall case, laid flat with spines out.In the dim, curatorially correct lighting, they glow like some kind of mysterious dark matter. But during a preview of the building, which reopens this weekend after a four-year, $80 million expansion, the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, reached for a sunnier metaphor.Six of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of the First Folio. The library has placed all 82 of its First Folios — the largest collection in the world — on permanent display.Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesThe Folio — a collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his friends in 1623, seven years after his death — is “the ultimate message in a bottle.”“And the miracle is that every generation opens up the bottle and it turns out the plays, the message, was addressed to them,” Witmore said.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