Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel Wants Canada to Save Us, Eh?

    Kimmel is all for making Canada the 51st state: “If Canada also had 54 electoral votes, forget MAGA — our next president will be a kindhearted lesbian moose.”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.Oh, CanadaPresident Trump agreed to suspend his threatened tariffs on Canada’s exports after making a deal with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday.Trump said he considered Canada’s “concessions” a “big victory,” but Jimmy Kimmel noted on Tuesday that Trudeau had reiterated a border commitment that he’d already announced.”That’s right, under President Trump, our allies will be reiterating in their boots from now on,” Kimmel said.“Next, his plan is he’s going to force France to give us the Statue of Liberty. Won’t that be nice? The art of the deal.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s nice, he decided not to break up with them till after Valentine’s Day.” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump’s also doubling down on this idea that Canada would agree to become our 51st state — as if Drake hasn’t been through enough this week.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But let’s just imagine for a second that somehow they do make this happen and Canada does become a state. Do they think it would be a red state? There are 41 million people living in Canada. They’re about the same number we have in California. California has 54 electoral votes. If Canada also had 54 electoral votes, forget MAGA — our next president will be a kindhearted lesbian moose.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m trying to say, I’m for it. Save us, Canada — you’re our only hope.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Egg Edition)“I never thought I’d live in a time where there’d be surge pricing on eggs. This is going to be a tough Easter, kids. Get ready to start hunting Swedish meatballs.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Can you imagine if Joe Biden was still president and there weren’t any eggs in the store? Trump would be screaming into an empty McMuffin right now.” — JIMMY KIMMELWe 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

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    ‘The Antiquities’ Review: Relics of Late Human Life in 12 Exhibits

    According to Jordan Harrison’s museum piece of a play, we are long extinct by 2240. But the future has kept our Betamaxes.By a campfire on the shore of Lake Geneva in 1816, five friends take up the challenge of telling the scariest story. Mary Shelley is clearly the winner, with her cautionary tale (soon to be a novel) of an obsessed doctor whose electrified monster achieves sentience, then runs wild. So freaked out is her pal Lord Byron that his immediate, sneering response — “you’re demented” — quickly turns into a shiver and a prayer.“May we never be clever enough to create something that can replace us,” he says.A mere 424 years later, in 2240, two post-human beings look back on that vignette, and the whole of the Anthropocene, with wonder and pity. How could people have thought of themselves as the endpoint of evolution, one of these inorganic intelligences asks rhetorically, when mankind was obviously just “a transitional species” and “a blip on the timeline”?That timeline is the compelling if somewhat overbearing structural device of Jordan Harrison’s play “The Antiquities,” which opened on Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons. Starting with Shelley’s monster (which she counterfactually calls a “computer”) and ending with, well, the end of humanity, it could win a scary-story contest itself, as it maps one possible route, the Via Technologica, from Romantic glory to species demise.For the inorganics of 2240 are here not to praise mankind but to bury it. They are guides to “exhibits” in what the play’s alternative title calls “A Tour of the Permanent Collection in the Museum of Late Human Antiquities.” The Shelley scene is the first of 12 such exhibits, demonstrating how inventions gradually overtook natural intelligence and then, like Frankenstein’s monster, destroyed it.From left, Aria Shahghasemi, Sieh, Andrew Garman, Marchánt Davis and Amelia Workman in a scene, dated 1816, on Paul Steinberg’s set made up of matte metal panels.Richard Termine for The New York TimesAt first, the inventions seem useful or harmless or — to us, smack in the middle of the timeline — hopelessly obsolete. A woman in 1910 (Cindy Cheung) presents a wooden finger to a boy injured in a workhouse accident. A nerd circa 1978 (Ryan Spahn) shows off an awkward robot prototype that recognizes 400 English words. (The guy who is pleasuring the nerd is impressed.) In 1987, a mother (Kristen Sieh) whose grieving son (Julius Rinzel) cannot sleep agrees to let him watch one of her soaps, recorded on that magical yet soon-to-be-discontinued technology, the Betamax videotape.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

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    The Playwright Larissa FastHorse Doesn’t Want to Be a Cautionary Tale

    After a delay, “Fake It Until You Make It,” the writer’s follow-up to her Broadway satire, “The Thanksgiving Play,” is finally onstage in Los Angeles.In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was in high school in Pierre, S.D., friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Talk would turn to the area’s “drunk lazy Indians,” she said, and “I’d be like, ‘um, excuse me, I’m right here.’”“And then it was always, ‘Oh, well, not you!’” she continued. Even after FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” opened on Broadway in 2023, the “not you” slights continued. At one of her own plays in New York, she overheard women in the bathroom joking about how Native Americans would be late to the show because they tell time by the sun — it was an evening performance — and because they would be taking horses, not cars. “People say crazy stuff like that all the time,” she said.In Southern California, where she has lived since 1991, it rarely occurs to strangers that she is Native, or, as she noted, that anyone might be. “It’s all part of the great erasure,” she said. “Everyone speaks Spanish to me in L.A.,” she said. “Which is fine, it’s lovely. But it’s like I have to fight to be Native American here.”Over the years, FastHorse, 53, has transformed her experiences as a Native American navigating her way through the worlds of theater, nonprofits, TV writing and ballet into thought-provoking, often wickedly funny work. Her plays are both a way of confronting that “great erasure” — “the last thing people tend to think about are Native Americans,” she said — and replacing offensive stereotypes, like the “Hollywood Indians” she grew up watching on TV, with more nuanced and human portrayals.In “The Thanksgiving Play,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2018, four well-meaning white people struggle mightily to produce a more historically accurate holiday pageant for grade schoolers, replacing happy pilgrims and prayers of gratitude with a bag of bloody Native American heads. In “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” (2017), the last members of a fictional tribe encounter a pair of kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan members.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

  • 150 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    7 Surprisingly Busy Days in the Life of an Experimental Theater Maker

    Peter Mills Weiss shared details of a week of “everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants.”January is known as a time when New York commercial theater recovers from its holiday bender and takes a break from openings.It’s another story for the experimental performance scene, which struts its stuff at festivals such as Under the Radar, Prototype and Exponential. For someone like Peter Mills Weiss, it’s go time.“January is this incredible crush of everyone doing everything all the time, and by the seat of everyone’s pants,” Weiss, 36, said over the phone. “I’m happy to support in all the ways that I can.”Weiss wears many hats, most prominently as a creator with his regular collaborator, Julia Mounsey, of such unsettling, darkly funny shows as “While You Were Partying“ at Soho Rep (2021) and “Open Mic Night” at last year’s Under the Radar.In addition, he and Ann Marie Dorr are joint interim producing artistic directors of the Brooklyn avant-hub the Brick Theater and its annex, Brick Aux. Weiss, who lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, also juggles projects as an actor and a sound designer. “I like being a jack-of-all-trades,” he said.Weiss kept a diary of his cultural diet during a mid-January week that culminated with his participation in “Soho Rep Is Not a Building. Soho Rep Had a Building…,” a 12-hour “marathon wake” in honor of Walkerspace, the company’s former home in TriBeCa. These are edited excerpts from phone and email interviews.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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Late Night Weighs In on the ‘World’s Dumbest Trade War’

    Jimmy Kimmel thinks President Trump decided not to impose tariffs on Mexico because he saw the guacamole bill for his Super Bowl party.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.Tariff ManPresident Trump announced new tariffs on Canada and Mexico over the weekend but agreed to pause them for 30 days on Monday.Jimmy Kimmel called Trump’s tariffs “fake,” saying he was “pretending to issue tariffs so that Canada and Mexico can pretend to bend over for him, and then it’ll look like he’s the big hero.”“He’s like a toddler negotiating nap time with his parents.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“People are wondering why Trump would start a war with our closest allies, and he was like, ‘I didn’t say anything about Russia and North Korea.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Maybe it’s the New Yorker in me, but the last people you want to upset are your upstairs and downstairs neighbors.” — JIMMY FALLON“So now, we have a one-month cease-fire in what some liberal rag called The Wall Street Journal described as ‘the dumbest trade war in history.’ To which the Dallas Mavericks said, ‘Hold my Luka Dončić.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But you do have to hand it to him. Starting the ‘world’s dumbest trade war’ is an accomplishment to add to a very long list: first of all, world’s dumbest trade war, world’s dumbest Covid response, world’s dumbest climate policy, world’s dumbest hurricane map, world’s dumbest election interference, world’s dumbest wildfire response, world’s dumbest crowd size comparison, world’s dumbest insurrection, and world’s dumbest Eric. He’s like the Michael Phelps of the world’s dumbest stuff.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“No American wakes up saying, ‘Damn Canada. We should really go after Canada.’ I mean, except for Kendrick Lamar. That dude has it out for Canadian rap.” — SETH MEYERS“I just hope cooler heads prevail and the countries involved in this dumb trade war can all get back to selling each other crap as soon as possible.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Tequila Edition)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

  • 88 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Schmigadoon!’ Review: An Affectionate Golden Age Schpoof

    The Apple TV+ series comes to the stage of the Kennedy Center with its snark and affection for classic Broadway musicals intact.Rejoice, ye musical nerds! On the stage of the Eisenhower Theater, off the Hall of States at the Kennedy Center, between the Watergate complex and the Lincoln Memorial, at the heart of America’s temple to high-minded midcentury cultural propriety, your disreputable art form, with its salty predilections and disruptive mores, is on loving display in “Schmigadoon!”But maybe that’s overselling what is essentially a dandy little spoof of some tuners.You may recall that “Schmigadoon!” was an Apple TV+ series about a contemporary couple who, experiencing relationship problems, find themselves trapped in a world of love-insisting musicals. During its first season, in 2021, that world was highly reminiscent of Broadway shows of the 1940s and ’50s like “The Music Man,” “Carousel” and “Oklahoma!” but with bits of “The Sound of Music,” “Brigadoon” and “Kiss Me, Kate” tossed in. In the second season, the scene shifted to “Schmicago” and musicals of the ’70s. (An unproduced third season would have taken the couple “Into the Schmoods.”)The show being offered through Sunday by the Kennedy Center’s musical theater initiative, called Broadway Center Stage, is essentially the first season’s six-episode arc boiled down to two acts by its author, Cinco Paul. If you loved the television show, you probably know every note. If not, you probably don’t want to.I say that as someone whose feelings run in the middle. Neither onscreen nor onstage was I ever very interested in the on-the-outs couple, Josh and Melissa, for the simple reason that as characters they are skeletally thin. He’s the repressed, flat-affect guy; she’s in touch with her ambivalence to the point of annoyance. Though very smartly and appealingly performed here, by Alex Brightman and especially Sara Chase, neither would have lasted two scenes as protagonists of any of the musicals “Schmigadoon” models itself on.But, oh, those musicals! They are classics for a reason, whether for pure delight or complex feeling, and never as normative as they appear on the surface. “Oklahoma!” asks us to accept the inevitable harshness of life but not buckle under it; “Carousel” questions the possibility of redemption. “The Music Man” suggests that, in River City as elsewhere, even the truest love is a bit of a scam.Sara Chase and Alex Brightman, both seated, as a couple trapped in a world of love-insisting musicals, with McKenzie Kurtz, center, as one of those musical theater archetypes, a variant on Ado Annie from “Oklahoma!”Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanWe 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

  • 150 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Super Bowl LIX, Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV This Week

    The Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will face off, after the much anticipated Puppy Bowl XXI.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, Feb. 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.A Sunday filled with football, puppies and ads.It’s time for the annual Taylor Swift-bowl — oh, sorry, I mean Super Bowl. For the second year in a row, Swift will be rooting on her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, who are facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. Sunday at 6:30 p.m. on Fox.Before the biggest football game of the year, there is a much fiercer competition happening between team ruff and team fluff in their pursuit of the Lombarky trophy at Puppy Bowl XXI. Featuring over 100 puppies from shelters all around the country, it’s an opportunity to see cuteness on the small screen and support their adoptions. Sunday at 2 p.m. on TBS and streaming on Max.However you spend game day, get ready earlier in the week by recalling some of the best advertisements of the past, with “Super Bowl Greatest Commercials.” Wednesday at 9 p.m. on CBS.Puppy Bowl XXI features over 100 puppies from shelters all around the country.Animal Planet, via Associated PressAre you working on the yachts or chartering it?Everybody’s favorite hunky captain is back for a new season of “Below Deck Down Under,” the show that follows the crew of a charter yacht. Sailing around the Seychelles off the coast of Africa, Captain Jason Chambers leads a crew of familiar faces and some new ones — for the first time on the franchise, there is sous chef, which feels long overdue. But who is going to put in Captain Chambers’ contact lens now that his chief stewardess Aesha Scott has moved on to the original “Below Deck”? Monday at 8 p.m. on Bravo.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