Eliana Willis

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    The Comedian Looking for Something All of America Can Laugh At

    Partway through his latest special, “Lonely Flowers,” the comedian Roy Wood Jr. tells the story of the time he accidentally hired a white photographer. Or, as he corrects himself, he hired a photographer who he did not think would be white until he showed up. Whenever he travels to a city for a gig, he explains, artists who live there reach out to him to offer their services. He respects their hustle and sometimes accepts those offers, like the one he got from a guy who wanted to take some pictures of him. “Come on take the pictures,” Wood wrote back. “I’ll see you next week, Deon!”Wood drops Deon’s name casually, letting the audience pick up on the joke before he has to explain it. As they start to lose it, Wood joins them in astonishment. Pitching his body forward, throwing his arms out and bugging his eyes, he yells: “You see what I’m saying? I don’t know no white Deons either! Never met one!”Deon ends up being a bald, unimaginably chiseled military veteran with menacing tattoos consisting of “an animal, a death threat then a Bible verse” decorating his arms, the kind of white man that a Black person might not want to be left alone with. Wood is terrified of him — he makes sure to pay him up front — but he finds him unexpectedly sympathetic. It turns out that after returning from service abroad, Deon feels intensely isolated, and photography gives him a sense of purpose.Onstage, Wood is unhurried, an amiable man who, despite being 46, has the countenance of a churchgoing grandfather who still starches his Sunday suit. He is a master of the leisurely, even comforting, story that plays to his audience’s expectations of what is good, kind and virtuous, only to foil those expectations with a well-timed word or mischievous glance.When I first watched “Lonely Flowers,” I could feel this story about Deon teetering toward the saccharine: Maybe we can all get along, or at least get along better, if we just listen to one another. But then Wood lets us in on a disturbing detail: “I like the camera,” Deon told him, “ ’cause, you know, I get to look down the crosshair and still shoot people.” Wood’s look of earnest sympathy dissolves, and we’re left wondering how to feel about Deon after all.Then the joke rounds yet another corner: Wood turns serious again, recalling how sincerely Deon thanked him in the greenroom, shaking his hand firmly and looking him right in the eye. “I was like, Wooowww,” Wood says, his voice dropping to a stage whisper, seemingly humbled by the interaction. But then we reach the other side of his pause: “He was about to kill some people.” Wood imagines Deon at home, cleaning his rifle right up to the moment Wood contacts him. “We’ll never know how many lives I saved,” Wood says triumphantly, “because I took a chance on a white man!”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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    Stephen Colbert Would Like to Know Who’s in Charge Here

    The “Late Show” host was taken aback by the White House’s claim that Elon Musk doesn’t run DOGE: “It’s literally named after his favorite meme!”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.SpatchcockedThe so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, continues to cut a swath through the Civil Service. Or as Stephen Colbert put it on Wednesday, “our government is getting spatchcocked by Elon Musk and his post-pubescent pink slip troopers.”“Naturally, the federal workers in their path of wanton destruction are experiencing anger, chaos and confusion, which, coincidentally, are also the Secret Service code names for Trump, Elon and Don Jr.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It turns out being an unelected donor running an unauthorized employee kill squad might get you sued at some point in the future. So in new legal filings, the White House claims that Elon Musk is not in charge at DOGE. What? It’s literally named after his favorite meme!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is the most confusing leadership structure since Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Who is Chris? Why does he seem to belong to Ruth?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Elon and the DOGE-bags have fired so many people so quickly, in so many critical areas, with so little thought beforehand, that the government is now scrambling to rehire the nuclear staff it fired on Friday. These are folks involved with designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardize national security. I share those concerns.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But here’s the wrinkle and the rub: The government has struggled to reach the people that were fired after they were locked out of their federal email accounts. So now we got a bunch of [expletive] people with a lot of time on their hands who know how to build nuclear weapons.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Rehiring people on Tuesday that you fired on Friday does not scream ‘government efficiency.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (On Principle Edition)“And with Trump doing so much so fast, leave it to the Never Trumpers to do what little they can to make a fast buck. An event called the Principles First Summit convenes this weekend in D.C. What are their principles? Well, judging by the lineup, cashing in on whatever’s left of Trump envy.” — GREG GUTFELD“The biggest and most bitterest names in the anti-Trump world will be there: Adam Kinzinger, Michael Steele, Bill Kristol and George Conway. All that was missing was Joy Behar.” — GREG GUTFELD“There are a few Dems to shore up the list of yesterday’s pundits who’ve seen their audiences flee like Tim Walz hearing a car backfire.” — GREG GUTFELDWe 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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    Cynthia Erivo Will Host This Year’s Tony Awards

    The actress won a Tony Award for “The Color Purple,” and is now nominated for an Oscar for playing Elphaba in the film adaptation of “Wicked.”Cynthia Erivo, the Tony Award-winning actress whose Oscar-nominated performance in the “Wicked” film has brought her wide recognition, will host this year’s Tony Awards.The American Theater Wing and the Broadway League — the two organizations that present the awards — announced on Wednesday that Erivo would host the ceremony on June 8 at Radio City Music Hall. Much of the event will be broadcast on CBS.Erivo, 38, is a British actress who had her breakout role in “The Color Purple,” starring as Celie in a revival of the musical adaptation of the Alice Walker novel. That production opened on Broadway in 2015; Erivo’s performance was the talk of the town that season, and she won the Tony Award for best leading actress in 2016.She pivoted quickly to work in film and television, picking up two Oscar nominations, for best leading actress and for best original song, for the 2019 film “Harriet,” and this year she is nominated as best leading actress for “Wicked,” which is the first installment of a two-part film. (The second half, in which Erivo also stars, is to be released in November.) In the “Wicked” films, Erivo plays Elphaba, the green-skinned witch whose debatable wickedness is the subject of the story.Erivo has been busy this year — ubiquitous as she has promoted “Wicked” with her co-star Ariana Grande, but also pursuing her own projects. On Tuesday, the Hollywood Bowl announced one more: in August Erivo will star as Jesus in a one-weekend revival of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”The Tony Awards honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway; this year’s ceremony will consider shows that open between April 26, 2024, and April 27, 2025. This year’s nominees are to be announced on May 1. More

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    Drawing From Bob Dylan’s Songbook, Learning Lessons in Mortality

    Ordinarily, the actor-writer-musician Todd Almond is a pretty unflappable stage presence. But normal rules do not apply when you discover at intermission that Bob Dylan is in the audience of the performance you’re giving of a musical that’s saturated with his songs — and your harmonica solo is coming up.“I don’t know if you’ve ever panicked,” Almond writes in his new book, “Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl From the North Country’ and Broadway’s Rebirth.”An oral history, it chronicles the journey of Conor McPherson’s “Girl From the North Country” from the Public Theater in 2018 to Broadway in 2020, then through the theater’s traumatic pandemic shutdown to a restart in 2021 on a much more fragile Broadway. Rigorously footnoted, informed by interviews with fellow company members as well as industry figures, the book is shaped by Almond’s own memories as a cast member making his Broadway debut.Its publication dovetails with Audible’s audio release of Almond’s surreal, nearly solo musical “I’m Almost There,” about one man’s fear-filled, distraction-strewn path to love. Inspired by “The Odyssey,” it had a limited run at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan last fall, directed by David Cromer.Earlier this month, Almond, 48, spoke by phone from his house on an island in Maine. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Almond, center, in the musical “Girl From the North Country” at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan in 2020.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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    ‘The Pitt’ Has Impressed Real Doctors With Its Accuracy

    Max’s unusually accurate medical drama, starring Noah Wyle as a beleaguered E.R. physician, has become the talk of real-life hospital breakrooms.Doctors and nurses who love Max’s “The Pitt” remember the moment they realized it wasn’t like other medical shows.Caitlin Dwyer, a charge nurse in Milwaukee, took note of a character’s decision — counterintuitive but medically correct — not to defibrillate a patient with a particular type of heart failure.Dr. Elizabeth Rempfer, an attending physician in Maryland, felt a pang of recognition at the depiction of a chaotic and desperate waiting room.For Dr. Tricia Pendergrast, a resident physician in Ann Arbor, Mich., it was a character who faced such an unrelenting caseload that even a trip to the bathroom was cut short.“It’s the first time that I’ve watched doctors on television that I felt like I could see myself in them,” she said.Most medical professionals learned long ago not to expect reality in dramatizations of their work. From the early days of “General Hospital,” to “Grey’s Anatomy” and its various spinoffs, to more recent hits like “The Good Doctor” and “Brilliant Minds,” TV medical dramas have tended to go heavy on the drama, light on the medicine.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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    For Playwrights, Making It to Midcareer Is a Cliffhanger

    Act 1 was a constant struggle for rent and opportunity. But now that these emerging dramatists have emerged, what will they make of Act 2?“Absolutely not,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins declared.Leslye Headland chuckled. “Oh never, no.”“I don’t know anyone who could!” was Samuel D. Hunter’s astonished response.“Not really,” hedged Bess Wohl. “Until maybe last year.”The question that brought such universal denials from four frequently produced, much-awarded American playwrights was: “Have you ever made enough to live on from your plays?”To win audiences and awards for your efforts is undoubtedly affirming, but the financial returns for dramatists are slim. Even after the premiere of “An Octoroon,” which would later win an Obie Award for best new American play, Jacobs-Jenkins was living in a “horrible sublet on an air shaft,” with a possible case of whooping cough and a definite lack of health insurance. Headland considered herself a success not when her play “Bachelorette” made a splash Off Broadway in 2010, but when she no longer had to work at Rocket Video to make ends meet. And Hunter told me that the most he’d earned in any one year from his plays — including “The Whale” and “A Case for the Existence of God” — was “less than $30,000.”Playwriting has never been a golden ticket, or even, for most, a subway pass. It’s hard enough to get a first play written and produced; getting a second and third off the ground, let alone a 10th, has in recent decades seemed just about impossible. Who knows how many rich voices we never got to hear in maturity?Especially since the Covid pandemic wiped out a host of emerging artist programs and career development grants, the problem has reached existential proportions. Theater, after all, depends on good plays, and good plays depend on authors with long professional horizons. Many of the greatest works of dramatic literature are neither early nor late but in between. (“Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night” and “Othello” are dead center in Shakespeare’s professional timeline.) But how can playwrights have a midcareer if they can’t survive the start?Or so I have often worried.Katherine Waterston, Tracee Chimo and Celia Keenan-Bolger in Leslye Headland’s 2010 play “Bachelorette.”Joan MarcusWe 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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    Stephen Colbert Laughs Off New York Mayor’s Staffing Woes

    This week, Colbert said, Eric Adams’s problems “stopped being funny and started becoming hilarious.”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.Rat RaceNew York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, has had a challenging start to his week, with four of his eight deputy mayors announcing their resignations. Stephen Colbert called it the moment when “Adams’s controversies stopped being funny and started becoming hilarious.”“The resignations were from the first deputy mayor, deputy mayor for health and human services, deputy mayor for operations, and deputy mayor for public safety. So, at this point, the city is evidently being run by the remaining deputy mayor: 100 rats in a trench coat.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe resignations came after several federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York quit, having come under pressure from the Trump administration to drop charges in the mayor’s corruption case.“That takes courage. Thankfully, all these lawyers found jobs at the new firm of Wegot, Balls & Howe.” — STEPHEN COLBERTColbert reminded viewers that Adams has “been involved in controversy for years now.”“For instance, while he was running to be the mayor of New York, no one could tell if he lived in New York or New Jersey; once he became mayor, he appointed, and later had to remove, his brother as deputy police commissioner. He announced a personal war on rats, introduced a Times Square RoboCop that failed as a police officer but thrived as a public urinal, and claims that the Big Apple is littered with unique crystals that give out a special energy. Yes, in fact, I saw a gentleman enjoying some of those unique crystals in the Port Authority bathroom yesterday. He definitely radiated a ‘special energy.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Reality Bites Edition)“This is the worst ad I have ever seen. It’s a virtual support group for singles, but it looks like an A.A. meeting for ‘Animal Crossing’ villagers.” — TAYLOR TOMLINSON on Meta’s new ad for its VR game, “Horizon Worlds”“CGI has gotten very good — ‘Avatar,’ ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ — get it together! You’re telling me this is the best you can do? It looks like an animated show for children made by even younger children.” — TAYLOR TOMLINSONWe 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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    Jonathan Bailey’s Bratty, Bad-Boy ‘Richard II’ at the Bridge Theater

    The actor, on a hot streak after “Wicked,” takes on his biggest stage role to date. In London, he plays Shakespeare’s unfortunate king as a flouncing sociopath.The Bridge Theater is within walking distance of the Tower of London, where in 1399 King Richard II was imprisoned and forced to abdicate England’s throne in favor of his cousin, who became Henry IV. Where better to stage a new production of William Shakespeare’s play about Richard’s downfall? From the playhouse foyer, theatergoers can look out at the tower across the River Thames, and the distance of those 600 years shrinks to nothing.In this modern-dress take on “Richard II” directed by Nicholas Hytner and running through May 10, the hapless king is played by the English actor Jonathan Bailey, who is on a hot streak following recent high-profile screen roles — as Fiyero in “Wicked” and Anthony Bridgerton in “Bridgerton” — and is now taking on his biggest stage role to date.Bailey gives an engrossing performance as Richard, whose corrupt misrule fuels popular support for the usurper cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (Royce Pierreson), despite the medieval doctrine that the monarch is anointed by God and therefore untouchable. After making a series of strategic blunders, Richard is decisively outmaneuvered by Bolingbroke’s rebel army and meets a swift, brutal demise.Historical accounts remarked upon Richard’s effeminacy and in Bailey’s adroit rendering he is a capricious, flouncing sociopath whose every utterance is suffused with performative irony. He declares with mock solemnity that he has no choice but to raise taxes — and then gleefully helps himself to a line of cocaine. Moments after his uncle’s death, he hops onto the recently vacated hospital bed and blithely scoffs down grapes. When Richard finally agrees to hand over power, he proffers the crown and then retracts it — twice — like a petulant child refusing to part with a toy. All this badness is great fun to watch.Bailey with Royce Pierreson, whose Bolingbroke has the abstracted air of a man impelled by forces greater than himself.Manuel HarlanIn contrast, Pierreson’s Bolingbroke has the abstracted air of a man impelled by forces greater than himself. With his hulking frame, balled-up fists and blunt vocal delivery, he is a striking counterpoint to the dissipatedly charming Richard. (After one of the king’s more florid speeches, a bewildered Bolingbroke impatiently asks one of his cronies to translate: “What says his majesty?”) Michael Simkins is the pick of the supporting cast as the Duke of York, who tries in vain to straddle the warring factions. His finger-wagging exasperation, verging at times on slapstick, gives an audience-friendly commentary on the unfolding intrigue.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