Eliana Willis

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    ‘Squid Game’ Season 3 Recap: More Misery and a Surprise Cameo

    The final season of the Netflix hit brought the story to a largely predictable conclusion, with one last twist at the end.This article includes spoilers for all of the final season of “Squid Game.”The final season of Netflix’s international sensation “Squid Game” is officially labeled Season 3. But who are we kidding here? The six episodes that end this series feel very much like a continuation of the seven episodes that aired earlier this year as Season 2, covering the same characters, still in the middle of the same deadly tournament. Nothing new is introduced here in the “Squid Game” homestretch. The show’s writer and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, just connects the last few dots. It’s no wonder then that Season 3 feels so dispiritingly rote.This new set of episodes begins with the show’s protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) completely demoralized. In Season 1, he had survived a secret competition on a mysterious island — where the losers are killed and the ultimate winner takes home a fortune — for the entertainment of obscenely wealthy “V.I.P.s.” Shaken by the experience, Gi-hun in Season 2 tried to find and expose the tournament’s backers before deciding the only way to destroy the operation would be from the inside, by competing again.The season ended with a massive miscalculation by Gi-hun, as he attempted to lead some other players in an armed revolt against the games’ guards and bosses, unaware that one of his supposed allies, Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), was actually the operation’s manager — “the Front Man” — playing incognito in order to keep a close eye on him.At the same time, In-ho’s brother Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) — a former police detective working with Gi-hun to end the games for good — kept searching for the island, unaware that the captain of the boat he chartered was in league with the Front Man and steering him far away from his target.It may not have been the best idea to return In-ho to his Front Man duties at the end of Season 2, separating him from the now-despondent Gi-hun. One of the most rewarding elements of Season 2 were the conversations between In-ho, a misanthropic cynic pretending to be a compassionate human being, and Gi-hun, a fierce idealist determined to prove to the games’ masters that people are not inherently greedy, selfish and shortsighted. With In-ho out of the game and Gi-hun deflated, Season 3 loses some juice right from the start.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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    Taraji P. Henson to Make Broadway Debut in August Wilson Play

    The actress will star opposite Cedric the Entertainer in a revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” next spring.Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer have signed on to co-star in a revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” on Broadway next spring.The production — the play’s third on Broadway since 1988 — will be directed by Debbie Allen.“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is a part of Wilson’s Century Cycle, which chronicles Black life in America with one play set in each decade of the 20th century. “Joe Turner” is set in 1911; like most of the plays, it takes place in Pittsburgh.The drama is set in a boardinghouse peopled by migrants from the rural South who are searching, suffering and spiritual. Henson and Cedric will play the couple, Bertha and Seth Holly, who run the boardinghouse.Henson studied theater at Howard University, but her career has been spent in film (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and television (“Empire”). This will be her Broadway debut as an actor; she was credited as among the producers of a 2023 Broadway play, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”Cedric, a comedian who has also worked on television (“The Neighborhood”), has one previous Broadway credit; he starred in a very short-lived 2008 revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.”Allen, best known as a performer and choreographer, has one previous directing credit on Broadway — she directed a 2008 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The “Joe Turner” revival is being produced by Brian Moreland, who previously produced a 2022 revival of Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” as well as last season’s production of “Othello.”Moreland said in a statement that the show would open next spring at an unspecified Shubert theater; the rest of the cast has not yet been announced. More

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    ‘The Bear’ Is Back, but Where’s the Beef?

    The restaurant’s business challenge in Season 4 — balancing comfort food and haute cuisine — is also a metaphor for the show’s creative issues.This article discusses events through Season 4 of “The Bear,” now available on Hulu.The new season of “The Bear” is the story of a struggling restaurant and a successful restaurant. They are both the same restaurant.The struggling restaurant is, of course, the title establishment. Season 3 ended with the chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) speed-reading a crucial newspaper write-up. (There is no better way to flatter critics than to make your cliffhanger about the contents of a review.) Season 4 reveals that it was mostly a pan, and not the nice, carbon-steel kind. Now the Bear is on a ticking clock — an actual, physical clock — counting the seconds until the “parachute” of investment cash runs out.Bustling happily alongside is the beef-sandwich window, a legacy of the restaurant’s origins as the humble neighborhood joint the Original Beef of Chicagoland. Overseen by Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), an eager, soft-spoken culinary-school dropout, it hands out dripping Italian beef sandwiches to an endless line of customers.Unlike the Bear, the Beef (if we can call it that) is not fancy. It does not change its menu daily. It does not serve flavored steam or desserts that double as magic tricks. It is not trying to dazzle you with technique. It does one satisfying thing, then comes back and does it again. And, Season 4 suggests, it could be the salvation of the foundering business, as Ebraheim’s new consigliere (Rob Reiner) steers it toward becoming a local franchise.When is a sandwich not just a sandwich? “The Bear,” like many shows about creativity, seems to contain its own critique. The dichotomy of the Bear vs. the Beef embodies an argument over how to make art, one that very much applies to this show — and one that is to some extent the show’s subject.It’s about ambition vs. accessibility, change vs. repetition, consistency vs. risk, complexity vs. simplicity. What do you want when you watch TV — a good sandwich or a challenging tasting menu? Beef or Bear?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: A New ‘Wrinkle in Time’ Needs to Iron Out Some Problems

    Despite a gorgeous score and some fine performances, the musical adaptation of the Madeleine L’Engle classic gets trapped in a time loop.Heather Christian, whose mind-blowing, multidimensional music seems to arrive from a studio deep in the universe, was the obvious and thrilling choice to compose the score for a stage adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time.” After all, the 1962 Madeleine L’Engle novel that the show is based on, a classic of both children’s literature and science fiction, is about a girl’s adventures in hyperspace, and Christian, in works including “Oratorio for Living Things” and “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” gives the distinct impression of having made such journeys herself. Certainly she has brought back riches from the far reaches of her ear that few other theater composers would dare to imagine.She does so again with “A Wrinkle in Time,” providing an exhaustingly beautiful score for a show, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, that is otherwise just exhausting. Playing at the Arena Stage in Washington through July 20, and filled with wonders, it features some first-rate performances from a vocally splendid cast but is far too overloaded and unvaried to fulfill its promise.That may be a problem built into the rich underlying material. (Other adapters, notably the filmmaker Ava DuVernay, have not done it justice either.) L’Engle’s plot about Meg Murry’s trek through space to rescue her father is complicated enough, with its witchlike trio of spiritual guides, its good and evil planets and its time warps called tesseracts. But it is much more than that: It is a moral bildungsroman, as Meg, encountering the worst of the world, must mature enough to confront it.The musical’s book, by the playwright Lauren Yee, is faithful to a fault. As in the L’Engle, Meg (Taylor Iman Jones) is an angry and disaffected seventh grader; she is often in trouble at school, especially in math class, for refusing to “show her work.” Two years since her father’s disappearance, she and her brother, Charles Wallace, an intense little genius, have formed a closed circle of support and empathy under the loving eye of their stalwart mother. It takes some daring on Meg’s part merely to allow the circle to open enough to admit one newcomer: a popular boy from school, Calvin O’Keefe.From left, Amber Gray (Mrs. Whatsit), Stacey Sargeant (Mrs. Who) and Vicki Lewis (Mrs. Which).DJ CoreyThere the story might have stalled out as a middle school romance were it not for the arrival of the three witches: Mrs. Whatsit (Amber Gray), Mrs. Which (Vicki Lewis) and Mrs. Who (Stacey Sargeant). It is they who explain how the opportunities of the tesseract might be exploited as a shortcut to finding Mr. Murry in the vast space-time of the universe. The rest of the show is concerned with the search, as the three children “tesser” repeatedly, along the way confronting a force called It that threatens to seduce the world into a coma of complacency.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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    Jordan Roth, a Broadway Big Shot, Is Now Reinventing Himself

    Jordan Roth, the scion of a New York real estate fortune, a convention-challenging fashionista and a social media habitué, spent 15 years as a Broadway macher, running one of the big three theater landlords. He programmed hits like “The Book of Mormon” and “Hadestown,” nurtured plays and musicals in development, and joined the theater industry’s inner circle at its cloistered confabs, all the while showing up at openings in increasingly fabulous couture.But it’s fairly obvious to anyone watching Roth’s evolving public persona that he’s been looking for a new adventure.He has sold most of his stake in Jujamcyn, the company through which he owned five Broadway theaters, and he has dialed back his theater producing.Jordan Roth rehearsing what he’s calling a “narrative fashion performance” in a black box studio in Brooklyn.Now he is moving on to a different stage, combining his love of fashion, his hunger to perform, and his taste for storytelling. He is pursuing “narrative fashion performance,” and he plans a debut on July 10 at the Louvre in Paris.“I worked for a long time facilitating other people’s creativity, and that was very meaningful and very fulfilling, but I started to miss my own,” Roth, 49, told me during a rehearsal break at a black box studio in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood.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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    ‘Tour de France: Unchained,’ Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    Netflix airs the documentary series on the bike race and various networks release shark stories.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are airing or streaming this week, June 30-July 6. Details and times are subject to change.Wide-ranging documentaries.On July 7, 2005, London’s public transportation system was targeted in an attack that involved four suicide bombings during morning rush hour. The terrorist attack killed 52 people and nearly 800 were injured. The new four-part documentary series “Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers” shares unseen footage and features interviews with politicians, emergency workers and relatives of the victims to tell the story of the attack and the aftermath. Streaming Tuesday on Netflix.The summer Olympics happen once every four years, but if you are looking for a yearly sport to get invested in, the Tour de France might be for you. Airing on NBC and streaming on Peacock this month, the annual men’s race, with multiple stages over the course of approximately 2,000 miles and 23 days, not only tests the endurance of athletes but also provides scenic views around France. A new season of the documentary series “Tour de France: Unchained” gives an in-depth look at the 2024 race, following several different teams and athletes. Streaming Wednesday on Netflix.In 1971, Ms. magazine was co-founded by Gloria Steinem and was first published as an insert in New York magazine. By January 1972, the first stand-alone issue was released on a monthly basis. The three-part series “Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print” looks at the magazine’s founding and its history as a publication that focuses on women-centered issues, including abortion, work balance and sexual politics in a primarily male-dominated space. The documentary also features interviews with Steinem, her co-founders Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Pat Carbine, and the first editor of the magazine, Suzanne Braun Levine. Wednesday at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max.Reality check-in.If you thought we had seen enough of this group of Swig-sipping, drama-creating ladies of MomTok, you were sorely mistaken. Nearly two months since the second season aired, the women of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” are back for a reunion this week, hosted by Nick Viall of “The Bachelor” fame. Lots of fights, feuds and snarky quips have continued with the group after the show has aired, so there is lots left to discuss. Let’s just hope that no one makes them play another round of pregnancy test roulette. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.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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    What to See in London Theaters This Summer

    A handpicked guide for visitors (and residents), including classic drama, musicals, new plays and shows for children.The London stage is, as ever, bustling with an array of shows to satisfy all tastes. Starry plays and revivals jostle with high-profile musicals, both new and revivals, new drama and children’s theater.Here’s a guide to some of the enticements of the coming months, presented with an awareness that just as London contains multitudes, so, too, does its theater.Shows With Star PowerRosamund Pike, center, in rehearsals for “Inter Alia,” which begins previews July 10.Manuel HarlanInter AliaRosamund Pike has made her name onscreen in films like “Gone Girl” and “Saltburn” and returns to the stage to head the new play from the team behind the London and Broadway hit “Prima Facie.” Like that play, Suzie Miller’s “Inter Alia” is set in the legal profession, with Pike as a prominent London judge, though unlike its solo-performer predecessor, “Inter Alia” features a supporting cast, led by Jamie Glover. The show is just one of several National Theater titles vying for playgoers’ attentions this summer: Others include the return of Michael Sheen in “Nye” and the West End transfer of Beth Steel’s “Till the Stars Come Down.”Runs July 10 through Sept. 13 at the National Theater.GiantThe accolades have been pouring in for the onetime director Mark Rosenblatt’s Olivier Award-winning debut play, which recalls an episode in the career of the author Roald Dahl. John Lithgow is in career-best form as Dahl, who has written a book review that is widely seen as antisemitic and refuses to reign in his language. Aya Cash and Elliot Levey do standout work playing his publishers; Nicholas Hytner is the characteristically adroit director. More

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    For South Koreans,‘Squid Game’ Was More Than Just Entertainment

    The Netflix hit has left a lasting legacy as a major cultural export, but also one that exposed some unsettling aspects of Korean society.Contains spoilers for Season 3 of “Squid Game.”On Friday, fans around the world tuned in for the third and last season of the juggernaut Netflix series “Squid Game.”Since 2021, they’ve watched as hundreds of contestants played deadly versions of children’s games in an attempt to win a cash prize of 45.6 billion won, around $33 million.At the grisly end of Season 3’s six episodes, its beloved protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), was dead, and its villains were very much alive and thriving.For some viewers in South Korea, where the show is set, that fell short of delivering the justice they were hoping for.After eagerly waiting half a year since the cliffhanger ending of Season 2, Kim Young Eun, a 24-year-old university student in Seoul, watched the entire season with her boyfriend at a comic book cafe, just hours after its release on Friday night.The Piggy Bank, where prize money is deposited each time a player dies on the show, was part of the fan event in Seoul on Saturday. Jun Michael Park for 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