in Theater
Years Later, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ Wields Different Magic
As his own life unfolds, an artist reconsiders his reaction to Joan Didion’s memoir about loss. More
Eliana Willis
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- in Television
For Donald Trump, the Recriminations Will Be Televised
The former president’s trials aren’t being aired. That isn’t stopping him from turning them into a political reality show.The civil-fraud case against Donald J. Trump’s businesses in New York, in which he was ordered to pay a penalty of $355 million, was not televised. Neither was his civil trial for the defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Nor — barring an unlikely change in federal court policy — will be his looming federal election-interference trial.But outside the courtroom, the show goes on.In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads.To TV producers, because Mr. Trump is a former president, a candidate and high-profile defendant, his on-camera tirades are news. But there is also a kind of transaction at work. TV news craves conflict and active visuals. There are only so many times you can show a motorcade, or reporters cooling their heels in the street. Mr. Trump’s appearances give them sound, fury and B-roll.At the same time, Mr. Trump gets the kind of unfiltered access to the airwaves that networks were, once upon a brief time, wary of giving a candidate notorious for fabrications and conspiracy theories.On the day a judge set a trial date for his Manhattan criminal case stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, cable news networks took him live as he called the case a Biden-campaign plot to steal the election: “This is their way of cheating this time. Last time, they had a different way.”On Friday evening, after the civil-fraud ruling, he spoke to the cameras at his home and private club Mar-a-Lago, claiming that the case (brought by the New York attorney general) “all comes out of Biden,” accusing the judge of corruption, citing his election poll numbers and lamenting that “the migrants come in and they take over New York.”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
- in Theater
‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before
A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange.A scene from the play.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times“The Shawshank Redemption” — the story of a man wrongfully convicted of murder who defies prison officials’ tyranny and eventually pulls off a daring escape — has been a target for Chinese censors before. Mentions of it were briefly censored online in 2012, after a prominent Chinese dissident escaped house arrest and fled to the American Embassy. In general, the Chinese authorities have shown little tolerance for calls, artistic or otherwise, for freedom and resistance to injustice.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
- in Theater
Review: Sarah Snook Is a Darkly Funny Dorian Gray
In a stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Snook plays all the characters — with the help of screens.A large, rectangular screen hangs from the top of the stage at the Theater Royal Haymarket in London. It is, rather appropriately, in portrait mode.Beneath it, the Australian actress Sarah Snook (“Succession,” “Run Rabbit Run”), sporting a Johnny Bravo-style blonde quiff, is circulated by a small team of black-clad camera operators who broadcast her every move onto the screen in real time as she simultaneously narrates and performs the title role of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”Later, several more screens descend, playing prerecorded footage of Snook in no fewer than twenty-five other roles. Over the course of the next two hours, the onstage Snook interacts seamlessly with these digitalized selves. There are no other actors involved.Wilde’s 1890 novel, in which a handsome rake makes a Faustian bargain with the cosmos by trading his soul for eternal youth (and comes to regret it), lends itself to stage adaptation: It is dialogue-heavy, punctuated by witty, morally intelligent exposition; its allegory of human hubris is timeless.This adaptation, by the Sydney Theater Company, directed by Kip Williams and running through May 11, is a formally ambitious but playful multimedia production. The single-actor format and clever use of camerawork give visual expression to the novel’s themes of overweening egotism and existential dread.The play’s aesthetic palate is a blend of period and contemporary. There’s something tongue-in-cheek about much of the dated garb.Marc BrennerWe 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
- in Theater
Tobias Menzies on ‘The Crown’ and His Role in ‘The Hunt’
The British actor excels at playing reserve, and what roils beneath, on “The Crown.” And now he brings that stoicism to “The Hunt,” onstage in Brooklyn.On a morning in early February, the actor Tobias Menzies walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the relative anonymity he prefers. Menzies wasn’t hiding. He wore no sunglasses, no cap, just Blundstones, jeans, a shearling coat. He didn’t duck when people came his way. But the past few years, including multi-season stints on “The Crown” and “Outlander,” have brought him a new visibility, which still makes him uneasy.“I’m not that confident about my life or what it is to be able to put it out in the public,” he said, shoulders hunched against the breeze. “I’m just bumbling along as best I can.”Menzies, 49, had come to Brooklyn, to rehearse “The Hunt,” a theatrical adaptation of the Thomas Vinterberg movie that begin performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Friday. Back in 2019, Menzies had originated the stage role of Lucas, a preschool teacher falsely accused of exposing himself to a child, in a London production. A member of a local hunting club, Lucas now finds himself targeted by the community that once embraced him.In the years since “The Hunt” premiered, Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” and a fan base for his dual roles of Frank Randall and his sadistic ancestor Black Jack Randall on the Starz series “Outlander.” He also played somewhat against type as an anxious therapist in Nicole Holofcener’s acerbic comedy “You Hurt My Feelings.”Menzies has won an Emmy, for playing Prince Philip on the Netflix hit “The Crown,” opposite Olivia Colman.Sophie Mutevelian/NetflixFive years ago, the role made perfect sense for Menzies, who specializes in wounded masculinity. The play, adapted by David Farr, is caustic and cerebral, and it reunited him with a frequent collaborator, the director Rupert Goold. And Lucas is a type that Menzies has often gravitated toward, a man unable, whether by upbringing, temperament or circumstance, to show his feelings. Lucas benefits from both Menzies’ natural reserve and his ability to show what roils beneath that stoicism, a game of emotive hide-and-seek.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
- in Television
‘Genius: MLK/X’ Offers Portraits of the Icons as Vital Young Men
“We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, who created the series with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are among American history’s most thoroughly chronicled figures, their voices and mannerisms captured forever on recording after recording, their lives picked over in book after book.By himself, Malcolm X has been the subject of two Pulitzer-winning biographies in the past 13 years and just last year Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” landed a spot on Barack Obama’s yearly best-books list. Both men adorn countless T-shirts, posters and memes. They aren’t just people; they’re also symbols — of civil rights, of social progress, of a decade that saw many of its heroes murdered.But symbols don’t make for particularly compelling drama. So when Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre signed on to play King and Malcolm X, respectively, in the new National Geographic series “Genius: MLK/X,” which premiered earlier this month, they knew their imperative was to make their iconic characters as human as possible and leave more famous portrayals in the past.“The first thing I had to do, and the first thing I needed everyone around me to do, was to stop speaking about them as icons,” Harrison said in a video interview last month alongside Pierre. “I had to live in the moment that they existed. They did not know who they were or where they were going.”Gina Prince-Bythewood, who, with her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, are among the executive producers of the series, put it this way: “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real and tangible for an audience. And to do that, you need to show their humanity.”Jayme Lawson, as Betty Shabazz, and Pierre in “Genius.” The series emphasizes the strength and support of the men’s wives.Richard DuCree/National GeographicWe 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
- in Television
‘The Walking Dead’: Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira Are Back. Will Audiences Follow?
When Rick Grimes, the rugged, righteous former sheriff played by Andrew Lincoln in AMC’s zombie horror series “The Walking Dead,” was written out of the series at Lincoln’s request in its ninth season, the show seemed to lose its hero, its heart and its hopeful moral center. A well-weathered and much brutalized leader, Rick was part of an ever-expanding ensemble but always felt like the main character.Rick’s departure created a vacuum that the show — which concluded in November 2022 after more than 150 episodes and 11 seasons — could never quite fill, even as a six-year time jump moved the story ahead into the future. Audiences seemed to lose interest, too: Ratings plummeted toward the end of the show’s run to a fraction of what they were during its mid-2010s peak popularity.Rick was never actually killed off: He left “The Walking Dead” under mysterious (and somewhat contentious) circumstances, whisked away by an unexplained helicopter with the promise of one day returning in a planned series of movies. Those movies instead morphed into a new six-part mini-series that reveals what happened to Rick after his sudden departure. “The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live,” premiering Feb. 25 on AMC and AMC+, finds Lincoln reprising his signature role in a new setting: a dystopian metropolis called the Civic Republic ruled by a military police force called the Civic Republic Military, or C.R.M.“The Ones Who Live” reunites Rick with his wife, Michonne, the katana-wielding firebrand played by Danai Gurira, who left “The Walking Dead” early in the show’s 10th season. Gurira and Lincoln have stepped up to serve as executive producers on “The Ones Who Live,” with Gurira also credited as a creator alongside Scott M. Gimple, the former “Walking Dead” showrunner and current chief content officer for the “Walking Dead” universe.Lincoln and Gurira starred together for many years in “The Walking Dead” until Lincoln left in Season 9, and Gurira in Season 10.Jackson Lee Davis/AMCIn a video interview from Los Angeles just before the premiere screening of “The Ones Who Live,” Lincoln and Gurira were chatty and playful, with the air of old friends who are totally at ease together. Lincoln, blithe and funny, kept insisting that Gurira answer questions first, while Gurira, trying to hastily scarf down a salad, mimicked him back: “You go ahead.” “No, you go ahead!” “No, YOU go ahead!” They eventually managed to discuss why they left “The Walking Dead,” why they came back and how “The Ones Who Live” differs from the original. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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
- in Television
Late Night Recaps Trump’s Double-Trouble Trial Day
“The only way to follow all of the action was to have multiple TVs,” Stephen Colbert said. “That’s why I watched all the proceedings today at a Buffalo Wild Wings.”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.‘An Insane Day for America’Former President Donald Trump had two simultaneous criminal trials on Thursday: one in New York regarding falsified business records and another in Georgia pertaining to election interference.Stephen Colbert called it “an insane day for America, because it’s a regular day for Donald Trump.” He reminded viewers that in addition to those two cases and a civil fraud trial, the former president was “also facing the Jan. 6 trial in Washington D.C., the classified documents case in Florida, Colorado trying to throw him off the ballot for insurrection, and his appeal of the verdict of the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, in which a jury has already found that Trump committed sexual assault.”He concluded, “And yet, despite all this, people want to hire this maniac to be president.”“I know how numb we’ve become, but it’s not normal. No other candidate for the presidency has ever had to pause his campaign to defend himself in multiple courts. And I’d like to point out that in all seven of his cases, no one — no one — doubts that he did these things. We’re just sitting around patiently waiting to find out if the wheels of justice will grind fast enough for there to be any consequences.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And the media is covering it like it’s any other political story, like it’s all horse race. But in this horse race, one of the horses is old, while one of the horses is old, has hoof-in-mouth disease, and keeps quoting horse Hitler.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This morning, Don Trump was back in the warm embrace of the American judicial system, the only place that truly loves and appreciates him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This is his version of uniting the country: criminal trials in the North and the South.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump unsuccessfully tried to get his trial in New York dismissed today, while he is also trying to get the prosecutor in Georgia dismissed. It’s a regular Dismiss America pageant that he’s running.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s never good when you’re summoned to court and you’re, like, ‘I can’t, I have court.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump didn’t attend the Georgia hearing, and I get it — it’s so annoying getting invited to a destination trial.” — JIMMY FALLON“The only way to follow all of the action was to have multiple TVs. That’s why I watched all the proceedings today at a Buffalo Wild Wings.” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe 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
