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    Review: ‘We Live in Cairo’ Falls Short of Being Revolutionary

    Egyptians stand up to their government in a play that excels in its design but rings hollow when its subtext and character development are scrutinized.Building a new world is just as difficult, maybe even more so, as tearing down an old one. Just ask the Arab Spring revolutionaries of “We Live in Cairo,” whose solidarity fractures after they get what they were fighting for.The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s show, which opened on Sunday at New York Theater Workshop, is divided into a before and after, with intermission sitting neatly in the middle: The leadup to the violent protests of January and February 2011, which prompted the resignation of the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, followed by the buildup of bitterness and strife. But while passions supposedly run high, the temperature of this new musical — which at best and at worst feels like “Rent” on the barricades — almost never rises above tepid.Like Mark Cohen, the aspiring filmmaker in “Rent,” Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer, takes on the responsibility of documenting the action, in this case the resistance of a handful of young Cairenes fighting government oppression.Layla meets them through her boyfriend, Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the lead in the recent revival of “The Who’s Tommy”). The group’s firebrand, Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni), who comes from an activist family, landed in jail for criticizing Mubarak on Facebook. Its levelheaded pillar is Amir’s brother, Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), who wants to attend law school in New York, and its party-loving jester is Fadwa’s wealthy cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), an artist who spray-paints caricatures of the country’s leaders.Those murals connect to some of the brightest elements of Taibi Magar’s production — the physical ones. Tilly Grimes’s set, with carpets in red tones and a place for the band at the back of the stage, has a lived-in quality that suggests the warmth of the friends’ relationship as well as the feeling of relative safety that prevails at their hangout. David Bengali’s video design does the heavy lifting when the outside world intrudes, and includes illustrations by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer that represent Karim’s work alongside projected news images, some of them appropriately brutal. (Raphael Mishler designed the papier-mâché head of Mubarak that Karim wears when we meet him.)Unfortunately, design alone does not a musical make, and piddly details like book and score must be taken into account. There is no questioning the Lazours’ passion for the project, which has been in the works for a decade and premiered at American Repertory Theater, in Massachusetts, in 2019 — the album “Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo)” was recorded remotely with various singers the following year. But the characters are never convincingly defined, except for Fadwa, who also benefits from Tarabzouni’s fiery performance.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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    Mimi Hines, a Replacement Star in ‘Funny Girl,’ Dies at 91

    She was best known as half of a comedy team with her husband, Phil Ford, until her hall-filling voice earned her raves in a role made famous by Barbra Streisand.Mimi Hines, a powerful singer and live-wire comedian who etched her name in Broadway lore as the replacement for Barbra Streisand in the original production of “Funny Girl,” died on Oct. 21 at her home in Las Vegas. She was 91.Her death was confirmed by her lawyer and friend Mark Sendroff.A “mischievous sprite,” as The New York Times once called her, the diminutive Ms. Hines brought an outsize energy to her work, whether she was dishing out one-liners in nightclubs as half of a comedy-and-song duo, Ford & Hines, with her husband, Phil Ford, or delivering showstopping numbers to packed houses on Broadway.During her peak in the 1950s and ’60s, journalists often noted her elfin quality and her distinctive facial features — cleft chin, deep dimples and wide, toothy grin — which she was not shy about using as a comic prop.When Mike Wallace interviewed her and Mr. Ford in 1961, he informed her that a newspaper writer had recently described her as “two buck teeth and a carload of talent.”“That’s not true,” she responded. “My whole mouth is buck.”Ms. Hines and Mr. Ford got their first big break in 1958 on “The Tonight Show,” which at the time was hosted by Jack Paar. It was the first of several “Tonight” appearances they would make over the years. Her rendition of the song “Till There Was You” from “The Music Man” moved Mr. Paar to tears.“It was a magic night on TV,” Ms. Hines said in a 1963 interview with The Prince Herald Daily Tribune of Saskatchewan. “They say 12 million people saw it.” They also appeared on several episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as on many other variety and talk shows.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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    ‘Hysteria!,’ ‘Stranger Things’ and the Satanic Panic That Never Goes Away

    Five years ago, the television writer Matthew Scott Kane sold “Hysteria!,” a scripted drama that takes place in the late 1980s. The series was inspired in part by the tumult of misinformation he found online and in the media of the late 2010s. Shows like these take time to make, and Kane worried the idea would pass its best-by date.“I kept thinking, man, I don’t know if this is going to feel relevant,” he said in a recent interview.“Hysteria!” which premiered on Peacock on Oct. 18, is set in a small Michigan town in the grip of the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, an episode of mass hysteria which imagined that a cross-country network of satanic cults was engaged in ritual abuse, animal sacrifice and infanticide. In the pilot, a high school football star is discovered dead. Suspicion turns to several of his classmates, members of a heavy metal band that exploits satanic imagery.The aesthetics of “Hysteria!” — the wallpaper, the jeans, the popular music — are distinctly ’80s. But the impulse to displace social anxieties onto perceived groups of outsiders is as American as apple pie. (Are those apples poisoned? Do they have razor blades inside?) And in a culture of heightened political rhetoric and pervasive misinformation, as apparent now as it was five years ago, the distance between the satanic panic and current conspiracy theories — QAnon, say, or the supposed grooming of children by queer people — is a short one, barely the length of a suburban lawn.Recent works of fiction — “Hysteria!”; the novel “Rainbow Black”; the fourth season of “Stranger Things”; the film “Late Night With the Devil” — all treat the satanic panic as a discrete historical event. But they also suggest how the panic’s concerns resonate in the present. As it turns out, Americans are still panicking. We may always be panicking.“Hysteria!,” a new Peacock show set during the satanic panic, features an attempted exorcism. Mark Hill/PeacockWe 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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    ‘Attack on Titan’ Shows that Anime and Broadway Could Be a Good Match

    “Attack on Titan: The Musical” showed what a crossover between two seemingly different types of fans could look like.There are a few things that New York theatergoers can always expect to see on Broadway stages: some Disney, some Sondheim, some Hollywood stars. One may not expect to see the Colossal Titan.What is the Colossal Titan? That would be a giant, skinless humanoid creature, all red tendons and exposed ligaments, that has a taste for humans. This is basic knowledge, of course, for the legions of fans of “Attack on Titan,” the internationally popular Japanese manga that takes place in a dystopian world where people live in a penned-in society hidden behind towering walls.About 2,000 of those fans, many dressed as their favorite characters, filled New York City Center to see “Attack on Titan: The Musical” on the first night of its recent run earlier this month. This particular brand of manga-based onstage entertainment, and the fans who enjoy it, may at first seem like a novelty, but that’s only true in America — and perhaps only for the moment. In Japan, anime plays and musicals are omnipresent.Three sold-out performances later, it was easy to think that maybe the center of a Venn diagram between anime fandom and theater fandom is not as tiny or unusual a space as it may at first seem. Broadway presently banks on pop culture, already established intellectual properties and the fans who invest in them; the success of this performance of “Titan” made it possible to see a future in which anime doesn’t once again get mis-characterized as niche, or separate from mainstream culture, but rather as part of it.In other words, who’s to say that in a few years, anime won’t be another standard sight on Broadway?For now, it’s still uncommon to see what unfolded onstage earlier this month. Each time a titan appeared, it was a spectacle. Some materialized on a digital backdrop, crushing buildings and people below. Others were massive puppets, requiring a small battalion of coordinated handlers. And then there was the Colossal Titan, rendered with an inflatable head and arms.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 ‘McNeal,’ a Play About A.I., Lured Robert Downey Jr. to Broadway

    In “McNeal,” the playwright Ayad Akhtar explores the way artificial intelligence is disrupting the literary world and raising questions about creativity.This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel.He wanted the title character, played by Robert Downey Jr. in his Broadway debut, to deliver a monologue that sounded like a computer wrote it. So Akhtar uploaded what he had written into ChatGPT, gave the program a list of words, and told it to produce a speech in the style of Shakespeare. The results were so compelling that he read the speech to the cast at the next rehearsal.“Their jaws dropped,” Akhtar said. “It had preserved the speech that I wrote, using those words in such fascinating ways that it was astonishing to everybody there.”Ultimately, Akhtar used only two of the chatbot’s lines. But his attempt to mimic A.I.-generated text — an oddly circular process of a human imitating a computer’s imitation of a human — had an uncanny effect: Downey’s delivery of the final speech feels both intimate and strangely disembodied.“It’s the one secret lie that Ayad tells in the whole play,” Downey said, sitting on the edge of the Vivian Beaumont stage, where he, Akhtar and the play’s director, Bartlett Sher, gathered recently to talk about “McNeal.” “The only thing that isn’t true about this play is that A.I. wrote the final speech.”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 Tom Llamas, an NBC Anchor, Spends His Sundays

    Mr. Llamas, who has been racing between hurricanes and election coverage, makes time for baseball with his children and not-so-scary movies with his wife.Five nights a week, Tom Llamas is the face of election coverage for NBC News.But on Sundays, he is about 40 minutes north of NBC’s Manhattan studios working out and hitting baseballs with his son at home in Westchester County, N.Y.“In New York City with kids, you have to get up and go somewhere — whether it’s a car ride, or an Uber, or a taxi — to do anything,” said Mr. Llamas, 45, who moved with his young family to a seven-bedroom home in Purchase in 2022 after five years in a three-bedroom apartment in Midtown East. “As the kids were getting older, the process was starting to weigh on us.”The home — which is outfitted with a gym, a gymnastics area and a record room — is a welcome respite from the busy news cycle. Over the past few months, Mr. Llamas has gone to Paris to report on the Olympics; Chicago and Wisconsin to anchor from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions; and Florida and New Orleans to cover hurricanes.“What people are going through during the hurricane is way worse than what I have to go through, but it’s been incredibly difficult,” said Mr. Llamas, who was born in Miami and recently returned from an assignment covering Hurricane Milton in Florida.Mr. Llamas, who commutes to NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza by either car or Metro-North train, lives with his wife, Jennifer Llamas, 43; two daughters, Malena, 11, and Juju, 8; and a son, Tomas, 7.Mr. Llamas and his family make breakfast together. He said his 8-year-old daughter, Juju, was “pretty good at it, too!”Gregg Vigliotti 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

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    ‘Good Omens’ Season 3 Cut Short Amid Allegations Against Neil Gaiman

    The series is the third production linked to the author to face turmoil after allegations made by five women surfaced this summer.“Good Omens,” a series based on a novel by the author Neil Gaiman written in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, will return for a third and final season, but it will consist of only one episode, Prime Video announced on Friday.“Good Omens” is the third production to face turmoil this year amid allegations, including claims of sexual assault, that five women have made against Mr. Gaiman relating to conduct from 1986 to 2022.The final season of the series will be truncated to one 90-minute episode, and Mr. Gaiman, who contributed to the writing of the final series, will not be working on the production, according to Amazon MGM Studios.The production company did not comment on why Mr. Gaiman, 63, will not be involved. Mr. Gaiman, who also did not respond to a request for comment on Friday, has previously denied any wrongdoing.The first two seasons of “Good Omens” included six episodes each. The changes to the final season of the series came after two other productions related to Mr. Gaiman were halted earlier this year.The actor Michael Sheen in “Good Omens.” Chris Raphael/Amazon StudiosThe allegations played a role in pausing the production of “The Graveyard Book,” an adaptation of the young adult novel by Mr. Gaiman, according to a person at Disney, adding that the allegations were not the sole reason that the production was paused. Disney would not provide any additional reasons.“Dead Boy Detectives,” a TV series based on a comic book by Mr. Gaiman, will not return for a second season, according to Netflix, which did not say why.The turmoil in the productions linked to Mr. Gaiman has come after the five women spoke on the podcast “Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman.”There are no publicly known lawsuits or open police investigations related to the allegations. Lawyers representing Mr. Gaiman did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.Mr. Gaiman is the author of dozens of works, including the “The Sandman” and the novella “Coraline,” which became a popular animated film. Mr. Gaiman’s works have earned many accolades, including multiple Hugo Awards, the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal.“Good Omens,” which premiered in 2019, tells the story of the friendship between Aziraphale, a fussy angel played by Michael Sheen, and Crowley, a demon played by David Tennant. The final episode will star Mr. Sheen and Mr. Tennant, according to Amazon MGM Studios.Production on the final episode of “Good Omens” will begin in early 2025, and it will premiere on Prime Video. More

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    Without Another Debate, the Campaign Became a Duel of TV Scenes

    As the candidates raced to claim different corners of the national screen this week, it was “Undercover Boss” vs. “Roll the clip.”In a typical election season — remember those? — right about now we would be preparing for, or recovering from, the final presidential debate. But Oct. 23, the date of a proposed CNN showdown that Kamala Harris accepted and Donald J. Trump declined, came and went without one.Instead, as Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump raced to claim different corners of the national screen, they were essentially staging a virtual debate, presenting competing versions of themselves on strikingly different stages.Mr. Trump substituted the debate podium with a takeout window, performing a shift on the fry cooker at a closed McDonald’s franchise and violating the occasional job protocol. It was a familiar kind of reality-TV stunt for a reality-TV candidate.This time, however, he was not emulating “The Apprentice” but staging a political version of “Undercover Boss.”On the CBS reality series, which aired 11 seasons from 2010 to 2022, company executives went incognito to work low-level jobs at their companies. The premise was to show bigwigs how the grunts lived. But it also served, in the years after the financial collapse and Great Recession, as a form of prime-time crisis P.R. Chief executives were people too, it told us; they shared common purpose and mutual respect with the rank and file.Mr. Trump’s shift, which lasted less time than a single “Undercover Boss” episode, had different aims. Most overtly, it was a way of using virality — what news producer can resist footage of Donald Trump shoveling fries into a container? — to spread his unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Harris had lied about working at McDonald’s while in college. (As with his birtherism campaign against Barack Obama, media coverage generally noted that his charges were baseless, but the dust still got kicked up, the doubts potentially sown.)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