Eliana Willis

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    Trixie Mattel of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ on the Sitcom That Brings Us All Together

    “The love story of Jim and Pam — every time I watch that unfold, I find something new to cry about,” the entertainer said.Trixie Mattel knows that anything is prettier in pink — almost.She had no qualms about drenching the Palm Springs resort that she and her partner, David Silver, redid in 2022 in bubble gum hues, but their private residence was another matter.In “Trixie Motel: Drag Me Home,” out on June 1 on Max, Mattel — who won the third season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” — and Silver transform an old craftsman in Los Angeles into a pie-in-the-sky fabulosity.“We really wanted sexy Hollywood Regency, but it’s not just my house, so it can’t be all pink and girly,” Mattel (real name: Brian Firkus) said in a video call. “Let’s just say it definitely looks like two gay men live here now.”“There was something very emotional about building your home with your partner that you’re going to spend your life in,” she added before talking about her obsession with Amanda Lepore, the resonance of “Watchmen” and the bonding power of “The Office.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1BlondieWhen I was 15 or 16, I had my first job at a chicken restaurant, and I used to drive around in my ’94 Dodge Intrepid, listening to the best of Blondie with the CD that I got at the Target in Sheboygan, Wis. I guess a female-fronted rock band for me was really a big deal. I’m gay. And so something with a woman in the front who’s glamorous but powerful and the voice is beautiful — it just blew my mind.2Purple Disco MachineIt’s the gayest music. It’s so fun and glitzy and sexy, and it has so much flourish, and it has so much style, and he riffs on a lot of classic disco elements but kind of updates it. His remix of “Praise You” by Fatboy Slim is just amazing. He has a new single out called “Beat of Your Heart” that I’m in love with. I play him all the time in my DJ sets.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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    In ‘The Big Cigar,’ a Black Panther Stars in a Fake Movie

    This new series is based on the unlikely true story of a Hollywood producer who used a bogus film production to help Huey Newton flee to Cuba in 1974.When the movie producer Bert Schneider met the Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, he swooned.Schneider, who had helped revolutionize the movie industry (and made a lot of money) as a producer of films like “Easy Rider,” wanted to shake up things off the screen as well. He saw Newton, who had already done a prison stint for the killing of a police officer — Newton denied that he shot the officer, and the conviction was eventually overturned — as the real deal, a star on the front lines of the actual revolution.Their unlikely partnership is now the heart of the new limited series “The Big Cigar,” premiering April 17 on Apple TV+. It’s a caper about how Newton (played by André Holland) fled to Cuba in 1974 after he was arrested and charged with the murder of a prostitute (also a crime he claimed he didn’t commit). Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) ponied up cash and logistical assistance, including a fake film production, to help Newton escape.Holland and Alessandro Nivola, as Bert Schneider, in “The Big Cigar,” which is based on a true story.Brendan Adam-Zwelling/Apple TV+“Cigar” tells a wild tale with shootouts and chases and a couple of strange bedfellows: a Black revolutionary on the run and a well-coiffed Hollywood power player looking to bankroll him. Even as it takes some liberties with the facts, the series reflects the ties that existed between some counterculture entertainment figures and radical organizations of the ’60s and ’70s.“We didn’t see it as a story of Hollywood patting itself on the back,” Jim Hecht, the writer and an executive producer, said in a video interview. “There was a time when people actually did put their bodies on the line and do things for a cause that they believed in. They took personal risks to do things that were political.”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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    ‘Doctor Who’ Season Premiere Recap: Back in the Groove

    The new season, written by Russell T Davies and starring Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th Doctor, opens with a double episode premiere.Season 1, Episodes 2 and 3: ‘Space Babies’ and ‘The Devil’s Chord’Russell T Davies, the showrunner for the new season of “Doctor Who,” had a tough task ahead of him.How do you convince longstanding fans that this British institution of a show is back in safe hands after several disappointing seasons, while also introducing a new international audience to a sci-fi series steeped in 60 years of history?In the premiere double bill of “Doctor Who,” you can feel Davies grappling with these questions, with largely successful results. After the show was canceled in 1989, Davies rebooted “Doctor Who” in 2005, manning the ship during Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant’s tenures as the time-traveling Doctor. Under Davies, “Doctor Who” was not only popular, but, dare I say it, kind of cool.We met Davies’s new Doctor, played by the Scottish-Rwandan actor Ncuti Gatwa, last year in the show’s 60th anniversary episodes (and somewhat confusingly, this new season’s first episode aired as a stand-alone Christmas special). This is also the first season to debut on Disney+ in the United States, and since the rules governing time and space in the “Whoniverse” are notoriously complicated, there’s a lot of world building to do in less than two hours of TV.Typically, a “Doctor Who” two-parter would feature a shared story or location, but here we have two separate adventures. The first episode, “Space Babies,” does much of the heavy lifting to set up the season, so that by the time “The Devil’s Chord” rolls around, “Doctor Who” can do what it does best: take the audience on rip-roaring, high-voltage adventures.“Space Babies” picks up where the Christmas episode, “The Church on Ruby Road,” left off. The Doctor’s new companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) enters the TARDIS, his spaceship disguised as a police box, with lots of questions about where he comes from. It’s the Doctor’s job to take her, and any first-time viewers, through the basic Time Lord fact sheet: He comes from the planet Gallifrey and is the last of his species, an orphan like Ruby; he has been alive for thousands of years; and he spends his time traveling through time and space. As introductions go, it’s not subtle, but it gets the job done.Ruby is human, TARDIS technology confirms, but she remains a question mark we can expect the season to return to later.Bad Wolf/BBC StudiosWe 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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    At Theatertreffen, the Hobbits Are Yodeling

    A quirky and joyful play based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books joined weightier works at this year’s Theatertreffen drama festival.“Where is Frodo?” an actress dressed as Gollum asked as she crawled past me, sounding slightly panic stricken. It was the first thing I heard when I entered “Gigantic in Middle-earth” (“Riesenhaft in Mittelerde”), an ambitious immersive theatrical experience inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” The work is one of 10 productions selected for this year’s Theatertreffen, the annual springtime celebration of the best of German theater. To step inside the elaborate staging, which originated at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, in Switzerland, was to plunge headlong into a lovingly prepared yet scrappy version of Tolkien’s fantasy world. As much a playful examination of Tolkien superfandom as it was a retelling of the author’s saga, the show came to life humorously, energetically and sometimes epically with music, puppetry, video, dramatic light, swirling fog and blowing leaves. The audience is in the midst of the action, sitting and standing among the nearly 20 constantly moving performers.The forces required for this extravaganza, a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater, were monumental. The show boasted four directors, including one of the Schauspielhaus’s artistic leaders, Nicolas Stemann, who also played piano throughout the evening. “Gigantic in Middle-earth” is a collaboration between Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater HORA and the Helmi puppet theater.Fabian SchellhornThe most memorable performances came from members of Theater HORA. The Swiss company, which works with actors with cognitive and developmental disabilities, has recently been featured in weighty productions at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in Liège, Belgium, that explored the challenges of living with Down syndrome and other conditions. Here, it was pure joy to watch HORA’s actors embrace their inner hobbits, dwarves, wizards, orcs and elves — including one that yodels!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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    ‘Sally & Tom’ Frees Sally Hemings From Being a Mere Footnote

    Suzan-Lori Parks’s play is the latest work by a Black writer seeking to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective to make her fully dimensional.Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know so little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Yet, Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts.In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character — and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, told me, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.)She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we can really imagine what it is for a 14-year-old to be looked at by a 41-year-old, and not just looked at but to engage in sexual exploitation with this man.”Parks’s fidelity to the history means she doesn’t alter Hemings’s fate. Instead, she experiments with the storytelling by plotting “Sally & Tom” as a backstager, or a play within a play, in which the main character, Luce (also played by Irving), is an African American dramatist who is writing a play about the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Luce is playing Hemings in her own play, which is called “The Pursuit of Happiness.”In fact, each cast member plays two parts: Luce’s partner, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is playing Tom in the production, and Alano Miller plays both Hemings’s older brother, James, and Kwame, a Hollywood actor who has returned to his old theater company. When the historical story and the present-day one collide, they often reveal the sometimes comical and often complicated reality that can arise when mounting a show dealing with race relations in the American theater today.Contemporary woes: Irving and Ebert as a modern couple struggling to produce a play (and overcome race relations in the American theater) in “Sally & Tom.”Jeenah Moon 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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    What to Watch This Weekend: A Tense Restaurant Drama

    Looking for some kitchen adrenaline between seasons of “The Bear”? Try the British series “Boiling Point” on Netflix.Ray Panthaki and Vinette Robinson cook up some drama in “Boiling Point.”James Stack“The Bear” will be back with a new season on June 27, but if you crave the adrenaline and misery of a fine-dining kitchen in the meantime, “Boiling Point,” on Netflix, puts its own tasty spin on similar ingredients.The show is technically a sequel to the 2021 movie “Boiling Point,” a single-shot movie about one catastrophic night at a fancy restaurant. This “Boiling Point,” which aired in Britain in 2023, picks up months later and includes many of the same characters. Urgent moments from the film surface in flashback, but the show feels like a distinct work, not just an iteration in a franchise. Its characters themselves are figuring out how to make something — a restaurant, even just one dish, even just one serving of that dish — that can stand on its own two feet, how to differentiate their work from the output of others.Our fearless leader is Carly (Vinette Robinson), who runs her kitchen with positivity and support, who believes in both order and praise. She is spread so thin you can see through her, and each passing minute drains her further. Her difficult mother, some rude investors, the squabbling subordinate chefs — everyone needs something from her. She clenches her fists while she sleeps, scowling with worry even while unconscious.When we meet her, Carly is giving an energizing pep talk and introducing a new chef around the kitchen. It soon becomes clear that he has overstated his qualifications, and things start falling apart. By the end of the night, the social structure of the staff is shattered, and catastrophe and chaos spiral from there for the subsequent four episodes. Nothing seems to go right, so much so that both the audience and the characters start to wonder: Has anything ever gone right?“Boiling Point” is festive with its dishes, and the ensemble chemistry is top-notch. Its real feat, though, is its sense of strength and failure. Carly and her staff are obviously capable, but it’s never enough. Stress motivates and destroys all the characters here, driving them to addiction, self-harm and exhaustion, but they also come back hungry for more striving, eager for more struggle. One must imagine Sisyphus saying “yes, chef.” More

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    ‘Black Twitter’: Movements, Memes and Crying Jordan

    This new Hulu docuseries explores how a social media subculture influenced American culture at large.When Prentice Penny first began work on the forthcoming docuseries “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” the last thing the director wanted to do was explain to anybody just what Black Twitter was. How could he?“Everybody has a different opinion what it is, and a different entry point and path to how they feel about it,” he said.“Black Twitter” is a kind of shorthand descriptor referring loosely to commentary, jokes and other kinds of cultural conversation and activism driven largely by Black users of the social media platform now named X. What Penny wanted to do was capture the pivotal moments that have come to define this organic online community, including the movements (Black Lives Matter; OscarsSoWhite) and defining hashtags (#uknowurblackwhen, #BlackGirlMagic) it has propelled and championed.And he wanted to do all of this while Black Twitter was still around.“So much of Black culture in this country isn’t documented,” Penny said. “When you see books about culture and race being banned, when you see narratives saying, oh, there were good sides to slavery, you realize that Black Twitter could be here today and gone tomorrow.”Prentice Penny, left, Joie Jacoby and Jason Parham at the film’s debut at the South by Southwest film festival in March.Andrew Walker/DisneyIndeed, since Penny started the project, Twitter itself has disappeared — or the name officially has, anyway. “I don’t trust anybody who stopped calling it Twitter,” said Jason Parham, a producer on the show whose 2021 Wired story “A People’s History of Black Twitter” inspired the series.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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    Caitlin Clark Hype Will Test the W.N.B.A.’s Television Limits

    The docuseries “Full Court Press” closely tracked college stars like Clark and Kamilla Cardoso. Fans who want to follow elite W.N.B.A. rookies could have a tougher time.The decision makers for the docuseries “Full Court Press” chose wisely when selecting which women’s college basketball players they would follow for an entire season.They recruited Caitlin Clark, whose long-distance shots at the University of Iowa made her a lucrative draw. Kamilla Cardoso, a Brazilian attending the University of South Carolina, could provide an international perspective. Kiki Rice, from the University of California, Los Angeles, would be the talented but reserved young prospect.Those selections proved fortuitous when each player advanced deep into the N.C.A.A. tournament. Clark and Cardoso competed in the most-watched women’s championship game in history before becoming two of the top three picks in the W.N.B.A. draft.“The way that it turned out, it’s like, ‘This is not real life,’” said Kristen Lappas, the director of the four-part ESPN series that will air on ABC on Saturday and Sunday. “That just doesn’t happen in documentary filmmaking.”Interest in women’s basketball is surging because of young talent. Clark, Cardoso and other top rookies like Angel Reese and Cameron Brink are providing the W.N.B.A. a vital infusion of star power, quickly obliterating one record when 2.4 million viewers watched April’s draft.Now the league, whose media rights package expires in 2025, must capitalize by making sure fans can easily follow the players they grew to love during their collegiate careers.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