Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Season 1, Episode 2 Recap: The Agony

    Valya has shown that she is clearly willing to sacrifice whatever, and whomever, it takes to accomplish her goal. Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Two Wolves’Desmond Hart is an anomaly. He is alive after a sandworm attack that should have left him in the belly of the beast. He knows of the Sisterhood’s secret plan to play puppet master with the universe’s rulers as their marionettes. He can burn people to death using only his mind, apparently from light years away. He can resist the Voice, with which Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen has subdued even other powerful members of her own Sisterhood.He has no compunction about consigning a child to an agonizing death, or about torturing that child’s father for displaying insolence toward the emperor he serves. He’s a scary dude.He also has a point.There’s no question where “Dune: Prophecy” wants your sympathies to lie regarding this guy; burning a little boy to death won’t win you many fans. However, in its second episode, the show reveals that Mother Valya is playing a game in which, up until recently, she was the only real player on the field. By installing her Truthsayers throughout the Imperium, she has managed to manipulate not only the emperor and his aristocratic frenemy, Duke Richese, but also the rebel forces responsible for taking down spice harvesters on Arrakis and infiltrating the imperial palace. When the rebel cell has outgrown its usefulness, she has no problem ordering its exposure and destruction. It’s all for the greater good, after all.The same is true of the orders she gives back at the Sisterhood’s home base. To her sister Tula’s dismay, Valya orders that Tula’s star pupil, Lila (Chloe Lea), undergo “the Agony.” This portentously named process, a version of which is undergone by Paul Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica, in the “Dune” films, involves ingesting a poison with no antidote. With proper command of the body on a cellular level, an acolyte can break the poison down, unlocking her “genetic memory” — the collected knowledge and wisdom of all her maternal forebears — and becoming a Reverend Mother in the process.Why Lila? A powerful empath, she is secretly the great-great-granddaughter of Mother Raquella, the Sisterhood’s founder and the first woman to (involuntarily) undergo this process. If Lila is able to contact Raquella within her own mind, Valya believes that they can learn more about their founder’s prophecy concerning “the Reckoning” and “the Burning Truth.”But training for the Agony usually takes many years, and this is a rush job, precipitated by the coming of Desmond Hart and the monkey wrench he has thrown into the Sisterhood’s plans.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

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Chuck Woolery, Host of ‘Love Connection,’ Dies at 83

    After a career that included stints on “Wheel of Fortune” and other popular game shows, he took a combative turn as a right-wing podcast host.Chuck Woolery, the affable host of “Love Connection,” “Wheel of Fortune” and other television game shows, who later criticized liberal values and the Democratic Party as the co-host of a popular right-wing podcast, died on Saturday at his home in Texas. He was 83.His death was confirmed by Mark Young, the co-host of his podcast, “Blunt Force Truth.” He did not specify the cause.In the late 1970s, Mr. Woolery was the inaugural host of “Wheel of Fortune,” now one of the longest-running game shows on television. And in the early 1980s, he was tapped to host “Love Connection,” a dating show that helped to make him a household name.On a stage flush with red and pink cutout hearts, he maneuvered with an easy charm through interactions that could be both endearing and irreverent.At times he could be a coaxing Cupid; at others, a referee as contestants traded barbs over who was complaining or who had skipped out on dinner.“I felt more like the audience,” Mr. Woolery said in a 2020 interview with the journalist Adam Wurtzel. “What would the audience ask? What would the audience feel?”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

  • 163 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Blue Man Group to End New York Run After Three Decades Off Broadway

    The troupe is also closing its Chicago company, but continues to perform in Berlin, Boston, Las Vegas and, soon, Orlando.Blue Man Group, the wordless theatrical troupe of drum-beating, paint-splattering, bald blue performers, will end its run in New York on Feb. 2, more than three decades and 17,000 performances after it began.The troupe, which started as experimental street theater and is now a subsidiary of the global circus behemoth Cirque du Soleil, will also end its Chicago run on Jan. 5.But the show will continue to run elsewhere, with long-running companies in Berlin, Boston and Las Vegas, and a forthcoming run in Orlando, where it is scheduled to reopen next spring after a four-year closure prompted by the coronavirus pandemic. There have also been touring productions.The end of the New York production was announced in a news release by Jack Kenn, the company’s managing director; the release did not say why the show was closing, and a spokeswoman for the company declined to provide any further information.The closing at Astor Place Theater in Lower Manhattan comes at a challenging time for theater, as production costs are higher, and audience sizes generally lower, than before the pandemic.Blue Man Group, which began performing at Astor Place in 1991, will conclude its New York run two years after the end of “Stomp,” another wordless, percussion-heavy show that had been an Off Broadway staple since 1994. And “Sleep No More,” an immersive riff on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” that opened in 2011, says its final performance will be Jan. 5. (It has previously postponed closing dates several times.)Off Broadway has been a mixed bag since the 2020 shutdowns — many nonprofits are struggling, staging fewer shows and employing smaller casts than before. But in the commercial Off Broadway arena, there has been a rebound, as a number of shows have found ways to break through and succeed.Some producers now believe that limited run shows have better odds of success, because consumers are more motivated to buy tickets when they know it’s now or never.A new generation of long-running Off Broadway shows has arrived, although generally not with the longevity of Blue Man Group. A few examples: “The Play That Goes Wrong” transferred from Broadway to New World Stages in 2019 and is still running there; a revival of “Little Shop of Horrors” has been running at Westside Theater, also since 2019; and “Titaníque,” now at the Daryl Roth Theater, has been running Off Broadway since 2022. More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    The Voice of Milhouse on Saying Goodbye to ‘The Simpsons’

    After 35 years of voicing Bart’s unlucky but indefatigable best friend, Pamela Hayden is retiring. She still has high hopes for his future.When you answer your phone to hear a grown woman shouting “Wazzzuuuuup?” in the voice of a 10-year-old boy, you can be pretty sure that you’re talking with Pamela Hayden. For some 35 years, Hayden has played many distinctive characters on “The Simpsons,” the long-running animated Fox sitcom, but none with more nerdy exuberance than Milhouse Van Houten, the hapless but good-hearted best friend of Bart Simpson.On Wednesday, however, Hayden announced that after having played Milhouse since before “The Simpsons” was even its own series (and having amassed a roster of other roles including the bully Jimbo Jones and Bart’s sweetly pious neighbor Rod Flanders), she has retired from voice acting. Her final “Simpsons” performances as Milhouse and Jimbo will be shown on Sunday night.Hayden, 70, whose voices have been heard on numerous animated shows since the 1980s, said in a phone interview on Thursday that voice acting is not vastly different from on-camera acting. When you’re putting yourself in the mind-set of a voice character, she said: “You’re thinking to yourself, what do I want? How bad do I want it? What happens if I don’t get it? And Milhouse has to think a lot about what happens if he doesn’t get it, because he hardly ever does.”Dave gets a surprise greetingOur reporter was expecting a call from Pamela Hayden, just not her opening line.And with the same soft-spoken compassion she has brought to her performances, Hayden said she understood why Milhouse became the most enduring and best-known of all the characters she played.“Milhouse is somebody who’s having a rough time a lot of times, but he doesn’t take it personally,” she said. “It doesn’t ruin his life. He wakes up the next day and he still feels like things are going to be better, even if they’re not.”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

  • 75 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Stratford-Upon-Lake-Michigan: Royal Shakespeare Company Plays Chicago

    The Royal Shakespeare Company, which keeps the plays of William Shakespeare alive in the town of his birth, was long a regular presence in the United States. It brought Ian McKellen to Brooklyn as King Lear, built a replica of its main theater in an Upper East Side drill hall and sent a stream of shows to Broadway.But in recent years the renowned troupe has taken fewer overseas trips from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.Now, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, the company has returned to the United States — but not to New York, where some of the main importers of European work remain diminished and disoriented. It has struck up a partnership with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, which is led by Edward Hall, whose ties to the Royal Shakespeare Company run unusually deep: His father, Peter Hall, the eminent British director, founded it.“My love of Shakespeare grew up from my father talking to me about Shakespeare, and why he was passionate about Shakespeare, and why he thought Shakespeare endured, and quoting Shakespeare,” he said. “I watched him work a bit, and then, like every child, you go off into a corner and find your own way, which is what I did.”His earliest memory of Shakespeare is watching “The Wars of the Roses,” directed by his father, when he was 4 or 5, and “seeing a lot of people in armor with very exciting-looking weapons.”Edward Hall, the artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is the son of Peter Hall, the founder of the R.S.C. He’s also the human for a dog named Dennis.Lyndon French 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

  • 138 Shares139 Views

    in Television

    Lottery to Be Held for Coveted Seats at Menendez Brothers Hearing

    The court is expecting high demand and has announced a public lottery for a limited number of seats at a status hearing in Los Angeles on Monday.What’s one of the most exclusive tickets in Los Angeles? It may not be what you think.A lottery is being held on Monday to determine who will be the 16 people who get to witness what happens next in the case of the Menendez Brothers, who are serving life sentences for murdering their parents in 1989.The drawing will take place between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Pacific time, in front of the Van Nuys Courthouse West, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County said. The seats for 16 people, in a county of more than 10 million residents, will be allocated just one hour before the status hearing is set to begin at 10:30 a.m.The court occasionally holds public lotteries “when seating is limited and public interest is high,” a court spokesperson said in an email.The high level of interest in the case is in part spurred by a new series as well as a new documentary on Netflix that detail the brothers’ abuse allegations against their parents. Erik and Lyle Menendez killed their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, more than 35 years ago in their Beverly Hills mansion.The Menendez brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. At the time, the judge said that he sentenced each brother to two consecutive life sentences because they had carefully decided to kill their parents.In the almost three decades since, the public perception of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when they committed the murders, has shifted somewhat. Many have shown their interest in the murders in social media posts, and have often pushed for the brothers’ release, with the renewed attention earning them a new class of defenders.Last month, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, said he would request that the brothers be resentenced, which could ultimately lead to their release.“I came to a place where I believe that under the law, resentencing is appropriate,” said Mr. Gascón, who has since lost his seat.The brothers could also find freedom through clemency from California’s governor, for which they have petitioned. Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he would hold off on considering that request until the new district attorney, Nathan Hochman, takes office early next month and has had a chance to review the case. More

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    In Marlon James’s ‘Get Millie Black,’ Colonial Rule Haunts Jamaica

    Marlon James’s new HBO detective series, “Get Millie Black,” draws on Jamaica’s colonial history as well as his family’s experiences.In 2015, the author Marlon James was in London, where he had just won the Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Holed away in a hotel room after the ceremony before he flew home to Minneapolis, the characters for a TV show began to take shape.“I’ve always looked at novel writing and storytelling as a kind of detective work,” he said in a recent video interview. “Characters show up in my head and I wonder why. They’re a mystery to be solved.”In the resulting HBO limited series, “Get Millie Black,” there are several other mysteries to be solved. The five episodes, from the showrunner Jami O’Brien, tell the story of an obsessive detective, Millie (Tamara Lawrance), who returns to Jamaica from London to reconnect with her sister and join the local police force. While investigating the case of a missing teenage girl, she comes close to breaking point.With all the requisite twists and turns of the detective genre, “Get Millie Black” — which premieres Monday — is a confronting look at Jamaica’s criminal underworld, set against the misty backdrop of a colonial past that is never far away. “In this country, nothing haunts like history,” Millie says in Episode 1: “Pick something ugly, bigoted hateful, shameful, violent and you see a shadow reaching back 400 years.”James’s mother became a police detective in Jamaica in the 1950s, when it was rare to see women in the role, and even rarer to see them succeed.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis long shadow has fallen across much of James’s writing, stalking him since he was growing up in Portmore, a town just outside Jamaica’s capital, Kingston.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

  • 150 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    ‘A Man on the Inside’ Review: Ted Danson in Another Good Place

    Created by Michael Schur and starring Danson, this Netflix sitcom synthesizes the most gutting realities of life and death into cozy, low-stakes comedy.“A Man on the Inside,” created by Michael Schur and starring Ted Danson, synthesizes the most gutting realities of life and death into a cozy, low-stakes comedy populated by well-intentioned sweethearts. The show is as gentle and mild as baby soap, though it could hardly promise no tears.Danson stars as Charles, whose wife died a year earlier from complications of Alzheimer’s. He is a retired professor and a San Francisco booster who wrote a book about the Golden Gate Bridge; he has a warm but arm’s-length relationship with his daughter, Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who encourages him find a project or hobby. So he responds to an ad in a newspaper and finds himself working for a private investigator, going semi-undercover in a Bay Area retirement community.The show is loosely based on “The Mole Agent,” a Chilean documentary from 2020, though the stakes here have been dialed way down: While the figures in the film were investigating potential abuse in an elder-care facility, here the narrative clothesline is a missing necklace. The only person truly aggrieved by its absence is the necklace owner’s son (Marc Evan Jackson), who icily describes his mother moving back in with him as “suboptimal.”Under the weakly exasperated guidance of Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), the investigator, Charles moves into Pacific View. Virginia (Sally Struthers), an aggressive flirt, and Florence (Margaret Avery), an energetic poet, take an immediate liking to him, which bothers Virginia’s on-again-off-again lover, Elliott (John Getz), who declares Charles his “sexual rival.” Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Charles develop the rom-com-y friendship that would be doomed by Charles’s duplicity were the show not defined by its characters’ deep wells of forgiveness. Didi (Stephanie Beatriz) is the devoted administrator running the facility, cheery and capable. Mostly, Pacific View is like a resort, with parties and companionship and dignified care. According to Didi, loneliness is as detrimental to seniors as any aspect of aging.Perhaps it is merciful not to dwell in the self-dissolving agony of dementia, for death to be peaceful, hygienic and offscreen. A subplot about a declining woman named Gladys (Susan Ruttan) is central to the story and handled gracefully — shallowly. Better to discuss a fancy watch that costs $10,000, which the characters do, often, or run up an $800 Uber tab. Elliott, the most ornery and cynical resident, can’t stay mad long, and he encourages Charles to simply become inured to his peers losing themselves.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