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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 9 Recap: Cowboy Hitler

    “The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman,” Roy confesses. It’s safe to wager Dot never felt the same.Season 5, Episode 9: ‘The Useless Hand’“You Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?”You never want to get a question like that from your father-in-law, even when you’ve been using your post as the county sheriff to funnel money into their far-right militia for some imagined holy war against “the deep state.” But the question itself, posed to Roy Tillman, suggests the answer: Roy has always been Hitler in the bunker — just as Hitler himself was inevitably Hitler in the bunker — yet he has flashed enough tough-guy charisma to bring other “patriots” into his orbit. He has been cosplaying Ammon Bundy for votes, money and unchecked power, but sometimes an actor immerses himself too deeply into a role. And now he has the feds surrounding his ranch.Throughout the season, we have seen examples of Roy’s brutality and psychopathy, the ease with which he follows his impulse toward extreme violence. But Dot, in a scene where she is cornered by his current wife and trying to speak to their shared experiences, has it right: “He’s weak.” If anything, that weakness makes him more dangerous, especially as his options start to become more limited and he evokes the Masada, an ancient fortress where Jewish rebels made their last stand against the Roman Empire. (As the legend has it, the two-year siege ended in a mass suicide by the rebels.) Last week, Dot was correct in saying that Roy had no plan for what to do after bringing her back to the ranch, other than treating her like a horse that needed to be broken.Much of this week’s episode takes place during this last stand at Tillman Ranch, as federal agents roused by Danish’s disappearance and Dot’s kidnapping finally have urgent cause to hold Roy accountable. Amid the chaos that follows, the show takes full stock of Roy as a fake cowboy, driven by feeling rather than calculation, despite the power he has been able to accumulate. A rational leader would know that shooting the lawyer and right-hand of Minnesota’s billionaire debt queen would not go unanswered, but he was embarrassed and angry and wanted to put this smug slickster in his place.As for Dot, he confesses, “The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman.” That’s when he decides to kill her, too.Of all the fine casting choices this season, Jon Hamm may be the savviest, because memories of “Mad Men” have us trusting in his relative infallibility on the job, even if his Don Draper proves dramatically less certain off the clock. Hamm is such a magnetic cult of personality that comedies like “30 Rock” and the underrated “Confess, Fletch” have made a point of turning him into a grinning buffoon. “Fargo” has done likewise, but much more gradually, as Roy’s biblical authority over Stark County has loosened along with his grip over his emotions. His plea to his patriots, “After they murder me, they’re coming for you next,” has the ring of Trumpian victimization to it. And they will dutifully follow him off the cliff.Roy’s desperation raises the stakes for a thrilling penultimate episode that finds Dot scrambling for safety on the ranch, having seen where he buries the bodies. She can’t have anticipated being in the crossfire between the feds and a militia stocked with heavily armed weekend warriors, but she knows enough about Roy’s state of mind to see where things might be headed. When she works her way back into the house, which is full of little trap doors and hidden passageways that she knows enough to exploit, she gets a call in to Wayne before Karen puts a rifle on her.Given how much the season has been about adversarial women finding common cause, it’s a relief that Dot’s attempt to bond with Karen fails. The show has already gone perhaps too far in softening up Lorraine, and it risks flattening the female characters if they’re all of a similar mindset. The threat that Dot represents to Karen, who rages about how the bedroom hasn’t changed since she left (“We sleep in your filth”), suggests that Roy is bored by his current wife’s compliance. That’s why he needs her to role-play in bed.As Dot finds herself the bleakest possible hiding spot while Witt Farr and a band of agents strike out to locate her, poor Gator comes stumbling back into the picture, led along by Ole Munch, who enacts his own version of biblical justice for when Gator killed his host-of-sorts and made off with his money. Roy knows right away that his son has made a grave mistake, but shows only disappointment when Munch drags Gator back to the ranch by his neck, having carved out his eyes with a hot knife. With no mother or mother-figure left in his life, Gator had opted to please his father, and his reward is to be abandoned in the fog, unable to summon any sympathy from a hard, narrow, narcissistic idol. His childlike pleas for “daddy” are carried off into the mist.Munch does show mercy to the woman who mangled his ear, however. With Roy’s men closing in on the “grave” where she imagines no one will find her, Munch does his part to liberate her by taking them out and lifting her to freedom. “To fight a tiger in a cage is not a fair fight,” he tells her. His beef with Roy appears to be settled. Or maybe he just respects her agency. And prowess.3 Cent StampsA very small Coen reference of note in this episode: While negotiating for his life at Munch’s shack, Gator offers all sorts of illicit goods, including drugs, a flamethrower and finally prostitutes. “Sure gets lonely out here,” he says, echoing a line from a witness in “Fargo,” who remembers Steve Buscemi’s character soliciting prostitutes for himself and his cohort in their lake hide-out.“An old woman watches young men play a game. She drinks. She drinks because her own son has spit the nipple from his mouth. She bothers no one. And yet, you killed her.” Munch’s centuries-old, biblical sense of justice is also quite stilted.“What’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t have someone killed?” Lorraine probably isn’t the first person to say a line like that.Funny advice for Dot on the phone. Lorraine: “Now put your big-girl pants on and get in the fight.” Indira, with the saner follow-up: “Dorothy, don’t get in the fight.”The Trump-era commentary comes through in Meyer’s clarifying the meaning of the term “witch hunt” to Roy: “You know what a ‘witch hunt’ is, right? Not witches hunting men, but men killing women to keep them in line.” More

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    Review: For Jews, an Unanswered ‘Prayer for the French Republic’

    In Joshua Harmon’s play about the legacies of antisemitism, a Parisian family must decide when it’s time to get out.Such is the sadness of our world that plays about antisemitism, however historical, cannot help but be prescient. Take “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s sprawling family drama about the Salomons, Jews who have “been in France more than a thousand years,” as one of them puts it, still sounding provisional. With violent incidents on the rise, and a fascistic, Nazi-adjacent party gaining in the polls, should they finally seek safety elsewhere?When it ran Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully timely, with the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other antisemitic atrocities barely in the rearview mirror. Two years later, with so much more awfulness to choose from, Harmon, revising his script for Broadway, has cut references to those events. What is too much for the world is way too much for the play.And the play, for all its urgency, is already way too much. Running just over three hours, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened on Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is still not long enough to do justice to the multiple histories it wants to tell. In the manner of prestige television series, but compressed for the stage to the point of confusion, it tries to dramatize the largest and most intractable world issues within the microcosm of a single family, creating an impossible burden on both.The play also revisits an earlier time, alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s with, from left, Daniel Oreskes, Nancy Robinette, Ethan Haberfield and Ari Brand.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it. Chief among them is Betsy Aidem, as Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, a psychiatrist living in Paris in 2016 who seems to need a psychiatrist herself. Overprotective and yet hypercritical of her two children, she loses control when one of them, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), is beaten up by antisemitic thugs near the school where he teaches.Marcelle’s frenzied response creates a fissure in the family that the play then proceeds to pry wide open. Her husband, Charles Benhamou (Nael Nacer), a physician who emigrated to France from Algeria when conditions became impossible for Jews in the early 1960s, eventually concludes that, like his native country then, his adopted one now is profoundly unsafe. Familiar with sudden uprootings, he wants to move as soon as possible — to Israel.Pointing out that Israel is no one’s idea of a safe haven, Marcelle is at first inalterably opposed to the idea. But it is less her fear of the Middle East than her connection to France that compels her to stay. Her elderly father, Pierre (Richard Masur), runs the last of the piano stores that the Salomons built into a national brand, with 22 stores, over five generations starting in 1855. A gorgeous, amber-colored grand, with “Salomon” spelled in gold on the fallboard, is the first and last thing we see in the show.There are few pieces of furniture harder to pack than a grand piano, which here becomes symbolic of the gift Jews have made to French culture and the expectation of permanent welcome the gift would seem to have earned them. That it hasn’t is the story’s heartbreak.But France is hardly the whole story, as Harmon shows us in alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s. Somehow left untouched by the German occupation of Paris, Marcelle’s great-grandparents Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) await word of the fate of their family at the end of the war. Soon, their son Lucien (Ari Brand) returns with his son, Pierre (Ethan Haberfield) — the old man of the later scenes but then just 15. Both father and son are obviously traumatized by their time in Auschwitz. And where is everyone else?You can probably guess. But if the scenes from the earlier period lend pathos to the later one, with which they frequently interpenetrate, little flows back from the later to the earlier. The 1940s material is sad but dutiful. Similarly, three characters who take up a lot of the play’s energy in the 2010s do not actually contribute much to its central conflict. One is Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Anthony Edwards): aggressively atheistic, disdainful of Sabbaths and seders, nasty without apparent cause except to provide cover for his otherwise contextless presence as the narrator.Ranson, left, and Benhamou clash over their opposing views about Israel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSlightly more integrated, and much more entertaining, is Marcelle and Charles’s daughter, Elodie (Frances Benhamou), a frequently pajamafied, hilariously logorrheic, self-involved know-it-all riding out the tail end of a two-year manic-depressive episode. (If you saw Harmon’s 2012 play, “Bad Jews,” she’ll remind you of Daphna Feygenbaum, an early version of the type.) Her punching bag is Molly (Molly Ranson), a distant cousin who visits Paris during her college year abroad. Both Marcelle and Elodie lay into Molly constantly, as if her naïveté, which they attribute to her being a pampered American, were a crime against Judaism.Though Ranson makes as good a case on Molly’s behalf as the script will allow — she played the object of Daphna’s fury in “Bad Jews,” so she knows the territory — her conflict with the Benhamou women, like her budding romance with dreamy Daniel, is a loose end and a diversion: a season-two development in a one-season story. She is, at least, more likable than the Parisians. Marcelle’s frenzies and Elodie’s diatribes (one lasts a withering 17 minutes) tip the tone into psychiatric cabaret, leaving the antisemitic trauma to jostle for dramatic space with the garden-variety antisocial kind, eventually to be overwhelmed by it.Is it Harmon’s point that “bad” Jews like the Salomons in the 2010s, perhaps made neurotic in the first place by antisemitism, have as much right to the protection of their homeland as unimpeachably “good” ones, like their forebears in the 1940s? In any case, a right to our attention is a different matter, especially as the characters’ fiercely defended opinions grow repetitive and perseverative — and then flip radically, without apparent motivation. By the third act, the arguments have stripped their gears completely, and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.That exhaustion is one of the few elements of naturalism (to be a Jew is to be morally exhausted) in a mostly expressionistic production. Like many Cromer stagings, “Prayer for the French Republic” is richly and darkly lit (in this case by Amith Chandrashaker) and moves among periods and locations with exquisite smoothness on tracks and turntables (sets by Takeshi Kata). The original music, by Daniel Kluger, sounds like Jewish memory, led by the cheerful-baleful tang of a clarinet.But like Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” “Prayer for the French Republic” (its title the name of a blessing recited in French synagogues for 200 years) gets lost in its central question: How can Jews know if it’s time to leave yet another home, in a history of hundreds, where they think they are safe but may soon find out otherwise? The prayer that they might not have to leave at all — the prayer for the end of antisemitism itself — has not been answered yet.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 18 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More

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    Roundabout to Stage ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and ‘Yellow Face’ on Broadway

    Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit on Broadway, said it would produce the three shows next season.Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit operating on Broadway, is planning to stage a jazz-inflected production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s famed 19th-century comic operetta, in the spring of 2025, the organization said Tuesday.Next season it also plans to stage the first Broadway productions of two plays: “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s work about a group of Iranians trying to learn English, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama, and “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s semi-autobiographical play sparked by the controversy over the casting of a white performer as a Eurasian character in the original production of “Miss Saigon.”All three shows will be staged at the Todd Haimes Theater, which is currently called the American Airlines but is about to be renamed for the Roundabout chief executive and artistic director who died last year after four decades with the organization.The announcement, which also includes plans for two Off Broadway plays and the promise of an Off Off Broadway work, indicates that Roundabout is planning its most robust season since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a financially devastating period that, for Roundabout, has been followed by fewer productions and smaller casts. Although revivals of classic musicals were once Roundabout’s bread and butter, “The Pirates of Penzance” will be the first musical production to begin at Roundabout in six years.“We’re here, and we’re producing, and we’re producing some exciting stuff,” said Scott Ellis, a longtime Haimes collaborator who is serving as Roundabout’s interim artistic director, and who is expected to stay in that role for at least two years. “It felt important to say that we’re committed to producing as many shows as we used to.”“The Pirates of Penzance,” a comedy about an indentured pirate apprentice who falls in love with a military officer’s daughter, was once a staple of American theater, and it has been staged a whopping 26 times on Broadway, starting in 1879. But the last Broadway revival was in 1981.This new production, directed by Ellis, features a reconceived book, score and setting — it is to be set in New Orleans, with a framing device imagining that Gilbert and Sullivan staged “The Pirates of Penzance” there. The script has been adapted and updated (the female characters are more capable than in historic productions, for example) by Rupert Holmes, who has also written some new lyrics; the score has been reorchestrated with jazz stylings by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters.The show is to star Ramin Karimloo, last seen on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “Funny Girl,” and David Hyde Pierce, best known for the television show “Frasier” and now featured Off Broadway, at the Shed, in Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.” Karimloo will play the Pirate King, while Pierce will play Major General Stanley as well as Gilbert, who is now a character explaining to the audience the adaptation’s conceit. The two test-drove the roles at a one-night Roundabout benefit concert in 2022.The production of “Yellow Face,” which is to start performances in September, will star Daniel Dae Kim, who in 2016 played the King of Siam in a Broadway revival of “The King and I” and is an alumnus of the television shows “Lost” and the “Hawaii Five-0” reboot. The play is to be directed by Leigh Silverman, who in 2007 directed productions of it in Los Angeles (at the Mark Taper Forum) and New York (at the Public Theater). Kim recently recorded an audio version of the play for Audible, also directed by Silverman.“It feels more relevant now than it did even when it was originally produced, so we made a big push to give the play its due,” Kim said in an interview. “Representation has been a big issue in my career and my life, and this play’s subject matter is really the issue of representation. In some sense it’s a time capsule, but it’s also a barometer for where we are today. And it’s also very funny and entertaining, because no one goes to theater to be taught a lesson — we go to theater to be entertained.”The production of “English,” which is to start performances in December, is to be directed by Knud Adams, who also directed the Off Broadway production in 2022 at Atlantic Theater Company.Roundabout is also planning to stage two new plays Off Broadway next season: “The Counter,” about a friendship between a waitress and a customer at a small-town diner, written by Meghan Kennedy and directed by David Cromer, and “Liberation,” about a friendship among six Ohio women, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White. And the company said it would stage an Off Off Broadway production in its underground space, but that it has not yet chosen that show. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Isn’t Expecting an Apology From Aaron Rodgers

    Kimmel said although the N.F.L. star may believe that Kimmel is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, it’s more likely that Rodgers “is mad at me for making fun of his topknot.”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.Flag on the PlayOn his first show of the new year, Jimmy Kimmel addressed recent comments that the N.F.L. quarterback Aaron Rodgers made about him in connection with Jeffrey Epstein. During an appearance on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” last Tuesday, Rodgers insinuated that Kimmel was nervous about the publication of some court documents because they would reveal a link between Kimmel and Epstein.On Monday night, Kimmel said Rodgers might actually believe his “false and very damaging statements,” but that the more likely scenario is “he doesn’t actually believe that — he just said it because he’s mad at me for making fun of his topknot and his lies about being vaccinated.”Kimmel cited Rodgers’ “Thanksgiving Day Parade-sized ego” as part of the problem and said he wasn’t expecting an apology, but he did want to differentiate between the jokes made on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and flat-out lies.“We say a lot of things on this show — we don’t make up lies. In fact, we have a team of people who work very hard to sift through the facts and reputable sources before I make a joke, and that’s an important distinction. A joke about someone — even when that someone is Donald Trump. Even a person who lies from the minute he wakes up until the minute he’s smearing orange makeup on his MyPillow at night — even he deserves that consideration, and we give it to him. Because the truth still matters, and when I do get something wrong, which happens on rare occasions, you know what I do? I apologize for it, which is what Aaron Rodgers should do, which is what a decent person would do. But I bet he won’t. If he does, you know what I’ll do? I’ll accept his apology and move on.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But here’s the thing: I spent years doing sports. I’ve seen guys like him before. Aaron Rodgers has a very high opinion of himself. Because he had success on the football field, he believes himself to be an extraordinary being. He genuinely thinks that because God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he’s smarter than everyone else. The idea that his brain is just average is unfathomable to him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We learned during Covid somehow he knows more about science than scientists. A guy who went to community college then got into Cal on a football scholarship and didn’t graduate; someone who never spent a minute studying the human body is an expert in the field of immunology.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Aaron got two A’s on his report card — they were both in the word ‘Aaron,’ OK?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“They let him host ‘Jeopardy’ for two weeks, now he knows everything.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Revisionist History Edition)“Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is facing criticism after she recently failed to cite slavery as the leading cause of the Civil War. Not only that, she’s facing a D in social studies.” — SETH MEYERS“Judges? Oh, no, I’m sorry. The answer we were looking for was ‘slavery.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Oh, yes, she had Black friends, but then they heard her opinion on what caused the Civil War.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yes, slavery is the obvious answer to ‘What caused the Civil War?’ Just like ‘Donald Trump’ is the obvious answer to ‘What caused Civil War 2?’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Monday’s “Tonight Show,” the “America’s Got Talent” host Mel B shared her plans to commemorate the Spice Girls’ 30th anniversary with a postage stamp featuring her face.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe pop star Dua Lipa will stop by Tuesday’s “Late Night,” one month after day drinking with Seth Meyers.Also, Check This OutPrince, bathed in purple light and rainy weather, performed at the Super Bowl in 2007.Doug MillsForty years after its release, Prince’s Oscar-winning rock musical film “Purple Rain” is being adapted for the stage. More

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    Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is Becoming a Musical

    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is lined up to write the book, and Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct.“Purple Rain,” Prince’s breakout rise-of-a-rock-star film, is being adapted into a stage musical featuring some of the pop musician’s best-loved songs.Orin Wolf, the producer who previously shepherded the Tony-winning adaptation of “The Band’s Visit” to the stage, and who is currently backing the theatrical adaptation of another music industry movie, “Buena Vista Social Club,” announced on Monday that he is developing the musical, based on the 1984 film.The stage adaptation will feature a book by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner whose family drama, “Appropriate,” is now running on Broadway. The director is Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with new material contributed by Jacobs-Jenkins) had a short run on Broadway in 2022.“Purple Rain” is about an ambitious musician, called the Kid, facing strife with his parents, his love interest, and his fellow musicians. The film won an Academy Award for best original song score.Wolf did not announce any other details, including when or where there might be an initial production (most musicals have runs either Off Broadway or outside New York before braving the high costs and intense glare of Broadway). Prince died in 2016; representatives of the rightsholders to his music were quoted in a news release describing themselves as supportive of the production. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Curse’ and the Critics’ Choice Awards

    The season ends for this Showtime series with Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone, while awards season begins.With network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 8-14. Details and times are subject to change.MondayANTIQUES ROADSHOW 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). If you are nosy like me, this show has it all — a look into people’s homes, their family histories and the value of their old things. And you get a history lesson along the way. This quintessential PBS show is back for its 28th season, with the first few episodes taking place at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage before traveling to Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. Who knows what treasures (or trash) will be uncovered.TuesdayREAL HOUSEWIVES OF SALT LAKE CITY REUNION 8 p.m. on Bravo. There is a lot to unpack after the fourth season of R.H.O.S.L.C., so this is only the first of a three-part reunion. Andy Cohen is back in his usual hot seat to moderate (or, rather, stir the pot). And from the trailer, we see that along with lots of yelling and tears there will be a recreation of the “Mean Girls” Burn Book and a homage to Will Smith’s outburst at the 2022 Academy Awards.HARD KNOCKS 9 p.m. on HBO. This annual N.F.L. documentary series is wrapping up after following the Miami Dolphins this season. A few key moments have included Alec Ingold’s nomination for Walter Payton Man of the Year award, Braxton Berrios’s relationship with the TikTok star Alix Earle and lots of family time for the players and coaches around the holidays.WednesdayFrom left: Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen in “Little Women.”Wilson Webb/Columbia PicturesLITTLE WOMEN (2019) 9 p.m. on Starz. This movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and based on the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott of the same name, stars Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen as the little women. The supporting cast is also pretty stellar with Timothée Chalamet, Laura Dern, Bob Odenkirk and Meryl Streep. The film is “faithful enough to satisfy the book’s passionate devotees, who will recognize the work of a kindred spirit, while standing on its own as an independent and inventive piece of contemporary popular culture,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. At least one scene, if not several, will make you weep.ThursdayCHILDREN RUIN EVERYTHING 9:30 p.m. on The CW. The third season of this Canadian sitcom is coming to U.S. screens this week. This show comes from Kurt Smeaton, a producer of “Schitt’s Creek,” another Canadian show, which took the United States by storm. Starring Meaghan Rath and Aaron Abrams, the show follows couple as they navigate their lives outside of being parents to their three young children.FridayFrom left: Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain.”PhotofestSINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952) 10 p.m. on TCM. This is a classic of a category I can’t get enough of: movies about making movies, à la “A Star is Born” (any version you want) or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” This musical focuses on a moment in Hollywood when actors, directors and producers were shifting away from silent movies to “talkies.” Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor star.Saturday75TH ANNUAL CREATIVE ARTS EMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on FXX. You can think of this award show as a pregame to the main Emmy Awards on Jan. 15. This broadcast, edited from two previous events, honors the more technical and behind-the-scenes work that goes into the nominated shows rather than the acting, directing and writing.SundayRyan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie,” which is nominated for 18 Critics’ Choice Awards.Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated Press29TH ANNUAL CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS 7 p.m. on The CW. Every winter I think of a scene from “Schitt’s Creek”: Alexis asks Moira what her favorite season is, and she matter-of-factly responds, “awards.” Around 600 film and TV critics and reporters make up the voting body for this show, which kicks off the run-up to the Oscars. It’s likely “Barbie” will leave with an award or two since it has 18 nods. Chelsea Handler will host.THE CURSE 9 p.m. on Showtime. This show, starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder as a couple at the center of a home renovation reality series, has had us cringing all season, but we still can’t look away. As James Poniewozik wrote in his Times review of the show, “it’s a dark satire of performative philanthropy and exploitation. It’s a psychological horror drama about marriage. It’s a reflection on the power of TV to create illusions.” The show’s 10th episode wraps up the season. More

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    Julia Jordan Set Aside Playwriting to Win Gender Parity in Theater

    After years of fighting to win parity and recognition for women in theater, Julia Jordan said: “Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.”Ask the playwright Julia Jordan what the need was for the Lilly Awards, which she co-founded in 2010 to honor women in theater, and the answer is a mix of anecdote and statistic.Her mind goes straight to the years after she completed the playwriting program at the Juilliard School in 1996. As two men in her class, David Auburn and Stephen Belber, became some of the hottest young playwrights around, she struggled to get her work staged.“Very good friends of mine, no slam against them,” Jordan, 56, said on a December afternoon before she stepped down as executive director of the Lillys. “It was just odd.”The numbers bore out her perception. A report, published in 2002 by the New York State Council on the Arts Theater Program, found that only 17 percent of productions on U.S. stages in the 2001-02 season had been written by women.One day around 2003, she recalled, Auburn came over “because I was really depressed about it. And he said, ‘Why don’t you try switching the gender of your protagonists?’” (Auburn, reached by email, confirmed he was a good friend of Jordan, but said he does not remember this incident.) Writing male-focused narratives was, in any case, a conventional strategy for female playwrights at the time.“I literally took my most autobiographical play, and I made me male. And I called it ‘Boy,’” Jordan said. “Almost immediately people wanted to produce it.”To Jordan, a longtime leader in the fight for gender parity in theatrical production, all of this was context for the creation of the Lillys, which she started with the playwrights Marsha Norman and Theresa Rebeck. The catalyst, though, was their collective outrage, in the spring of 2010, that one of the season’s best-reviewed Off Broadway hits, Melissa James Gibson’s “This,” was ignored by the existing award-giving bodies.The new accolade was for “everybody who should be getting awards, and who should have been getting awards and didn’t,” said Jordan, who, with Juliana Nash, wrote the acclaimed musical “Murder Ballad.”At the 2023 Lilly Awards, held in late November on the “Stereophonic” set at Playwrights Horizons, the hair and wig designer Cookie Jordan and the actors Liza Colón-Zayas and Ruthie Ann Miles were among the honorees. The playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the composer Georgia Stitt each received $25,000 prizes, funded by the Broadway producer Stacey Mindich, meant to buy them time to write.Under Jordan, the Lillys organization — named for Lillian Hellman — blossomed to include the Count, which tracks theatrical production statistics by gender and race; an artist residency program with child care; the online publication 3Views on Theater; and the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, which awards graduate school fellowships for female and nonbinary dramatic writers of color.Creating the Hansberry Initiative was one goal that Jordan felt she had to achieve before she could move on. The other was reaching gender parity for playwrights, which the Count’s preliminary figures indicate has happened this season on Off Broadway stages dedicated to new-play production.“We didn’t get 50/50 in 2020, but we have it now,” Jordan said.So on Dec. 31 she handed off her job to Sarah Rose Leonard and Brittani Samuel, the founders and editors of 3Views — though Jordan plans to share her connections and expertise as needed. (Samuel also contributes theater reviews to The New York Times.)Jordan is already at work on a few projects, including a family drama and a musical with the British singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesLast month, with her tenure nearly finished, Jordan sat down to talk at a cafe in Flatbush, Brooklyn. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.At the awards in November, you said the Lillys are the thing in your career that you’re proudest of.I do feel like I had a little bit of a playwriting career happening, and then this was so time-consuming. But I got so much love for it, you know? I respond well to love [laughs], so it really started to kind of push my writing aside. That was always a little bit of a sadness, if I thought about it. At the same time, I feel like it’s kind of split my brain. I actually have to work at it to stay organized, you know? So between that and being a mom with young kids, that’s like three different brains, and I can only do two. I stopped teaching, which I loved, but that would have been four.So your work became being a champion?Yeah. Mostly I’m really proud of it. I meet young female writers, and they almost don’t know what happened, or they don’t know that it was so recent. Nobody has ever told them to write a play with a male lead. They’ve never been told that women’s plays are not very dramatic and are really poetic. They have never been told that the audience doesn’t really want to see plays by women. It’s just not on their radar. And that [progress] happened really quickly.How has doing this job changed you?Before this happened, I didn’t really ever think of myself as activist-y. I’m sort of surprised I was good at it.What are you going to do now?I have one project that I can’t talk about yet, kind of in my political, troublemaking world. But then I’m starting to write. I have a play that I’m working on, and I’m writing a musical with a pop star; she’s huge in Europe and England. Her name is Emeli Sandé. I get to go to London every few months and hang out in her studio. And then the play is a family drama.Do you think your activism will filter into your playwriting?I often wonder about that, because I don’t feel like I’m a super political writer. I always did write about girls, you know; I always did write about gender, in some sense. I really do like when people can write a political play really well. But I don’t know that if I went straight at it, I would be able to do a good job.As a playwright, do you feel like you’re going back into a theater that is changed from when you started the Lillys?A hundred percent. Everybody gets produced now. There’s much more competition. In a good way.The deck was really stacked when you started.It was stupid. And we had to sit through a lot of bad theater because of it. But yeah, I feel like it’s wildly different. I also feel like theater goes through these phases of what it’s interested in. What I write about, I don’t know anymore how that fits in.Your final Lilly Awards honored women over 40?Over 50. There were a couple [in their 40s]. Close enough.Why that focus?The women that were my level and a little bit older who got passed by when they weren’t producing women, nobody went back and read the Susan Smith Blackburn [Prize] lists [of plays by women] and went, “Hey, we should probably look at these again.” It’s a whole ecosystem problem because for the most part, literary managers and their assistants tend to be young — tend to be female, but tend to be young. So they’re not going back. The women over 50, they were the ones who really kind of made all this happen. And they didn’t benefit from it in the same way [as younger women]. They really didn’t. That’s why we wanted to start shining a light in that direction and just say, “Hey, not dead yet.”But I also think that those plays by those women would really speak to a piece of the audience that needs to be kept around during this sort of building the new audience. Instead of like, “Let’s just not have anybody go to the theater for a while while we build a new audience,” how about we do both? More

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    Ani DiFranco Learned (and Cried) a Lot During Her First Year in N.Y.C.

    “The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city,” said the singer-songwriter, who will make her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Ani DiFranco calls herself the fairy godmother of “Hadestown,” the 2019 Tony winner for best musical. Anaïs Mitchell, its composer and librettist, calls her this too, as DiFranco discovered during a recent publicity event.“I said, ‘OK, it’s settled,’” DiFranco recalled. “Certainly many more people have put in much more time and contributed hugely along the way, but I sort of helped get it from zero to one.”DiFranco had already released a couple of Mitchell’s records on her label, Righteous Babe, when, some 15 years ago, Mitchell revealed that she had a play based on Greek mythology that she wanted to turn into an album. And so they did, with DiFranco singing the part of Persephone. Now DiFranco, 53, will make her Broadway debut in that same role in February.“I couldn’t say no,” she said in a discussion that touched on the importance of the acoustic guitar, punk and “gifts of nature.” “It was too thrilling at this point in my life and career, and at my age, to try something new and be out of my comfort zone and be challenged and grow and learn. I just knew it was a deep, resounding yes.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Abstract ExpressionismIn my late teens I was exposed to the genre of the painting culture known as Abstract Expressionism. It was so inspiring and validating because it was this form of visual representation which was not about meticulously reproducing reality. It was about having a canvas be a window into a moment, and you can feel the sweep of the arm and the energy behind it and the torque and the velocity and the ferocity and the emotion.2Acoustic GuitarHaving an instrument that I — over 10,000 hours and then some — became one with has been like having another limb. Sometimes when there’s nowhere else to turn and nobody, it’s there for me. Sometimes when my own voice is failing me, my guitar can say it for me.3New York CityI moved here when I was 18 or 19 from Buffalo. I cried my way through the first year for every reason that you can imagine. I had experiences that were terrifying, that were life-threatening but also just life-changing and beautiful and culturally mind-blowing. The lessons that New York has for you around every corner — it was a big part of my young adulthood, this city.4PunkYou could be a performer without being a beauty queen. You didn’t have to be a buttoned-up, coordinated, put-together, choreographed, polished, perfected thing. There was something about the punk ethos that just really allowed that in me.5JazzMusic that has improvisation at its epicenter is so profound and essential because that’s what music-making is: watching somebody figure it out and solve the problems and face the adversities that exist on any given night, and inventing a new path to go with your fellow performers.6Feminist LiteratureIn the late ’80s and early ’90s, I started reading Audre Lorde and Alice Walker and Judy Grahn and bell hooks and Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton. These poets and philosophers and writers seismically unlocked me to myself. I grew up in a man’s world, and I was taught everything through a man’s eyes in a man’s words. It wasn’t until I read these women that I realized, “Oh, there’s more.”7World MusicWhen I started getting legit gigs at folk and roots music festivals, they would throw you onstage with other performers. There might be a singer from Guam, some Tuvan throat singers, some African dudes with guitars and an Eastern European choir. We didn’t share a verbal language, but we could talk to each other through music and become friends in this way.8New OrleansThe first time I played Jazz Fest, I thought, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Every time I was not on tour, I would go to New Orleans, because I wanted to go where I felt inspired. Then I started renting an apartment, then I fell in love with a local, and he was my reason to stay and make a home. I’ve been there about 20 years, and the shine has not worn off one bit.9Marijuana and PsilocybinI’ve smoked a lot of pot in my day, and I know it to be a really instrumental element of my awakening. I haven’t engaged in mushrooms as much, but I feel like it is also fundamental to human evolution. Whole genres of music and artistic movements have evolved and moved forward hand in hand with these gifts of nature.10ReadingWhen I moved to New York, I was at the New School studying, and I found myself reading books and talking about them. It’s like, Oh my God, this is really important stuff. The format of a book, it’s a road deeply into another person’s mind and life, to a whole other way of being, to whole other worlds, that I don’t find paralleled in any other genre of art. More