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    ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Judge Exits After Paula Abdul Lawsuit

    Ms. Abdul accused Nigel Lythgoe, a longtime producer and judge on the reality show, of sexually assaulting her when they worked on “American Idol” together. He denied the accusation.Nigel Lythgoe has stepped down as a judge of “So You Think You Can Dance,” the show said on Friday, after he was sued by Paula Abdul and accused of sexual assault.Mr. Lythgoe, who has denied sexually assaulting Ms. Abdul, said in a statement that he was stepping down from the show that he had helped create “with a heavy heart but entirely voluntarily because this great program has always been about dance and dancers, and that’s where its focus needs to remain.”“In the meantime, I am dedicating myself to clearing my name and restoring my reputation,” Mr. Lythgoe, who was also a producer of the show, said in the statement.Variety was first to report Mr. Lythgoe’s exit.In the lawsuit, which was filed last month, Ms. Abdul accused Mr. Lythgoe of shoving her against the wall of a hotel elevator, grabbing her genitals and breasts and shoving his tongue down her throat in the early 2000s while she was a judge on “American Idol.” Mr. Lythgoe, who had been a producer for the show at the time, called the allegations “false” and “deeply offensive to me and to everything I stand for.”Mr. Lythgoe, 74, has been one of the faces of “So You Think You Can Dance” since he helped create the show in 2005. He had been among the producers who had made “American Idol” a phenomenon in the United States after an earlier iteration aired in Britain, and “So You Think You Can Dance” also proved to be a ratings success in its early seasons by following a similar format.Mr. Lythgoe, a commercial dance impresario, had been a judge on the show for 16 of its 17 seasons, providing on-air feedback to young contemporary, ballroom and hip-hop dancers. The show had been planning a return this spring with a new format and was going to team Mr. Lythgoe with new judges, including Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the “Dancing With the Stars” choreographer, and Allison Holker, a former contestant.The production companies behind the show, which include Dick Clark Productions and 19 Entertainment, and Fox, the network that airs it, said in a joint statement on Friday that the show would proceed without Mr. Lythgoe and would remain “committed to the contestants, who have worked incredibly hard for the opportunity to compete on our stage.” More

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    ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Will End Its Broadway Run in April

    The Tony winner for best musical, about a high school girl with a rare genetic disorder and a criminally dysfunctional family, will begin a national tour in September.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky show that combined pathos and comedy to win last year’s Tony Award for best musical, will end its Broadway run in April, nearly 19 months after it began performances.The show’s final performance will be April 28, at which point it is expected to have played 32 previews and 612 regular performances on Broadway.Small and zany, “Kimberly Akimbo” was often overshadowed in a contemporary Broadway dominated by established titles, jukebox scores and celebrity performers. But it has outlasted most of the other productions from the 2022-23 season.Set in a New Jersey suburb in 1999, the musical is about a high school girl with a rare genetic disorder, a criminally dysfunctional family and an anagram-loving friend.Adapted from a play with the same title, “Kimberly Akimbo” opened in the fall of 2022 and is directed by Jessica Stone. It won five Tony Awards, including the prize for best book, by David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote the play); for best score, with music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics by Lindsay-Abaire; for the leading performance by Victoria Clark, a 64-year-old actress who plays the adolescent protagonist; and for a featured performance by Bonnie Milligan, who plays an amoral aunt.The musical began its life in 2021 with an Off Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater Company. The show has just nine characters, and, unusually, they have been played by the same actors throughout its life; all the actors plan to stay until the closing.The show, with David Stone (“Wicked”) as its lead producer, was capitalized for $7 million, a modest budget for a Broadway musical today; it has not yet recouped those costs.The Broadway run is to be followed by a national tour that is scheduled to begin in September at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. More

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    In a Land of Primary Colors, Home Is Where the Bounce House Is

    As part of Under the Radar, Nile Harris resurrects his play that weaves together text, sound, minstrelsy and dance to explore the American experience.What makes a house a home? And what constitutes an American home? Planted dead center on the stage in “This House Is Not a Home,” a slippery, ever-shifting work by Nile Harris, is a house — a bounce house. But it’s more than an inflatable plaything.It is at the heart of a web of ideas that touch on national politics, arts funding and a local New York scene — the tiny slice of Lower Manhattan known as Dimes Square. You get a sense of where Harris stands on that bit of geography: In “This House,” there is a fight. Over a vape.Beginning Saturday as part of the Under the Radar festival, “This House” — sad and boisterous, dark yet at times blisteringly funny — will be reprised at Abrons Arts Center, where it was first presented with Ping Chong and Company last summer. (Harris is a member of Ping Chong’s artistic leadership team.)A provocative look at politics and race, “This House” is a critique of the American experience that explores the intersections of modern-day liberalism, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and well-meaning nonprofit arts institutions. It gets raucous. Will the bounce house survive this insurrection? The idea for what became the work began in the summer of 2020 when Harris, 28, and his friend, the interdisciplinary artist Trevor Bazile, started to fantasize about a bounce house. It reminded them of the Capitol Building, Harris said, but it could also represent any institution — and then morph back into “a preadolescent meme.”Harris started to envision a series of happenings that might incorporate a bounce house: “Should we pull up to a George Floyd protest with a bounce castle,” he said of one idea, “and have people jump for Black lives?”The bounce house idea was placed on the back burner until 2021, when Bazile became the director of New People’s Cinema Club, a New York film festival funded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a financial supporter of Trump-aligned candidates. “Trevor had a very clear point of view around, like, it doesn’t matter the hand that feeds you — it’s all bad,” Harris recalled. “There’s no clean money.”“With this Peter Thiel money,” he added, “we bought a bounce castle because that was on our forever list to do.”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy.Elias Williams for The New York TimesAs part of the film festival that year, Harris and Bazile hosted a party featuring a bounce house in a Dimes Square loft. But just two days after the festival closed, Bazile, who was 25, died suddenly. (Harris declined to specify a cause.) While “This House” is a running commentary — sonic, spoken, choreographic — on many subjects, it is, at its core, a meditation on grief.It’s also an extension of a manifesto, released by Harris and Bazile as a Google document, about a fictional board meeting. The manifesto, a labyrinth of hyperlinks, poses questions like: “Do you like Black voices or just the voices that say what you want to hear?” “Will you wear your Telfar bag to the race war?”Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread minstrel character he calls Timmy, whose face is fixed in a smile. “Maybe there’s some comment there about Blackness and Black life, but it’s a smiling face,” he said. “It’s approachable.”Dyer Rhoads, the production’s dramaturg and set designer, has created a vibrant set that brings to life a universe of primary colors, where paintings, plastic and, of course, the bounce house, function as a larger-than-life diorama. But because “This House” reacts to the events of the moment, it will not be the same show it was last summer.“I always say it’s 60 percent set and 40 percent improvised,” Harris said of the show, which is informed by world events and uses improvisation, including audience interactions. “It responds to current affairs, it responds to the conditions that it’s put in. And we are in a very different state in the world than we were six months ago.”Improvisation means everything to Harris, who added, “How I understand being a moving and performing body is responding to what is presently happening in the room.”“This House” features the performance artist Crackhead Barney employing her daring crowd work; and the dancer Malcolm-x Betts, whose unfurling, out-of-body improvisations lend a vivid vulnerability to an increasingly fractious stage world. To Harris, the work is a play. But the “the play,” he said, “is the people. The play is about me, Malcolm and Barney and our thoughts on the world.”Harris, born and raised in Miami, was a serious theater student growing up. He attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, along with Rhoads, and graduated with a B.F.A. in acting. “I’m an actor for better or worse,” he said. “I don’t know what I am.”Actually, you get the feeling that he does know — or at least that through making art, he’s figuring it out. Harris has created shows since his teenage years; after moving to New York in 2017, he discovered the experimental downtown dance world and took a formative workshop with the choreographer Sidra Bell. “It really cracked open my brain,” he said of her improvisatory approach. “If I have any dance education, that is a point of reference.”“A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” Harris said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesHe studied clowning, too: “A lot of how I understand my relationship to audience is through the notion of clowning,” he said. “There may be laughter, there may be costuming, there’s physicality.”Creating the physical approach for Betts’s movement in “This House” began when the pair spoke about childhood memories; Betts said that it was as if the bounce house represented the ghosts of children.Betts’s improvisations are rooted in his movement background — Black club house dancing, vogueing, West African dance. “The dancing is very physical,” he said. “The memories are moving through me, and memory can also trigger you to go into a space that you don’t expect to go. It’s triggering in a way that enables something new to unlock.”Even as Harris calls “This House” a play or even an opera — the sound design is an important component, especially the way that vocal amplification is incorporated — he thinks a lot about language in the body. He doesn’t consider himself a dancer, though he has performed as one, and dance is a continuing practice for him, he said, “inside of my greater theatrical concerns and convictions.”“I love dancers,” he said. “I hang out with dancers, I’m in that community of people. There’s just something about that community of artists that is really just moving. If you can commit to valuing impermeable things that barely exist and dedicating your whole heart to it? It’s so not shiny, it’s so not sexy. It’s just, like, that commitment is work. And that feels really important.”That also relates to something Rhoads, the dramaturg, said about “This House”: “In a lot of ways, it’s ended up being about the risks we take for art.”And Harris is open to risks. Big ones. “Do you want to know my dream?” he said. “I really want to create and direct a pop star concert. It’s not narrative — it’s associative, it’s sound based, it’s image based and it’s dancing.”He said he was thinking of a Doja Cat — someone who would get him, someone who would appreciate his affinity for creating interludes with weird little meme jokes. “I want to work with scale,” Harris said. “There’s no opportunities for emerging artists or an artist in New York to work with scale. By hell or high water, I will.” More

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    ‘The Curse’ Season 1, Episode 9 Recap: ‘All in’

    “Green Queen” gets an awkward early screening as Whitney tries to broach her feelings with Asher.Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Young Hearts’It’s amazing what a reality television edit can do. Throughout “The Curse,” we’ve been exposed to what Asher and Whitney look like acting for the cameras, but we have rarely seen what they are like when they are actually on camera, once they’ve gotten the glossy treatment that the Property Brothers and other hosts have before them.The truth is: Whitney might seem painfully fake in her daily interactions, but she performs very well. She’s a natural, and watching a cut of the newly retitled “Green Queen,” it’s easy to understand why the network is so high on her. All of that falsity fades away under the bright lights, which crave that sort of manicured behavior. She fits into her role perfectly.This week’s episode, is revelatory with regards to Whitney on multiple levels, and it’s also a tour de force for Emma Stone, an actress whose natural understanding of the camera and what it can do allows her to play all the facets of this complicated, troubled character. The episode leaves no doubt about just how wrong she and Asher are for each other. But before then, a series of smaller Whitney-related events peel back layers of her carefully constructed persona.Why did Whitney marry Asher? The question has plagued this series. Their relationship is so lacking in any affection that doesn’t feel forced, you have to rack your brain to imagine a time when they were truly in love. Here, we get clarity on some of her potential reasoning. Asher’s infatuation with Whitney provided her with an escape hatch. She could take his name to get away from her old life as a lackey for her parents. After learning that a relative of one of the show’s drivers was evicted from a building run by her parents, she Googles herself under her old name, “Whitney Rhodes.” There’s a photo of her smiling at the opening of the complex, complicit in all of their misdeeds.Asher was a way to disassociate from her parents on paper — even if she’s still using their money to fund her ventures. She’s no longer “Whitney Rhodes”; She’s “Whitney Siegel,” who wears a Star of David around her neck to further distance herself from her past — no matter how merely symbolic that piece of jewelry is.Maybe at one point the intensity of Asher’s affection was appealing to Whitney, who saw something almost exotic in his Judaism. Now, however, she can’t stand him. And what’s worse: Now they have to perform for a representative from HGTV, Martha, stopped by to check up on the show’s progress. When Dougie, parroting what he has heard from the network, explains that the story line about the dissolution of their marriage isn’t going to work, Whitney starts to cozy up to Asher again. And she yet can’t help but feel enraged by his little touches. Asher challenges her to say that she loves him. She refuses, though she will go bowling, clearly a favorite pastime of his, to make amends.During their outing, there is a moment of what appears to be genuine joy between the two of them, but the spell is quickly broken when Asher’s friend Bill from the casino approaches. Bill wants to apologize. He thought that Asher was the leaker, but says he was mistaken. Asher, thinking he is impressing Whitney, confesses to being the “whistle-blower.” Later that night, she hears him quietly speaking to himself, perhaps masturbating, proudly bragging about this achievement. But then the fantasy morphs into imagining himself watching Bill having sex with Whitney. You can see the disgust grow on her face.He approaches her while she’s furiously rowing on an erg machine about new language in the contract that suggests he might be “exposed to ridicule, humiliation or condemnation.” Then an idea seems to dawn on her: She’ll show him everything, including the confessional where she spills her feelings about their relationship. Maybe if he sees it, he’ll listen to her and understand. So she and Asher and join Dougie in his hotel room, sitting awkwardly in the bed, to view an early cut of “Green Queen.”A strange thing is that after everything we’ve been privy to, “Green Queen” is still pretty compelling television. Dougie knows what he’s doing, and you can see why HGTV would be interested in the material. Here’s a very pretty person — Whitney — vowing to do good, and, as filmed by Dougie, she seems smart and capable. Asher, meanwhile, just seems at first like a goofy nuisance, making nonsensical jokes about Arnold Palmers. It’s bizarrely charming.Dougie is willing to skip over the material that really goes for Asher’s jugular — the network doesn’t want to use it anyway — but Whitney wants Asher to see just what she has done to him. Stone’s face is solemn. All of Whitney’s eager-to-please brattiness has been sapped from it as she watches with grim anticipation. It’s brutal to behold. Onscreen, Whitney appears earnest as her minor complaints about Asher morph into genuine concerns about her relationship. The problem is his worship of her.She wonders: “Can someone love you so much that the real version of you completely ceases to exist?” It’s a funny question coming from Whitney, who doesn’t really seem to have a great sense of self to begin with.And yet it’s possible, thanks to the manufactured quality of reality TV, to empathize with Whitney, maybe for the very first time. On one level we know what we’re seeing is at times fake — for instance, the shots of her laughing at the art collector’s party, where we know she had an uncomfortable time. Still, Stone sells the oppressiveness of Asher’s love for her and how stifling that can be. So it’s almost a relief when Asher storms out of the room. He got it, you think.But then he returns, his fervor renewed. He has manic energy as he closes in on her face, telling her she was right. “I’m a terrible person,” he spits. “There’s not some curse. I’m the problem.”Whitney is shocked. Instead of repelling him, she has succeeded in making him cling to her even tighter. “I’m all in on Whitney,” he says.It sounds like a threat. She starts to cry, tears he reads as an emotional outpouring. But there is terror in her eyes.Notes From EspañolaThe episode begins with an eerie sequence from the point of view of an unknown driver who waits for Whitney to leave her home and then drives all the way to the shopping plaza. Who is that?I had to put on closed captioning during the scene where Asher is talking to himself to understand what he was saying, so if you didn’t catch that at first, that’s not on you.Whitney’s discovery that Cara is her masseuse is exquisitely awkward, but does the fact that she eventually decides to walk away from the appointment show some growth? Or does her overtipping as a way of assuaging her guilt undo all that?The way in which Stone flinches just a little bit every time Fielder touches her is brilliant.Fielder’s enthusiastic bowling is almost as unnerving as his enthusiastic rapping last week. Almost.I can’t get over the ick factor of the shot of Whitney’s father trapping a roach in the apartment where he apparently is now forced to live. Her folks might be the scummiest people on this show.We’re in the homestretch, and I truly have no idea how any of this is going to resolve. That’s a good thing, but also I’m so scared. More

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    A Reinvented ‘True Detective’ Plays It Cool

    There were times, a year ago, in Iceland, on a glacier, in the dark, in temperatures well below freezing, when Issa López thought to herself: “Who wrote this? What is wrong with this person?” López, the showrunner and director of Season 4 of the HBO anthology series “True Detective,” had only herself to blame.This shivery “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” premieres on Jan. 14. Set in Ennis, a fictional town in northwest Alaska, it stars Jodie Foster as the chief of police and Kali Reis as an intimidating state trooper. Opening just as the area descends into months of unrelieved darkness, the six-episode season has an icy milieu and a female gaze forcefully distinct from the show’s past outings.Created by Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective” debuted nearly a decade ago as a bayou noir starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Sultry, macho and spanning two timelines set 17 years apart, it entwined a familiar serial killer investigation with sweaty philosophy and intimations of the supernatural. Though that first season had its critics, it made for essential, much debated viewing. The second season, set in an unglamorous Southern California exurb and starring Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, made a smaller, grimmer splash, as did the third season, which starred Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff and relocated the action to the Ozarks.That third season, which premiered in January 2019, attracted significantly fewer viewers. That might have meant the end of “True Detective.” But HBO believed the franchise could continue. The network began to search for a new showrunner for Season 4, preferably a woman of color. (Earlier seasons skewed overwhelmingly male and largely white, in front of the camera and behind it.) Among the potential candidates was López, a Mexican filmmaker who had written and directed a roster of Spanish-language features, including “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” a movie about missing and murdered women and children that mingled crime, fantasy and horror.Foster was drawn in by the original script but asked that her character, a somewhat blinkered white woman, be aged up and that the story’s center to be ceded to Reis’s.Michele K. Short/HBOThat film impressed Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. The essence of “True Detective,” Orsi said by phone in a recent interview, “is the way in which the horror genre is encapsulated within the detective noir narrative.” Confident that López could accomplish this, Orsi invited her to pitch a new season.López had spent nearly two decades pitching American networks and studios. She understood that network interest was no guarantee that a project would be made. And she knew that when it came to English-language work, she would be considered a risk, untried. So she decided there was no harm in dreaming big. And dark. And cold.“You write the impossible,” López said during a video call last month. “You write what you want to see.”Though López grew up in more temperate climates, she is a fan of the John Carpenter horror movie “The Thing,” set in Antarctica, and of the Alaskan vampire comic “30 Days of Night.” Assuming the project would never be greenlighted, she wrote what she wanted to see: an “existential whodunit,” as she put it, set in Alaska’s furthest, iciest reaches. To her surprise and mild dismay, HBO said yes.“It was so much fun to dream that world,” López said. “Except then I had to go there and shoot it.”López decided there was no harm in dreaming big when she pitched HBO her idea for the new season of “True Detective.” “You write the impossible,” she said. “You write what you want to see.”This season — the first without Pizzolatto, though he retains an executive producer credit — can be seen as a photo negative of the first. It is chilly rather than steamy, shadowed rather than sunlit, tundra-dry instead of humid. Despite occasional flashbacks, it restricts itself to a single timeline. In the first season, women appeared mostly as beleaguered wives or prostitutes. Here the gaze and the detectives are defiantly female.Is this still “True Detective”? While Pizzolatto was not available for comment, López argues that it is. This season retains what she sees as the series’s essentials: two detectives, shrouded in secrets and enmeshed in a landscape that holds secrets of its own. The series, she believes, favors a kind of expressionism in which the inner lives of the characters explode into the environment.“The darkness around them comes from inside of them,” she said. That’s certainly true of this season, though the earth’s axis may want to have a word. And if López exchanges the first season’s meditation on male toxicity and identity for a consideration of female victimhood and agency, she also returns the series to its roots in cosmic horror, even calling back to the certain Season 1 symbols, like the spiral.Orsi sometimes doubted the wisdom of having handed a marquee franchise to someone with little television experience, but López’s choices and attitude reassured her. “Every step of the way, I was taken aback by how confident she consistently was about what we were asking of her,” Orsi said.That confidence also inspired Foster, who hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”“I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” Foster, sitting beside López, said. “There was so much that I was curious about and that I wanted to learn from. Then I met Issa and that really nailed it. I could tell that she had a collaborative spirit.”Before this new season of “True Detective,” Foster hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver.” “I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” she said.The initial episode finds Foster’s Liz Danvers called into investigate the sudden disappearance of the employees of an Arctic research station. (These men are later found naked and frozen into a single block of human ice. Call it a cold case.) The mystery reunites her with Reis’s Evangeline Navarro. Former colleagues, they fell out years ago, in the wake of a gruesome domestic violence case.In the initial drafts, López wrote Navarro as Latina. But after researching the region, López decided that the character should have Native ancestry, specifically Iñupiaq. Foster asked for other changes. She felt that Danvers, a somewhat blinkered white woman whom she nicknamed “Alaska Karen,” should be aged up and that she should cede the story’s center to Navarro.Previous iterations of “True Detective” had depended on at least two major stars. Reis, a former professional boxer who made her acting debut two years ago in the revenge drama “Catch the Fair One,” is a relative newcomer. But no one mistrusted that she could shoulder a series, even as she differs in meaningful ways from Navarro.Reis, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent; Navarro is Iñupiaq and Dominican American. Reis’s language is not Navarro’s language, her ceremonies not the character’s. But they share a single-mindedness, a sense of duty and purpose. So Reis threw herself into research. “I just really want to make sure that I represented Alaska Natives, Iñupiaq people,” said Reis, who sat beside Foster and López in last month’s video interview. (They were all dressed in polite neutrals, though Reis had accessorized her outfit with a fierce-looking choker.) “I didn’t grow up seeing my face on the screen. I wanted to make sure that they could look on the screen and see themselves.”Reis, who is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent, threw herself into researching the cultural background of her character, who is Iñupiaq and Dominican American.Though Navarro is deeply intuitive and alive to the supernatural, Reis was determined that she present as a modern woman and an effective officer, avoiding cliché. “She’s not going to be the token Native,” Reis said.To further that, she met with various Iñupiaq women, as well as several Native state troopers. She quizzed them, respectfully, on what they ate, what they wore, what slang they used. She asked the troopers how they squared their responsibilities to their community with their duties as law enforcement officers.Informed by these conversations, she, Foster and López set about creating what the earlier seasons of “True Detective” hadn’t made space for: women who are as changeable, difficult and complicated as the men.“We’re not really used to seeing women like that,” Foster said.López had done her own research, some online, scouring YouTube and Instagram for videos, some on a visit to Alaska, where she sat with Inuit men and women, ate the caribou and seal they hunted, went snowmobiling with them on the frozen seas. At a local grocery store, she noted the ruinous price of Oreo cookies. That went into the script, too. With the help of Barry Jenkins, an executive producer, the production also brought on Cathy Tagnak Rexford, a native Alaskan who is partly of Iñupiaq descent and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, who identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in, as producers. As López told it, Rexford and Johnson asked for more scenes of food-making, of laughter, of community. (They could not be reached for comment.)As Alaska lacked the infrastructure to support a six-month shoot, the production had to make do with an area outside of Reykjavik and some computer-generated caribou and polar bears. The shoot was, Foster said, an intimate experience, with the dark and the frigid mitigated by the camaraderie and the beauty of the Northern Lights.Perhaps that beauty softened some of the script’s elements. There is no shortage of existential horror (body horror, too — missing eyeballs, a severed tongue), but the show entertains the possibility of justice and the notion, not entirely foreign to the “True Detective” franchise, that if other people are the source of most suffering, they can also provide comfort.All these months later, cozy on a sofa with her colleagues, López can look back on the experience warmly. “I learned to love the ice and the cold air, and now I miss it,” she said. “I would love to go back there for a vacation. Never to shoot again, though.” More

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    Vinie Burrows, Acclaimed Actress Who Became an Activist, Dies at 99

    She got her start on Broadway at 15. But after finding a dearth of roles for Black women, she ultimately turned to one-woman shows that addressed racism and sexism.Vinie Burrows, a Harlem-born stage actress who made her mark on Broadway in the 1950s, but who grew frustrated by how few choice roles were available for Black women and turned her focus to one-woman shows exploring the legacies of racism and sexism, died on Dec. 25 in Queens. She was 99.Her death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son, Gregory Harrison.Ms. Burrows made the first Broadway appearance of her seven-decade career in 1950 alongside Helen Hayes and Ossie Davis in “The Wisteria Trees,” a reimagining of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” by the writer and director Joshua Logan that shifted the drama from an aristocratic Russian estate to a 19th-century Louisiana plantation.Ms. Burrows in a scene from “The Wisteria Trees” (1950), in which she made her Broadway debut, with Ossie Davis, who is sitting beside her, and Maurice Edwards.Martin Beck Theater, via Performing Arts Legacy ProjectHer Broadway career continued to blossom into the mid-1950s. Among the high-profile productions in which she appeared was a 1951 revival of “The Green Pastures,” Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1930 retelling of Old Testament stories from an African American perspective. In the early 1960s, she appeared with Moses Gunn and Louis Gossett Jr. in a New York production of “The Blacks,” a searing and surrealistic examination of racial stereotypes and Black identity by the subversive white French author and playwright Jean Genet.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?  More

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    Glynis Johns, a Tony Winner and Actress in ‘Mary Poppins,’ Dies at 100

    In a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years, she was also known for her role in the hit 1965 Disney movie “Mary Poppins.”Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic career that endured for more than 60 years won a Tony Award for her role in “A Little Night Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the show’s most memorable number, “Send In the Clowns,” and played an exuberant Edwardian suffragist in the Disney movie classic “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.The death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her manager, Mitch Clem.Ms. Johns was 49 and on the brink of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music” opened at the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Times described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a slightly world‐weary and extremely lovewise actress in turn‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Times, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”To Walter Kerr, also writing in The Times, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, dangerous … and gratifyingly funny.”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?  More

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    ‘Reacher’: Women Want What He’s Got, and Not Just the Beefcake

    The hit Amazon series about a bone-crushing crime fighter isn’t only Dad TV. Women dream of having the character’s freedom and abilities, too.You may have felt the tremor: A jacked-up beast of a guy has wandered into TV Land, and his name is Reacher. Season 1 of the Amazon series that bears his name was a monster hit when it dropped in early 2022, and Season 2, which concludes on Jan. 19, appears to be even bigger, becoming Prime Video’s No. 1 title globally on its debut weekend. And the series is crushing it critically the way Reacher crushes a villain’s skull. As of early January, the new season had a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 84 percent audience score — when do critics ever rate a brawny action show higher than the audience?Everybody loves this “Reacher.”And by everybody, the reviews seem to suggest, that mostly means every man.A review in Paste Magazine offered this pithy summation: “I’m not saying it’s only for dudes, but I think we’re in safe territory saying it’s mostly for dudes.” And what dudes appear to like is minimal emoting and maximal fisticuffs, delivered by a mountain of muscle — a former Army investigator turned peripatetic crime-solver, who doesn’t waste time wringing his enormous, meaty hands over petty details like having a fixed abode or even a change of clothes.But here’s the thing about “Reacher”: Women watch it, too. Sure, 58 percent of the viewers for Season 1 were male, according to Nielsen. Still, that leaves a rather large number of people who are not. Common wisdom when it comes to Jack Reacher’s popularity is that men want to be him and women want to be with him. But I’ll venture that some women want to be him, too. Or at least, they want some of his freedom.Hatched by the writer Lee Child, Jack Reacher has anchored, since 1997, a series of best-selling novels that have long had a strong female readership — estimated in 2018 by their publisher, Penguin Random House, at around 60 percent. One of their biggest mainstream champions is a woman, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin. I have read about 20 of those novels, mostly in their natural habitats (flights, vacation rentals), and I’m proud to share a fandom with the British writer Antonia Fraser, who in a letter to The Guardian in 2022, wrote, “The thought that there is a new Jack Reacher to read in the evening makes the whole day whiz by happily.”Female readership of the the Reacher novels, started by Lee Child, have been estimated at 60 percent. The first debuted in 1997.The most recent book was written with Child’s brother, Andrew.Now, the Amazon show, starring Alan Ritchson, finally offers a worthy screen adaptation. This is happy news after the two movies from the 2010s, which were derided for casting Tom Cruise as a guy described in one book as having “a six-pack like a cobbled city street, and a chest like a suit of N.F.L. armor, and biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.” Not only does Ritchson fit the physical requirements — which are so crucial to the character’s essence that they are not negotiable — but he also has a way with deadpan humor and is as light on his feet as a human the size of an industrial refrigerator can be.Reacher appeals to men in general and fathers in particular because, as the TV critic Eric Deggans of NPR writes, he is “a character freed from all the pressures and responsibilities many dads face every day” — a fairly representative critical assessment, based on the many reviews I’ve read. “He has no wife, steady romantic partner, kids or family,” Deggans continues, “not even a mortgage, rent payment or full-time job.”But I suspect that plenty of moms would welcome the opportunity to be freed from those demands as well. (And they are more likely than dads to be guilt-tripped for even entertaining the fantasy.) Reacher, who travels the country with nothing but a toothbrush, an A.T.M. card and the clothes on his back, does not have any responsibilities other than the ones he sets for himself. I’m not a mother, but I do have a spouse, a deskbound job and bills to pay, and I often find myself thinking, “I’ll have what he’s having.”Some fans were disappointed by the casting of Tom Cruise in two Reacher movie adaptations, given the importance of the character’s size in the books.Karen Ballard/Paramount Pictures and Skydance ProductionsIn the series, as in the books, Reacher (Ritchson, left, with Shaun Sipos and Serinda Swan) must collaborate with other people, forcing him to act more like a human. Brooke Palmer/Amazon Prime VideoConsider the benefits: When Reacher needs a change of clothing, he simply buys something cheap wherever he happens to be. (Miraculously, he always finds his size, which appears to be InfinityXL, in local thrift or surplus stores.) In this season’s first episode, he spends $22 on a new outfit. Effortlessly landing a complete get-up on a two-figure budget is living the dream.His diet is straightforward, too. For breakfast, it is always bacon and eggs. Otherwise, it’s a cheeseburger and fries, and he always scarfs down everything with great relish. Forgive me for thinking this sounds more satisfying, if only for a day, than picking at a “girl dinner” — especially since his eating habits miraculously translate to muscle instead of fat.Maybe the single most enviable thing about Reacher from a woman’s perspective, though, is that he is never afraid. Dark alleyways and menacing strangers don’t faze him, and what woman does not envy that confidence? Often while silently, powerlessly stewing as some jerk harasses a woman in public, I have fantasized about walking up to him and, with just one withering stare, reducing him to a quaking puddle of fear.Reacher can do that. And if that’s not enough, he can punch him into oblivion. For some of us, the transference is real.It is undeniable that Reacher can come close to being a lone sociopath (though he tends to return rather than initiate violence, or at least to strike preemptively). But Child has cannily ensured that while Reacher wanders alone, he rarely operates alone, forcing his hero to act like a human and giving women other vicarious means to connect with him. Season 2 is very much a team story, as Reacher reconvenes with members of his army investigations unit, including Frances Neagley (Maria Sten). Her phobia about being touched might be one reason her relationship with Reacher is successfully platonic; they have the kind of committed friendship you rarely see women have with straight men in books or onscreen, something I find incredibly refreshing.Reacher also is capable of being a thoughtful and attentive lover. In Season 1, he works with two local cops, played by Willa Fitzgerald and Malcolm Goodwin — you’ll have one guess which one he sleeps with. In Season 2, he and his former Army colleague Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) consummate an attraction that was forbidden back when he was her boss. In both cases, as usual, he respectfully avoids a messy romantic entanglement, all while supplying some much-sought-after action between the sheets.This side of beef has been tenderized for brief but meaningful flings. Believe it or not, a lot of women want those, too.Because of course, there are fans who do, in fact, want to be with Reacher. Fair enough. For them, it’s worth noting that in one novel he is described as being so good in the sack that “The floor quivered. The hall door creaked and shuttered.” I’ll hazard a guess that if anything remotely resembling that scene ever makes it into a future season of “Reacher,” it might well be the rare thing that unites men and women, dads and moms, straight and gay, in a huge burst of happy laughter. More