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    Cynthia Nixon Knows What Poem She Wants Read at Her Funeral

    “I love ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died,’” said the actress, currently performing Off Broadway in “The Seven Year Disappear.” “That one gets me every time.”Cynthia Nixon hadn’t been onstage since 2017, when she and Laura Linney alternated the roles of Regina and Birdie in “The Little Foxes.”She wasn’t expecting her comeback to be “The Seven Year Disappear,” playing an artist who also re-emerges after seven years.“It was really startling to me and a weird, uncanny echo of the play,” Nixon said. The Jordan Seavey production runs through March 31 at the New Group, and four performances, from March 29 to 31, will be live-streamed.Nixon is a two-time Tony Award winner, including one for “The Little Foxes,” but she is widely known for her work in television, including as Miranda Hobbes in “Sex and the City” and in “And Just Like That …” and as Ada Brook in “The Gilded Age.” This summer, she plans to begin shooting the third seasons of those latter two series, volleying from one to the other.“I can see in some ways it being fun,” she said. After all, she’s pulled off something like it before.“I did this thing when I was 18 where I was in two Broadway plays at the same time,” said Nixon, who ran back and forth between “The Real Thing” and “Hurlyburly,” both directed by Mike Nichols, and even made the curtain calls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With ‘Tommy’ Revival, Pete Townshend Is Talking to a New Generation

    He’s also still working through his childhood trauma. Considering his musical’s legacy, he sees a story about how “we prevail ultimately, by turning toward the light.”As he entered a suite at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan, Pete Townshend mentioned that an afternoon meeting had been canceled. “So,” he added, “we have lots of time to talk.”Townshend is one of rock’s great singers, songwriters and guitarists, and he’s also among music’s pre-eminent talkers. Since the Who first took the stage 60 years ago, he has considered interviews to be an adjunct to his music, a parallel way for him to clarify or interrogate the ideas he pours into songs.In 1969, the Who released “Tommy,” a rock opera written mostly by Townshend, although the bassist John Entwistle contributed the songs “Cousin Kevin” and “Fiddle About,” and the drummer Keith Moon suggested the premise of “Tommy’s Holiday Camp.” Townshend expected the double album to fade quickly, in the way of most records. Instead, it took root in pop culture, and in short succession was adapted by a ballet group in Montreal, the Seattle Opera and the London Symphony Orchestra. Then, most memorably, it was a delirious 1975 film directed by Ken Russell.The “Tommy” hoopla had faded before it was adapted for Broadway in 1993, with a book by Townshend and the show’s director, Des McAnuff. In a review in The New York Times, Frank Rich called it “stunning” and “the authentic rock musical that has eluded Broadway for two generations.” It ran for two years, and garnered Tony Awards for McAnuff’s direction and Townshend’s score.Ali Louis Bourzgui, center standing at a pinball machine, as Tommy in the Broadway revival of “The Who’s Tommy” at the Nederlander Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLast year, the pair revived “Tommy” in a reimagined version at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where it drew candescent reviews, and on March 28, it opens at the Nederlander Theater, with Ali Louis Bourzgui making his Broadway debut in the title role.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 5 Recap: Judgment Day

    An elaborate plan is disturbingly effective and once again, an episode closes on a horrific high note.Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Judgment Day’“It’s not working,” Raj Varma says.An officer in the Royal Navy — and the boyfriend of the cosmologist Jin Cheng, a fact one doubts is a coincidence — Raj has been handpicked by top black-ops bloke Thomas Wade to run a crucial operation. Scientists and military engineers under his command must retrieve all available data from the floating headquarters of Mike Evans’s pro-alien cult, without allowing the cultists to destroy the information or doing so themselves in the process.To Raj, it looks like the plan has failed. Using the experimental nanofibers developed by Auggie Salazar, finally free of that maddening alien countdown, now that the Shan-Ti have cut off contact with their faithful, they’ve constructed an invisible net that seems ready to catch the ship. Given how the team is talking about casualties, sinking seems the more likely outcome.But to all appearances, the gigantic repurposed oil tanker is cruising right through the Panama Canal, passing by the support beams across which the nano-net has been stretched. Raj, who inherited his ends-justify-the-means attitude from his war-hero father, has long suspected Auggie’s heart isn’t in the project, since she’s pretty much told him so to his face. He suspects sabotage. He leans in toward her in the command center. “Why isn’t it working?” he asks her accusingly.The camera shifts focus from his face to hers. “It is,” she says, never taking her eyes off the monitor showing her the ship.It was at this point that I said, out loud, “Oh, this is going to be gnarly.”These recaps have stressed how much power “3 Body Problem” derives from its sense of inevitability: These aliens have no other choice, they are on their way, they are powerful, and one day they will arrive. In the bravura special effects sequence that follows that moment, the co-creators and writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the director Minkie Spiro and the visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier boil this dread down into immediate physical form.For the next several minutes after Auggie confirms her nanofibers are in working order — dialogue-free minutes in which our nominal heroes stare in dumbfounded horror at the carnage — these invisible blades slice through the slowly-moving ship, cutting everything and everyone aboard to ribbons. A severed hose dribbling water as it twitches to and fro is our first clue as to the effect the fibers are going to have when they make contact with human bodies. Even so, the resulting image of person after person coming apart and falling to bloody rectangular pieces is one of the most admirably disgusting things ever filmed for the small screen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Andrea Riseborough Has a Hidden Agenda

    Currently in two series, “The Regime” and “Alice & Jack,” this versatile actress has played dozens of characters. What connects them? Not even she knows.“I really do wish sometimes that I could do all of this a different way,” Andrea Riseborough said. “But I suppose I just do it the way that I do it. And there are consequences.”She paused then, pressing her lips into a thin smile. “That all sounds a bit dramatic,” she added.This was on an afternoon in early March, and Riseborough, 42, a metamorphic actress with a worrying sense of commitment, was seated at a West Village cafe, a basket of vinegar-doused French fries in front of her. She is often unrecognizable from one project to the next, a combination of makeup, hairstyle (what Meryl Streep is to accents, Riseborough is to coiffure) and marrow-deep transformation. Here, offscreen, she wore a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt under a busy leather jacket. Her hair, still growing out from the dismal pixie cut she got for the HBO series “The Regime,” was pulled back with an elastic.In person, she is a particular mix of gravity and nonchalance. She knows that she has a reputation for seriousness, which she rejects. “It would be pretty strange to apologize for being serious when you’re giggling so much,” she said. But I rarely heard her laugh. She considered each question carefully and her responses were often philosophical rather than personal. “People,” she might say in place of “I.” Or “most people.” Or “everyone.” Her face, at rest and free of makeup, isn’t especially restful. There is a watchfulness to her, a sense of thoughts tumbling behind those eyes.In her two decades in the business, goaded by a tireless work ethic that sometimes saw her completing as many as five projects per year, she has amassed credits across stage, film and television. It can be hard to find a through-line among those enterprises, mainstream and independent, comedy and tragedy and horror.In ”The Regime,” Riseborough, left, plays palace master for a despot, played by Kate Winslet.Miya Mizuno/HBOIn 2022, for example, she starred in the sex-addled queer musical “Please Baby Please,” produced by her production company; the cockeyed interwar drama “Amsterdam”; the boisterous children’s film “Matilda: the Musical”; the bleak Scandinavian thriller “What Remains”; and the wrenching Texas-set indie, “To Leslie,” for which Riseborough received her first Academy Award nomination. (That nomination was complicated by perceived campaigning irregularities, though the Academy ultimately concluded that no guidelines had been violated.) Try to connect those dots.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 4 Recap: The Raid

    An infiltration, a detainment and a fairy tale that takes a dark turn.Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Our Lord’“3 Body Problem” knows how to end an episode, that’s for sure. The premiere closed with spectacular blinking stars, the second episode with an ominous alien transmission, the third with a brutal murder of a character played by John Bradley, one of the show’s best known actors. (The irony that he earned his reputation on “Game of Thrones,” itself a show famous for killing off one of its best known actors early on, has not escaped me, and likely did not escape the showrunners.)By rights, Episode 4 ought to end with the feeling that humanity is firmly in control. Using Jin as an undercover informant, Clarence and Wade infiltrate a summit held for followers of the San-Ti, the alien race headed our way. Slowly, it should be noted: Ye Wenjie, the secret leader of the group, says they are 400 years away. The organization-slash-cult run by Wenjie and her partner in crime Mike Evans is playing a very long game.As far as Clarence and Wade are concerned, it’s game over. They send in a strike team to round up the members, especially Wenjie. But the mystery woman who’s been dogging our heroes’ every step realizes Jin is a narc and opens fire, leading to a bloody shootout. Clarence rescues Jin, but the woman escapes.Wenjie, however, does not. Even as a wounded Jin finally comes clean to her friend Will about what’s been happening, Wenjie is brought before a panel of what look like high-ranking military and intelligence officials to answer questions about the cult and the force it serves. Not only do they have her and the people who came to the summit, Wade says, they also have a lock on the ship Mike uses as a mobile headquarters. Wenjie is unfazed.“You’ve got me because they let you,” she tells Wade and his colleagues. “They are coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. And when they arrive” — here she smiles — “you’ll be so grateful.”Once again, “3 Body Problem” leans hard on the inevitability of the invasion in the eyes of all who learn about it. Just as Episode 3 emphasized how relocating to Earth is the only possible solution for the titular problem faced by the San-Ti, this one drives home the fact that now that their mind has made up, it’s all over but the shooting. (No pun intended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher to Star in Broadway Play

    The duo will lead the cast of “Left on Tenth,” a stage adaptation of Delia Ephron’s best-selling memoir.The actors Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher are set to star in a stage adaptation of “Left on Tenth,” Delia Ephron’s memoir about a late-in-life romance.The producer Daryl Roth said Friday that she intended to bring the play, adapted by Ephron and directed by Susan Stroman, to Broadway next fall. She did not specify a theater or an opening date.“Left on Tenth,” published in 2022, is about how Ephron simultaneously battled cancer and found love in the years after the death of her husband and sister (the essayist and filmmaker Nora Ephron).Ephron is a novelist and screenwriter, best known for “You’ve Got Mail,” which she wrote with her sister. She and her sister also collaborated on an earlier play, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.”The “Left on Tenth” team has a long list of credentials. Roth has produced 13 Tony-winning shows and seven Pulitzer-winning plays; Stroman has won five Tony Awards as a director and choreographer.Margulies, currently starring in “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, has appeared on Broadway once before, in the 2006 play “Festen.” Gallagher is a Broadway veteran who last starred in a 2015 revival of “On the Twentieth Century”; he has also worked extensively in film and television.Also Friday, the producers of the new musical “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, said their show, which they announced last fall, would begin previews Oct. 19 and open Nov. 14 at the Palace Theater. The Broadway production is to star Katie Brayben as the title character, and Andrew Rannells as her husband, Jim Bakker; the two performers previously played those roles in a production of the musical at the Almeida Theater in London in 2022. “Tammy Faye” features music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters, and a book by James Graham; the show is directed by Rupert Goold. More

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    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 3 Recap: Coming Soon to a Planet Near You

    With its subtly stunning third episode, “3 Body Problem” reveals the double meaning of its title.Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Destroyer of Worlds’Anyone else feel like a deer in the headlights? Anyone agree that this is a great way for an alien-invasion story to make us feel?With its subtly stunning third episode, “3 Body Problem” reveals the double meaning of its title. On one level, it refers to the physical impossibility of consistently and accurately predicting the movement of three bodies in relation to one another in space. This is the dilemma facing not just the characters in the advanced virtual-reality video game Jin and Jack have been playing, but the very real alien civilization upon which the game is based. Its three suns move and align in such a way as to create regular but random apocalyptic events, from infernal heat to sudden ice ages to gravitational vortexes, that destroy the civilization again and again.But sometimes there are stable eras that can last a long time. The aliens, known as the San Ti or Three-Body, have lived in a stable era long enough to develop interstellar communication and travel. They know their eventual fate will be the same as that of all the fallen civilizations before them, so they’re seeking a new home. Thanks to Ye Wenjie’s invitation back in 1977, they’ve found one. And a secret society of human quislings led by Wenjie’s friend Mike Evans is preparing the way, using the mysterious video game headsets to either recruit prominent scientists to the cause, or root out those who can’t be trusted.So why does the San Ti’s arrival feel both ominous and inevitable? The former feeling is easy enough to explain: The alien Lord, represented as a female voice in a loudspeaker in conversation with Evans, has decreed that humanity must be taught to fear again lest it destroy itself. (She is voices by Sea Shimooka, who also plays the formidable recurring character in the game.)But the feeling that the San Ti’s decision to take our world for their own is so irrevocable comes courtesy of that video game. Jin solves the final level and “wins” the game when she determines the real three-body problem isn’t how to save the planet torn between the three stars — that’s scientifically impossible — but how to save the people who live on it. Jin’s own logic and ethics alike point to the only solution: The people must flee, and find a new home. Through the skillful writing of the series co-creator Alexander Woo, the revelation hits the characters and the audience alike with the ironclad certainty of a mathematical equation.Humanity’s reign over Earth is not alone in having received a terminal diagnosis. Will, the humblest member of our group of five heroes, learned last episode that he is dying of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He has only months left to live, but though he’s talked to his guy friends about this, he can’t bring himself to tell Jin, the object of his unrequited affection for years. Not even when he reveals he’s quitting his beloved job as a teacher to travel and invites her along with him does he explain his rationale. When she tells him she might be up for it some other time, just not now, he doesn’t tell her now is the only time he has.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Calls Trump’s V.P. Selection Process ‘The MAGA-pprentice’

    Kimmel’s advice to Donald Trump’s potential running mates: “If he asks you to run, run!” 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.‘The MAGA-pprentice’In his monologue on Thursday, Jimmy Kimmel talked about the speculation over who Donald Trump’s running mate will be. Supposedly, Trump plans to audition potential candidates at campaign rallies. “He’s turning this into ‘The MAGA-pprentice,’” Kimmel said.“The finalists for V.P. include Elise Stefanik, Tim Scott, Tulsi Gabbard and Dr. Ben Carson, even though Dr. Ben Carson died six years ago.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ben Carson is literally a sleeper candidate. Can you imagine Vice President Carson sitting behind Trump at the State of the Union? This is a guy who falls asleep standing up.” — JIMMY KIMMELTrump is also said to be considering Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, despite the many insults the two have thrown at each other in the past. Kimmel found it funny that Rubio now says it would be an honor for anyone to be offered the position.“Oh, poor little Marco, he thinks he’s different,” Kimmel said. “He’s thinking, ‘I’m the one who’s going to ride this bull.’ No, no, you will wind up in the mud with all the other rodeo clowns.”“Think about all the people who thought they could domesticate Donald Trump: Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Jeff Sessions, Kevin McCarthy, Rudy Giuliani, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, all his wives. I mean, you think this won’t be you, too? Destroying people like you — it’s the only thing Donald Trump is good at. If he asks you to run, run! Get those little legs moving like a toddler going into a Chuck E. Cheese.” — JIMMY KIMMELWe 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