Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Like They Do in the Movies’ Review: Laurence Fishburne Widens His Lens

    In his solo show, the screen and stage star shines a light into his formative dark corners and on the people who made an impression.When Laurence Fishburne wants to get closer to audiences of his one-man show, he lowers himself into a deep squat near the lip of the stage. Hands clasped and knees spread wide, the actor — who has become an avatar of inscrutability during his half-century screen and stage career — seems to be trying to shrink himself down to life-size.Fishburne’s indomitable presence is the muscle behind “Like They Do in the Movies,” which opened on Thursday night at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan. His vigor and gravitas are unwavering, even as Fishburne, the 62-year-old “Matrix” star, softens to reveal difficult details from his childhood and to portray others whose vulnerability made a personal impression.Part memoir and part ethnography, the show opens with Fishburne, who played a schemer in the 2022 Broadway revival of “American Buffalo” and a Supreme Court justice in the 2008 one-man play “Thurgood,” as you’ve likely never seen him before: draped in sequins (the flowing black robes are credited to Jimi Gureje). Addressing the audience in griot fashion, Fishburne briskly sketches his early years, introducing his mother, Hattie, a charm-school matron turned abusive stage mom. Using the refrain “but more on that later,” he indicates open questions he’ll return to, including how his father fits into the picture.These recollections have a clipped momentum, like listening to a celebrity narrate a tell-all at 1.5 speed. If the pacing makes him seem a bit guarded, it also serves a practical purpose: The production, written by Fishburne and crisply directed by Leonard Foglia, runs nearly two and half hours with an intermission. Greater economy would pack a more decisive punch, but the show rarely goes slack and Fishburne’s performance is thoroughly engrossing.That’s especially true as he slips into the more familiar territory of playing other people, in a series of vividly drawn monologues book ended by his own reflections. The play’s title may suggest a tour through Fishburne’s own Hollywood résumé, which includes an Oscar-nominated turn as Ike Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” But here, Fishburne plays a truck packer for The New York Daily News, a Hurricane Katrina survivor and a homeless man who washes cars, among others.Stalking Neil Patel’s sparse set — a stage with only a long table and a pair of chairs — Fishburne nimbly dons each persona with a keen and easy sensitivity. The assembly of character studies, mostly everyday New Yorker types, lacks an obvious sense of cohesiveness, though Fishburne himself emerges as the common thread.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Water for Elephants’ Review: Beauty Under the Big Top

    The circus-themed love story, already a novel and a movie, becomes a gorgeously imaginative Broadway musical.First come her ears, floating like ginkgo leaves. Then, from behind a screen, her shadow appears, followed by the marvelous sound of her trumpet. Next to arrive is her disembodied trunk, with a mind of its own, snuffling out friends and enemies and food. Finally, at the end of Act I of the new musical “Water for Elephants,” she is fully assembled: Rosie, the star of the circus, big as a bus and batting her pretty eyes.This gorgeous sequence, played out over perhaps 20 minutes, is emblematic of the many wonders awaiting audiences at the Imperial Theater, where “Water for Elephants” opened on Thursday. After all, Rosie is not a living creature potentially vulnerable to abuse. Nor is she a C.G.I. illusion. She is not really an illusion at all, in the sense of a trick; you can see the puppeteers operating and inhabiting her. Rather she is a product of the human imagination, including ours in the audience.What a pleasure it is to be treated that way by a brand-extension musical, a form usually characterized by craftlessness and cynicism. Indeed, at its best, “Water for Elephants” has more in common with the circus arts than it does with by-the-books Broadway. Sure, it features an eventful story and compelling characters, and apt, rousing music by PigPen Theater Co., a seven-man indie folk collective. But in the director Jessica Stone’s stunning, emotional production, it leads with movement, eye candy and awe.That’s only appropriate, given the milieu. The musical’s book by Rick Elice, based not just on the 2011 movie but also on the 2006 novel by Sara Gruen, is set among the performers and roustabouts of a ramshackle circus at the depths of the Depression. Escaping an unhappiness we learn about only later, Jacob Jankowski (Grant Gustin) jumps onto a train heading (as his introductory song tells us) “Anywhere.” But really, because the train houses the failing Benzini Brothers troupe, it’s heading everywhere — downhill and fast.Elice has smartly sped up the action by eliminating one of the two introductory devices that kept the movie’s story at a distance. In the one he retains, a much older Jacob (Gregg Edelman) serves as the narrator of the long-ago events. With pride but also anguish he recalls how, as a young man trained as a veterinarian, he quickly established himself in the chaotic and sometimes violent company of the circus: a hunky James Herriot caring for the medical needs of the animals. Soon, though, he becomes involved in more complicated, dangerous ways.The complication comes in the form of Marlena, the circus’s star attraction, who performs on horseback. The danger comes from her husband, August, Benzini’s possibly bipolar owner and ringmaster.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

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    What to Watch This Weekend: A Rapid-Fire Sitcom

    “Great News,” a gone-too-soon comedy on Netflix, descended from “30 Rock” and has a similar sensibility and jokes-per-minute rate.Like many TV fans, I was thrilled when Netflix saved the ridiculous and wonderful “Girls5eva” from cancellation at the hands of Peacock. A cheeky treat about a ’90s girl group reuniting, “Girls5eva” belongs to a category of show I like to call “30 Rock” Offspring. It’s not exactly a spinoff of that beloved, long-running NBC sitcom about the making of a sketch comedy show, but “30 Rock” alumni are involved and the quality and rapid pace of its jokes are similar. You barely catch your breath after one punchline before the next comes hurtling toward you.Not all children of “30 Rock” have cheated death, but the unlucky ones are still worthy of your viewing time. Once you’ve finished “Girls5eva” on Netflix you can stay on that platform to watch “Great News,” the sitcom created by Tracey Wigfield and produced (of course) by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. The news is indeed “great.” You’ll have a blast.“Great News,” which premiered in 2017, lasted only two seasons on NBC, but its mere 23 episodes are gloriously funny. The premise centers on Katie Wendelson (Briga Heelan), a stressed-out cable news producer with an overattentive mother Carol (Andrea Martin). After one of Carol’s friends dies (she is described as “the other Carol”), she decides to go back to school and get an internship at Katie’s network. Katie is annoyed, but it turns out Carol is the only person who can handle the bombastic and self-involved anchor Chuck Pierce (John Michael Higgins).As in any good sitcom, the plot of the pilot just jump starts the action. Katie and Carol will continuously bicker and make up, but they are only one part of the newsroom. Chuck has a similarly delusional co-anchor in the vain Portia (Nicole Richie), and Katie develops a will-they-or-won’t-they with her boss, Greg (Adam Campbell).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

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 2 Recap: The Warning

    Fans of spooky technology will have much to enjoy in this episode.Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Red Coast’For its second episode in a row, “3 Body Problem” saved the best for last.The year, via flashback, is 1977, and we’re following the continuing adventures of young Ye Wenjie. Decades later, as an older woman played by Rosalind Chao, she’s better known to us as the mother of the late researcher Vera Ye, and thus the woman who passes along her mystery headset to her colleague Jin Cheng.For the moment, however, she’s just a political prisoner turned valued member of a top-secret Chinese government program designed to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. “Valued,” however, is a relative term. Inspired in part by research gleaned from a verboten American source, she’s figured out how to amplify their signal exponentially by bouncing it off the sun, which will effectively turbo-boost it. But the idea is first stolen by one of her colleagues, then shot down by another as insufficiently doctrinaire. Though she takes a chance on aiming their exceedingly polite broadcast at the sun at least once, she and her team have heard nothing back.Until now. The oceanic whoosh of interstellar signals to which she’s been listening without cease for years suddenly shifts into something sharp and deliberate. The computers make it clear that this isn’t some fluke but an actual signal. Then the message comes in:“Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you do not answer. If you respond we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.”Speaking personally, the terror-fueled adrenaline dump that would have ensued after I read that very first “Do not answer” would have reduced me to an insensate lump. But that’s not the kind of person Ye Wenjie is. Accustomed to keeping her true feelings hidden for years, she keeps it together well enough that no one else at the sleepy installation notices anything has happened. Quietly, she aims the transmitter back at the sun for maximum range.“Come,” she types out in reply. “We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”Wenjie has her reasons for this kind of cynicism. The installation is surrounded by endless miles of recklessly cleared forest. The only person besides her who appears to care about this at all is the handsome American environmentalist Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer), who is single-handedly trying to reforest the region. This would come as a surprise to the present-day characters: By 2024, Evans (played as an older man by Jonathan Pryce) is an oil magnate and the world’s foremost purveyor of scientific disinformation.At any rate, the need to build a new installation will force Evans to shut down his Johnny Appleseed operation. Meanwhile, Wenjie’s attempt to find closure over her father’s murder by confronting his killer, an young former Red Guard radical (played by Lan Xiya) whom the revolution has since devoured in turn. (Almost literally: Guards forcibly severed her gangrenous arm at a labor camp.) Despite having been imprisoned and brutalized, the young woman snarls that she’d kill Wenjie’s dad all over again if she could.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 1 Recap: The Final Countdown

    Suicidal scientists and flashing stars highlight the first episode of this new series by Alexander Woo and the “Game of Thrones” creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Countdown’The plot of “3 Body Problem” is not going to be the thing that grabs you about “3 Body Problem.”Perhaps because of the actions of a rogue scientist at a Chinese installation in the 1970s, an alien intelligence has instituted some kind of countdown. The decreasing numbers appear in the minds of the world’s bleeding-edge scientists, who are driven by the countdowns to end either their life’s work or their lives. According to a secret code blinked out by the stars in the sky in a phenomenon that spans the globe, all of humanity may be headed for the same result. Also, a possibly evil virtual-reality video game is involved.See? It doesn’t take long to sum up what happens in “Countdown,” the premiere of the new series from the “Game of Thrones” impresarios David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and their collaborator, Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), adapted from a trilogy of books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin. Nor is it hard to run down the characters, who at this point are primarily pieces moved from place to place to advance the aforementioned plot.Half the episode is set in Mao’s China during the 1960s and 1970s. Our viewpoint character here is Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng). She’s the brilliant daughter of a scientist whose adherence to concepts like relativity and the Big Bang puts him at odds with the values of the Cultural Revolution. As Wenjie watches, he is accidentally beaten to death by keyed-up teenagers during a struggle session, in which his own wife, Wenjie’s mother, denounces him.At first condemned to hard labor, Wenjie catches the eye of the architects of a nearby scientific project run by the government. They offer her a job working alongside them, but given her checkered political past, the job is a life sentence: Once she goes to work at the secret installation, she can never leave it. Wenjie is already on thin ice after taking the fall for a heterodox journalist who passed her a copy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and at risk of being physically forced to incriminate other innocent scientists if she stays in prison. She takes the deal.At the installation — a cliff-side redoubt overlooking vast deforested areas and topped with a gigantic transmitter — Wenjie quickly learns the truth. This isn’t a test site for some experimental weapon. It’s an attempt to communicate with worlds beyond our own.Decades later, in 2024, all of science is in sudden turmoil. Particle accelerators around the globe have spent weeks returning results that are either a complete contradiction of 60 years of physics or complete gibberish. The scientific establishment, and more important its financial backers, have to use Occam’s razor and assume the latter — that the particle-accelerator game has somehow become rigged, and is therefore useless. One by one, they’re shut down for failure to justify further funding.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

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    Why ‘Uncle Vanya’ Is the Play for Our Anxious Era

    IN WATCHING MIXED-BREED dogs play, I’ve often thought that mutts are more dog than the purest purebred. They’re the essence of caninity, all mud, turf and wet fur. So, too, with dramatic works: Some are purebred — think of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (1611) or Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1962) — while others are mad rambles, off leash and messy. This brings me to Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (1897), a singularly psychologically destabilizing piece of theater that’s now being seen anew as a study of post-Covid paralysis, not to mention the existential dread of watching your life slip away by the spoonful. Although first produced in Moscow in 1899, it feels just like our present American age, when nobody hears anybody else because listening hurts too much; when the most comforting activity imaginable is a long, solitary walk followed by an even longer interlude of silence. This is a drama about being driven insane by the sound of other people’s desires, complaints and aspirations when you’re already being tortured by your own. The pandemic and the boorish political and public discourse that followed drove us inward, unable to fight back, going nuts like poor Vanya.Plotwise, it’s deceptive in its simplicity. A family’s marooned at its rural estate, where culture is only a rumor. A visiting popinjay academic from the city arrives accompanied by his second wife, both sowing chaos. They remain blind to their banal savagery and are even self-righteous about it, as when the narcissistic Professor Serebryakov says, “You live a purposeful life, you think, you study, you lecture, your colleagues respect you, it all seems to have meaning — and then suddenly you’re thrown into a darkened cellar, with stupid people, listening to their horrible conversation.” In fact, his academic life has long been irrelevant, and the stupid people he’s referring to are family members he relies on for money. Now he’s set up camp here, where the mother of his late wife, his only daughter and his put-upon brother-in-law (the titular uncle) all reside — the relatives he’s sponged off for years.For Uncle Vanya, this situation becomes intolerable, especially after Serebryakov insists that the property be sold and the profits set aside for his comfort. Equally unbearable: the professor’s new wife, Yelena, a detached beauty years his junior who’s driving Vanya and the alcoholic Dr. Astrov, another visitor, batty with lust. Humiliation is everywhere. You could watch the play and mistake it for a genteel, comic trip down a quaint country road of the past … and you’d be missing the entire point, which is that most of us are too civilized to survive the struggle with those to whom we’re inextricably tied.Katherine Parkinson (left) as Sonya and Rupert Everett as Vanya in a 2019 production of “Uncle Vanya,” adapted by David Hare and directed by Everett, at the Theatre Royal in Bath, England.Nobby Clark/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesPERHAPS THAT’S WHY many theater artists have returned to “Uncle Vanya” recently. In April, the latest revival will open at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, a new version by Heidi Schreck directed by Lila Neugebauer, featuring Alison Pill, Alfred Molina, William Jackson Harper and Steve Carell, all of whom possess the intelligence and suppressed anger of an entire army of riven Chekhov characters. Also on the American horizon is Andrew Scott’s one-man “Vanya” from London, in which he — exhaustingly — does all of the parts. Adapted by Simon Stephens and directed by Sam Yates, that choice amplifies how important actual clumps of actors are to Chekhov, and how much is lost by their absence: Scott creates a mood of almost farcelike mania, which is a magic trick, yes, but the threads of sorrow that permeate the text are blunted. Although you don’t need a lot of space: Last summer, there was an intimate, candlelit Manhattan production with the director-actor David Cromer as a depressive Vanya padding about a real apartment borrowed for the purpose (before the show moved to a larger event space).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

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel Suggests Trump Take a Sip of His Own Medicine

    “If Donald Trump wants immunity, he should drink bleach like he told us to do when we wanted immunity,” Kimmel said.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.Has He Tried Bleach?On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to rule that he has absolute immunity from criminal charges stemming from his attempts to subvert the 2020 election.On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump “also wants immunity from chlamydia, just in case.”“His lawyers told the court, ‘Denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.’ Which sounds bad, right? And yet somehow, we’ve had 44 presidents before him — that never happened to any of them except for this one guy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A president could make some seriously crazy stuff happen. If you’re dumb and arrogant, you commit the crimes yourself on television, then you have a problem. Then you have to beg the Supreme Court for something preposterous, like immunity. But if Donald Trump wants immunity, he should drink bleach like he told us to do when we wanted immunity.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Turns out the guy who bragged to Billy Bush he can do whatever he wants thinks he should be allowed to do whatever he wants.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (March Madness Edition)“My hope is that we get all the madness out in March, so we don’t have any left for November.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Gonzaga tomorrow plays McNeese State, which, not only do I not believe Gonzaga is a real place, I don’t think there’s any such place as McNeese State, either. I know for a fact there are 50 states, and McNeese is not one of them, OK? This is a game between two imaginary teams they’re putting on. The A.I. has finally taken over.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Today, President Biden posted his bracket, and he picked a favorite, UConn, to repeat as national champions. Yeah, Biden relates to UConn ’cause they both have a 38 percent chance of winning again.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, Biden has UConn, Houston, North Carolina and Tennessee in his Final Four, while Trump was able to identify all the mascots: [imitating Trump] ‘I see the duck, the bear, the lion.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Trump didn’t fill out a bracket ’cause he doesn’t have the 10 bucks to join the pool.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingKristen Wiig used an opera singer to answer Jimmy Fallon’s interview questions on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Shirley” star Regina King will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutA letter from Eric Clapton to Pattie Boyd, who inspired his song “Layla.” It begins, “Dearest L.”Christie’s Images Ltd.Pattie Boyd, who was at the center of one of rock’s most mythic love triangles, is auctioning love letters that Eric Clapton wrote her while she was married to George Harrison. More