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    In ‘Irishtown’ and ‘The Black Wolfe Tone,’ Where Are the Rolling Hills?

    Two plays at Irish Repertory Theater, one featuring a “Derry Girls” star, explore the real and the mythical in cultural identity.In the rehearsal room of the Irishtown Players, the posters on the walls are a sampler of the company’s performance history: 20th-century classics, almost all. Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” is up there, of course, and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” too, and Conor McPherson’s “The Weir.”The only unfamiliar title, “The Happy Leper of Larne,” almost winks from its frame, suggesting a maudlin-cheery cousin to “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”For the Irishtown Players — the fictional Dublin troupe at the center of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s new backstage comedy, “Irishtown” — “The Happy Leper” was a hit. Now some producers are bringing the company to Broadway in the author’s follow-up play. But with mere weeks until they leave for New York, the playwright, Aisling (Brenda Meaney), has gone rogue. Her just-delivered script is a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault, set in England.To Constance (a flawlessly funny Kate Burton), the ranking company member, such a play is not Irish at all.Poppy (Angela Reed), the play’s British director, points out that by definition it is, because Aisling is.“Yes,” Constance allows, her voice rising theatrically, “but where are the rolling hills, where is the bar, why is everyone alive?”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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    ‘Dead Outlaw’ Cancels Library of Congress Concert to Protest Firing

    The Broadway musical, which earned seven Tony nominations, scrapped a performance after the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla D. Hayden, was fired by the Trump administration.The Broadway musical “Dead Outlaw” announced on Friday that it was canceling an upcoming concert performance at the Library of Congress, one day after the Trump administration fired its top librarian.A brief statement from the show, which earned seven Tony nominations this month, said that it had decided not to perform at the library “upon learning of the termination of Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress.”Dr. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to serve as head of the institution, was a “fierce advocate for preserving America’s cultural memory and a great champion of the Broadway community,” the statement said.No other details were given.The Library of Congress had planned to present a free concert on Monday afternoon featuring members of the cast and creative team of “Dead Outlaw” performing selections from the show at its Coolidge Auditorium.The cancellation is the latest indication of the growing tensions between some in the arts community and the Trump administration. President Trump has once again proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and last week the endowment began withdrawing grants from arts organizations around the country.This week some members of the cast of “Les Misérables” were said to be planning not to perform at a gala performance at the Kennedy Center that Mr. Trump, who took over the center, was planing to attend. Earlier this year, a string of artists and speakers canceled engagements at the Kennedy Center after Mr. Trump purged the historically bipartisan board of Biden appointees and made himself chairman.Dr. Hayden’s firing on Thursday drew swift outrage from Democrats, many of whom praised her work, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic minority leader, who said in a statement that Dr. Hayden was an “accomplished, principled and distinguished” leader of the library.She was appointed as the 14th librarian of Congress by President Barack Obama in 2016. She was fired a year before the end of her 10-year term.Cindy Hohl, the president of the American Library Association, condemned the firing in a statement, saying that Dr. Hayden’s “abrupt and unjust dismissal is an insult to the scope and breadth of work she has undertaken in her role leading the Library of Congress.”Dr. Hayden was fired in a two-sentence email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of White House personnel. The notice did not cite a cause.The Library of Congress is the latest federal cultural institution to come under fire from Mr. Trump. In February he abruptly fired Colleen Shogan, the head of the National Archives, who had been appointed by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., without citing any reason. And in an executive order in March, he criticized the Smithsonian Institution, and directed Vice President JD Vance to seek to influence its Board of Regents.Jennifer Schuessler More

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    Rediscovered Thomas the Tank Engine Pilot Is Released

    The episode, from 1983, was found in storage by accident. It was restored and made available for viewing for the first time on Friday.Thomas the Tank Engine notices a funny smell. He breaks a rule, has a mishap and gets stuck. He is rescued and learns a lesson. Ringo Starr provides the narration.If you have ever seen any of the more than 500 episodes of the children’s show “Thomas & Friends,” you might imagine you have seen it before. But you really have not, because this scene is from the newly rediscovered pilot episode, which has been restored and was made available for viewing for the first time on Friday.The episode, filmed in 1983 and titled “Down the Mine,” was found accidentally in storage, Ian McCue, a producer of the series for a decade, told the BBC.Ian McCue, a producer, examined the newly discovered film.MattelThe episode was pieced together from multiple film stripsMattelThe five-minute episode was pieced together from multiple 35-millimeter film strips. The picture and sound were cleaned up, and newly composed music was added.“I think there’s a sort of a lovely charm and innocence about it, and I think even as a pilot, as a test piece, it still has that lovely, classic, timeless story to it, and the voices, everything is just so delightful,” Mr. McCue said.For the uninitiated, Thomas is a cheerful blue locomotive with an expressive face who first appeared in British children’s books by the Rev. W. Awdry. The character and his fellow locomotives, like Percy (green) and James (red), rose to new levels of popularity when they were animated for the popular program, which premiered in 1984.The show became a favorite of children and parents alike, many of whom were drawn to its relaxed rhythms. “Children live these days in a fast-paced world, but I don’t think children really change,” the producer Britt Allcroft, who brought the characters to television, said in a 1995 BBC documentary. “They need in their lives gentleness, comfort.”Clips of the show were repackaged for a PBS show, “Shining Time Station,” starting in 1989. Toys, movies and a theme park followed, and humble Thomas became a billion-dollar business.Mr. Starr was the original narrator of the series. George Carlin, Alec Baldwin, Pierce Brosnan and others followed.Ringo Starr, fourth from left, was the original narrator of “Thomas & Friends.”MattelA vast majority of the many characters were originally male — and, apparently, white. More recently, the show made efforts to diversify, adding new engines like Yong Bao of China and Ashima of India.Loyal fans of the series of all ages were thrilled by news that the pilot episode had been found, expressing eagerness to see the footage and amazement that it had been lost for so long. Enthusiasts on Reddit posted words like “finally,” “I’m so happy” and “let’s go!” punctuated by other words that Thomas and his friends would never utter.Once the restored episode was out, the reactions veered to softer sentiments. As one fan wrote, “Feels like being a kid again.”Thomas, cheerful as always.Mattel More

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    Late Night Celebrates the First American Pope

    “We have an American pope and a Russian president,” Jimmy Kimmel said, calling it “an historic era.”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.‘New Pope, Who Dis?’Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope on Thursday, becoming the first American pope.“We have an American pope and a Russian president,” Jimmy Kimmel said. “Isn’t it incredible?”“We have the first American pope. And let me just say, as an American, are you sure about this? We don’t really have the gravitas that you associate with pope-iness. We’re less ‘somber procession’ and more ‘monster truck rally.’” — DESI LYDIC“I just think it’s just a little bit weird that the holiest man in the world probably knows all the words to the Chili’s ‘Baby Back Ribs’ song.” — DESI LYDIC“The Pope Mobile is now a Ford F-250 with truck nuts.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You can tell he’s American ’cause he stepped out on the Vatican balcony and said, ‘New pope, who dis?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Another Leo Edition)“They make him pick a name. He chose Leo XIV, which is a shame because there have been 13 other Leos. We’ve never had even one Pope Bob, which would have been pretty great.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“How have there been so many popes named Leo? Leo doesn’t even sound like a Pope name. Sounds more like the altar boy who got high and ate all the communion wafers.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, he may be the new pope, but to his friends back in Chicago, he’ll always be ‘Bobby Bratwurst.’” — JIMMY FALLON“From now on, the pope is going to sound like this. [imitating Chicago accent] Hey, dere, it’s yer buddy Leo, the deep dish papa. Just talked to God, and not even he can help da White Sox. Sorry. First order of business, I will be canonizing Michael Jordan. Now let’s end by saying daaa prayers.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe Colombian superstar Shakira played “Box of Lies” with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutLovie Simone in “Forever,” a new adaptation of the Judy Blume novel created by Mara Brock Akil for Netflix.Elizabeth Morris/NetflixAn all-Black cast stars in the new Netflix series “Forever,” adapted from Judy Blume’s 1970 novel of the same name. More

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    Carolina Bianchi’s Last Play Knocked Her Unconscious. ‘The Brotherhood’ Is Tougher.

    Carolina Bianchi created a storm by drugging herself onstage at the beginning of a trilogy about sexual assault. Her latest play, “The Brotherhood,” asks what happens next.At first, Carolina Bianchi didn’t realize the sensation that her 2023 stage production “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” was creating. After all, she is unconscious for most of it: In order to explore the consequences of a sexual assault she experienced a decade earlier, Bianchi, a Brazilian director and performer, drinks a spiked cocktail that knocks her out onstage, then lets actors manipulate her motionless body.At the Avignon Festival in France, where the show premiered, there were tears. Audience interruptions. Post-show conversations that stretched into the early hours.Practically overnight, Bianchi became an international theater phenomenon. “The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella” has since been performed in 13 countries, to a mix of acclaim and bemusement. In Australia, it even triggered a debate over whether the onstage action was in breach of local laws on consent.“It took me almost six months to understand what was happening,” Bianchi said in a recent interview. “People were really touched, on different levels.”Now Bianchi is back with a follow-up, “The Brotherhood,” the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it. It picks up where the first installment left off, asking “what happens when someone comes back” from an assault, Bianchi said.“The Brotherhood” is the second chapter of a planned trilogy about sexual violence and the social structures that enable it.Max Pinckers for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct’

    A new play about a middle-age professor and his teenage student forces you to ask: Who’s grooming whom?We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you’ve heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman’s venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty’s labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson’s long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman’s manhandling of an actual lawn mower.Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a “world class college.” He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac.” Currently he is separated from his third.Soon another cliché enters: the “grossly underwritten” sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to “expose their mediocrity.” That’s Beatty’s Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.“The erotics of pedagogy,” Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.It is here you may say to yourself: I’ve seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays (“Oleanna”) and novels (“Disgrace”) — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man’s point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie’s lines are more like this: “I shouldn’t / I don’t know why I / Said that / Sorry I’m mm.”The thrill of this production, our critic writes, is that it doesn’t tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Reformed’ Is a Charming Show About a Young Rabbi

    Sitcom shenanigans nestle alongside philosophical musings in this French dramedy on Max.The French dramedy “Reformed,” on Max (in French, with subtitles, or dubbed), follows a young rabbi who moves back home to begin her career. Léa (Elsa Guedj) is smart, knowledgeable and capable, but she is also new at this and nervous. It doesn’t help that those around her, including members of her own family, scoff at the idea of a female rabbi — when they’re tired of scoffing at religion in general.“There was Galileo, there was Freud, there was Auschwitz,” says her father (Éric Elmosnino), a therapist. “I thought we’d figured it out. God doesn’t exist.”Doubt is a constant presence in “Reformed,” both grandly and in the sense that “Eh, aren’t we all just muddling through?” The show is based loosely on the book “Living With Our Dead,” by the French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, and the episodes center on life cycle events: a bris, a bar mitzvah, a wedding, a funeral, shiva. Most of the people availing themselves of Léa’s services aren’t particularly observant, and they’re not sure if or how to engage with the rites.And Léa isn’t sure either, so she rehearses different voice memos. Yes, do it. No, don’t. Oh no, uh, there was a family emergency, I can’t help you. But invariably, she does help them, with real care and curiosity, not in trite or Pollyannaish ways. She is doctrinal but not doctrinaire, and all these rituals of change for her congregants are rituals of change for her, too. She becomes more confident and mature ushering a reluctant bar mitzvah boy through the process. She hones her discernment skills while officiating a wedding.The most intriguing relationship on the show is between Léa and Arié (Lionel Dray), the local orthodox rabbi and her former teacher. There’s a magnetic pull and constant fascination between them, a lot of trust but also a sense of betrayal. He’s her mentor, and they have an intense erotic energy, but each also sees the other as practicing religion incorrectly — a tension that can be playful right up until it is profoundly hurtful. The goings on at their respective shuls highlight their own misgivings about their denominational choices: Maybe her practice is shallow; maybe his practice is misogynistic. Let’s resolve to smolder at each other about it.In addition to being charming, “Reformed” is interesting. Sitcom shenanigans nestle alongside philosophical musings. A farce unfolds at a seder, and goofy sibling banter segues into deeper conversation and back. Seven episodes are available now, and the season finale arrives on Friday. More

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    In ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare

    The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steve Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.The actors periodically slip into trance-like choreographed dance moves with strange, synchronized gesticulations.Manuel HarlanThe music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)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