Eliana Willis

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    in Theater

    In ‘Music City’ and ‘Babe,’ Existential Battles of the Heart and Soul

    Bedlam’s country music show is a rollicking good time. But the New Group’s production of “Babe,” starring Marisa Tomei, is a frustrating one-act lacking cohesion.If country music has a superpower, it’s the ability to spin conventions and catchphrases into affecting narratives. The book for “Music City,” a terrific new jukebox show mining the JT Harding catalog, essentially does the same thing on a larger scale.While Harding’s name might not resonate, his songs have scored sizable plays on streaming services: He is a co-writer of Uncle Kracker’s “Smile,” Blake Shelton’s “Sangria” and Keith Urban’s “Somewhere in My Car.” All of those songs turn up in “Music City,” a rollicking good time that understands contemporary country music — the style and the lifestyle — in a way we don’t often see on New York theater stages.For this Bedlam production, the director Eric Tucker and the scenic designer Clifton Chadick have turned the West End Theater into the Wicked Tickle, a homey Nashville joint specializing in open mics (and evoking that city’s real-life Bluebird Cafe). One such session is underway as audience members file in and take their seats — ticket holders can sign up for a slot in that preshow section and basically warm up the room for the characters.The focus of our attention are the imaginatively named TJ (Stephen Michael Spencer), an outgoing singer-songwriter with a knack for upbeat tunes, and 23 (Casey Shuler), a soulful newcomer with a crack in her voice and a tear in her beer — largely because of the strain of dealing with her addict mother (Leenya Rideout). The two young strivers decide to try writing songs together, and Peter Zinn’s book goes exactly where you think it’s going to go, with antagonists (both played by Andrew Rothenberg) setting up some speed bumps along the way: Bakerman, a drug dealer TJ is indebted to, and Stucky Stiles, a behatted, creatively adrift country star reminiscent of Strings McCrane in “Hold On to Me Darling.”“Music City” is not lacking for earworms (which also include two numbers written for the show and four that had not been previously recorded), but it also understands that almost as important as the songs is how they came to be. TJ and 23 express themselves through music — it is who they are — so when Stucky comes fishing for new material, they must choose who will get to deliver these little pieces of their heart.The only caveat in this very effectively staged production is the superfluous, distracting choreography by John Heginbotham (Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!”), but it is kept to a minimum. “Music City” is a good example of a jukebox done well, highlighting an industry that values songwriting craftsmanship as well as its commercial value and even revisiting some of the questions that were raised in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic”: What does music mean to the people who are passionate about it? How do you measure success?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

  • 75 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    ‘Interior Chinatown’ Review: Off the Shelf

    Charles Yu adapts his award-winning novel into a series that is both starkly different from the original and frustratingly familiar.“Interior Chinatown” was never going to be an easy adaptation. The novel’s success — which was considerable, including a National Book Award in 2020 — flowed from how seamlessly its author, Charles Yu, deployed the metafictional device at the book’s heart. His gimmick was simple enough in outline, but it was hard to see how it would work onscreen (even though it was, in part, about television).The adaptation is now here, in a 10-part mini-series that premiered Tuesday on Hulu, and it was overseen by Yu, who is both a novelist and a TV writer; he served as showrunner and wrote the first and last episodes. To keep his concept alive, he has stretched and twisted it to the breaking point — the onscreen “Interior Chinatown” is recognizable as an expansion of the book, and at the same time a completely different story and experience.It is an adroit and polished response to the different expectations of the screen-watching and book-reading audiences (and to a nearly seven-hour running time). It improves on the book in some ways, but in other, more obvious ways, it inherits the book’s problems. Overall, it reinforces the apparent difficulty of lifting Asian American characters out of the ghetto of good intentions and achingly familiar situations.In his novel, Yu gave a spin to a typical story of Asian American anxiety — Willis Wu, the son of immigrant parents, works in a Chinese restaurant while seething over his invisibility in mainstream America — by combining it with a satirical take on a “Law & Order”-like TV crime drama, written in screenplay format. (The title puns on “interior” as a screenwriting term.) Wu is a bit player, Generic Asian Man, in both the TV show and in his “real” life, which exist on different fictional planes but are cleverly intermingled. They are suffused in each other with such thoroughness that Yu, and Wu, barely need to move between them; the story is often in both worlds at the same time.Allegory is a tougher sell in the more literal world of the actual TV screen, however, and Yu has adjusted. The show takes the somewhat nebulous events of the book and, while still trafficking in plenty of flashy self-referential effects, presents a more conventional, linear plot with a jokey, sardonic style that replaces the book’s wistfulness. Most noticeably, the ethnic family drama has been condensed, while the cop-show component has grown to the point that it effectively takes over.The story’s two worlds now exist on the same plane: The restaurant worker Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) worms his way into the police department in order to investigate the death of his older brother, taking on Asian-accessible roles like tech guy and interrogation interpreter that the cops literally do not see.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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    ‘Wicked’ Review: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Oz

    Cynthia Erivo is the strongest draw in this splashy, overly long movie, which is the first installment in a two-part adaptation of the Broadway show.With its flying monkeys and magical shoes, oh my, the story of the Wizard of Oz has been lodged in the popular imagination for over a century. It is, after all, an archetypal American myth: an epic of good and evil, the comfort (and dreariness) of home, the draw (and freedom) of the road, the perils of power and the yearning for transformation. The 1939 film with Judy Garland, in particular, is so embedded in the American cinematic DNA that it’s inspired everyone from Martin Scorsese to David Lynch, Spike Lee and John Waters, who once called (accurately!) the wicked witch “every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style.”I wonder what Waters will make of “Wicked” and its green-hued, deeply sincere heroine, Elphaba, a ready-made meme machine played by Cynthia Erivo in what becomes a showstopper of a performance. Both the character and the actress are the strongest draws in this splashy, largely diverting, tonally discordant and unconscionably long movie, which is the first installment in a two-part adaptation of the Broadway show “Wicked.” That juggernaut opened at the Gershwin Theater in 2003 and shows no signs of (ever) closing; it will presumably still be raking it in when “Wicked Part Two” is set to open in November 2025.Like the stage musical — Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics, while Winnie Holzman wrote the book — the movie centers on Elphaba and Glinda, short for Galinda (Ariana Grande, fiercely perky), witches from the enchanted Land of Oz. Written by Holzman and Dana Fox, it opens right after Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, is declared dead. (Dorothy is nowhere to be seen.) Glinda, a.k.a. Glinda the Good, floats in to belt the catchy “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and subsequently goes down memory lane to relate her and Elphaba’s tale, focusing on their tenure at Shiz University, a campus populated by a hardworking ensemble and anchored by a waterfront, Disney-esque turreted castle.“Wicked” is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” and the big surprise in each work is that Elphaba isn’t as bad as her reputation. Hers is a classic saga of misunderstanding retooled for contemporary sensibilities, a chronicle of alienation and belonging, inchoate desire and heavy-handed moralizing that, onscreen, begins in Munchkinland when her father was the governor, her mother was a cheat and Elphaba the inconvenient result. At some point, her mother dies, as they do in fairy tales, and Elphaba grows into a sober, bespectacled child the color of farm-fresh asparagus (Karis Musongole) and, in short order, a serious, very talented melancholic.The director Jon M. Chu opens “Wicked” big and only goes bigger, at times to a fault. His credits include “Crazy Rich Asians” and the musical “In the Heights,” but “Wicked” is a horse of another color and it’s filled with huge sets, some dozen musical numbers and many moving parts that generations of fans know intimately. From the start, Chu gives “Wicked” an accelerated pace, amping it with restless, swooping camerawork and overloading it with a surfeit of everything, with ceaselessly moving bodies and eye-popping props. There’s much to ooh and ahh over, be it Elphaba’s eyeglasses with their seashell spiral or her beautiful Issey Miyake-style pleats, but Chu’s revved-up maximalism doesn’t leave much room to savor it.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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    in Theater

    Francesca D’Uva Works It All Out Onstage

    With a solo show about grief and life, the comedian and composer brings her experimental musical comedy to an Off Broadway audience.Francesca D’Uva moved across the rehearsal room, singing and dancing, making the space her playground.Her voice jumped from a guttural, emo-metal drone to a high-pitched, almost operatic belt to a soft serenade. She played a surreal cast of characters: a sexy nurse from a Wii game she used to play; British children looking for the nanny of their dreams; Shakira.The show was an emotional pinball machine, seeming to invite laughter and tears. In one scene, she conjured the memory of her kindergarten Nativity play in which she was cast as a cow.“Everybody’s laughing at me, everybody’s mooing at me,” she sang.A familiar face in New York’s alternative comedy scene, Ms. D’Uva, 30, performs regularly at venues around the city and has appeared on television in “Three Busy Debras” and “Fantasmas.” Vulture named her a “Comedian You Should and Will Know” in 2024.Ms. D’Uva’s dramatic instincts find an outlet during the show in a range of characters, including at least one Colombian pop star.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWith the Off Broadway premiere this week of “This Is My Favorite Song,” her solo show at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, she takes her genre-defying act to a new arena.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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    in Theater

    ‘The Piano Lesson’ Review: Ghosts in the Instrument

    This film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play falters in some specifics, but is still vital viewing.Riddle me this: When is a piano not merely a piano? Answer: In “The Piano Lesson,” where one piano contains a whole world.A whole family’s world, anyhow. The piano in question is an old upright, carved all over with the faces and figures of departed ancestors and stolen from the white Mississippi man who once enslaved members of this family. For Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), that means it’s sacred, a link to past trauma and resilience that must be preserved.For her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), the piano represents something else: money. More precisely, when he looks at the piano he sees the cash he needs to buy a piece of land back home in Mississippi and set up his own farm. That’s why he’s traveled up here to Pittsburgh, where Berniece lives with her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and an uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson). Ostensibly Boy Willie has come to sell watermelons to locals with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). But it’s the piano he’s after.To others, the piano means other things. For Avery (Corey Hawkins), an elevator operator who dreams of starting a church and marrying Berniece, the piano offers the possibility of a stable future. But for Doaker Charles’s brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts), the instrument is a reminder of the exhilarating, unrelenting life he once lived on the road as a successful pianist, before he became washed up and broke.In 1990, “The Piano Lesson” won the eminent playwright August Wilson his second of two Pulitzers for drama. It’s part of his Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called his Century Cycle), a set of 10 decade-spanning plays about Black American life, all set in Pittsburgh. It’s been staged repeatedly since then; the 2022 Broadway revival starred Washington, Jackson and Fisher in the same roles they play in this film.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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    in Television

    After Channeling Rob Gronkowski on TV, He’s Taking On ‘Travis Kelce’

    The actor Laith Wallschleger was playing college football a decade ago. Now he’s playing some of the best tight ends in N.F.L. history.Before his current career as a stuntman, voice-over artist and actor, Laith Wallschleger was a defensive end at the University of Delaware. That college football experience came in especially handy this year, when Wallschleger portrayed onscreen versions of the tight ends Rob Gronkowksi and Travis Kelce, who have seven Super Bowl rings between them.Wallschleger drew praise, including from the actual Gronk, for his exaggerated capturing of Gronkowski’s jolly, party-loving demeanor in a few brief scenes in “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez,” the Ryan Murphy dramatization series on FX and Hulu about Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who was convicted of murder.This week, Wallschleger will star in a Lifetime movie, “Christmas in the Spotlight,” as a fictional football player who is courting a pop singer. The film was loosely inspired by the real-life events surrounding the subtle but then not-so-subtle start of Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift.Wallschleger, 32, minored in theater in college and has known the Gronkowksi family for more than 10 years. In an interview, he discussed what it was like to play both athletes and how he hoped Swift’s passionate fan base would respond to his performance as a pretend Kelce.Excerpts from the conversation have been edited for length and clarity.Wallschleger as Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski in “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.”FXHow did you prepare to portray Gronkowski given that you guys already have a personal friendship?Being such close friends over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time together, so I’ve seen a hyped-up Gronk, chill Gronk, maybe even moody Gronk and all the different shades. I listened to a lot of podcasts that he was on just to get the voice and the mannerisms down. He’s got an interesting voice. It’s like a cross between a Buffalo and New York twang, and he’s got a little bit of a lazy tongue, too, so it was tricky trying to get that down.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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    in Television

    Desi Lydic Says Trump is ‘Picking Mascots,’ Not Leaders

    “The Daily Show” host said Trump could do worse than an “actual doctor” like Dr. Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: “I’m impressed he didn’t pick Dr Pepper.”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.Paging Dr. Oz, Medicare MascotPresident-elect Donald Trump continued to roll out his cabinet selections this week, with Dr. Mehmet Oz being tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.On Wednesday’s “The Daily Show,” the host Desi Lydic said, “It could be worse.”“At least Dr. Oz is an actual doctor. I’m impressed he didn’t pick Dr Pepper.” — DESI LYDIC“So far, he’s made a number of cabinet picks whose main qualification seems to be being on TV. His defense secretary is a guy from ‘Fox & Friends,’ his transportation secretary is a guy from Fox Business, and his attorney general is a guy who I’m pretty sure was on ‘To Catch a Predator.’” — DESI LYDIC“Wow, another daytime television guy. It’s like his whole cabinet was selected by a kid who was home sick with the flu.” — SETH MEYERS“But is someone going to tell him that this isn’t actually a doctor’s job? This is running a vast insurance bureaucracy. If you have to pick someone from TV, at least pick the LiMu Emu.”— DESI LYDIC“And you might be saying, ‘Relax, Dr. Oz doesn’t have to know what he’s doing — he’ll have people around him who do.’ Sure, except that Dr. Oz’s boss will be R.F.K. Jr.” — DESI LYDIC“There’s not going to be a layer of competent workers at some point. It’s just celebrities all the way down. Because Donald Trump isn’t really picking leaders of agencies — he’s just picking mascots.” — DESI LYDICThe Punchiest Punchlines (Happy Birthday, President Biden Edition)“President Biden today celebrated his 82nd birthday, and he marked the occasion the way many older men do, by fighting Jake Paul.” — SETH MEYERS“Happy birthday, Joe! We got you a cake, but Nancy Pelosi insisted you sacrifice it for the good of democracy.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“You could tell Biden is getting up there because they didn’t cut him a slice of cake — they puréed it and he drank it with a straw.” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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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    in Television

    Pamela Hayden, the Voice of Bart’s Friend Milhouse, Retires From ‘The Simpsons’

    Ms. Hayden voiced many “Simpsons” characters since the show started in 1989. She’s most famously the voice of Bart’s awkward 10-year-old best friend.Pamela Hayden, who has voiced characters on “The Simpsons” since it began in 1989 and famously played Bart’s nerdy best friend Milhouse Van Houten, announced on Wednesday that she was retiring from the show.Ms. Hayden, 70, said on her Facebook page that after 35 years she would stop performing on “The Simpsons” and would “pursue other creative outlets.” Episode seven of season 36, scheduled to air on Nov. 24, will be her final episode.“One thing that I love about Milhouse is he’s always getting knocked down but he keeps getting up,” Ms. Hayden said in a tribute video posted on “The Simpsons” social media pages. “I love the little guy.”Credited with voicing dozens of Simpson’s characters, including one of Milhouse’s bullies, Jimbo Jones, Ms. Hayden’s most famous character is Milhouse. His blue hair and big eyes are accentuated with large, round glasses. The clumsy, shy 10-year-old is one of the most endearing characters in Springfield, thanks in part to his halting, sheepish voice and his stubborn resilience.Milhouse, named after former President Richard Milhous Nixon, often finds himself following his best friend, Bart, into trouble as a gullible sidekick. Throughout the show, Milhouse often cites his mother’s concerns for his safety as an excuse to not go on adventures. In one instance, Milhouse relayed that his mother “says solving riddles is an asthma trigger.”Hayden, left, has voiced the character of Milhouse and others for 35 years.FOXOne adventure he does agree to is playing “Fallout Boy” to Bart’s “Radioactive Man.” The band Fallout Boy took its name from the character.In addition to her role in “The Simpsons” universe — which includes parts in a movie, the television show and video games — Ms. Hayden has several credits outside the series. She voiced a character for a 2015 Lego video game and was a main voice in “Lloyd in Space,” a Disney cartoon centered on a child alien that ran for four seasons from 2001-2004. “Pamela gave us tons of laughs with Milhouse, the hapless kid with the biggest nose in Springfield,” Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons,” said in a statement. “She made Milhouse hilarious and real, and we will miss her.”A spokesman for Fox Television did not immediately respond on Wednesday to an email seeking comment.It was not immediately clear what the future holds for Milhouse or Ms. Hayden’s other characters for the rest of its 36th season. Tim Curtis, a representative for Ms. Hayden, said in an email that the network would “start exploring recasting soon.”“The Simpsons” has not yet been renewed for a 37th season, Variety Magazine reported.In the tribute video to Ms. Hayden that was posted on “The Simpsons” social media accounts, Ms. Hayden said that Milhouse provides a great life lesson in perseverance and optimism.“Everything’s coming up Milhouse!” the boy shouts with glee in one scene while water floods his room. More