Eliana Willis

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    How Hollywood Glamour Is Reviving the Endangered Broadway Play

    George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Denzel Washington and Mia Farrow are coming to Broadway, where some producers see plays with stars as safer bets than musicals.Robert Downey Jr. is deep in rehearsals for his Broadway debut next month as an A.I.-obsessed novelist in “McNeal.” Next spring, George Clooney arrives for his own Broadway debut in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and Denzel Washington returns, after a seven-year absence, to star in “Othello” with Jake Gyllenhaal.Then comes an even more surprising debut: Keanu Reeves plans to begin his Broadway career in the fall of 2025, opposite his longtime “Bill & Ted” slacker-buddy Alex Winter in “Waiting for Godot,” the ur-two-guys-being-unimpressive tragicomedy.Broadway, still adapting to sharply higher production costs and audiences that have not fully rebounded since the coronavirus pandemic, is betting big on star power, hoping that a helping of Hollywood glamour will hasten its rejuvenation.Even for an industry long accustomed to stopovers by screen and pop stars, the current abundance is striking.It reflects a new economic calculus by many producers, who have concluded that short-run plays with celebrity-led casts are more likely to earn a profit than the expensive razzle-dazzle musicals that have long been Broadway’s bread and butter.For the actors, there is another factor: As TV networks and streaming companies cut back on scripted series, and as Hollywood focuses on franchise films, the stage offers a chance to tell more challenging stories.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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    Myha’la, Star of HBO’s ‘Industry,’ Arrives

    The one-name star of the HBO show “Industry” is composed under pressure.On a humider-than-humid afternoon in July, Myha’la stepped into a teahouse in her Brooklyn neighborhood and joined the line leading to the front counter.She was wearing a khaki skirt and a matching cropped jacket that revealed the panther tattoos on either side of her abdomen. Her nails were red — she had politely rejected her stylist’s suggestion to paint them brown — and her pixie cut was slick with gel.The menu seemed endless, with lists of flavors and foams that slowed down several customers placing their orders. Myha’la, a star of HBO’s Gen Z financial drama “Industry,” knew exactly what she wanted: An oolong latte with almond milk, boba and grass jelly.The woman she plays on the show, Harper Stern, is similarly decisive. As her fellow bright, young overachievers crumble beneath the fluorescent lights of a British investment bank, Harper sees each wobble by a colleague as an opportunity to place an even riskier bet on herself.“She’s got the sort of killer, quiet confidence that’s actually very dangerous,” Myha’la, 28, said, having installed herself at a counter facing State Street.When she landed the role on “Industry,” which returns for its third season on Sunday, it was her biggest acting job since she graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2018. She didn’t have to look too hard to find common ground with the character, an ambitious young Black woman in an elite, cutthroat environment.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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    Howie Cohen, Whose Alka-Seltzer Ads Spawned Catchphrases, Dies at 81

    A copywriter, he and a partner in 1972 came up with “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate that whole thing.” Soon, sales were, well, fizzing.Howie Cohen, an advertising copywriter, often said he was congenitally familiar with indigestion. So perhaps it was only natural that in the 1970s, he, along with an ad agency colleague, would conjure up a catchy slogan that would not only sell more Alka-Seltzer but also become an American pop culture punchline: “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”That bedside lament, spoken by the comedian and dialectician Milt Moss — he actually said that thing on camera — vaulted from a 30-second TV commercial to sweatshirts, supermarket windows and even church marquees.It proved even more popular than “Try it, you’ll like it,” the first catchphrase for Alka-Seltzer that Mr. Cohen coined with his business partner, Bob Pasqualina, an art director at the Manhattan agency Wells Rich Greene.Mr. Cohen, who helped popularize products and companies like Petco (“Where the pets go”) and the fast-food chain Jack in the Box (exploding its clown mascot in a TV commercial in announcing a new, more sophisticated menu), died on March 2 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.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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    Overlooked No More: Renee Carroll, ‘World’s Most Famous Hatcheck Girl’

    From the cloakroom at Sardi’s, she made her own mark on Broadway, hobnobbing with celebrity clients while safekeeping fedoras, bowlers, derbies and more.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For 24 years, as the hatcheck girl at Sardi’s, the storied theater district restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan, Renee Carroll found fame from within the close confines of a cloakroom.From that post, she hobnobbed with celebrity clientele, fed insider gossip to newspaper columnists and wrote an immensely popular, chatty book that dished about which stage actress ate too much garlic (Katharine Cornell, if you must know) and how fading stars wistfully reacted when rising newcomers like Joan Crawford entered the dining room.Checking hats at a restaurant might seem like a menial job, and in fact the salary for safekeeping homburgs, fedoras, bowlers and derbies was measly, but Caroll saw the position as an opportunity to make her own mark on Broadway.With her wisecracking personality, she won over actors, writers and producers while earning dime or quarter tips. If someone checked a play script with her, she perused it and offered canny critiques, sometimes unsolicited, by the time the patron had finished lunch.Her approbation was considered such a good-luck charm that even hatless playwrights and producers were known to leave her money. Eugene O’Neill once entrusted her with his wristwatch when he had nothing else on hand to check.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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    ‘Mafia Spies’ Recounts the C.I.A. Plot to Kill Castro

    The docuseries tells the bizarre but true story of the C.I.A.’s various schemes to use the mob to assassinate the leader of Cuba.The stories have swirled around for years, often in the form of feverish conspiracy theories. The major players should ring familiar by now: John F. Kennedy. Fidel Castro. The C.I.A. The mob. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” raised the delirium to operatic heights; Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel “Libra” gave it a jolt of postmodern cool.But “Mafia Spies,” the new docuseries now streaming on Paramount+, takes a different tack. Based on Thomas Maier’s nonfiction book of the same name, it lays out the true story of how the C.I.A. collaborated with the mafia to plot the assassination of Castro. Much of this is documented in files about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were released in batches by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018, and which Maier used as the basis of his book.Maier — who is also a producer on the series — and the showrunners, Tom Donahue and Ilan Arboleda, turn the archive data into a narrative that prompts one double take after another and is often intentionally funny. But however improbable some of it seems, the guiding premise is that it all really happened. One goal of the show is to debunk the many conspiracy theories that swirl around this era of history.“If we had relied on conspiracy theories, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Donahue, who also directed the series, said in a video interview alongside Arboleda. “As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.”The six episodes of “Mafia Spies” feature a labyrinth of plots and a sprawling cast of mobsters, spies, politicians, revolutionaries and entertainers. But the big picture is actually pretty simple.The C.I.A., led at the time by Allen Dulles, wanted to eliminate the new Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro — or, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, he wanted Castro “sawed off,” according to the historian Stephen Kinzer, who is featured in the series. Through a “cutout” (or middle man), Robert Maheu, a businessman and lawyer, the C.I.A. enlisted organized crime leaders, chiefly the Chicago Outfit’s Sam Giancana and John Roselli, to assassinate Castro. (The mafia had its own reasons for wanting Castro dead: After he seized power in 1959, Havana’s casinos were no longer a cash-cow haven for them.)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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    ‘Industry’ Is Back With Boats, Cocaine and Bigger Ambitions

    In its new season, the HBO finance drama expands beyond the trading floor and moves into the network’s marquee Sunday-night slot.The creators of “Industry” pitched the Season 3 opener to HBO with three words: “Coke and boats.”“We were like, ‘Don’t kill us, but this is where we want to start Season 3,’” Mickey Down, one of the creators, said in a video call.The HBO executives did not want to kill them. They were thrilled that the show, which follows a chaotic group of young employees at an investment bank in London and often deals with the more specialized details of finance, was going in a broader direction.While illegal substances are nothing new for the show, most of the action had been centered on the trading floor. The new season, beginning on Aug. 11, opens with a hedonistic party on a luxury yacht, filmed in Majorca. It is a flashback with devastating implications for one of the principal characters, a rich woman named Yasmin, played by Marisa Abela.“Coke and boats” was just one of the ways in which Down and the other creator, Konrad Kay, sought to expand the show, in the new season, Down said.HBO hopes that the wider vision will draw a bigger audience. The series previously debuted new episodes on Mondays and now gets a marquee Sunday-night slot, taking the place of “House of the Dragon,” which just finished its second season.“We have high hopes for the show,” said Francesca Orsi, head of drama for HBO, adding that if “the world embraces Season 3 in the way that we have, both in its critical praise but also its viewership, there’s no question that we want to continue moving forward with 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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    On Netflix, a Very British ‘Love Is Blind’

    The creators of a new version of the reality show, in which contestants agree to marry before meeting face to face, sought to challenge a nation’s archetypal reticence.Tom Stroud, a 38-year-old advertising consultant, sits on the floor of a 12-foot-square room on the reality dating show “Love is Blind: U.K.,” facing a blank wall. On the other side is Natasha Waters, a 32-year-old job counselor, who has just told Tom that he’s everything she’s looking for in a man. He’s flattered — but he needs to let her know that he’s interested in somebody else.“I can feel how good you are,” he begins tentatively. “Um … but … I’m thinking about, sort of, um,” he trails off. He stares off into the distance, sighs heavily, fidgets with a ballpoint pen. “I need to be really honest with you …” he says, after a long pause. “I don’t know if it’s romantic love … it could just be friendship.”It may be no surprise to learn that Stroud is from Britain. This is, after all, the country’s archetypal reticence on display — a contrast to the freewheeling earnestness and candor of the six seasons of the American version of “Love is Blind.” The greater emotional restraint of contestants on the spinoff show is one aspect that makes it extremely, unmistakably British.Nazleen Karim, the showrunner and an executive producer of the series, acknowledged that this inhibition had been a possible concern. “Initially, we were like, ‘Will the Brits be able to emote and be as effusive as the U.S. cast?’” she said in a recent video interview.“We knew the format of the show was so strong, and that the emotion would get there, but part of us was thinking, ‘Will they be able to do it? Will it take them more dates?’” Seeing that process play out against “the stereotype of the stiff upper lip,” she said, was part of the attraction of taking the show’s format outside the United States.That format, in which a group of men and women conduct a series of blind dates from different pods to decide whether to get engaged before meeting in person, builds on the success of other American shows, such as “The Bachelor” and “Married at First Sight,” that have combined marriage with reality TV. The most popular British show in the same style, “Love Island,” is not centered around wedlock.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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    Steve Martin Is Out. Who Will Play Walz and Vance on ‘S.N.L.’?

    Steve Martin is out, and the roles of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem settled. But the internet has been busy dream-casting the rest of the “S.N.L.” election ticket.The approach of another presidential election brings with it many questions: In what direction is the United States headed? Who will be our next president and vice president? And, most crucially, who will play them on “Saturday Night Live”?Election-season comedy sketches are an “S.N.L.” staple, providing cast members with opportunities to gain visibility for their impersonations of prominent politicians and — increasingly — for the show to tap into its network of celebrity guests, friends and spouses to play these roles. When new political figures come to national attention, we can’t help but indulge our inner Lorne Michaels and imagine who we’d cast to imitate them.The show’s plans were likely scrambled last month when President Biden announced that he would stand down as the Democratic presidential nominee. That paved the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket, and for Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to join as her running mate. On the Republican side, former President Donald J. Trump offered his vice-presidential slot to Senator JD Vance of Ohio.These are all characters likely to appear on “S.N.L.,” whose 50th season will begin on Sept. 28. And while the show hasn’t officially announced who it intends to cast in these key roles (and NBC declined to comment for this article), there is plenty of history and wild internet speculation to sift through. Let’s take a look at where these races currently stand.Kamala HarrisHarris’s increased prominence in the campaign should lead to the same on “S.N.L.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesRudolph has already won Emmy Awards for playing Harris on the show.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe front-runnerNecessity is the mother of invention, and now that “S.N.L.” needs a Harris impersonator to play a prominent role this fall, Maya Rudolph is clearly the mother to call on. An “S.N.L.” cast member from 2000 to 2007, Rudolph began playing Harris in guest appearances during the Democratic primaries in 2019, racking up some highly GIF-able moments and winning two Emmy Awards along the way. Rudolph appeared as Harris 10 times through 2021, and the woman herself, in social media posts, appeared to approve of the portrayal. “S.N.L.” has not confirmed that Rudolph will play Harris, but Deadline has reported that production on her Apple TV+ series, “Loot,” has been pushed back to make room for her return to the show — as everyone and their mother seems to be clamoring for.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