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    I’ve Never Watched Anything as Transformative as ‘Sailor Moon’

    The show is about friendship, yes, and also liberation that does not match the world’s expectations of femininity.The first lesbian relationship I saw portrayed on-screen was in “Sailor Moon.” Uranus and Neptune were two characters who seemed undeniably in love. The show is Japanese anime, though, and I could only watch the English-dubbed version that called them “cousins.” The titular Sailor Moon and the other Sailor Scouts are celestial superheroes sent across time to protect Earth from nefarious forces. In the human world, they take on the appearance of ordinary girls, but can transform into their fighting selves via personal totems. Sailor Moon often has a compact mirror and shouts, “Moon Prism Power, Makeup!” before transforming during battle and declaring, “In the name of the moon, I’ll punish you!” Swoon.“Sailor Moon” aired early on weekday mornings when I was in middle school, around 1995. I was a bookish tomboy in Compton, Calif., a working-class suburb full of Black and brown people, where superheroes looked more like gangsta rappers than anime characters. I went to Sunday school every week in stockings and Mary Janes and thought of femininity as a chore rather than a good time. I loved women but hated the imagined woman I was supposed to one day swell into, makeup and perfume and nail polish and gold jewelry signaling my arrival wherever I went like bells on a cat. In this vision, I worked and maintained a household and didn’t expect much acknowledgment for the effort — and certainly no fun.I grew up watching horror movies with my mother in the ’80s because she didn’t care about ratings systems and liked what she liked and wanted someone to watch with her, which explains a lot about me. I also watched cartoons freely, without being minded. Animation was a safe place. I controlled the VHS tapes, and my family would scatter whenever the opening of “The Little Mermaid” boomed into the house. In the world of cartoons, I was alone and unobserved. I think queer artists recognize this medium as a place of solace and fantasy — a secret world running parallel to the one in which L.G.B.T.Q. humans and people of color are targeted by book bans that want to annihilate both us and evidence of our existence.Comics have always been a place for dreaming, for silliness, for the disregard of rules that apply to anything from physics to the patriarchy. Yes, the medium can also be used to perpetuate dangerous and demeaning ideas, but the nature of the form makes room for fantasies both malicious and divine. The queer experience thus finds a home in animated worlds. Queer art can be a propagandist of possibility in a universe not always in favor of queer existence, and that is lifesaving. The queerness of “Sailor Moon” isn’t really about Sailor Moon, a.k.a. “champion kicker of ass in a Japanese schoolgirl skirt and tiara,” though. The world of “Sailor Moon” is interested in transformation, in upsetting expectations of presentation and value related to girlhood, masculinity, strength and gender roles. The show is about friendship, yes, and also liberation that does not match the world’s expectations of femininity. The series includes actual trans characters and a lesbian couple with superpowers, in case there is any doubt.Anime in the ’90s and 2000s had its hyperviolent giant-mechanical-suit boy culture down. Representation of my personal identity was not prioritized broadly speaking, but the iconic status of “Sailor Moon” within the queer community was no accident. Although the more direct Sapphic references were edited out of the English version, censorship couldn’t erase the show’s queer sensibility for me. I remember the scene with Uranus and Neptune. Neptune is stretched out on a chaise longue, asleep by their pool, and Uranus leans over and wakes her up, whining that she’s not paying attention to her: “It’s not fair, you know. You just go into your own world and leave me behind.” Cousins, my ass. The show does not let up on the attraction the girls have for Uranus, even though they aren’t supposed to be attracted now that it’s clear she’s a woman. Years later, in a Best Buy circa 2005, I found DVDs of the show’s uncut Japanese version with subtitles, which confirmed what I’d known all along: They were lovers! I also discovered the existence of the Sailor Star Lights — who possessed the earthly bodies of boys but fought as girls and underlined the show’s gender queerness in the fifth and final season. (That season didn’t air with the others in the ’90s.) I felt vindication followed immediately by the depression of a closeted queer holding onto fictional characters as a promise for something other than every predetermined choice of girlhood. But I also discovered I could be more than one thing in one body: I could be masculine and feminine, powerful and clumsy; I could have vices and gifts, and not one trait would have to be the defining quality. I could be liberated.The secret message of “Sailor Moon” might be that queerness is not just sexual (fight me); queerness is also existing under duress, where one’s instinct toward self-determination is a kind of spiritual expanse that grows from deep within the body and psyche then cascades out into an eventual shape unlike most others. Hulu has been streaming the show since 2014, broadening access to these inspirational figures. In “Sailor Moon,” the concept of transformation is about light, magic and power hidden in the ordinariness of living. There is nothing queerer than that (except maybe actual gay sex). Venita Blackburn is the author of “How to Wrestle a Girl,” “Black Jesus and Other Superheroes” and the forthcoming novel “Dead in Long Beach, California.” She is an associate professor of fiction at California State University, Fresno. More

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    How Anderson Cooper Deals With Grief and Memorializes His Family at Home

    How do you memorialize the people you loved and lost? Object by object, the CNN anchor is trying to figure it out.It took Anderson Cooper more than a year after his mother’s death to begin clearing out her apartment. It was an emotionally draining task, one that he put off — something his mother may have anticipated, because she left him a road map.He began finding notes she had left him, tucked away in drawers and sealed containers. Written in her hand on heavy stationery, they acted as a kind of treasure hunt to their shared grief.Mr. Cooper’s mother, the heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, was one of the most famous women in the world, courted by Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, photographed by Richard Avedon, and a muse to Truman Capote, who is believed to have based the character of Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” partly on her.Just sorting through her personal papers would have been challenging for her son after her death at the age of 95 in 2019.But the apartment was also the final resting place of objects that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s father, Wyatt Emory Cooper, an author and screenwriter who died in 1978 when Anderson was 10, and his older brother, Carter Cooper, who died in 1988, when they were both in their 20s, after jumping from his mother’s balcony.Next to a pair of satin trousers, Mr. Cooper came across a piece of paper: “These are Daddy’s pyjamas.”“Daddy’s glasses,” read another, left on top of a stack of spectacles tied with a ribbon.And then, tucked away in a plastic container, he found a white silk shirt next to a knitted skirt. “Blouse and skirt I was wearing when Carter died,” read the sheet of paper lying on top.Anderson Cooper, 56Occupation: CNN anchor, author and podcast hostOn processing the past: “I’m the last one left from this sort of interesting family that existed,” he said. “I just find it sort of haunting this idea that everyone just disappears.”When a person you love dies, you are left with memories, a mental film reel of the experiences you shared, the lessons they taught you and the refracted light of their love. And at the most basic level, you are also left with their stuff — often more stuff than you can keep.Among the notes Anderson Cooper found when he went to clean out his mother’s apartment was this one, left on top of a stack of glasses that had belonged to his father.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 56, began keeping voice memos on his phone as he was sorting through his mother’s belongings in 2021. They grew into a podcast on grief, “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” which began its second season in November.For decades, the longtime anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°” has chronicled other people’s suffering. Now, he has become a correspondent from the land of his own grief.He recently invited a reporter to his Manhattan home, in Greenwich Village, where he has displayed some of the objects he retrieved from his mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side.Ms. Vanderbilt, whose fashion designs were the subject of numerous magazine features, was fond of saying that “decorating is autobiography.” For her son, decorating has also been an exercise in choosing what to remember.The doors of his home — a historic firehouse he bought for $4.3 million in 2009 — open onto the space where the fire truck once stood. When he bought the building, there was one way to get upstairs — a steel spiral staircase — and two ways to get back down: that narrow staircase or a fireman’s pole.The cherry-red spiral staircase was initially the only way to get upstairs in the former firehouse. Mr. Cooper preserved it, but added another staircase.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesA living room bookcase is filled with antique books, including some that belonged to Mr. Cooper’s mother, his father and his Vanderbilt ancestors.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMr. Cooper worked with an architect to subdivide the four-story, warehouselike space into rooms. Both the spiral staircase and the fireman’s pole were preserved. But now, a wide staircase zigzags upstairs. The wall next to the main staircase serves as a gallery of his mother’s paintings, as well as portraits of her signed by well-known photographers.It’s a celebration of Ms. Vanderbilt’s much-publicized life: At the age of 10, she became a tabloid sensation after a custody battle pitted her wealthy mother against her wealthy aunt. As the heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, she inherited millions. But she was also a self-made woman, creating a line of jeans and a fashion empire that generated $100 million a year in revenue. She was married four times and had affairs with some of Hollywood’s leading men, including Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, who sent her adoring telegrams signed “The Feller on the White Horse.” She also wrote numerous books and painted prolifically, in a faux-naïf style.To the casual observer, there are only happy memories of her in Mr. Cooper’s home — of her legendary beauty, her talent and her connections to the famous people of her day.In the basement of the firehouse, Mr. Cooper is working his way through the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBut laced throughout are also hints of grief: On a side table is a Victorian calendar, made of intricately fashioned bronze, with three little windows for a day, date and month. “Friday,” says the first window. “22,” says the second. “July,” says the third.Mr. Cooper found the calendar on a shelf next to his mother’s bed. Then he realized what the date referred to: It was on July 22, 1988, that his brother jumped off the balcony of their mother’s 14-story apartment building, as she pleaded with him not to.After her son died, Ms. Vanderbilt moved multiple times, and the calendar went with her. But its dial never moved again, forever marking the moment of tragedy. “I was getting rid of my mom’s apartment, and I just didn’t want to let go of everything,” said Mr. Cooper, who now displays the calendar in his living room.It was three years after his brother’s death, in 1991, that Mr. Cooper discovered war reporting: After graduating from Yale University, he worked briefly as a fact checker for Channel One, a daily news program broadcast to schools. He lasted mere months before convincing a colleague to make him a fake press pass and loan him a Hi8 camcorder. In late 1991, he sneaked into Myanmar, where insurgents were fighting to overthrow the military dictatorship and sold his first TV story.The Victorian calendar that Mr. Cooper found near his mother’s bed, which still shows the day of his brother’s death: July 22, 1988.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMaansi Srivastava/The New York TimesIn 1992, he covered famine in Somalia. In 1993, Sarajevo. In 1994, he crossed a bridge into Rwanda. When he looked down, he saw bodies caught on the rocks, their arms flailing in the water. It was at the edges of the world, in places of extreme suffering, that he discovered he could feel again, he said.When he was 10 and his mother came to tell him that his father had died of a heart attack, he remembers crying — a little, he said. And then almost never again.He pulled inward, learning to control his emotions, he said. Among his earliest impulses was the desire to be fully independent. One of his first appearances in the pages of this newspaper was in a story about a lemonade stand he helped run. He got his own bank account, and after his father’s death, he began working as a child model for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.He retreated even further after his brother’s death, when Mr. Cooper was 21.Tracing two lines in the air, he said: “I sort of live in this middle ground of no high highs and no low lows.”He continued: “The only time I felt stuff is when things were so extreme that you couldn’t help but feel — where it was so overwhelming, terrifying, tragic that through, like, osmosis, it overcame all of the sort of things I had worked up to prevent myself from feeling,”But it was a fleeting solution. “I would come back home,” he said, “and I just felt dead.”The death of his mother and the subsequent birth of his sons — who are now 3 and almost 2 — made him take stock. (Mr. Cooper is co-parenting his children with his former partner, Benjamin Maisani, 50, an entrepreneur and nightclub owner.) He described the sadness that he used to see in his mother’s eyes. He doesn’t want his sons to see that in him.Photographs of Carter Cooper, Mr. Cooper’s brother who died when they were in their 20s.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBy now, he is down to the last 70 or so boxes of his mother’s belongings. Unpacking them has meant unboxing the real estate in his mind.A few months ago, he was in the basement of his townhouse, working his way through the containers, when he opened a box of his father’s papers and discovered an essay his father, who died of a heart attack at 50, had never published. Its title: “The importance of grieving.”Among Mr. Cooper’s earliest memories is of falling asleep curled up like a puppy on his father’s lap, while his father typed late into the night.Alone in the basement, Mr. Cooper began to read the essay. A few pages in was a description of what happens to a child who doesn’t grieve: “When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life with a sadness for which he cannot find an appropriate explanation.”Mr. Cooper stopped midsentence, taking off his glasses. For several seconds, he was silent.“I read this quote and I realized,” he said finally, his voice breaking, that “this is exactly what I’ve done.”Last year, he invited his podcast listeners to share their stories of loss. The hotline he created filled up with more than 46 hours of voice mail messages. Listening in his basement, alone, as he unpacked his mother’s boxes, he was overwhelmed.He has arrived at a new stage of grief, he said. He now feels “a welling,” he said, “that is underneath me at all times.”Mr. Cooper shows off the gallery of his mother’s paintings and photos that he created in the stairwell of his townhouse.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesAnd for once, he is feeling it in the city where he was born, mere miles from the Upper East Side, where his father and brother both died too young. He is feeling it without needing to go to a foreign country.“Here,” he said, “just in regular conversations with people.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Revisits His ‘Illusion of Suffering’ on Broadway

    As with so many family reunion plays, the squabbling Lafayette siblings in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate” dislodge their share of skeletons from the closets of their childhood home, a former plantation in southern Arkansas. But here those secrets, hovering over everything and everyone, may be actual skeletons, and worse. The increasingly unsettling revelations power what The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called a “very fine, subversively original new play” at its Off Broadway premiere in 2014 at the Signature Theater.So subversive and so original that it took almost a decade to reach Broadway. Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient whose works include bold reimaginings of “The Octoroon” and the 15th-century play “Everyman,” got there a bit earlier when he contributed original material to a 2022 revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Second Stage’s production of “Appropriate,” which is in previews at the Helen Hayes Theater and opens on Dec. 18, is his first original work on Broadway after nearly a half-dozen New York productions.As it happens, two of the three actors playing the siblings had their own shared history. Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Corey Stoll (“Billions”) were a year apart at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York, but they didn’t work together until Stoll briefly joined the cast of the Paulson-led TV series “Ratched” in 2020. (She fantasized about sawing his leg off during sex, he squashed a leech with his bare hand, and she tried to boil him alive in a hydrotherapy tub — all in the span of two episodes.)The two actors joined Jacobs-Jenkins and the director, Lila Neugebauer (“The Waverly Gallery,” Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Everybody”), backstage at the Helen Hayes last month to discuss catharsis, sibling rivalry and the tyranny of stage directions. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Michael Esper, Stoll, Natalie Gold and Paulson in the Broadway production at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLila didn’t direct “Appropriate” Off Broadway, but the two of you have been in each other’s orbit for a while.BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS We actually met at the Humana Festival, where the show premiered in 2013.LILA NEUGEBAUER I was there with a different play.JACOBS-JENKINS Shortly after “Appropriate” happened at the Signature, Lila directed a production of it at Juilliard. I just knew instantly that she had grasped something about the undercurrents and the essential energies of the play.Sarah and Corey, when did you come on board?SARAH PAULSON I read the play in September of 2021. I hadn’t read anything as complicated and deep and funny in a very, very long time, and I said yes almost immediately.COREY STOLL Right in the depth of the pandemic, my agent sent me a stack of plays. It was like: “Since you’re not doing anything, I just want you to read all these plays.” And this one was so clearly the one to do.One character alludes to “the universality of suffering,” but there’s suffering and then there’s suffering. You’ve got these three siblings and all the bad things they’ve done, even criminal things …PAULSON It’s not me who’s done the criminal things. Write that down.STOLL Sarah is a real advocate for her character. You [to Paulson] cannot stand people talking ill of her.PAULSON It’s easy to do when a person isn’t thinking critically or deeply about who she is.My point is that these actions pale in comparison to the suffering inflicted on the play’s Black characters, whom we never meet. It feels almost like that line of dialogue is trying to level a playing field that ought not be leveled. Am I reading too much into the text?JACOBS-JENKINS When I wrote it, I was really interested in this writer named Dion Boucicault. He has this essay, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” where he says the sole purpose of everything in the theater is to create an illusion of suffering that then creates something cathartic in the audience. I believe that everyone onstage is suffering. They all believe they are suffering. But how do we judge — how can we judge — someone else as suffering or not? I think that’s one of the games that the play is trying to get us to play.Have these ideas also evolved for you, Lila, now that you have directed “Appropriate” twice?NEUGEBAUER The first time, the play struck me on more theoretical terms. Now I feel more of an invitation to have complicated feelings about these characters. Every character has done something that someone in the audience or someone onstage might feel is questionable or strange or other. Every person walking the planet is the star of their own lives. Therefore, it feels like the thing that’s happening to them is the most significant thing that could ever be happening to anyone.“The play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic,” said Paulson, center, with Alyssa Emily Marvin, left, and Esper.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe presence of siblings can be a pretty quick reminder that there are other people in the world. Is it hard creating that rapport?PAULSON It doesn’t hurt that we know each other and have worked together, but I would argue that the play does a lot of that work in terms of how to create the sibling dynamic.STOLL There’s a momentum to the arguments between these two. At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy. Even though that conflict is still very hot, and there is still a whole lifetime of resentment, that intimacy is there.PAULSON And I want to stress that we are missing Michael Esper, the third end of the triangle, who is wonderful.I remember Larissa FastHorse said “The Thanksgiving Play,” with its all-white Broadway cast, was a response to what she had been told about who was castable. Young Jean Lee has written great works, and “Straight White Men” was the one to reach Broadway. Now “Appropriate” has an all-white cast. Does this say anything about the American theater today?JACOBS-JENKINS There’s a phenomenon that’s been written about in academia called the “white life novel.” “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin is an example. Zora Neale Hurston has a book called “Seraph on the Suwanee.” It’s this thing where Black writers or Black-identified writers will write one thing that’s all white people. I think this is often an experiment in trying to get the viewer or even an industry to own its own blind spots.I’ve talked a lot about reading The Times’s review of “Stick Fly” by Lydia Diamond, which is an amazing family drama that was critiqued for not being enough about race and class in America and for being melodramatic. And then an equally wonderful play by Tracy Letts called “August: Osage County” was praised for being familiar by the same critic. There was no mention of the way that I think Tracy was actually engaging in very smart ways with whiteness and Indigenous presence. That double standard was very informative to me as a young writer who is constantly asked to do articles for The Times about Black drama.Honestly, everybody onstage is a political statement. Nobody’s a neutral body. And until you can talk about that, there’s nothing to pat ourselves on the back about as an art form in terms of how we do or don’t deal with these issues. I love Tennessee Williams. I love “The Piano Lesson” by August Wilson. No one calls “The Piano Lesson” a family drama. They call it about the Black experience in America. No one ever talks about “A Raisin in the Sun” as one of our best family dramas. I want to be able to love and own these things equally. And I feel like even this question is part of that continuum of things I have to address that no one else has to address when we make work in America.Can I ask about the stage directions in the script? They are ——JACOBS-JENKINS Chaos.They do sometimes go on for a page and a half. It reminded me of reading Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.JACOBS-JENKINS When I started writing this, I was drunk on Williams and O’Neill. The reading experience is different than the experience of seeing the piece in a theatrical space. Your task as a playwright is to light up the things inside of people that lead them to the most electric choice. And that’s just as true for the reader. You’re trying to inspire the reader to bring more than just something schematic or familiar to the script.And when the script reaches the three of you, do you see those directions as marching orders?PAULSON It depends. Most of the plays I’ve done have been by people like Tennessee Williams or Lanford Wilson, people who were already dead. I’ll read a Williams stage direction and think, “Is that what Laurette Taylor did? Because I definitely want to do that if she did it.” For me, they can be incredibly evocative and other times they feel almost directorial.STOLL I tend to bristle against them in film and television because I think they’re often overprescribed, but here I’ve found them to be really helpful. Look, I’m happy with any help I can get.“At first, it just seems like these are two people who despise each other. Then you get to the second act where the whole play downshifts a bit, and we can find an intimacy,” Stoll said of the characters that he and Paulson portray. Erik Tanner for The New York TimesHow about you, Lila? If they can be overly directorial, where does that leave you?NEUGEBAUER This is a bit of a spoiler, but there’s a bunch of information in the script about what might happen at the end of the play. I feel that the writer is spell casting with that text. He is giving me and the designers this spectacular provocation to use our imaginations, to make that spell manifest. It’s within the power of our theatrical machinery to show pretty much anything, but everything that happens onstage also has emotional information. It’s not just a literal event.In other words, Branden, I don’t think they’re listening to you.JACOBS-JENKINS Actors love to say, “The first thing I do is cross out all the stage directions.” And I’m like, “If we’re in the erasure business, I just take my delete button and now you have nothing to say.”A lot has happened in the 10 years since “Appropriate” premiered. How has that affected either the play itself or the way you think it will be received?JACOBS-JENKINS We definitely didn’t transfer to Broadway 10 years ago. So that’s a sign that something has shifted, maybe? The play was originally set in 2011, and there was a big debate about whether to update it. I didn’t think I could, because these people would look like true idiots if they had not paid attention to what everyone else has paid attention to since then.NEUGEBAUER I do think there has been a semi-mainstreaming of a certain degree of race consciousness in America that would make the events in this play not quite make sense if it were set in 2023. My suspicion is that audiences will bring a somewhat more nuanced vocabulary to it now. They have a different tool kit. And that’s going to be very interesting. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Calls Hunter Biden ‘the Son Donald Trump Never Had’

    Biden is accused of living extravagantly while evading taxes. Kimmel described his alleged spending as an “early 2000s Charlie Sheen-caliber performance.”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.Prodigal SonLast week, a federal grand jury charged Hunter Biden, the president’s son, with scheming to evade taxes on income from foreign businesses. The indictment accuses him of spending millions on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes.”On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel said Biden was “like the son Donald Trump never had.”“They say Hunter made more than $1.6 million in A.T.M. withdrawals. He spent around $683,000 on payments to various women; over $237,000 on health, beauty and pharmacy, which, you thought you had a long receipt at CVS.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“One hundred and eighty-eight thousand on adult entertainment, and a little over $71,000 on rehab and re-rehab and re-rehab for a grand total of almost $5 million, which is, I mean, that’s like an early 2000s Charlie Sheen-caliber performance. It’s impressive.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“No presidential family member in recent memory comes with as much baggies — uh, I mean, baggage — as Hunter, and now the law has finally caught up with him. ” — KAL PENN, guest host of “The Daily Show”“It’s shocking to think the presidential race might come down to who goes to jail first: Hunter Biden or Donald Trump. Although, maybe if we’re lucky, the two of them might end up in a cell together? Like, you throw George Santos in there, and I am watching that show.” — KAL PENN“The White House has reiterated, which, they reiterated that President Biden will not pardon Hunter if he is convicted of any crime, although they didn’t say anything about not dressing him up as a turkey next Thanksgiving and pardoning him then.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines ($700 Million Investment Edition)“The L.A. Dodgers signed superstar Shohei Ohtani to the biggest contract in all of sports history, $700 million. Wild, right? That is $1 for every minute it takes to watch one single baseball game.” — KAL PENN“The Dodgers will pay him $700 million over the next 10 years. Hot dogs, from now on, will be priced at $500 apiece.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ohtani is leaving the Angels organization, which was a tough decision, but, ultimately, he’s saying he just wanted to explore a different part of the freeway and now he’s coming here.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And also, let me just say, it is so great that Asian kids have another athlete to look up to, am I right? But let’s acknowledge it’s also a lot of pressure: [imitating child] ‘Dad, I got 100 on my chemistry test.’ [imitating parent] ‘But only 80 on your fastball — go outside and practice!’” — KAL PENNThe Bits Worth WatchingAfter three weeks off-air, Stephen Colbert told the story of his burst appendix on Monday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe pop singer Tate McRae will perform on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutMargot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. (“Barbie”)“Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” and “Succession” are among this year’s top Golden Globe nominees. More

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    Review: In ‘Translations,’ What’s Lost When Language Is Looted

    An exquisite revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play at the Irish Repertory Theater is the first of three there by the Irish author.A drunken philosopher alights on what may be his pinnacle argument: That we are shaped not by the facts of history, but by our imagination of it. “We must never cease renewing those images,” he says, or we’ll stop living.That thirsty scholar is Hugh (Seán McGinley), who runs one of Ireland’s clandestine (and illegal) hedge-schools, teaching a rustic assembly of adult pupils out of his dilapidated shanty. “Translations,” from 1980, is the first play in the Friel Project, a season of three works at the Irish Repertory Theater. A modest yet exquisite revival directed by Doug Hughes, it makes a rigorous case not only for Brian Friel’s pre-eminence as an interpreter of Irish national identity, but for the vitality of art in deciphering life.It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage. A rebellion in 1798 led not to independence but to forced union with Britain in the United Kingdom. And now, British soldiers, including the listless romantic Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian), are mapping the countryside and anglicizing Irish place-names. One of Hugh’s two sons, Owen (Seth Numrich), has become not just a translator, but a champion for the “King’s good English,” more enthused about the endeavor than even Yolland. The actors lend the fraternity between these young men an energy and curiosity that emphasizes the consequences of what they’re doing: renaming a homeland out from under its inhabitants’ feet.Yolland is the one who hesitates, though not on moral grounds: A hapless son of empire, he fetishizes feeling like an outsider, growing sweet on the sound of Irish vowels and even sweeter on Maire (Mary Wiseman), a milkmaid with her sights set on America. Their giddy, headlong infatuation is fueled by mutual incomprehension, before a sharp turn whose potentially tragic fallout Wiseman plays with affecting transparency.Friel’s shrewd spin on the pastoral drama is grounded in the convictions of these carefully drawn characters. But the play also confronts soaring questions about the nature of language — how it connects people to their homes (the trodden-earth set is by Charlie Corcoran) and to one another, and what happens when a native tongue is erased.Owen Campbell delivers a quieter register of heartbreak as Hugh’s humbler son, Manus, whose dream of preserving homegrown education, with Maire at his side, becomes another colonial casualty. Embodying extreme ends of the communicative spectrum are Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi), a presumed mute who struggles to articulate her name, and Jimmy Jack (John Keating), a disheveled bookworm who waxes at length in Greek and Latin about his crush on Athene, the goddess of wisdom.Dressed in clay-colored peasant garb by Alejo Vietti, and tenderly lit by Michael Gottlieb, each of these characters is illustrated with a Rembrandt-like specificity. As their portraits make clear, it’s essential to keep reimagining the plight of those consumed by imperial appetites. Doing so may lead to deeper understanding among us.TranslationsThrough Dec. 31 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Golden Globes to Announce 2024 Nominations

    New owners have beefed up the voting pool in an effort to move the prizes past scandals of recent years.To many, the Golden Globe Awards are a perfect example of Hollywood’s two faces.In public, the entertainment capital plays along: It’s an honor just to be nominated, giggle tee-hee, this event is an absolute delight.In private, smiles drop and eyes roll: The prizes are not seen as meaningful markers of artistic excellence, but there is no way around them. From a business perspective, the Globes represent a crucial marketing opportunity for winter films and TV shows.The nominations for the 81st ceremony, which will be televised by CBS on Jan. 7, will be announced on Monday morning by Cedric the Entertainer and Wilmer Valderrama.The Golden Globes have long been positioned as an important campaign stop for Oscar hopefuls. Nomination voting for the 96th Academy Awards begins on Jan. 11.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?  More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Christmas Specials and a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ Recap

    Several networks present holiday-themed specials, and Bravo airs “A Decade of Rumors and Lies,” hosted by Lisa Vanderpump.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBIG BROTHER REINDEER GAMES 8 p.m. on CBS. I honestly can’t think of another time where a reality show dedicated a season to creating a holiday vibe. On this spinoff of the long-running competition show, nine previous contestants will come back to play six episodes of holiday-themed games, and the winner will walk away with a $100,000 stocking stuffer — it doesn’t get much more holly and jolly than that.BARRY MANILOW’S A VERY BARRY CHRISTMAS 10 p.m. on NBC. Manilow will be joined by a 24-piece band to perform his greatest hits and a couple of holiday songs at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, where Manilow regularly performs. Rumor has it that Santa will make an appearance — as long as he can pull himself away from the roulette table at the Bellagio.TuesdayFrom left: Tom Schwartz, Lisa Vanderpump, Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval in a 2022 episode of “Vanderpump Rules.”Nicole Weingart/BravoVANDERPUMP RULES: A DECADE OF RUMORS AND LIES 10:15 p.m. on Bravo. It is hard to believe that these restaurant employees have been providing endless drama and entertainment for an entire decade. Ahead of the premiere of the 11th season in January, Lisa Vanderpump (the reason we are all here) narrates this special, which looks back at some of the previous seasons’ best moments.WednesdayCMT PRESENTS: A CODY JOHNSON CHRISTMAS 9 p.m. on CMT. Christmas is headed to Texas this week: Cody Johnson is joined by his family on this special to discuss holiday memories and traditions. He will also perform some classic holiday songs with a country flair.ThursdayTHE CLIP SHOW: HOLIDAY EDITION 8 p.m. on NBC. There’s nothing that can bond a family together quite like laughing at people getting humiliated on TV. Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila host this show that is a bit like “American’s Funniest Home Videos,” but all the mishaps have to do with ice- and snow-related accidents or awkward presents being given and received.FridayNATIONAL CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTING 8 p.m. on CBS. It was December of 1923 when President Calvin Coolidge held a celebration outside of the White House with a decorated Christmas tree and a performance from the U.S. Marine Band. The tradition carries on 100 years later with performances from Darren Criss, Dionne Warwick and St. Vincent, to name a few.SaturdayWill Ferrell, left, in “Elf.”Alan Markfield/New Line ProductionsELF (2003) 7 p.m. on AMC. Be warned, you should have waffles, maple syrup and marshmallows on hand while watching this movie because it has been known to induce that craving (or, if you don’t have a problematic sweet tooth, it might just turn you off those things). Will Ferrell stars as Buddy, the human who thought his whole life that he was an elf. He ventures to New York City to find his real dad, but on the way gets some tough reality checks and somehow charms a very sweet and blond Zooey Deschanel.DIE HARD (1988) 9 p.m. on MTV. It is officially that time of the year for the annual fight with your weird uncle about whether or not “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie. In the film, John McClane (Bruce Willis) goes to a holiday party to try to reconnect with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia). During the party, terrorists take over the building and hold everyone hostage — and John has to spring into action. It does take place on Christmas Eve, and there wouldn’t have been a plot if there weren’t an office holiday party, so my vote is that it is a Christmas movie. (But I also watch “Love Actually” and “The Holiday” all year long, so I don’t know if my opinion should be trusted.)SundayWILLIE NELSON’S 90TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION 8 p.m. on CBS. Recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in April 2023, this celebration of Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday will finally be broadcast to let those of us who couldn’t make it to the live show join in. The event is hosted by Jennifer Garner, Chelsea Handler, Woody Harrelson, Ethan Hawke, Helen Mirren and Owen Wilson. Nelson performs along with Sheryl Crow, Snoop Dogg, Norah Jones and the Chicks.Matt Bomer, left, and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeFELLOW TRAVELERS 9 p.m. on Showtime. This is the new show of the fall that I’m surprised that we aren’t all talking about. The story is, at its core, a love story between Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). But on the side, it is also a political thriller that dives into the policies and public narratives that were affecting gay communities throughout the second half of the 20th century. The story jumps back and forth in time, from the 1980s, when Tim is sick and is reconnecting with Hawkins, to a different past decade every episode, to explain the intricacies of their relationship. More

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    Review: In ‘How to Dance in Ohio,’ Making Autism Sing

    A musical about seven autistic young adults, played by seven autistic young actors, breaks new ground on Broadway.It would have been enough of a first for a Broadway musical to tell a respectful or even vaguely authentic story about autistic people. On the rare occasions we have seen such characters represented in commercial productions, they have mostly been objects of pity, mockery or fear.So it is a welcome change that the seven autistic characters in “How to Dance in Ohio” are presented, without condescension, as young adults a lot like most others, albeit with unusual gifts and challenges. That they are also played by autistic performers makes the feel-good show, which opened on Sunday at the Belasco Theater, more than a first: It’s a milestone.With all that groundbreaking, perhaps it is no surprise that the production is otherwise very conventional, sometimes dispiritingly so. Just as the characters struggle to conform to the expectations of a neurotypical world, you feel the musical doing a similar thing, looking to traditional models (like “The Prom”) instead of offbeat ones (like “Kimberly Akimbo”) that would be a better fit. And though the result is sometimes uplifting, the uplift comes at the expense of the depth and complexity the show might have achieved were it not so intent on cheerful persuasion.Certainly in its brightness it is nothing like its source material, a 2015 documentary also called “How to Dance in Ohio.” Set at Amigo Family Counseling, a real Columbus mental health center for autistic people, the film, by Alexandra Shiva, highlights the experiences of several clients preparing for a spring formal. Over about 16 weeks, they practice specific applications of the life skills Dr. Emilio Amigo and his staff have been teaching them more generally, whether those skills are social (how to ask for a date), emotional (how to deal with rejection) or physical (how to do the Wobble).The documentary’s tone is objective and thus often dour. Not all its stories are happy: We see some clients struggle to speak, let alone dance. Even for the others, the excitement of the event is countered by fear — both theirs and their parents’, whose faces have been worn by years of worry. By not making the obstacles seem easily surmountable, the movie respects everyone’s hard work, regardless of success.The musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, features a cast of young actors who are all making their Broadway debuts.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo replicate that approach, however truthful, would be a big downer — and, for a commercial show, a fool’s errand. So the musical, directed by Sammi Cannold, instead starts from an assumption of ability and excellence. The young actors, all making their Broadway debuts, are highly skilled, sparkly cute and perfectly comfortable holding the stage.That makes their characters seem perfectly comfortable too. When best friends Caroline (Amelia Fei) and Jessica (Ashley Wool) go to Macy’s with their mothers to buy twirly gowns, you feel that they don’t need, as in the movie, constant assistance and reassurance — just a credit card. And though Tommy, a superhero fan preparing for his driving test, tells us he has “trouble making facial expressions,” the evidence of Conor Tague’s performance says otherwise. His facial expressions, like those of any good actor, would be legible from the back of the Belasco.Lacking the movie’s fundamental contrast of hopes and abilities, the show, by Rebekah Greer Melocik (book and lyrics) and Jacob Yandura (music), focuses on flimsier conflicts. Jessica doesn’t like Caroline’s (unseen) boyfriend, who’s too possessive. Remy (Desmond Luis Edwards) gets some hostile comments on his YouTube cosplay channel. Drew (Liam Pearce) is concerned about attending the prominent university that accepts him. (He’s an engineering savant.) Mel (Imani Russell) has trouble handling criticism once promoted to Head of Reptiles at the local Paws and Claws.Only Marideth (Madison Kopec) retains some of the complexity of the real character she’s based on, at least as seen in the film. When upset by social situations she cannot handle, she may freeze in fear or race out of the room, often into the comfort of the alternative universes she visits on her computer or the real-world facts she collects compulsively. (“You have more bones in your feet than in the rest of your body combined.”) This outlook is beautifully established in “Unlikely Animals,” a number that, like many of the show’s songs, has a thoughtful and poetic (and on-the-nose) hook. “Australia is a lesson,” she sings, “in what isolation and distance can do.”Even so, “How to Dance in Ohio” does not permit much doubt that Marideth and the others will have fun at the formal and achieve at least moderate independence beyond it. To take up the slack, the authors have displaced the story’s crisis onto Dr. Amigo (Caesar Samayoa) himself. An anodyne and often peripheral figure in the movie, he here makes a series of peremptory and bizarre missteps that, in the doldrums of the second act, alienate him from his clients, their parents and, for good measure, his own daughter, Ashley (Cristina Sastre), who works at the clinic and likewise blunders in her dealings with Mel. We are meant to understand that it’s not the autistic characters who need to change but the neurotypical ones.Foreground from left: Wool as Jessica, Desmond Luis Edwards as Remy and Caesar Samayoa as Dr. Emilio Amigo (Caesar Samayoa), who runs a mental health center for autistic people.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFair enough, but that story, warmly acted if clumsily executed in a series of impossible hairpin turns, isn’t as distinctive or compelling as the one the movie tells.This being a musical, the compensation is meant to be in the songs, and there is much about Yandura’s music and Melocik’s lyrics to admire. The opening, “Today Is,” in which we meet the clients as they build their lives from bits of memorized routines, is cleverly set to scale-like phrases reminiscent of piano exercises. The expected number at Macy’s turns out to be not for Caroline and Jessica but for their mothers, with the touching refrain “I want to see a picture of my daughter getting ready for the dance.” Throughout, the phrase “how to,” sung by almost everyone as they stumble their way forward — “how to set clear boundaries,” “how to manage long-term grief” — suggests that people have more in common than their different kinds of wiring might suggest.But stepping too hard on the dramatic accelerator, the book strips its gears as it goes along, often resorting to advocacy jargon (“nothing about us without us”) and flat-out cheerleading. Nor can the minimal production do much to deliver the oomph it clearly wants as the story reaches for a Broadway ending.Perhaps it’s enough that “How to Dance in Ohio” offers solace and encouragement in a mild, conventional package. (There are cool-down spaces for those who need them, as one of the actors explains in welcoming the audience.) Doing sweet, reparative work for any part of humanity means doing sweet, reparative work for it all.How to Dance in OhioAt the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; howtodanceinohiomusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More