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    ‘Duke & Roya’ Review: He’s Got Swagger, She’s No-Nonsense

    Jay Ellis stars as an American rapper who falls for his Afghan interpreter at an Army base in Charles Randolph-Wright’s new play.With an American behaving brashly at an overseas military base, getting locals into trouble and considering consequences only later, “Duke & Roya” feels like scarcely more than a retooling of “Madama Butterfly.” Like that old problematic chestnut, Charles Randolph-Wright’s new play is not without its pleasures, but lacking soaring melodrama, it’s hard to believe in its music.Here, the visiting Westerner is Duke (Jay Ellis), a hip-hop star at the height of his fame. In a present-day press interview, he recalls his visit to Afghanistan in 2016, during the country’s U.S. occupation, to perform for troops at a large air base near Kabul. The play, which opened Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, then flashes back to his arrival and his immediate attraction to his Afghan interpreter, Roya (Stephanie Nur).She’s a no-nonsense type, and he’s always on vacation mode. But Roya, who works for a women’s education organization, has done her research, and knows that the party boy, born to British and American diplomats, was once a bookish English major. His quoting Rumi and James Baldwin impresses her, and Duke appreciates how she challenges him.It’s the standard romance of a down-to-earth civilian who grounds a starry hot shot, and Ellis and Nur lend it enjoyable chemistry.Charm comes naturally to Ellis, a classic romantic lead in the HBO series “Insecure” who makes an amiable stage debut here. His swaggering Duke teases out the word “serendipitous” with the cascading, sweet-talking drawl of a Southern rapper, and he adeptly handles a few verses (penned by Ronvé O’Daniel). Nur finds appealing spaces for wit and agency in her more reserved, reactive role.But does the play know there’s a war on?Despite an opening scene of martial seriousness, Randolph-Wright treats Afghanistan like a Harlequin romance playground. When the two sneak out of the base for Duke to buy a piece of lapis lazuli, they’re thrown into unsurprising peril. Danger! Excitement! Two worlds collide!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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    ‘Ironheart’ Review: Marvel Follows Suit

    Our biggest cinematic universe ends its current phase with a Disney+ series about a young engineering genius with Ironman dreams.Marvel Studios tries to give some order to its oozing lava flow of movies and television shows by dividing them into “phases.” These divisions seem to be determined simply by the calendar rather than by anything happening onscreen. We are currently in Phase 5 — six features, eight series — and it has been defined less by themes or story arcs than by the odor of desperation coming off dreary films like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels.”Phase 5 ends with the release of “Ironheart,” a series about the young tech genius Riri Williams, who was introduced back in Phase 4 in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” (Three of six episodes premiere on Tuesday, on Disney+.) If you’re still hanging on with Marvel, this isn’t the one that will make you give up; it’s a respectable piece of work. But it’s not going to revive anyone’s flagging interest.“Ironheart” opens with Riri (Dominique Thorne) back in school at M.I.T., her Wakanda adventures in the past. She is obsessed with building her own Iron Man-inspired armored suit, telling skeptical teachers that it will be a boon for first responders, but she’s forced to crowdsource funds by doing other students’ projects for them.When M.I.T. loses patience and kicks her out, she heads home to the show’s setting, working-class Chicago. Her determination to find the money needed to perfect the suit brings her into contact with a criminal gang led by a man (played by Anthony Ramos of “Hamilton” and “In the Heights”) whose hooded cloak gives him supernatural powers.As Riri at first abets the gang in its elaborate capers and then turns against it, the usual array of Marvel elements is on offer. Action is lower in the mix than you might expect for a show built around a battle suit, and the fights and chases are not very imaginative, though the imperfections of Riri’s nuclear-powered suit allow for Iron Man-style physical comedy.Fan service is prominent — the back story of the hooded cloak’s powers involves the introduction of characters from various Marvel mythologies. Spoiler consciousness prevents revealing who some cast members, like Sacha Baron Cohen, are playing; one addition that has been made public is the magician and Doctor Strange associate Zelma Stanton (Regan Aliyah).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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    Lynn Hamilton, a Steady Presence on ‘Sanford and Son,’ Dies at 95

    A former Broadway actress, she was a no-nonsense foil for the unruly Fred Sanford. She also warmed hearts with a recurring role on the “The Waltons.”Lynn Hamilton, who became a familiar presence in American living rooms in the 1970s playing Donna Harris, the elegant and unflinching girlfriend of Redd Foxx’s irascible Fred Sanford, on “Sanford and Son,” and Verdie Foster, a dignified matriarch, on “The Waltons,” died on Thursday at her home in Chicago. She was 95.Her death was confirmed by her former manager and publicist, the Rev. Calvin Carson.Before landing her breakout television roles, Ms. Hamilton had considerable experience onstage and onscreen. She made her Broadway debut in 1959 in “Only in America,” in a cast that also included Alan Alda. She appeared in John Cassavetes’s first film as a director, “Shadows” (1958); two films starring Sidney Poitier, “Brother John” (1971) and “Buck and the Preacher” (1972); and “Lady Sings the Blues,” the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic starring Diana Ross.Still, almost no experience could have prepared her for working with Mr. Foxx, a hallowed comedian who grew up on the streets — he palled around Harlem with the young Malcolm X during their hustler days — and made his name with nightclub routines that were socially conscious and unapologetically dirty.“Sanford and Son,” a groundbreaking NBC hit, broke racial barriers. A predominantly Black sitcom, it starred Mr. Foxx as Fred Sanford, a cantankerous and wholly unfiltered Los Angeles junk man, and Demond Wilson as Lamont, his sensible, long-suffering son.Ms. Hamilton was originally cast, as a landlady, for only one episode during the show’s first season. She made enough of an impact to earn a regular role later that season as Donna, Fred’s girlfriend and, eventually, fiancée.Ms. Hamilton’s character and Mr. Foxx’s came close to getting married, but they never did. Tandem Productions/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWe 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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    ‘Baby Farm’ Is a Harrowing Nigerian Drama

    Inspired by the bleak, real-life phenomenon of Nigerian “baby factories,” the Netflix series nonetheless manages not to be a didactic, punishing slog.The five-part Nigerian thriller “Baby Farm,” on Netflix (in English and Nigerian Pidgin, with subtitles), follows a desperate young woman trapped in a sadistic maternity-care facility. Adanna (Onyinye Odokoro) finds herself pregnant, alone and broke in Lagos when a seemingly friendly sex worker ushers her into the welcoming arms of the Evans Foundation, a glam nongovernmental organization that claims to help women like her. Once there, the blond, British Sister Barb (Jenny Stead) really lays on the high-pressure sales tactics.Even though Adanna is uncomfortable, she agrees to move in. She is worried that living outside might damage her gestating baby, and she has nowhere else to turn. She can leave if she wants to, right? “Leave where, exactly?” replies Sister Barb.Adanna’s relief to have food and medical care is short-lived. She isn’t in a comfortable place for women to receive prenatal care; she is in a terrifying, abusive prison, run by Barb and her cartoonishly evil husband (Langley Kirkwood), the doctor and face of the organization. “You are here for one thing and one thing only: making babies,” he bellows. Once delivered, the babies are ripped from their mothers’ arms and sold to wealthy couples.The third prong here is Cherise (Rita Dominic), a Nigerian actress poised for a big break and international success. She and her husband are trying everything they can to have a baby, but nothing has worked. She regrets speaking so openly with the press about her miscarriages because now gossip bloggers hound her about it. Legal paths to adoption are off the table because of her husband’s arrest record, and her desperation and despair are so profound that she is willing to turn a blind eye to some of the sketchiness surrounding the Evans Foundation. She wants a baby through any means necessary.“Baby Farm” feels like a less-turgid “Handmaid’s Tale,” faster and soapier. The show moves between gutting, grounded moments and campy melodrama, which tempers the misery substantially. The topics at hand here are among the heaviest imaginable, and while this show is not based on a true story, Nigerian “baby factories” are real. But “Baby Farm” manages not to be a didactic, punishing slog. It is energetic, and even as its characters consider themselves utterly stuck, the story really moves. More

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    Bobby Sherman, Easygoing Teen Idol of the 1960s and ’70s, Dies at 81

    First on TV and then on the pop charts, he became so popular so young, he once said, that he “didn’t really have time to have an ego.”Bobby Sherman, an actor and singer who became an easygoing pop-music star and teen idol in the late 1960s, and who continued performing until well into the 1980s, has died. He was 81. His wife, Brigitte Poublon, announced his death on Tuesday morning on Instagram, providing no other details. She revealed in March that Mr. Sherman had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, though she did not specify the type of cancer.Mr. Sherman was 25 when he was cast in the comedy western that made him a star. On “Here Come the Brides,” a one-hour ABC series, he played a bashful 19th-century Seattle lumberjack. George Gent, reviewing the show for The New York Times, declared Mr. Sherman “winning as the shy and stuttering youngest brother,” although he predicted only that the show “should be fun.”“Here Come the Brides” ran for only two seasons (1968-70), but that was more than long enough for Mr. Sherman to attract a following: He was said to be receiving 25,000 pieces of fan mail every week.He had already become a successful recording artist, beginning with “Little Woman,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and proved to be his biggest hit. He went on to score three other Top 10 singles in 1969 and 1970: “La La La (If I Had You),” “Easy Come, Easy Go” and “Julie, Do Ya Love Me.”By the end of 1972 he had seven gold singles, one platinum single and 10 gold albums.When TV Guide in 2005 ranked the 25 greatest teen idols, Mr. Sherman took the No. 8 spot, ahead of Davy Jones and Troy Donahue. (David Cassidy was No. 1.) He appeared countless times on the cover of Tiger Beat, a popular magazine for adolescent girls. Even Marge Simpson, leading lady of the long-running animated series “The Simpsons,” had a crush on Bobby Sherman, as she confessed to her daughter Lisa in one episode.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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    ‘Cold War Choir Practice’ Review: When the President Made a Deal

    Ro Reddick’s music-infused comedy, set during the Cold War, finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.For Christmas 1987, Meek knows exactly what she wants from Santa Claus. All three items should fit easily on the sleigh: a stuffed animal, a Speak & Spell for language-learning and a nuclear radiation detector. You know, to keep inside the fallout shelter she’s building in the basement.At 10 years old, alert to the world, Meek is anxious about the Cold War and hoping to help stop it — or at least protect herself and her family, should Soviet missiles ever be aimed at Syracuse, N.Y. But she is also just a little kid, inquisitive and dreamy, with an “E.T.” sweatshirt and a taste for Atomic Fireballs from the neighborhood candy shop.Played by Alana Raquel Bowers, an adult deftly channeling tweendom, Meek is the winsome protagonist of “Cold War Choir Practice,” a brainy new comedy by Ro Reddick that’s infused with choral music and spiked with espionage. Directed by Knud Adams, and featuring a jewel-studded cast, the play finishes this year’s edition of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival on a high.That’s true even with the whole extra set of reverberations that the show abruptly acquired after the U.S. strike on Iran on Saturday — world peace being one of Meek’s consuming priorities. In a children’s choir, she sings of de-escalation (sample lyric: “No one has to die”) and gets matched with a pen pal from the U.S.S.R.“Dear Soviet Pen Pal,” Meek writes, brightly. “War is imminent. How are you today? Did you know the voice of a child has the power to stop a nuclear attack?”Meek (Bowers) and her father, Smooch (Will Cobbs).Maria BaranovaWe 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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    ‘The Bear’ Is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know

    The kitchen dramedy returns Wednesday, a year after its divisive third season ended on a cliffhanger. Here’s what to remember for the new episodes.The FX dramedy “The Bear” arrived on Hulu in the summer of 2022, and unlike a lot of award-winning TV, this series has stuck to a yearly release schedule, always arriving in late June. So get ready to start hearing “Yes, chef!” during everyday interactions.Season 4 debuts in full on Wednesday, returning viewers to the eclectic, vibrant Chicago food scene and the struggling restaurant at the heart of the story, the Bear. At the end of last season, Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), the Bear’s chef and co-owner, had just received a review in The Chicago Tribune that might determine whether or not his place stays open. But viewers still don’t know what it says.They almost certainly will find out in the new episodes, though Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” likes to keep the show unpredictable. Here are some things to keep in mind going into the new season.Chaos on the menuA quick reminder of how we got here: Carmy, suffering from self-doubt and burnout from his time working at high-end restaurants, returned to run the Original Beef of Chicagoland a few months after the suicide of his brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), who had inherited the restaurant from their volatile father. The first season ended with Carmy discovering Mikey had hidden thousands of dollars in tomato cans — enough to settle much of the restaurants’ debts, potentially.Instead, in Season 2, Carmy went deeper into debt with the family’s longtime backer, Jimmy Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), known variously as “Cicero” or “Unc,” to expand the restaurant into a new establishment called the Bear, serving sandwiches for lunch and a Michelin-level menu at night. The soft opening went well, despite a meltdown in the kitchen and a Carmy tantrum inside a walk-in refrigerator.Last season, the Bear built some buzz but still suffered from internal dysfunction, much of it because of Carmy’s persistent, restless reinvention of the menu. It all led up to the make-or-break review, which, based on Carmy’s reaction when he read it, does not seem to be the rave he and his team badly need.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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    The Curious Proposal to Fund New Hampshire’s Arts Council With $1

    New Hampshire residents pushed back, but lawmakers still plan to decimate the group, which gives grants to theaters and museums.The notice that landed in the inbox of Elliott Cunningham, the managing director of New Hampshire’s oldest playhouse, provided little explanation. But it made clear that the federal grant it had been awarded for a traveling production about a 12-year-old boy exploring backyard trails was no longer available.He expects a similar message from state funding sources to come next.Support for New Hampshire’s arts council is at risk as legislators finalize a two-year state budget this week. After one lawmaker suggested eliminating the organization, another countered with a proposal that the council should instead receive $1.The proposed cuts looked similar to President Trump’s move to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. In her inaugural address in January, Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, announced the formation of the Commission on Government Efficiency, a state version of the Department of Government Efficiency.The message has been clear: Reduce the size of government and trim budgets.To many state legislators, shrinking revenue means tough decisions. To arts administrators, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts is essential to sustaining the theaters, museums and festivals that help give the “Live free or die” state its character.Last fiscal year the arts council gave the New London Barn Playhouse, where Mr. Cunningham works, a $21,250 grant to upgrade its sound system. The council also helped pay for a wheelchair-accessible lift backstage at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, for broadband upgrades at the New England Ski Museum in Franconia and for new floors at a dance studio in Lebanon.“There are a million places in this country that have a million strip malls that all look exactly the same,” said Sal Prizio, the executive director of the Capitol Center for the Arts, which is blocks away from the State House. “You’re killing the things that make New Hampshire, New Hampshire.”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