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    ‘Love Island’ Contestant Yulissa Escobar Leaves Show After Racist Comments Surface

    Yulissa Escobar, 27, was abruptly dropped during Episode 2 after clips of her using a slur in a podcast were resurfaced. The season’s debut week also saw tech issues.“Love Island USA,” the reality dating show that sends singles to an island villa to pair up in hopes of winning a cash prize, is known and often appreciated for its messy plots onscreen. But this week, as Season 7 of the show premiered, most of the chaos took place offscreen. Some offscreen drama also reached the show’s predecessor, “Love Island UK.”Contestant Dismissed for Racial SlursFor starters, one of the contestants, Yulissa Escobar, was summarily dropped from the show after video recordings of her repeatedly using a racial slur in a podcast interview were dug up by online sleuths and then reported by TMZ.The clips created an uproar among fans online before the premiere on Tuesday, but the series is aired with a one- or two-day delay, and Escobar, a 27-year-old Cuban American from Miami, still appeared in the first episode.Before the premiere, fans were vowing on X and TikTok to vote Escobar off the show as soon as they had the opportunity. On the first night of the show, Escobar was also criticized by some viewers for wearing an outfit that they deemed appropriative of Chinese culture and using chopsticks to pin up her hair. At about the 18-minute mark of the second episode, which was shown on Wednesday, the narrator, Iain Stirling, abruptly announced that “Yulissa has left the villa.” She had been paired with Ace Greene, and later in the episode Stirling noted that Greene was single.Escobar could not immediately be reached for comment. Ryan McCormick, a spokesman for Peacock, which streams the show, declined to comment on why the producers had removed her.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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    Tom Felton to Reprise Draco Malfoy Role in ‘Harry Potter’ on Broadway

    Felton makes his Broadway debut this November for a limited engagement, playing a grown-up Draco, through March.Tom Felton, who rose to fame as Draco Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” film franchise, is reprising his role as the boy wizard’s blond archnemesis on Broadway, for a limited engagement beginning in November.He will be making his Broadway debut with his turn in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — his first return to the character in 15 years — and will be in the show through March, according to a news release.Felton said in a statement on Thursday that being part of the “Harry Potter” films had been one of the greatest honors of his life.“Joining this production will be a full-circle moment for me, because when I begin performances in ‘Cursed Child’ this fall, I’ll also be the exact age Draco is in the play,” he said. “It’s surreal to be stepping back into his shoes — and of course his iconic platinum blond hair — and I am thrilled to be able to see his story through and to share it with the greatest fan community in the world.”The Broadway show takes place 19 years after the original series ended. Draco is now a father, and he — along with Harry, Ron, and Hermione — sends his child to Hogwarts.Alexis Soloski wrote in a 2021 review for The New York Times that after the Covid pandemic forced the show to close, it returned with a shorter, streamlined story. The play, she wrote, remained “diamond-sharp in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.”Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, the producers for the show, said in a joint statement that Draco left an indelible impression on Harry Potter fans around the world and that Felton’s return to the franchise would offer Potterheads a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see him again. “This moment is powerful on many levels,” they said, adding that the moment was charged with nostalgia, evolution and emotion. “Tom’s return to Hogwarts bridges generations of fans and breathes new life into a beloved story.”Since appearing in the “Harry Potter” films, Felton has acted in the movies “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting.”In 2022, he released a memoir, “Beyond the Wand” and made his West End debut that year, as the star of “2:22 A Ghost Story.” More

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    The 2025 Tony Nominees Discuss Their Biggest Tests and Triumphs

    Since 2018 The New York Times has been interviewing and shooting portraits of performers nominated for Tony Awards, those actors whose work on Broadway over the prior season was so impressive that they are celebrated by their peers. This spring, we asked those nominees to tell us about tests and triumphs — how they persevered, persisted or muddled through challenges on the path to becoming a successful actor, and in the roles for which they are nominated.‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’Sarah Snook“I was pregnant when I was offered this role. Had I known what it was to do this show, and had I known what it was to have a kid, I probably would have said no! You’re kind of going in with blissful ignorance on both counts, and finding your way through that, and showing up and being conscious about being present in all the places that you’re asked to be, whether it’s family or it’s work.”‘Sunset Boulevard’Nicole Scherzinger“I’ve always struggled with low self-esteem and a lot of insecurities. This role has really helped me to become the woman who I was meant to be. Facing head-on those insecurities, that’s where you build your bravery and you build your armor.”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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    Stephen Colbert Wonders if Elon Musk’s Ketamine Has Worn Off

    It’s the only explanation the “Late Show” host can think of for the tech mogul’s apparent disenchantment with the Trump administration.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.‘I Have How Many Children?’The hosts got more monologue material on Wednesday from the presumed tensions between President Trump and Elon Musk, after the tech mogul and recently departed D.O.G.E. chief criticized Trump’s policy bill.“Apparently, the ketamine has worn off,” Stephen Colbert said.“That’s got to be a hell of a hangover. ‘[imitating Musk] Oh, my god. I spent $300 million to elect who? I have how many children? That can’t be their names.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I’m starting to worry that two narcissistic megalomaniacs with a total inability to see value in other humans might have a hard time making friends.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Musk was reportedly ‘butthurt’ — and yes, they did use that word, it is a quote — about some of the stuff that’s in the bill. Usually when Elon’s butt hurts, it’s because of all the drugs he is trying to smuggle through White House security.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I keep waiting to see Musk on a one-way SpaceX to El Salvador.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“‘I hear he is furious’ is the safest bet anyone could make when describing Donald Trump’s reaction to criticism. Let me know when someone says, ‘Insiders reporting that Donald Trump looking inward; reflecting on what role he may have played in turning his friend against him.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Fine Print Edition)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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    I’m

    Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach will star in a stage adaptation of the acclaimed 1975 film about a bank heist that goes tragically awry.“Dog Day Afternoon,” a classic New York film about an ill-planned bank robbery in Brooklyn, has been adapted for the stage and will come to Broadway next spring.The production will star Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, both of whom have won Emmy Awards for their work in FX’s “The Bear.” The director will be Rupert Goold, who is the artistic director of the Almeida Theater in London and who has received Tony nominations for two of his previous Broadway shows, “King Charles III” and “Ink.”“Dog Day Afternoon” tells the story of a group of hapless criminals who rob a bank, partly because one of them (a character named Sonny, played by Al Pacino in the 1975 film and to be played by Bernthal onstage) wants money to pay for his partner’s gender-transition surgery. The robbery turns into a hostage-taking and a confrontation with law enforcement. The film, directed by Sidney Lumet, was based on a true story; it won an Academy Award for Frank Pierson’s screenplay.The stage adaptation, a project that was previously announced in 2016, has been written by the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his drama “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which was produced on Broadway in 2023. Guirgis has an ear for dialogue of down-and-out New Yorkers, and has written a number of acclaimed plays about working-class characters.Bernthal and Moss-Bachrach are best known for their work onscreen — Bernthal stars opposite Ben Affleck in “The Accountant” and “The Accountant 2,” while Moss-Bachrach’s credits include “Girls” and the upcoming movie “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”They will be making their Broadway debuts in this play, but both are experienced stage actors. Bernthal studied theater in Moscow, founded an upstate New York theater company, and has performed Off Broadway and at regional theaters; Moss-Bachrach began his stage career at Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts and has since performed Off Broadway and in California.The play is being produced by Warner Bros. Theater Ventures (Warner Bros. produced the movie), along with Sue Wagner, John Johnson and Patrick Catullo. The announcement on Wednesday did not specify dates or a theater. More

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    ‘A Freeky Introduction’ Review: Pleasure Principles

    NSangou Njikam’s latest offering is an ode to the erotic and the divine, set to winking R&B and hip-hop songs, in a new production by Atlantic Theater Company.In “A Freeky Introduction,” the writer-creator, NSangou Njikam plays a quasi-deity, M.C., holy hedonist named Freeky Dee. He is a poet delivering sybaritic couplets above the thrum of R&B tunes. He is a missionary preaching the gospel of freakdom: “All of us are aftershocks of the Divine orgasm.” (The Big Bang, Freeky argues, was an explosive one.) The result is a sort of hip-hop hallelujah — a work of interactive theater that’s funny and familiar in its embrace of Black culture, yet flattened at times by a lack of specificity.Freeky Dee is also a storyteller. He opens the show, now at Atlantic Stage 2 in Manhattan, with the tale of an eagle destined to fly, but born into a nest of bullying buzzards — a not-so-subtle allegory about one species that must resist the self-appointed superiority of another. Accompanied by DJ Monday Blue onstage, Freeky Dee is the sole performer who acts out these scenes, including his pursuit of a fine lady named Liberty (“French, with a splash of Africa” and wearing “a crown that looked like sun rays coming out her forehead” — you get it).Njikam, who wrote and starred in the lively and semi-autobiographical “Syncing Ink,” is a fan of salacious reinterpretations. Under Dennis A. Allen II’s well-paced direction for this Atlantic Theater Company production, he delivers them with the charisma of a folkloric trickster. DJ Monday Blue’s sounds and samples lend a rock-steady groove — a feast of R&B and hip-hop staples. Whenever Freeky Dee sets up for a spoken-word set, the standing bass and sax lines of “Brother to the Night,” from the movie “Love Jones,” ring out. It’s a knowing wink — sonic choices that affirm Black cultural memory as its own special canon.Audience participation also becomes a form of communion for Njikam and Blue. At times, we’re ordered to recite an affirmation-laden “Mirror Song” or do kegel exercises in our seats. The show is always edging the sacred up against the sexual, which set designer Jason Ardizzone-West reinforces, adorning square columns with divine contradiction: half evoke West and North African etchings of figures kneeling in spiritual offering; while the other lean into smut — peach and eggplant emojis, thirst drops, figures on their knees for a different purpose.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 One Image:

    In One Image ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ by James Estrin with Laura Collins-HughesOne of this spring’s hottest tickets has been the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” starring George Clooney.Like the 2005 movie, the play transports audiences to the 1950s, when the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow faced off against the communist-hunting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on “See It Now.”In this scene, a team of journalists, including Clooney as Murrow, watch a recording of McCarthy condemning their work.The Banks of Monitors: Scott Pask, the show’s set designer, lined the proscenium with banks of black-and-white broadcast monitors. “There’s this level of immediacy when you’re closer to those,” he said. “But I also just think it frames an epic space in an epic way.”The Big Screen: “The physical decision we made is that we would look at small screens for the beginning of the show,” said David Cromer, the director. “We don’t bring on that big screen until about halfway through.”The Control Room: “There are switches and toggles and all kinds of technical equipment,” Pask said. “Probably most of it doesn’t work, but you see the dimension of all these objects. It’s like taking bits of technology … but then also adding in weird elements like little lights and literally Mason jars glued on the rim, stuck to the wall.”The Audience: “They’re there watching this thing that we made, it seems like with just full attention,” Pask said. “Heads are up. Those people that we’re seeing are within the first seven or eight rows, probably. And I have to imagine most of them are focused looking at George’s response.”In One Image‘Good Night, and Good Luck’June 4, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ETOne of the most meticulously textured, three-dimensional period sets on Broadway this season might instead have been conjured in two dimensions, on glowing screens.In the script to “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s stage adaptation of their 2005 movie of the same name, the authors envisioned a set using LED panels throughout.But the play’s Tony Award-winning director, David Cromer, had other ideas for recreating the 1950s broadcast world of CBS and Edward R. Murrow, the anchor of its news program “See It Now.”“They were sort of suggesting it, thought it might be cool,” Cromer said. “And I said, ‘Let’s do it the hard way.’”So he enlisted Scott Pask, an architecturally trained set designer and three-time Tony winner, to take on the challenge at the capacious Winter Garden Theater.Starring the Tony-nominated Clooney as Murrow in his face-off with the crusading Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the show is one of this spring’s priciest tickets. (Its penultimate performance, this Saturday night, will be broadcast live on CNN and livestreamed on CNN.com.)Pask’s set, which earned him another Tony nomination, is the container for it all — as in this photograph, which captures the April 6, 1954, broadcast of “See It Now” on which McCarthy, shown in archival footage, responds to Murrow’s on-air indictment of him. Studio monitors catch Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (Glenn Fleshler), listening, while their director, Don Hewitt (Will Dagger), sits just downstage. Overlooking the midcentury Manhattan tableau is one of the distinctive arched windows of Grand Central Terminal, because that’s where the real studio was, upstairs.To tell this story each night at the 1,537-seat theater, the creative team had many details to consider, including ensuring that the audience didn’t lose sight of Clooney. “If someone misses him for a beat,” Pask said, “it’s only for a second.”James Estrin/The New York Times

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    Late Night Hopes Trump and Musk Can Patch Things Up

    “Oh, no, not my two favorite people fighting!” said the “Daily Show” host Michael Kosta. “Don’t make me choose who I love more.”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.Big, Beautiful and DisgustingOn Tuesday, Elon Musk expressed his displeasure on X over President Trump’s “big, beautiful” domestic policy bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” and shaming House members who’d voted for it. On “The Daily Show,” Michael Kosta said it was sad that “two men who previously had never had a friend” were seeing their relationship get “D.O.G.E.’d.”“Oh, no, not my two favorite people fighting! Don’t make me choose who I love more.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“I’m not sure who to root for. It’s like Diddy versus R. Kelly.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But, yes, Elon is worried that Trump’s bill will raise the deficit too high. And when Elon is worried about something getting too high, you know it’s too high.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Boy, when he’s off the ketamine, he is a lot less fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And he may be right, but Elon has to be careful. You come out that hard against Trump’s central legislative achievement, and you’re going to be the first white person to get deported.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Shame on those who voted for it? Who bankrolled these people that voted for it? I want the name of whoever bankrolled — oh, wait, it’s his name.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Just days after leaving his official role at the White House, Elon Musk is now blasting President Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ as a ‘disgusting abomination.’ And that’s coming from the guy who made the Cybertruck.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Elon called it ‘massive,’ ‘outrageous’ and ‘pork-filled.’ And Trump was, like, ‘[imitating Trump] I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll take two.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (New Portrait, Who Dis? Edition)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