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    How ‘Sabbath’s Theater,’ Philip Roth’s Raunchiest Book, Made It to the Stage

    For their adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater,” John Turturro and Ariel Levy sought to preserve “the nasty side of existence” evoked in the book.For John Turturro, it was time to honor Philip Roth. Turturro, the veteran actor, had been friends with the novelist for nearly a quarter-century when Roth died in 2018 at 85. They first met, Turturro recalled, after Roth saw his performance in the 1994 film “Quiz Show” and picked him to star in a one-man stage adaptation of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth’s 1969 best seller about a young man with a penchant for self-pleasure.That play never got beyond readings. Plans for other works had similar fates. Two years after Roth’s death, Turturro appeared in the HBO mini-series “The Plot Against America,” David Simon and Ed Burns’s adaptation of Roth’s 2004 alternate-history novel.Still, Turturro said, he felt he wanted to “complete the conversation.” Now he’s starring in the New Group’s production of “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth’s 1995 novel about a lascivious 64-year-old ex-puppeteer named Mickey Sabbath, which is in previews at Pershing Square Signature Theater. The book, a National Book Award winner regarded both as maybe Roth’s greatest novel and his black sheep, is certainly his raunchiest and most transgressive. (What Alexander Portnoy does with a piece of liver, Sabbath does at his lover’s grave.)Those familiar with the story might reasonably wonder: Why, out of all of Roth’s nearly 30 works of fiction, has John Turturro elected to embody the most estranging, the most irredeemable, the quite simply filthiest character in Roth’s canon?Turturro is also starring as the title character. “I was not afraid of it,” he said of the divisive protagonist. “I don’t have to be the hero.”Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“He’s like a stand-up comedian. That lends itself to the theater,” Turturro, 66, said of the Roth who wrote “Sabbath’s Theater.” “When he’s on a rant you go from Lorena Bobbitt to Mussolini to Ibsen to Macbeth, all in the same breath.”There were other reasons, too. Turturro was attracted to the novel’s house style: Its manic, sarcastic, abasing observations, largely written in the third person but never far from Sabbath’s perspective, seemed made for the theater.As Sabbath, Turturro is onstage virtually the entire play, speaking for much of that time and cycling through emotions like excitement and pity, desire and tenderness, depression and optimism.“You let the whole creature out,” Ariel Levy, the New Yorker staff writer with whom Turturro adapted the script, told Turturro during a joint interview, quoting from “Sabbath’s Theater.” She added: “And that’s what [Roth] sensed about you.”Turturro replied: “I was not afraid of it. I don’t have to be the hero.”Not having to be the hero is an important qualification for the actor playing Mickey Sabbath. His exploits include an obscenity arrest, a phone-sex scandal and compulsive lecherousness — up to and including stealing his friend’s college-aged daughter’s underwear from her childhood bedroom. Judith Thurman, the New Yorker staff writer and close friend of Roth’s, said “Sabbath’s Theater” was Roth’s favorite of his own books, the one he chose to read from at his 80th birthday celebration.“It is his most impious book, in a lifetime of impiety,” said Thurman, adding: “I think he would have been delighted that Ari and John had the nerve to do this. Nerve was one of the qualities in an artist that he most admired.”Roth at home in New York City, a few months before he died in 2018.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThe 1995 novel is a National Book Award winner and regarded as one of Roth’s greatest.For both Turturro and Levy, Sabbath’s offensiveness, his audacity, his utter lack of embarrassment alchemized into Roth’s most life-affirming book, one that finds the protagonist recalling all the people and things he has loved and lost — his brother, his mother, his first wife, his vocation (his fingers are now arthritic), his longtime mistress. As Sabbath puts it in the play (in one of many lines of third-person narration transposed to Sabbath’s voice): “For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.”The production, directed by Jo Bonney, leans into the novel’s frank depictions of unbounded lust, gleeful disloyalty and bodily functions. It is, at times, almost a gross-out comedy. Yet the story’s undertones of grief also attracted Turturro and Levy. Turturro read Roth’s memoir of his father’s death, “Patrimony: A True Story,” after his own father died and identified profoundly with it. Levy’s 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” recounted a miscarriage, and she said that while working on the play she thought of her husband’s having lost a brother while a young man, as Sabbath does.“We did this workshop in London at the National Theater, and somebody there asked, ‘Why now?’” Levy said. “And John said, ‘Because we’re all going to die.’ And that’s it. The depth and the death, grief and being haunted and sometimes feeling the dead are as real to you as the living.”The conventions of theater permit Sabbath’s many ghosts to haunt him not just in his mind’s eye but physically on the stage. In one scene, a nightgown represents the corpse of a mother mourned by her daughter, Sabbath’s first wife, Nikki; Sabbath, feet away, is simultaneously in the present tense with another character and conjuring the memory of Nikki, who herself disappeared decades earlier.“The ghosts of Mickey’s loved ones are more real to him than the living,” Bonney said. Enacting the novel’s fragmented nature by jumping back and forth in time was crucial to its dramatic success, she added. “We’re taking people on this ride of the mind as opposed to a regularly plotted story.”Such staging was revelatory to Levy, 49, who had never worked professionally in theater. “When you’re just writing, all you have is words, words, words, words, words,” Levy said. By contrast, she added, in theater, “you have other things going into the storytelling, like the way a person’s body is or their voice.”PERHAPS THE GHOST foremost summoned by the production is Roth’s. Turturro’s lanky frame is the opposite of Sabbath’s, but it echoes Roth’s, and the actor acknowledged that his Sabbath is partly a gloss on the novelist.“He definitely has a Philip-like quality — dark, antic, hectic, comic at the same time,” said Thurman, who saw a reading of the play in 2021 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.Turturro with Jason Kravits, left, and Elizabeth Marvel in the show, scheduled to run through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhen it came time to seek a writing partner for the script, Turturro said it was important to find someone who would be faithful to Roth’s language.“I was thinking about playwrights,” Turturro said, “but then I was thinking, ‘Would they want to come in and rewrite Philip’s work?’”Instead Turturro pitched Hilton Als, a longtime theater critic who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Als suggested Levy. By then it was the spring of 2020, so Levy and Turturro met over Skype and got to work.“We didn’t write anything,” Levy said. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”During rehearsals last month, Levy, considering how a scene should be blocked, grabbed her pummeled copy of the novel, found the original rendering and consulted it like scripture.One challenge was turning the novel’s stream of consciousness into scenes with characters, along with soliloquy-like asides from Sabbath.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesTheir script stipulates that the 16 characters besides Sabbath be played by just two actors. In this production, Jason Kravits portrays Sabbath’s put-together, respectable friend Norman Cowan as well as his 100-year-old cousin, Fish; Elizabeth Marvel plays his mistress, his wives and his mother.Turturro said the decision was inspired by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1943 film “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” in which Deborah Kerr plays three characters. “You know that thing in life where people seem like iterations of each other?” Levy said. “One actress being all these women makes so much sense.”Alongside Turturro’s Sabbath, the signature performance might be Marvel’s turn as Drenka Balich, Sabbath’s 52-year-old Croatian mistress. A mother and a lover, a force of life and sex, Drenka has long been Exhibit A for those defending Roth from charges of misogyny in his depictions of women.“Drenka is such a heroine on so many levels,” Levy said, “so interesting and complicated and older, just a combination of traits you don’t see flipped together. You see it in life, but you don’t get to see it onstage, on the screen.”Is 2023 ready for Mickey Sabbath? If so-called cancel culture — which Roth forecast in “Sabbath’s Theater” and, more directly, in “The Human Stain” (2000) — were to come for any Roth novel, it would surely be this one.“We didn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s do this as a pushback against the oppressions of the moment,’” Levy said. “But is there a little bit of a thrill in all that? Sure, absolutely.”In a Yale Review essay published this year and partly titled “in praise of filth,” the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote that he “can’t imagine a book like ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ being published today, certainly not by anyone save a writer of Roth’s stature.” Yet to Greenwell it is precisely the novel’s depiction of various repellent activities that lends the novel its moral force. “By repeatedly tempting us to pass judgment on Sabbath,” Greenwell added, “Roth’s novel reminds us how much more a person is than their worst acts.”Turturro wants theatergoers to make their own judgments. “My job is to keep the audience awake,” he said. “Whatever you think, you think.”Levy added: “It’s not a good play to bring your grandma to. Although, it depends on your grandma. My grandma would have loved it. She was dirty. She was really dirty.” More

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    ‘Partnership’ Review: A Lost Tale of Ambition That Resonates

    The Mint Theater revives Elizabeth Baker’s charming 1917 comedy, which offers a gentle reminder about work-life balance.Find a job that you love and you’ll work every day of your life. So warns “Partnership,” the third Elizabeth Baker play to be staged by the Mint Theater Company, which has long nurtured the works of forgotten playwrights. Baker’s play premiered in 1917 in London, but the way it tackles the issue of work-life balance seems to speak more to the Great Resignation than to the Great War.The owner of a successful boutique in the south of England, Kate (Sara Haider) is focused on the needs of her distinguished clients. When George Pillatt (Gene Gillette), a potential rival, instead proposes a merger, marriage is part of the deal. The union, Kate understands, would be purely professional.As another character remarks, in one of the play’s most impressively undated lines, “Men are a lot, aren’t they?”Kate takes more of a shine to Pillatt’s companion Lawrence Fawcett (Joshua Echebiri), a gadabout investor with mud on his boots and a glint in his eye. Fawcett inspires Kate to contemplate a new way of life, including the exquisite novelty of a day off. In the show’s breeziest scene, the pair behold the Downs, an expanse of land and sky expressed in a breathtaking backdrop: The characters effectively step into a landscape painting (adapted from an artwork by James Hart Dyke) within the gilded frame provided by the scenic designer Alexander Woodward. It’s a testament to the production that it conjures the sense of a shimmering vista in a tiny theater.If the director Jackson Grace Gay tries a little too hard to coax out new laughs, the cast handles Baker’s gentle comedy with evident affection. Echebiri’s Fawcett comes alive in his natural habitat, while Gillette’s Pillatt has the constrained movements of one who thinks a leisurely walk is a waste of time. As Kate’s friend and associate Maisie, Olivia Gilliatt is having nearly as much fun as the costume designer (Kindall Almond) is having dressing her. Her ready energy and comical, gale force yawp could command a larger theater.Written during the height of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, this English playwright’s portrait of a driven businesswoman — two driven businesswomen, actually — feels boldly up-to-date. Refreshingly, by contrast, it treats some of the male characters as more or less incidental.The suggestion of farce never materializes, but there is class critique in the play’s portrayal of characters’ couture concerns and their endless talking shop.The plot itself — Kate’s transformation from workaholic to not-so-quiet quitter — barely rattles a teacup. But “Partnership” charms regardless, offering a gentle reminder about not letting work overtake your life. Some notions should never fall out of fashion.PartnershipThrough Nov. 12 at Theater Row, Manhattan; bfany.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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    Halloween TV: Five Shows That Mix Horror and Humor

    “Creepshow,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other shows serve up humor with their horror.Sorting through the seasonal bounty of horror and supernatural television series timed to Halloween, I have focused on shows that approach the grim task with a sense of humor. Here, in alphabetical order, are five series released this month that put more emphasis on wit than on sheer terror.‘30 Coins’The Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia careens through the conventions of the religious conspiracy thriller in this preposterous and highly enjoyable series that combines a “Da Vinci Code”-style premise with extremes of gore and a circling, tenuously comprehensible plot.In the first season, a Spanish village became the site of a battle among Roman Catholic cabals and emissaries of Satan over Judas’s 30 pieces of silver, which if collected would give their owner unimagined power. Or something like that. Fighting back against these forces of evil was a motley crew that included a renegade priest, the village’s unhappily married mayor and a plucky veterinarian.Paul Giamatti plays a cult leader in the new season of “30 Coins.”Manolo Pavón/HBOIn Season 2, which premiered this week on HBO and Max, the apocalypse has been averted but its likelihood is still palpable, and the number of creepy beasts in the manner of Bosch and Guillermo del Toro has exponentially increased. Also joining the show is Paul Giamatti as a science-fiction-writing cult leader who is human in form but as frightening as any beast.‘Creepshow’Now in its fourth season on the horror-centric streaming service Shudder (as well as AMC+), this anthology series wears its comic-book sensibility and B-movie aesthetic proudly. And the best of its 22-minute stories (two per episode) also exhibit the cleverness and industriousness that contribute to real pop-culture satisfaction. You’ll see the first twist coming, but the second and the third may take you by surprise.“Creepshow” doesn’t reach too far for its inspirations — Season 4’s familiar scenarios include a persecuted vampire family, a werewolf in a “Little Red Riding Hood” situation, a haunted video game and a cursed pair of 3-D glasses.But along with its unpretentious nature comes a willingness to be self-referential and provide fan service, and some of its most entertaining segments are unabashed in-jokes. The Season 4 opener, “The Hat,” suggests that the novels of a writer strongly resembling Stephen King were actually composed by a snappy homburg that refuses to stop writing. In “George Romero in 3-D,” Romero comes back to life in animated form to battle ghouls of his own creation. King and Romero were, of course, the writer and director of the 1982 film “Creepshow” from which the series was spun off.‘The Fall of the House of Usher’Mike Flanagan’s fifth horror mini-series for Netflix (a collection that began with “The Haunting of Hill House”) is, if you care about consistency with the source, a serious mismatch. The genuinely morbid intensity of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, on prominent display in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is out of tune with Flanagan’s well-upholstered, tongue-in-cheek, slightly synthetic approach to horror, where everything is right there on the surface.But that surface is often diverting, if not particularly frightening or memorable, and Flanagan can be counted on for large, capable casts. The eight-episode “Usher” offers Bruce Greenwood and Zach Gilford as current and past versions of Roderick Usher, reimagined as a Sackler-like big-pharma executive; Carl Lumbly as a prosecutor named Auguste Dupin; a raspy Mark Hamill as a corporate fixer named Arthur Gordon Pym; and T’Nia Miller as an Usher offspring named Victorine Lafourcade. The Flanagan regular Carla Gugino cycles through costumes and makeup, “Kind Hearts and Coronets”-style, as a seductive angel of death.Dupin, Pym, Lafourcade and many others are named after Poe characters who had nothing to do with “Usher,” an indication of how Flanagan’s series is less an adaptation of the original — it isn’t really that at all — than a Frankenstein’s-monster collage of references to numerous Poe stories and poems. Episode titles — “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” — clue you in to the style of gruesome death that’s about to take place. Passages of Poe’s prose and poetry are frequently incorporated into the dialogue, making for very flowery conversations. Gugino’s character is named Verna, an anagrammatic nod to Poe’s favorite bird.Flanagan’s biggest change is to expand and update the story into a carnivalesque critique of capitalist greed and inhumanity. Roderick Usher, childless in the original story, now has six heirs whose lives are a catalog of wealth-and-entitlement motifs: nightclub bacchanals, sex with subordinates, wellness profiteering, antiquities looting, crisis management, A.I. infatuation, baking silly trompe l’oeil cakes. Poe’s Ushers were doomed by malaise and sheer malevolent ambience; Flanagan’s have to die because they’re a virus on the earth. As apocalyptic metaphors go, his “Usher” is reasonably entertaining.‘Shining Vale’Jeff Astrof and Sharon Horgan’s series cunningly blends horror, satire and situation comedy in its picture of a modern American woman’s dilemma: Has Pat Phelps, the struggling writer played by Courteney Cox, been driven crazy by the stresses of marriage, motherhood and career? Or does she act like a crazy person because her house is haunted and she’s fighting off demonic possession?Courteney Cox, left, and Mira Sorvino, in the new season of “Shining Vale.”StarzThe first season of “Shining Vale” on Starz was a riff on “The Shining,” with Pat eventually taking an ax to her suburban Connecticut manse and to her feckless husband, played with simpering perfection by Greg Kinnear. Season 2, whose third episode premieres Friday, tackles another celebrated film, “Rosemary’s Baby”; the herbal tea a neighbor provides to calm Pat’s nerves after her release from a psychiatric ward has the unexpected side effect of reversing her menopause.The avenging (but often friendly) spirit played by Mira Sorvino in Season 1 has supposedly been electro-convulsed out of Pat’s head, but luckily Sorvino returns, now playing the concerned neighbor. She and Kinnear, along with a stellar supporting cast that includes Judith Light, Merrin Dungey, Parvesh Cheena, Allison Tolman and the great Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe in the original “Frasier”), bring a comic harmony to the show’s indelicate balance of tones.‘Wolf Like Me’A melancholy Australian romantic dramedy with werewolves, Peacock’s “Wolf Like Me” mixes tones and tropes in the manner of “Shining Vale” but with a quieter, less satirical effect. When “Shining Vale” sags, it goes flatly jokey; when “Wolf Like Me” runs out of energy, it gets blandly sentimental.But when the creator, writer and director of “Wolf Like Me,” Abe Forsythe, is on his game, it’s a funny, lovely and moving show that can tap straight into your emotions. Also crucial are the performances of Isla Fisher as Mary, an American werewolf hiding from the world in Adelaide, Australia, and the young actress Ariel Donoghue as Emma, a girl devastated by the loss of her mother who becomes Mary’s de facto stepdaughter and develops a fierce loyalty to her. Josh Gad plays Gary, Emma’s father and Mary’s unlikely new boyfriend, and does a nice job of staying out of Fisher and Donoghue’s way.Season 1 brought this accidental trio together, introduced a teasing note of magical realism (along with the outright full-moon supernaturalism) and established the theme of love’s triumph over grief and alienation. In Season 2, the focus shifts to Mary’s pregnancy, which is both a blessed event and a five-alarm crisis. Forsythe’s inventiveness occasionally runs low, and the characters can get strident and unengaging, but he builds to an exciting and wrenching finale that’s also a dire cliffhanger. More

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    Why ‘The Golden Bachelor’ Terrifies Me

    Television celebrates older people — but only for seeming like sexy young ones.In the first episode of ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” — the new 60-plus addition to the decades-old “Bachelor” franchise — Gerry Turner, 72, puts in his hearing aids, dons a tuxedo and cries within the first three minutes of airtime. Gerry, our Golden Bachelor, has been widowed for six years. His wife, Toni, died suddenly, of an infection, and in describing her passing he cannot contain his grief. We see photos of their lives together, from young marrieds to parents, from middle-aged partners to retirees enjoying themselves on a boat. Gerry is uncommonly slim and good-looking and seems to have been so throughout these various life stages. Toni, whose age is not specified, ages less magically. Her waist and eyeglasses thicken, as these things tend to. Clearly these changes did not dampen Gerry’s adoration. The type of tears he sheds on camera over her passing reveal what looks like a deep and enduring love — the thing every contestant on the set of “The Golden Bachelor” is now competing to find with him.Like the original, “The Golden Bachelor” presents around two dozen women, all vying for lasting happiness through marriage to a single, eligible catch. Other than the fact that contestants range in age from 60 to 75, the formula is familiar. Like “The Bachelor,” the season aims to end with a proposal. Like “The Bachelor,” most action takes place in a mansion full of bunk beds. Like “The Bachelor,” the contestants are typically lithe, sexy and hyperactive; some wear stilettos to breakfast, along with tube tops and hot pants and all manner of plunging décolletage; there are boobs everywhere, often huge ones. As the contestants emerge from their limousines, one by one, near the start of the first episode, making grand entrances with their mermaid hair and Pilates abs and buns of steel and snatched cheekbones and pneumatic-looking lips, often all over Gerry within minutes, a truth seems to dawn on the septuagenarian widower: Older women are not what they used to be. They are nothing at all like what they used to be. As if to underline this point, one of the contestants emerges from her limo with curler-set gray hair, baggy dress and walker — only to rip the whole kit off, fling the walker onto the paving stones and reveal her true self. This is Leslie, a 64-year-old dancer and former aerobics champion in a tiny lace corseted minidress. Leslie looks about 40 and acts even younger. The show, of course, is fun to watch. Many of the women are beautiful and spirited and accomplished. Gerry seems like a lovely man. Still, there is something here that sends a chill down my spine. The show has received glowing coverage from predictable corners (USA Today) and scored huge ratings for ABC. But is any of this actually good? For older people? Or even for younger people? I mean, this is “The Bachelor,” a mainstay of reality TV — a certain amount of desperation and superficiality is built into the DNA of the genre. But plunging older people into this context and then valorizing them because, perhaps with some nipping and tucking, they can just about fit? This feels more like a denigration of aging. Some of these people have been on Earth for 75 years. Here is an opportunity for them to demonstrate that life, comfortingly, has many chapters — that there is always change and that this change is not only natural, but good. Instead, we get a tight-and-toned show in which success involves being able to repeat Chapter 3 for as long as possible. This version of freedom has nothing to do with wisdom or respite, with taking stock or giving back or the hard-won succor of age. It is about working extremely hard to remain the same as you were when you were younger (or maybe even more fabulously youthy), especially if that youthful you was wont to grind barelegged to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a tinsel handkerchief dress.A state of nubile teenagehood already coats the age spectrum, from 8-year-olds with gel nails on Snapchat to middle-aged dads in hoodies on longboards. Now it is creeping ever further up the life span. Martha Stewart expanded from her cardigans and sheet-pan suppers to moue on TikTok and chitchat on talk shows about how she should date Pete Davidson. Madonna accuses critics of ageism as she rids her face and body of signs of time, to the point of looking like a different person. The idea of not aging is not only normalized but treated as an accomplishment. No surprise, then, that one “Golden Bachelor” contestant shows up on a motorcycle or that another, age 70, flashes Gerry her “birthday suit” upon meeting him or that everyone stays up all night dancing in skyscraper heels, apparently bunion- and sciatica-free. Other than the odd passing remark about “ear candy” (code for hearing aids) or taking the bed nearest to the bathroom, this show — sold as a showcase for how fabulous and free growing old can be, and how “it’s never too late” to find love — actually negates aging, erases lateness. More than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 in America every day; by 2034, there will be more Americans over age 65 than children. What we are being told is that they will be vital and relevant mostly insofar as they have maintained arms like Jessica Biel and off-the-chart libidos.A couple of weeks ago, I watched a few episodes of the 1980s sitcom “The Golden Girls” with my daughters. Like any other woman of 50 who knows how old those mostly gray-haired characters were supposed to be — at the start of the series, Blanche, Dorothy and Rose were in their early 50s — I experienced some cognitive dissonance. “Do they seem like they are the same age as me?” I asked my 11-year-old. No, she said. They seemed “more comfortable, like grandmothers used to.”Odd, but true: The kind of aging depicted on “The Golden Bachelor” is itchy and awkward. We hear a contestant say it’s nice to see older women enjoy how they feel in their skin; we hear contestants say they are breaking stereotypes of what it means to be old. But what good is that when those stereotypes are instantly replaced with “Girls Gone Wild” stereotypes about what it means to still be young? In Episode 1, after most of the contestants have sashayed into the mansion, another woman emerges. She is 84. She is wearing a nice blouse and forgiving trousers and flat shoes, like a normal person in her 80s. She says she is Jimmy Kimmel’s aunt — Aunt Chippy, as featured on his show — and she just wanted to meet Gerry, as she was sure he was lying about his age. The gag is that she is not really in the game, because she is old. Sitting with the other women in the mansion, she says: “I don’t belong here. Those ladies are really something. Look at this one. I’m in the wrong place.” She is later caught napping; at least one person here is comfortable with where she finds herself.But of course, Chippy leaves the set. I imagine her going home, making coffee, putting her feet up and calling a grandkid or an old friend to talk about the truly weird day she had, and how — thank God — she doesn’t need to be like that anymore, with the hair and the boobs and the sex. Because she was already young once, and even then it was exhausting, and now? She can’t even imagine.Source photographs for illustration above: Brian Bowen Smith/ABC; Ricky Middlesworth/ABC; Rosemary Calvert/Getty Images; Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Altoids Last Longer Than These Republican Nominees’

    “This morning, I didn’t even know who Tom Emmer was,” Kimmel said about a short-lived candidate for House speaker. “Now, I still don’t. I have no idea.”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.‘You Will Be Googled’Representative Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota, was nominated for speaker of the House on Tuesday before withdrawing because of a lack of support from the right.Jimmy Kimmel joked that it was just the latest history-making delay of the House “ungaveling before our eyes.”“In the history of our country, there has never been a situation like this. And there’s nothing in the Constitution that covers it, because the founding fathers, as forward-thinking as they were, never imagined such a large group of elected officials being so unbelievably dumb.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This morning, I didn’t even know who Tom Emmer was. Now, I still don’t. I have no idea.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“According to people I pay to care about it, Emmer is the House majority whip. He sits on the Financial Services Committee, and, perhaps most notably, he got two D.U.I.s, then sponsored legislation to lower the legal penalties that face accused drunk drivers. OK, so a little self-serving? He also introduced H.R. 2435: That Mailbox Was Already Knocked Down.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Altoids last longer than these Republican nominees.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Martin Scorsese’s out here making movies that last longer than speaker candidates.” — DESUS NICE, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Farewell, Tom Emmer. You will be Googled.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“At this point, I’d call the G.O.P. a clown car, but clowns go to college.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Who Flips Next? Edition)“Trump 2020 campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty today to a criminal charge in the Georgia election interference case, making her former President Trump’s fourth co-defendant of the trial to plead guilty. So I guess, in the end, he did teach them all ‘The Art of the Deal.’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s three Trump lawyers in one week! Which leads us to America’s favorite new game show: ‘Who … Flips … Next?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Right now, half of Trump’s lawyers are trying to keep him out of prison; the other half are trying to keep themselves out of prison.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingMick Jagger joined Jimmy Fallon to divulge some “Freezer Secrets” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Canadian stand-up comedian, actor and writer Mae Martin will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe Birmingham Royal Ballet performing “Black Sabbath: The Ballet,” which has had sold-out runs in England in Birmingham, Plymouth and London.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesHeavy metal meets classical dance in the Birmingham Royal Ballet’s smash hit, “Black Sabbath: The Ballet.” More

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    Review: In ‘Daphne,’ Remaking a Myth, With Mixed Results

    The playwright Renae Simone Jarrett makes her professional stage debut with a surreal reworking of a Greek myth about a river nymph.A crying baby pulled from a kitchen cabinet, a woman abruptly exiting a house via a window and a banged-up finger that turns into bark: The new play “Daphne” is chock-full of magical surprises and mystical transformations, but its surreal elements leave the audience with too many unanswered questions.In the play, which opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, Daphne (Jasmine Batchelor) has recently moved in with her girlfriend, Winona (Keilly McQuail) — an abrupt change that has Daphne’s friends concerned. And with good cause: Daphne is living in a big, mysterious house in the middle of big, mysterious woods with a controlling partner who disapproves of her leaving or receiving guests. After an accident leaves Daphne with an injured finger, she begins a botanical transformation like that of her mythological namesake.Daphne and Winona’s toxic relationship seems to be the trigger for Daphne’s transformation, as is the case in the Greek myth, when Daphne, a river nymph, prays for help escaping the predatory god Phoebus Apollo and is turned into a tree. If “Daphne” is trying to create a sort of mythological fairy tale, then the play’s other fantastical details only introduce more confusion: Winona’s peculiar, unseen bird named Phoebus; the neighbor (Denise Burse) whom Winona warns that Daphne is a home-invading witch; a human face found in a cabinet door.Scenes with Daphne’s visiting friends (played by Naomi Lorrain and Jeena Yi with a delightful, though out-of-place, sitcom-style humor) seem meant to provide some context about Daphne’s world and life outside her new home, but they do neither.Presented by LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s programming initiative for new artists, “Daphne” is the professional stage debut of Renae Simone Jarrett, a member of E.S.T.’s Youngblood collective for early-career playwrights. Jarrett’s script is spare, and the setup is initially intriguing, but ultimately too obtuse. The direction, by Sarah Hughes in her Lincoln Center Theater debut, accentuates the dark whimsy of the script but doesn’t provide insight into what those whimsical elements are meant to express. The same for the cast: Though they dutifully inhabit their characters, they cannot make them feel more than ephemeral.McQuail is especially captivating as Winona. Her languid way of moving, her dreamy delivery of quixotic musings and her aloofness — with a sharp edge of intention underneath — draw the spotlight from Batchelor’s steady, though flatter, Daphne. Is Winona the big bad of the story, or just the relationship? Is there some greater evil? Is Daphne losing her sense of reality, or is this a manipulation caused by Winona, or by the suspicious neighbor next door? Without clear stakes, it’s difficult to invest more deeply in the story.The production also withholds any specifics that would ground viewers in a particular setting. Scenes begin and end with snappy lighting transitions (by Stacey Derosier) between a cool daytime light and a warm nighttime glow, so Daphne’s world feels as if it exists in a timeless bubble. Maruti Evans’s rustic set design, a living room and kitchen of a home lined with wallpaper consisting of giant fall-colored leaves, also feels hemmed in, though the couple are meant to be living in a large, haunting abode.“Daphne” is so good at creating a sense of its main characters’ insularity that the production also feels confining, stuck within a set of indecipherable metaphors. But unlike Daphne, who is transformed by the end of this 90-minute contemporary myth, we’re left exactly as we arrived.DaphneThrough Nov. 19 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Book Review: ‘If You Would Have Told Me’ by John Stamos and ‘Being Henry’ by Henry Winkler

    Candid memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos reveal how lucky breaks — and Yale training, and a curling iron — made them into household names.IF YOU WOULD HAVE TOLD ME: A Memoir, by John Stamos with Daphne YoungBEING HENRY: The Fonz … and Beyond, by Henry Winkler with James KaplanWhen I worked for a casting director in the 1980s, the most fun part of the job was looking at the marked-up appointment sheet at the end of each day. Because film and TV auditions are intimate, often conducted over a desk, my boss had devised a code by which to secretly rate the sensitive actors sitting just inches away from her: CBNC (close but no cigar), LLIT (a little long in the tooth), and so on.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.So you can imagine my surprise when, after a very chatty young actor known for playing snotty know-it-alls had auditioned one day, my boss abandoned her usual hieroglyphics and simply scrawled next to the actor’s name on the appointment sheet, in all caps, the seven-letter epithet that starts with “A” and ends with “E” and is synonymous with “backside.” Cowabunga!Neither of the smart and entertaining new memoirs by Henry Winkler and John Stamos inspires such odium — even if both TV stars have written books that traffic heavily in their authors’ lesser angels. These foibles elicited differing reactions from me — I wanted to give the adorably needy Winkler the kind of slow-burn hug that would both congratulate and pacify him; I wanted to abandon the businesslike and unidealistic Stamos in a black box theater with Stella Adler until he starts babbling about “making choices” and his “instrument.”Winkler’s essential m.o. in life, we learn, is to try to make everyone love him because his Holocaust survivor parents didn’t. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he got his breakout role as the too-cool-for-school Fonzie on “Happy Days” just six weeks after moving to Los Angeles.Playing the Fonz has been a meal ticket that has yielded Winkler interesting reactions from unlikely sources. “You do not have to tell me who you are,” Marcello Mastroianni made clear. “Finally, we meet,” Orson Welles uttered.On the flip side, Winkler has spent much of his post-Fonzie career trying not to be typecast — an obstacle not made easier by the fact that he didn’t learn he was severely dyslexic until he was 34. Winkler has made up for lost time by branching out into other pursuits — directing, producing, writing children’s books .But Winkler’s bigger obstacle, it seems, has been emotional immaturity: Until he started therapy seven years ago, he had intimacy problems, including not being able to tell his partner, Stacey, that he loved her. (Wonderfully, Stacey, now his wife, writes responses throughout the book, such as “There were times when I thought … ‘Now I have another child?’”)Winkler’s affective shortcomings throw his social anxiety and bouts of verbal diarrhea into high relief. After meeting Paul McCartney, Winkler, hoping to hang out with the former Beatle, called him 10 times without getting an answer; after chattering incessantly at Neil Simon’s house over dinner one night, he spent months summoning the courage to ask Simon over, only to be told twice that the playwright was “busy.” It’s this kind of candor — coming from someone who once duct-taped deli turkey to his shoes so his dog would play with him — that makes Winkler so lovable on the page. Under the juddering neediness lies a mensch: After Winkler had shot his role in “Scream,” he was told his name couldn’t be on the movie poster because the Fonzie connection would create the wrong expectations for a horror film. But, Hollywood being Hollywood, when the film came out Winkler was asked to do press. Which he agreed to. Winkler’s story is also aided by the fact that his deepest work as an actor — on the terrific recent HBO series “Barry” — came directly after the therapy sessions that helped Winkler with his intimacy issues. As my former boss might have written, VTEBNLPBI (very tidy ending, but no less powerful because of it).John Stamos, he of “Full House” and “E.R.” and Broadway, takes longer to warm to on the page. Stamos is blessed with some of Winkler’s candor — he admits to having had two nose jobs and having gone to Alcoholics Anonymous. However, it’s hard to rouse a head of steam for a thespian whose raison d’être is to “get famous” and who cops to “trying to achieve sex symbol status.” WIJJ (where is the joy, John)?Such dampening pragmatism seems to spill over even to Stamos’s love life. After saying of one actress more famous than he was that “it wouldn’t hurt to get to know her,” he dated her for almost a year. Later in the book, Stamos confesses that he used to want to partner up with “someone who has a bigger, more exciting life than mine to elevate me” so they’d be “a power couple always in the press,” but, once he started seeing his now-wife, Caitlyn, he realized that what he’d always needed was someone who’s cozy-making — someone who would tell him when he has “too much product in my hair.” Some Stamos fans may enjoy this kind of Malibu verismo, but I found myself repeatedly looking floorward in search of a dog to pet. That said, a few things save Stamos from hanging himself. For one, he’s great with period detail. When Stamos auditioned in the early ’80s to play the thief and urchin Blackie Parrish on “General Hospital,” he had his mother feather his hair with a curling iron — hair that was already streaked with Sun In. He rejected his father’s Members Only jacket in favor of his mother’s long leather jacket, and tied a yellow bandanna around his leg in homage to Chachi on “Happy Days.” Then he drove to the audition in an El Camino he calls “the El Co.” You can almost smell the Travolta.Second, we can chalk some of Stamos’s apparent lack of passion about acting up to the fact that music — specifically, drumming — seems to be his true love. After befriending at Disneyland a Beach Boys cover band called Papa Doo Run Run early in his career, Stamos proceeded to charm his way into the inner circle of the actual Beach Boys and then to play drums hundreds of times with the legacy pop group during the 1980s and ’90s. These sections of the book are some of its most exciting.Lastly, Stamos is a highly social creature. I enjoyed reading about his mentors, Garry Marshall and Jack Klugman; the charity work he has done with abused and neglected kids; and the strings-pulling that he did on behalf of both his first wife, the actress Rebecca Romijn, and his pal Don Rickles. Similarly, the chapter about his friend and “Full House” colleague Bob Saget, who died last year, is lovely.Speaking of tidy endings: Winkler, it turns out, was an early influence for Stamos. After meeting the affable fellow actor, Stamos decided, “I’m going to treat people the way he treats me.”ALAFWARHC: At last, a friend for Winkler who’ll always return his calls.Audio produced by More

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    in Theater

    Théâtre de la Ville Reopens After 7 Years of Renovations

    The Théâtre de la Ville, now named for Sarah Bernhardt, reopened after a seven-year renovation. But its once-radical approach to dance is now less of a calling card.A lot can happen in seven years. When the Théâtre de la Ville — a flagship venue for Paris’s contemporary dance and theater scene — last welcomed audiences, in late 2016, TikTok had just launched. A pandemic seemed like a far-fetched idea. La(Horde), the influential dance collective featured prominently during the theater’s reopening festivities this month, was still wholly unknown.Roughly half of the Théâtre de la Ville’s current employees joined during the closure and didn’t set foot in the building during renovations, its director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota said during a tour of the playhouse last month. (While it was closed, shows continued at a temporary location, the Espace Cardin, at partner venues and on the Théâtre de la Ville’s second stage, Les Abbesses.)Anticipation for the reopening was high, and the Théâtre de la Ville does look — and feel — different. First, it boasts a new, slightly unwieldy name: the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt, a nod to its most famous owner, the French actress who ran the space between 1899 and 1923. (The venue’s website has yet to reflect the rebrand.)The biggest change, however, hits when you walk through the doors. The heavy-looking concrete staircase that led from the entrance into the auditorium has been eliminated. Discrete stairs are now hidden in the back of the hall, and two curved mezzanines in warm wood tones hug the facade — with panoramic views of the neighborhood, including the Théâtre du Châtelet, the rival playhouse that stands across the street.The old concrete staircase in the thater’s entrance is gone, creating an open atmosphere with panoramic views.Josephine BruederThe closure was never intended to last this long. The initial plan was a partial renovation to bring the Théâtre de la Ville, which hadn’t had a significant upgrade since 1967, up to current security and technical standards. Difficulties quickly piled up, initially because of extensive lead and asbestos, then owing to the Covid pandemic. The total cost, first estimated at 26 million euros, or $27.5 million, ultimately rose to €40 million ($42 million).The result is a distinctly 21st-century update, which adds yet another layer to what was already an architectural mille-feuille. Inaugurated in 1862, the building was destroyed during the Paris Commune of 1871 and rebuilt a few years later. It was then rebranded several times before the city of Paris chose to reimagine it in 1966. While the facade and roof remained, the Italian-style interior was gutted in favor of a more egalitarian, Brutalist-style auditorium, designed by Jean Perrottet and Valentin Fabre.The auditorium still feels familiar. While the seats are now a muted shade of sand instead of gray, its concrete underpinnings — dotted here and there with gold leaf — still hang over visitors in the hall. Behind the scenes, however, the stage machinery has been entirely updated. Even the mezzanines are now equipped with curtains and professional lighting, for smaller in situ performances.And Demarcy-Mota, Théâtre de la Ville’s director since 2008, is attempting to make up for lost time. In early October, the reopening was marked with a free 26-hour performance marathon, “The Great Vigil,” starring around 300 artists from the fields of dance, theater and music.“Marry Me in Bassiani,” a production created by the French dance troupe La(Horde) at Théâtre de la Ville.Aude AragoSome, like the choreographers Angelin Preljocaj and Lucinda Childs, were regulars long before the Théâtre de la Ville closed. Another frequent visitor, the flamenco star Israel Galvan, made a surprise appearance for a brilliant duet with the French harpsichordist Benjamin Alard.Others were making their Théâtre de la Ville debut, like the pianist Yi-Lin Wu, who set a meditative tone around 1 a.m. with a performance of Ravel’s shimmering “Gaspard de la Nuit.” There was something eerie about wandering the halls late into the night, encountering a highly theatrical statue of Bernhardt playing Phaedra, by a staircase, and climbing up to a newly opened studio, La Coupole, to watch “Ionesco Suite,” a five-play mash-up of the French dramatist’s works, directed by Demarcy-Mota — until well past 3 a.m.For many visitors at the opening, it was a joyful reunion with a playhouse that shaped much of the French dance scene in the last decades of the 20th century. At that time, the Théâtre de la Ville fiercely promoted avant-garde contemporary dance, and became known as the Parisian home of the Tanztheater luminary Pina Bausch, who visited each year.In her Théâtre de la Ville debut, the pianist Yi-Lin Wu set a meditative tone with a performance of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.” Laurent PhilippeThis identity had begun to shift in the years before the Théâtre de la Ville closed, with a greater diversity of choreographic trends represented on its stage. Still, during its seven-year absence, other Parisian venues like the Grande Halle of La Villette have stepped up their dance offerings or reoriented their focus to favor more diverse voices and collectives, many of them steeped in street dance styles.So as the Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt kicked its first season into gear this month, it was sometimes hard to discern what sets it apart from other theaters. High-profile choreographers are no longer identified with individual venues, the way Théâtre de la Ville once was with Bausch: Every programmer in town seems to want the same names.The collective La(Horde), which took over the stage after “The Great Vigil,” is one example. Less than a week before its run of “Marry Me In Bassiani,” a production the group created for a Georgian company, Iveroni Ensemble, La(Horde) was across the street at the Théâtre du Châtelet with its newest creation, “Age of Content.”There will be plenty more opportunities to see what Théâtre de la Ville-Sarah Bernhardt does with its revitalized venue as its season progresses. Demarcy-Mota, a theater director who splits his programming between dance, theater and a smattering of music events, said in his inauguration speech last month that he sees the stage as “a space for contradiction.”And the thrill of discovering new work in a theater known for groundbreaking performances could already be felt last week when La Coupole, the upstairs studio, hosted “En Addicto,” a one-man show inspired by a monthslong residency in a hospital wing devoted to addicts.Its director and performer, Thomas Quillardet, let the voices of staff and patients alike flow through him with just the right mix of empathy and levity. It brought to mind Demarcy-Mota’s commitment to sending Théâtre de la Ville artists to local hospitals during the pandemic, to share poems or mini-performances. It’s been a long wait, but these artists can finally come home. More