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    A Retelling of the Mahabharata, Set to Modern-Day Struggles

    At Lincoln Center, the Toronto-based theater company Why Not strives to balance the old and new in its production of the Sanskrit epic.The Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata has been adapted many times over in oral retellings, plays, movies, comic books and more. Consisting of over 100,000 verses, the poem has so many stories that picking which ones to tell is a statement in itself.And making that decision can pose its own challenges as Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes, co-artistic directors of the Toronto-based theater company Why Not, learned when they went about adapting it. Now they are bringing their expansive two-part contemporary staging, which premiered in 2023 at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, to Lincoln Center, where it will run from Tuesday through June 29.Their adaptation is based on the poet Carole Satyamurti’s retelling of the epic, which, at its core, is the story of two warring sets of cousins — the Kauravas and the Pandavas — trying to control a kingdom. The poem is part myth, part guide to upholding moral values and duty — or dharma. Some of the epic incorporates the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical text on Hindu morality, which is framed as a discussion between Prince Arjuna, a Pandava and a skilled archer, and Lord Krishna, a Hindu God who acts as Arjuna’s teacher.Jain, 45, began developing the piece in 2016 after receiving a $375,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the country’s public arts funder. Fernandes, 36, joined him on the project two years later after finishing graduate school in France. Jain described an early version of the script in an interview as “feminist” and “self-referential.” But the pandemic made them rethink which stories could best drive home the point of dharma — a central tenet of the text.Meher Pavri as an opera singer in the section drawn from the Bhagavad Gita. In the background, Neil D’Souza as the Hindu god Krishna and Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu as Prince Arjuna, Krishna’s pupil. David Cooper“To build a civilization, those with the most power must take care of those with the least,” Jain said, referring to the epic’s message. “In the animal kingdom, the strong eat the weak. There’s no problem with that. But humans have empathy, and we can build a civilization where we’re not just those who eat and those who are eaten, but rather those who feed and those who are fed.”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 Television

    Jay Ellis Considers Colson Whitehead His Literary GOAT

    “‘Harlem Shuffle,’ ‘Crook Manifesto,’ ‘Underground Railroad,’ ‘Nickel Boys’: I feel like I did not understand or see myself in fiction until I read him.”So far this year, Jay Ellis has played a basketball coach in the Netflix comedy “Running Point” and a record-setting M.V.P. in the action movie “Freaky Tales.”This summer, he’s swapping free throws for freestyles as he steps into the role of a hip-hop star in the Off Broadway play “Duke & Roya,” at the Lucille Lortel Theater. The drama finds him stumbling into a cross-cultural romance with life-threatening consequences.“At first glance,” he said, “there’s no reason why you think these two people would ever hit it off.”He added: “We’re in a world where everyone yells, no one listens. Everybody really just wants connection, to be seen, to be understood, and I just loved the idea that these two characters do.”Ellis, 43, temporarily relocated his family of four to New York from their home in Los Angeles. One particular aspect of the local culture suits him well.“I absolutely love pizza,” he said, name-dropping his latest find, Fini. “My daughter took a bite and was like, ‘Why don’t we have pizza like this in L.A., Daddy?’”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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    Anne Burrell Memorial Service Attended by Food Network Stars

    The Food Network chef, who died Tuesday at 55, was remembered in a star-studded service that sent her off with a singalong.As friends, relatives and colleagues filed into a memorial service for the Food Network host Anne Burrell in Manhattan on Friday afternoon, they noticed that somebody had placed on each chair a sheet of Billy Joel’s lyrics to “Only the Good Die Young.”At the end of the event, they learned why. Ms. Burrell’s husband, Stuart Claxton, urged them to “give her a big send-off” in a karaoke-style singalong joined by Food Network executives and hosts including Scott Conant, Amanda Freitag, Marc Forgione and Geoffrey Zakarian.“We’ve got one shot at this, so let’s make it count,” Mr. Claxton said as the opening lines flashed on two large screens on either side of the closed coffin in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side.The city’s medical examiner has not yet determined a cause of death for Ms. Burrell, who was found unresponsive in the shower at her Brooklyn home on Tuesday morning. According to an internal document viewed by The New York Times, Ms. Burrell, who was 55, was “surrounded by approximately (100) assorted pills.” Emergency medical workers who responded to a 911 call pronounced her dead at the scene.But any clouds of mystery were determinedly kept at bay during the service, which was a celebration of a woman who, by all accounts, rarely passed up an occasion to celebrate. She had spent the night before she died performing at an improv club in Brooklyn.Her manager, Scott Feldman, recalled that Ms. Burrell invariably introduced him as “my dad” when he went out with her in the evenings.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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    Anne Burrell’s Death Is Under Investigation as a Possible Drug Overdose

    The city’s medical examiner has not determined a cause, but an internal police document says the TV chef was found surrounded by pills.The New York City Police Department is investigating the death of Anne Burrell, the popular Food Network star who was found dead in her Brooklyn home on Tuesday morning, as a possible drug overdose, according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times.The document said Ms. Burrell, who was 55, had been “discovered in the shower unconscious and unresponsive surrounded by approximately (100) assorted pills.” Emergency medical workers who responded to a 911 call pronounced her dead at the scene.A spokeswoman for the city medical examiner’s office said Friday that an autopsy had been completed, but that any findings on the cause and manner of Ms. Burrell’s death were still pending.Ms. Burrell was an accomplished Italian chef who began her television career as a sous-chef to the celebrity chef Mario Batali on the Food Network show “Iron Chef America.” She was best known for hosting “Worst Cooks in America,” which has run for 28 seasons.With her plume of platinum-blond hair, signature mismatched socks and a way of teaching that included a big helping of unvarnished truth, she became a mainstay for the network, appearing as a guest or judge on several other shows and even once riding on the network’s float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.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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    ‘Dead Outlaw’ Musical to Close After Disappointing Run on Broadway

    The show was shut out at the Tonys after being nominated for seven awards, including best musical.“Dead Outlaw,” a hard-driving musical about a bandit whose mummified body became a curiosity, announced Friday evening that it would close June 29 after a disappointingly brief run on Broadway.The show announced the closing just 12 days after the Tony Awards. It was nominated for seven prizes, including best musical, but won none. It is the third new musical to post a closing notice since the awards ceremony, following “Smash” and “Real Women Have Curves.”The show began previews April 12 and opened April 27 at the Longacre Theater in Manhattan. The show’s running costs are modest, but so are its box office revenues; it grossed $449,666 during the week that ended June 15. At the time of its closing, it will have played 14 preview and 73 regular performances.The musical is based on the true story of Elmer McCurdy, a turn-of-the-century figure who robbed trains and banks — often ineptly — and died in a shootout with law enforcement. His unclaimed body was preserved and then exhibited for years before being stashed in a California amusement park, where it was rediscovered in the 1970s.The show was first staged Off Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theater, which is operated by Audible; it is the first Audible show to transfer to Broadway. The reviews were quite strong, both downtown and uptown; in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called it “the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you.”The musical was capitalized for up to $10 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money — the amount it cost to finance the show’s development — has not been recouped.“Dead Outlaw” features a score by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses; it is directed by David Cromer. The lead producers are Lia Vollack and Sonia Friedman. In a statement they said, “Despite glowing reviews and a loyal following, the commercial momentum just wasn’t fast enough in a crowded season. As the show reminds us, sometimes the most incredible lives are cut short.” More

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    in Television

    Terry Louise Fisher, a Creator of ‘L.A. Law,’ Dies at 79

    She channeled her experiences — and frustrations — as a Los Angeles prosecutor into an award-winning career as a television writer and producer.Terry Louise Fisher, who channeled her experience as a Los Angeles prosecutor into an Emmy Award-winning television career as a writer and producer for “Cagney & Lacey,” the groundbreaking female-oriented police procedural, and a creator, with Steven Bochco, of the sleek drama “L.A. Law,” died on June 10 in Laguna Hills, Calif. She was 79.Her death was confirmed in a social media post by Mark Zev Hochberg, a family member. He did not cite a cause.Ms. Fisher was best known for her work on shows about cops and lawyers, and she certainly knew the terrain. Before turning her attention to the small screen, she worked as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles for two and a half years.She quickly grew disillusioned with a revolving-door criminal justice system that seemed to her to boil down to a jousting match between opposing lawyers, with little regard for guilt or innocence.In a 1986 interview with The San Francisco Examiner, she recalled being handed an almost certain victory in an otherwise weak case involving a knife killing because of an oversight by the defense: “I felt really challenged, and my adrenaline was pumping. I realized I could win this case. And I slept on it. I went, ‘My God, has winning become more important than justice?’”Her unflinching view of the system informed her tenure in television. In 1983, she began writing for “Cagney & Lacey,” bringing depth and realism to a CBS series that shook up the traditional knuckles-and-nightsticks cop-show genre by focusing on two female New York City police detectives, Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly).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 ‘Comedy Samurai,’ the Writer-Director Larry Charles Tells Tales of Working on ‘Borat’ and ‘Curb’

    Early in Larry Charles’s juicy showbiz memoir “Comedy Samurai,” he describes a formative moment writing for the television sketch show “Fridays.” Andy Kaufman was doing a bit with a masked magician swallowing a sword, only to spit up blood. “These were the laughs, the comedy, that I would try to pursue all my life,” Charles writes. “The deeper codes of comedy.”His book, a must-read for comedy nerds, is an account of nearly half of a century attempting to crack those codes, mostly as a director and writer, working with the most famous funny people in show business (Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld) and some of its most notorious bullies (Scott Rudin, the Weinstein brothers).Charles, 68, describes them all with entertaining candor, while also illuminating the creation of several of the greatest comedies of the modern era, including “Seinfeld” (he wrote for the first five seasons), “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (he directed episodes for two decades) and “Borat,” which he directed.His career, which began by selling a joke to Jay Leno, is a pocket history of modern comedy, anchored by surprisingly melancholy portraits of his two most fertile artistic relationships — with Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. In a recent interview over Zoom, he reflected on the path from Coney Island to Hollywood.Besides Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen, Charles has also worked with Bill Maher, on the film “Religulous,” and Bob Dylan, on “Masked and Anonymous.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesYou grew up in Trump Village, a then new housing complex in Coney Island built by the President’s father, Fred. You meet him?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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    Seth Meyers and His Brother, Josh, Poke Fun at Family Vacations on Podcast

    In their podcast, “Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers,” the comedians interview notable guests about memorable childhood holidays.When Seth and Josh Meyers were kids, their family spent a week in Maine at a waterfront cabin, where their mother got bitten by a horsefly, developed a bad reaction and ended up in the emergency room.“Her forearms looked like Popeye’s,” Josh recalled.“I remember spending the entirety of the trip in a room with a bunk bed that was a billion degrees,” added Seth, the host of a late-night talk show and a “Saturday Night Live” alumnus.These days, the brothers — both writers and comedians and the rare siblings who claim not to have fought over territory when they were young — mine similar vacation disasters for their weekly podcast, “Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers.” They interview guests including comedians, actors, musicians and even Bill Gates, about their memories of childhood vacations, many of which went awry.“Family trips are high-stakes affairs. We have expectations that these trips should be special. We go into them with the intention of making memories,” Josh said. “And the further we get away from the doomed excursions, creepy hotels, car breakdowns, illnesses, bad weather and knock-down drag-out fights with our siblings, the funnier it all gets.”We talked about the inception of their podcast, which turns two this month, aspects of childhood travel that they miss and what makes family trips, even disastrous ones, worth taking.This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.Tell us how the podcast came about.Seth: A family trip sort of stress-tests the family dynamic, both for the good and the bad. I think you really find out a lot about the people you’re closest with when it’s an away game.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