Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Jordan Klepper Calls Trump Out for His ‘Irish Exit’ at G7

    The president left the Group of 7 summit in Canada a day ahead of schedule, and Tuesday’s “Daily Show” host thinks he knows why.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.‘Stay Tuned’President Trump left the G7 summit in Canada a day earlier than planned, flying back to Washington to deal with the Iran-Israel conflict, according to the White House.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Jordan Klepper called Trump out for his “Irish exit.”“Now, this is an important G7 for Trump, because he had to prove that he had the discipline and wherewithal to fix the global economy after he [expletive] up the global economy.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“We all know what this is, right? You’re at an event, you have to rush home because ‘something came up’? Look, I get it — none of us like to poop in an unfamiliar place. Sometimes, when you have a big matchup coming up, you just need that home-field advantage.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“After a few days with Trump, the Canadian prime minister was like, ‘I hate to see you go, but I also hate to see you here.’” — JIMMY FALLON“When French president Emmanuel Macron told the press that Trump left the G7 to work on a cease-fire, Trump attacked Macron, posting, ‘He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a cease-fire. Much bigger than that. Stay tuned!’ Much bigger than that? Not a cease-fire? Maybe not the most subtle messaging from the commander in chief. It’s like when F.D.R. said, ‘Gotta get me some sleep. Tomorrow is Big D-Day. Can’t say much more, but it rhymes with Shmormandy.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So either the United States is about to jump in or he just got bored during the G7 icebreakers.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“‘Stay tuned.’ Like it’s the season finale of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ or something.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Oh, great! Yeah, better than a cease-fire! Cease-fire plus! That’s great — I hate watching ads.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Trade Deal Drop 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

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    Review: He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s the Future King of England

    The Off Broadway play “Prince Faggot” aims to shock. But the real surprise is how good it is anyway.In 2032, a young man called Tips brings his boyfriend, Dev, home from college to meet the folks. Though cautious, Mum and Dad are neither surprised nor scandalized; after all, he’s 18, and they have known he was gay for a while.For the characters in Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” though, that gayness was long since a given. Early in the play, we are shown a famous picture of Tips at 4, looking adorable and, to them, arguably fey.Tips is better known to the world as Prince George of Wales, the oldest child of Prince William and Princess Catherine. The real Prince George is now 11. For that reason, I will hereafter refer to the character by his nickname. I am one of those who, as the play anticipates, resist the dragooning of a preadolescent boy into a dramatic argument about sexuality and monarchy — just as I cringe at the use of a slur I take no reclaimed pride in to market a title. If the playwright means to shock, mission accomplished.But here’s the real shocker: The play, which opened Tuesday at Playwrights Horizons, in a co-production with Soho Rep, is thrilling. Inflammatory, nose-thumbing, explicit to the point of pornography, wild and undisciplined (except in its bondage scenes) — yes, all that. Its arguments have so many holes in them, most hold water only briefly. Grievance is its top note: Tips is a whiner and Dev a theory queen. Love is everything and never enough.In other words, however objectionably conjectural, it’s real.Tannahill tries to sideline reality quickly though. In a throat-clearing prologue, he has the six actors (all exceptionally good in multiple roles) debate the propriety of telling the story in the first place. One (Mihir Kumar) argues that since “all children are ‘sexualized’ as heterosexual by default,” exploring a different framing is a kind of reparation. Another (K. Todd Freeman) retorts that to portray an actual child as queer is to invite a charge of grooming. A third (David Greenspan) adds wickedly, “Frankly, I think we’ve been doing a terrible job at grooming. I mean look at how many straights there still are.”From left, Rachel Crowl, K. Todd Freeman, N’yomi Allure Stewart and McCrea as the royals at the heart of the play.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWe 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

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    ‘Chaos’ Is a Morning Show Dramedy With Verve

    This Danish series, about a morning show in crisis, is light but not dumb, credible but still arch. It is also very different from “The Morning Show.”The Danish dramedy “Chaos” (in Danish, with subtitles), on Viaplay, centers on a morning show in crisis. “Denmark Awakes” is chugging along, not particularly vibrant or hugely popular but a fixture nonetheless. Then a new boss rolls in and announces that the show is about to be canceled, and suddenly the status quo is no longer an option.That is especially true for Lise (Katrine Greis-Rosenthal), who anchors the show with her husband, Martin (Hadi Ka-Koush). They smile through tepid human-interest stories about giant eggplants and unusually old dogs, but off camera, the cheery act is harder to maintain: He’s ready for kids, she definitely isn’t and thinks she may never be. So when she meets Johannes (Jacob Lohmann), a scruffy, emotionally wounded chef who is trying out van life for a while, she is drawn both to him and to the premise of a less conventional life.The staff at “Denmark Awakes” scrambles to grow its ratings, but attracting new, younger viewers is not easy. A brainstorming meeting concludes with three big ideas on the whiteboard: “MERMAN,” “DON’T SCARE MEN” and “DIRECTION.” Hmm. Maybe Johannes could do a segment, Lise suggests. And let’s have Lise and Martin take DNA tests onscreen! That is sure to be a trouble-free exercise with no unexpected results.Even though it is set at a morning show, this is — mercifully — not at all like “The Morning Show,” which is tediously trapped in its miasma of self-regard. “Chaos” is brisk and frisky, juiced by a rom-com engine and by the countdown toward the show-within-the-show’s cancellation. Is Lise’s life collapsing or beginning? Is everything falling apart, or was everything barely held together in the first place? Impending doom sucks, but would Lise be brave enough to make big changes without that pressure? Would anyone?“Chaos” is light but not dumb, credible but still arch. Its eight episodes are snappy and precise: no split timelines, no pointless subplots. More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Broadway’s ‘Real Women Have Curves’ to Close Because of Soft Sales

    The immigration-themed musical is the second show to announce a plan to close in the aftermath of this year’s Tony Awards.“Real Women Have Curves,” an immigration-themed musical about a young woman whose academic aspirations conflict with her mother’s desire for her to stay close to home and to help out at the family’s small business, announced on Tuesday that it would close on June 29 after struggling to find an audience on Broadway.Based on Josefina López’s 1990 play and a 2002 film, the musical began previews April 1 and opened April 27 at the James Earl Jones Theater. At the time of its closing, it will have played 31 previews and 73 regular performances.The musical is set in 1987 in an East Los Angeles dressmaking shop owned and operated by Latina women, some of whom are undocumented immigrants; it has echoes of events currently unfolding in Los Angeles, where immigration raids have prompted protests.“Real Women Have Curves” was nominated for two Tony Awards, for best original score (by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez) and for best featured performance by an actress (Justina Machado), but won neither. It is the second show to post a closing notice after going home empty-handed from the June 8 awards ceremony, following “Smash.”Reviews for “Real Women Have Curves” were mostly positive. In The New York Times, the critic Laura Collins-Hughes called it “a bouncy, crowd-pleasing comedy about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s ambitions.” She added, “It is also a tale of immigrant life in this country, and the dread woven into the fabric of daily existence for undocumented people and those closest to them.”“Real Women Have Curves” has had difficulty selling tickets throughout its run. It has been grossing about $400,000 most weeks, which is well below today’s running costs for a large-scale Broadway musical. The producers, in a last-ditch effort to boost ticket sales, picked up the costs for the cast to perform a song on the Tony Awards broadcast (not a given, since the show was not nominated for best musical), but that did not save the show.The musical was capitalized for up to $16.5 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.“Real Women Have Curves” features a book by Lisa Loomer with Nell Benjamin; it is directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo. Produced by Barry and Fran Weissler and Jack Noseworthy, the show had an initial production that opened in 2023 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. More

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    American Mythmakers, Revisited: Hunter S. Thompson and John Wilkes Booth

    Two shows attempt to make sense of the gonzo journalist and Lincoln’s assassin, cultural figures forever intertwined with American history.Two shows on stages just outside Washington, “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical” and “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!,” create a diptych of American mythmaking: One character sees the country crumbling and aims to shake it awake, the other sees it in betrayal of its founding principles and tries to burn it down.The writer Hunter S. Thompson had little regard for professional deadlines, but in “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” running through July 13 at the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., he faces one he can’t ignore. With a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a .45 in the other, the bathrobe-clad gonzo journalist — staring at a typewriter that has just landed with a thud onto the stage — neutrally informs the audience: “It’s February 20th, 2005. The day I die.” Then the self-proclaimed “major figure in American history,” played with feral charisma by Eric William Morris, manically attempts to commit his life, and the life of these disunited states, to the page.Created by Joe Iconis (music, lyrics, book) and Gregory S. Moss (book), and directed with anarchic propulsion by Christopher Ashley, the show is a frenzied, frothing act of theatrical resurrection. Morris is accompanied by a nine-member ensemble that functions as a Greek chorus of demons, muses and collaborators, ferrying us from Thompson’s Louisville boyhood to his professional dust-ups with the Hells Angels and drug-fueled detours through the underside of the American dream. His Colorado home, Owl Farm, serves as both writing bunker and memory palace. Crammed with gewgaws, it looks like the kind of place that would make people rethink their ideas about souvenirs.Subtlety was never Thompson’s forte, and this bio-musical wisely avoids making it an organizing principle. Iconis’s propulsive score is peppered with protest anthems, beat-poet swagger and a recurring rock ’n’ roll hymn to outsiders and misfits. “All hail Hunter S. Thompson,” the ensemble chants. “Hail to the freak.” Too much exposition? Too little? That depends on your familiarity with Thompson, a philandering husband and neglectful father who ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., cherished his constitutional right to own guns and nursed a near-cellular antipathy toward Nixon (played here by a reptilian George Abud).Though the show splendidly commits to unfiltered, maximalist expression, quieter moments also resonate, including when a young Hunter (Giovanny Diaz De Leon) reads a copy of “The Great Gatsby” and resolves to one day write into existence a more democratic country.Ben Ahlers as the title character in “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only!” at Baltimore Center Stage.J Fannon PhotographyWe 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

  • 88 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    How ‘Passengers’ Retooled After a Performer’s Injury

    The 7 Fingers company was about to begin performances of its multidisciplinary, train travel-themed show “Passengers,” and it was in a big pickle: A cast member was injured while practicing an especially tricky segment. It was anticlimactic — initially nothing seemed askew at the Tuesday evening rehearsal I had been observing — but the consequences were weighing on everybody. The first preview, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, was a mere two days away.The troupe, which specializes in a hybrid of circus and theater incorporating movement and music, had been running through part of a hand-to-trapeze segment. That discipline combines ground and aerial acrobatics, and is a signature number of the director and choreographer Shana Carroll. She had developed it for the Cirque du Soleil show “Paramour,” then took it to the 7 Fingers, the Montreal-based collective she helped found in 2002.Like many circus acts, hand-to-trap (as it’s commonly referred to), is spectacular but also dangerous. A flyer is catapulted up or dropped down by porters on the floor and one on a trapeze. There is no net or mat underneath the trapeze, because that’s where the floor team stands.The director and choreographer Shana Carroll, with her back to the camera, observing the juggler Pablo Pramparo, during rehearsal of “Passengers.”Amir Hamja for The New York Times“My safety mat becomes my porters, my colleagues,” said Marie-Christine Fournier, who is this production’s flyer.At one point on Tuesday, Fournier was in the air, dangling from the wrists of Eduardo DeAzevedo Grillo, a porter who was hanging upside down, batlike, from a trapeze. He released her and she gracefully dove into the arms of seven company members who were waiting underneath them.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

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    The Best TV Shows of 2025, So Far

    Returning hits like “Severance” and “The White Lotus” inspired plenty of chatter, but did they make our top TV list?The first half of 2025 saw the return of strike-delayed hit shows, like “Severance,” “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” that took turns dominating the cultural conversation. But only one of them made our top TV list.Read on to find out which one and to see which other series, new and old, scripted and nonfiction, impressed our television critics the most (listed alphabetically).‘Andor’Diego Luna reprised his title role in the final season of “Andor.”Lucasfilm Ltd./Disney+A prequel series to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016) — and arguably the most acclaimed “Star Wars” story of any kind since that film — “Andor” offered one of TV’s deepest explorations of the political realities and human costs of rebellion. Its two-season run wrapped up in May.“Prequels are often where dramatic tension goes to die,” James Poniewozik writes. “How invested can you be in a story whose outcome you already know? The genius of ‘Andor,’ created by Tony Gilroy, is to make that knowledge an asset.”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

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Late Night Thinks Trump’s Military Parade Was Kind of Dull

    It was “basically a $50 million version of when a 5-year-old shows you every car in his Hot Wheels collection,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday.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.Trump’s Sad BirthdayPresident Trump hosted a military parade in Washington on Saturday — either for the Army’s 250th anniversary or for his own birthday, depending on who you believed. The crowds seemed underwhelming.On Monday, Jimmy Kimmel called it Trump’s “much-anticipated Stupid Sweet 16 disguised as a tribute to the U.S. Army he bone-spurred his way out of.”“You know, after all his talk about how this wasn’t a birthday party for him, it kind of seemed like a birthday party for him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The White House is now claiming that over 250,000 people attended the parade. Yeah, it was an estimate, give or take 250,000.” — JIMMY FALLON“This was less a show of overwhelming force and more like a military museum getting in its steps.” — JON STEWART“It was boring. It was basically a $50 million version of when a 5-year-old shows you every car in his Hot Wheels collection.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You can be the president of the United States, you can have an entire political party and a global media apparatus at your disposal. You can cow the media and the wealthy into obedience. You can command an army and deploy troops and have unlimited wealth and power, but you still can’t force people to come to your [expletive] birthday party. And what is more American than that?” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Can You Hear Me Now Edition)“The Trump Organization today unveiled plans for a new Trump mobile phone service. Best of all, you won’t have any need for a friends and family plan.” — SETH MEYERS“That guy will do anything to try to get his father to answer his phone calls.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, on Donald Trump Jr.’s introduction of Trump Mobile“A lot of words come to mind when you think of Trump, but ‘mobile’ isn’t really one of them.” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump was like, [imitating Trump] ‘It’s called Trump Mobile. But for short, I’m calling it T-Mobile.” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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