Eliana Willis

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    in Television

    Forget the Punchline. It’s the Setup to These Jokes That’s Tricky.

    Ronny Chieng, Gary Gulman and other comics are experimenting with long buildups that can be audacious … when they work.A joke can be broken down into two sections: The setup, which isn’t necessarily funny, and the punchline, which better be.Facing a crowd that’s looking to laugh, comics tend to want to get to the payoff as quickly as possible. But there is a rich tradition of jokes that move in the opposite direction, where part of what’s funny is that the setup keeps going and going, long past what you expect.The most famous example might be the Aristocrats, the rare joke that inspired its own documentary. An old bit, it begins with a setup about family members trying to get an agent to book their act and its humor tends to be fundamentally dirty and gratuitous. But in the last year, some of the most ambitious new hours have used the long setup to develop more rarefied kinds of jokes, formally inventive, experimental and very funny.Witness the magnificently unusual joke midway through Ronny Chieng’s recent special, “Love to Hate It” (Netflix), which begins with him trying to find common ground with the MAGA movement, saying its supporters have a point that the country has problems. Slowing his aggressive rat-a-tat delivery, he lists evidence of decline — bad health-care outcomes, wealth inequality — and just when you expect a punchline to lighten the mood, he gets even more serious.Ronny Chieng kills with the long form in “Love to Hate It.”NetflixAdopting the tone of a politician, he says that we did not fulfill the implicit promise that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could make it. At this point, the comedy seems to have ground to a halt. It’s also when Chieng’s pace shifts, from slow and deliberate to pointedly sped up as he rapidly unspools a grand unified theory. The tempo of his hard-to-follow chatter, which covers tax and trade policy, among other economic minutiae, indicates a departure from logical argument and a venture into the ridiculous. It recalls how everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Benny Hill has used fast forward to create comedy.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 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Idina Menzel Played Elphaba and Elsa. Now She’s Back on Broadway.

    Menzel, a fan favorite since “Rent,” is back on Broadway in “Redwood,” and this time she’s climbing conifers.Idina Menzel was sitting on a bench in a California redwood grove, yearning for silence. It was late one autumn afternoon, and I had been trying for months to get her to meet me in a forest where we could discuss this musical she’d been working on for 15 years about a woman in a tree, and now here we were. But also, there was a wedding party walking by, and an unleashed dog that knocked over her hibiscus tea, and an aircraft buzzing overhead.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryNo matter. On the drive to the forest from a dance studio where Menzel had been practicing singing upside down, because yes, this musical requires her to dance and sing while scaling a giant tree, she had been thinking about what she wanted to tell me about why she was making a show that is outwardly about redwoods — it’s called “Redwood” — but also about a grieving woman’s search for sanctuary.“I’m a little reticent to say, but I think I have a lot of noise in my own head as a person,” she told me as we settled in at Oakland’s Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park. “The idea of escaping and freeing yourself from your own pain or loneliness or confusion is very healing to me.”In an entertainment industry where actors are lucky to have one career-defining role, Menzel already has three: Maureen, the rabble-rousing performance artist in “Rent”; Elphaba, the green-skinned who-are-you-calling-wicked witch in “Wicked”; and Elsa, the ice-conjuring queen in Disney’s animated “Frozen” films. Those characters have many strengths, but serenity is not one of them.Menzel had her breakout role in “Rent,” top left, and then won a Tony in “Wicked,” top right. Her other stage roles have included the Off Broadway play “Skintight,” bottom right, and the Broadway musical “If/Then,” bottom left.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/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

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    Practicing for When the Bombs Fall in ‘A Knock on the Roof’

    In a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, a woman rehearses how she would escape her building if Israeli forces were to strike.There comes a point late in “A Knock on the Roof,” a new solo play about ordinary people under bombardment in Gaza, when the boundary blurs unsettlingly and the audience can no longer tell: Is Mariam, the central character, awake or asleep? Are we watching a horrifying reality or a fear that’s taking shape in her dreams?Her everyday existence is fraught enough. Portrayed with easy approachability by Khawla Ibraheem, who is also the playwright, Mariam spends her days wrangling Nour, her 6-year-old son, and meticulously planning how she would escape her apartment building if the Israel Defense Forces attacked it.“You see,” she tells us in narrator mode, “two wars ago, they started using a technique called ‘a knock on the roof.’ It’s a small bomb they drop to alert us that we have five to 15 minutes to evacuate before the actual rocket destroys the building.”So Mariam trains to run as far as possible in five minutes, weighed down by whatever necessities she can put in a backpack — plus Nour, a heavy sleeper who will need to be carried if the bombs come at night. She puts him through practice-run paces alongside her mother, who moves in when the unnamed war begins, not because it’s safer but just to be with them.Directed by Oliver Butler at New York Theater Workshop, “A Knock on the Roof” long predates the current war between Israel and Hamas. As a program note explains, the play began as a 10-minute monologue that Ibraheem, who lives in the Golan Heights, wrote in 2014. Much of its further development came in the year before the conflict erupted in October 2023.The immediacy of the current war is what makes this production, which moves to London in February, so timely. Surprisingly, that does not necessarily give it a dramatic advantage.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 Theater

    How Kara Young, a Tony-Winning Actress, Spends Her Sundays

    Kara Young spends a rare day off brunching with her family in Harlem and popping into beauty supply stores along 125th Street.Many actors have to leave their support systems behind when they set out to follow their Broadway dreams.But Kara Young, a Tony Award-winning actress who grew up on the west side of Harlem — and lives just three blocks from where she was born — has been able to share her success with the community that raised her.Ms. Young, whose parents immigrated from Belize, attended elementary school and high school in Spanish Harlem, the neighborhood on the east side of Manhattan known for its Puerto Rican culture. “It’s a super beautiful community,” she said.“But at the same time,” she added, “I recognize that I’ve been privileged to be able to stay in the community I grew up in. Gentrification is real.”It was at the 92nd Street Y, she said, that she first became hooked on theater. Her older brother, Klay, was taking a mime class as part of an after-school program — and a 5-year-old Ms. Young knew she wanted in.Soon she was performing with the other students around Manhattan, and “that set off my imagination,” she said.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

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    Jimmy Fallon Makes His Broadway Debut in “All In”

    The “Tonight Show” host is performing in the new comedy “All In,” which features a starry cast. “It’s a dream,” he said.Four days a week, Jimmy Fallon performs for a TV audience of millions of people as the host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” But stepping onto the stage of the Hudson Theater in front of about 1,000 theatergoers made him nervous in a whole new way.“When you have too much time to think about it, you overthink it,” Fallon said after making his Broadway debut in “All In: Comedy About Love” on Tuesday night. “It’s exhilarating, it’s exciting and it’s exhausting,” he added, in a post-performance interview in his dressing room. “Even though I don’t really even do much.”Fallon, backstage with one of his co-stars, Lin-Manuel Miranda.Graham Dickie/The New York Times“All In,” short comedic segments based on stories written by Simon Rich and directed by Alex Timbers, features a rotating cast of brand-name actors who tend to hold scripts since they don’t have much time to rehearse.Fallon, 50, who on Tuesday night shared the stage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aidy Bryant and Nick Kroll (plus a band led by the married couple the Bengsons), will only appear for eight performances. But it still amounts to his Broadway debut. Which is a big deal for a kid from Saugerties, N.Y., who grew up captivated by the Tony Awards on television — and the Milford Plaza Hotel’s “Lulla-BUY of Broadway” commercials.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 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Putting His Father’s Final Words Onstage, With a Little Ambivalence

    The Portuguese director Tiago Rodrigues’s latest show, “No Yogurt for the Dead,” is based on his dying father’s scribbles but resists sharing much emotion.A terminally ill writer goes into the hospital. Aware that it will be his final stay, he holds onto a notebook, declaring to his family that he is working on his last article.When his son opens the notebook in the wake of the writer’s death, however, all he finds are illegible scribbles and a mysterious title: “The Dead Don’t Eat Yogurt.”When the son in this story is the renowned director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, there is a good chance the notebook will still end up becoming art. His father, the Portuguese journalist Rogério Rodrigues, apparently knew it, too. In “No Yogurt for the Dead,” which premiered Thursday at the Belgian playhouse NTGent ahead of a European tour, he tells his son: “No one could ever tell you anything interesting about anything at all without it ending up in one of your plays.”Rodrigues, who has been the director of France’s Avignon Festival since 2022, has a knack for turning intimate stories into stirring theater. One of his longest-running productions, “By Heart” (2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by teaching audience members a poem; in recent years, he has also explored the real-life struggles of others, as with the humanitarian workers of “Insofar as the Impossible.”“No Yogurt for the Dead” is the sixth installment in NTGent’s “History(ies) of Theater” series, which was started in 2018 by Milo Rau, then the director of the playhouse. Rodrigues’s play leans much further into autofiction than his work typically does, yet feels somewhat ambivalent about it. In a short introduction, with the house lights still on, the Belgian actress Lisah Adeaga, who plays a nurse, explains that “the writer of this play” — as she refers to Rodrigues — opted to “imagine” what his father’s final article might have been like.Throughout the show, Brás, left, and Manuela Azevedo swap beards, and the roles of son and father: Shortbeard and Longbeard.Michiel DevijverWe 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

  • 75 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    HBO Ends Partnership With ‘Sesame Street’

    The venerable children’s series must find a new home after about a decade on HBO and its streaming service, Max. Old episodes will be available through 2027.“Sesame Street” is relocating.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that makes the venerable children’s educational program, is looking for a new distribution partner after Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew its agreement to air new episodes of the show on HBO and its streaming platform, Max.Max said the decision was part of a broader corporate shift away from children’s programming. The 55th season of “Sesame Street” — featuring Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster and other colorful Muppets — will be the last to arrive on Max, in January. Old episodes will remain available through 2027.“Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said. “And so new episodes from ‘Sesame Street,’ at this time, are not as core to our strategy.”Sesame Workshop partnered with HBO in 2015, granting the premium cable outlet a nine-month window of exclusivity for new episodes. Under the agreement, the episodes were later broadcast for free on PBS, which has aired “Sesame Street” since 1970.The deal provided a significant cash infusion for Sesame Workshop, which expanded its production schedule to 35 episodes a year from 18. It is unclear which platform might pick up the series, but contenders could include Apple TV+ (which aired three seasons of “Helpsters,” another Sesame Workshop children’s series), Netflix and Amazon.“We will continue to invest in our best-in-class programming and look forward to announcing our new distribution plans in the coming months,” a spokesman for Sesame Workshop said in a statement.Sesame Workshop and HBO have been accused of contributing to inequality by allowing families who can afford premium cable to get new episodes of the show before others. In 2022, nearly 200 episodes of the show were pulled from Max.“HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families from having access to timely first-run episodes of perhaps the single most educational children’s franchise in the history of electronic media,” Tim Winter, who was then the president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement in 2019. More

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    in Theater

    Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

    Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.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