Eliana Willis

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    2023 Emmy Awards Will Be Postponed Because of Actors’ and Writers’ Strikes

    The ceremony, originally planned for Sept. 18, may be pushed into January in hopes that the labor disputes will be settled.The fallout from the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes continues.The 75th Emmy Awards will be postponed because of the strikes, according to a person briefed on the plans. The ceremony, originally planned for Sept. 18, does not yet have a new date but will most likely be moved to January, the person said.Emmy organizers are hopeful that would give the Hollywood studios enough time to settle the labor disputes. A new date will be finalized in the next few weeks.Fox, which is broadcasting this year’s event, and the Television Academy, which administers the Emmys, had concluded last month that it would have to postpone the event if the writers’ strike continued to linger until the end of July, The New York Times reported last month. The writers have now been on strike for 88 days and have not returned to the bargaining table with the major Hollywood studios since negotiations broke down in early May.By the time tens of thousands of actors joined the writers on picket lines and went on strike on July 14, it all but put a nail in the coffin for an Emmys ceremony in September.The postponement marks one of the biggest events that will get rescheduled because of the labor conflicts. The Emmys, which traditionally take place in August or September, were last postponed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. That year, the event ultimately took place in November.Organizing the Emmys is a significant undertaking, one of the reasons that the Television Academy and Fox set a late July deadline to make a decision on a postponement. Variety reported earlier that the Emmys would be rescheduled.Nominations for the Emmy Awards were announced this month. HBO, which led all networks in total nominations, became the first network in 31 years to earn four nominations in the best drama category — “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” “The Last of Us” and “House of the Dragon.” In the comedy categories, two-time winner “Ted Lasso” will compete against shows including “Abbott Elementary” and “The Bear.” More

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    Nonprofit Theaters Are in Crisis. A Times Reporter Spoke With 72 of Them

    Michael Paulson spoke with producers and artistic directors at nonprofit theaters across the country about the crisis their industry is facing.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Michael Paulson, who has covered theater for The New York Times for eight years, knew the situation was bad at the country’s nonprofit regional theaters, which had yet to regain their prepandemic audiences.But in recent months, the shock waves have gotten bigger: One of the nation’s largest companies, Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, said it would pause production on one of its three stages and lay off 10 percent of its staff. The Lookingglass, an anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, halted production for the rest of the year. Then this month, New York’s prestigious Public Theater cut nearly one in five of its jobs.“We’ve seen an increase in the number of closings, and it felt like this is real and serious and important for readers to know about,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview.That observation formed the basis for an article by Mr. Paulson that appeared on the front page of Monday’s newspaper. To document the crisis at America’s regional theaters, he spoke with the leaders of 72 top-tier companies across the country.Here, Mr. Paulson reflects on the reasons for the upheaval, on the most promising solutions being proposed and on the balancing act he juggles between the demands of daily news reporting and investigative projects. This conversation has been edited.How many of the issues that challenge nonprofit theaters stem from the pandemic?The pandemic was an accelerant. But the issues at the heart of this crisis — the aging of the audience, the growing role of streaming media in people’s entertainment diets, the decline in subscriptions as the way consumers plan their theatergoing — were underway before it. The economic situation combined with this inflationary moment proved unsurvivable for a number of theaters and damaging for many more.Are these challenges unique to theaters, or are they true of the nonprofit arts sector in general?Theater has some particular vulnerabilities — it’s a niche art form, and a lot of nonprofits pride themselves on developing new work, which means a show sometimes has a title or is by an artist that audiences don’t yet know. A bunch of people told me audiences want to be sure they’re going to have a good time before they set aside the time and the money, and that often means going to something that’s already established, versus something that is just being introduced to the world.Seventy-two interviews is a lot for one article. Do you envision this piece being the first in a series?I do have a tendency to be an overreporter, but I wanted to be confident that what we were reporting reflected a national pattern and wasn’t just an extrapolation from a handful of worst-case scenarios. I expect that a lot of my time this year is going to be spent thinking and writing about the economic challenges facing theaters in America.How do you balance the demands of daily news reporting with bigger-picture projects?I’m probably going to be doing fewer features about individual shows, while I focus on more of these stories about the health of the field, but I still want to write occasional pieces about artists and works of art. I think a mix of stories is what keeps a reporter sane.Do you anticipate doing a lot of that reporting in person?I hope so. A couple of days ago, I went to see “Evita” at American Repertory Theater outside of Boston, and over the weekend I went to see a play called “tiny father” at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. On Thursday, I saw a production of “Fun Home” at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C. I’m trying, to the extent I can, to see things outside New York. We need to pay more attention to nonprofit theaters and theaters outside New York — because there are real challenges in those places we need to be telling our readers about.What was the most surprising thing you learned while reporting this article?I was struck by how many theaters are now doing coproductions. It’s pretty dramatic: The Shakespeare Theater Company in D.C. had one coproduction out of six shows before the pandemic, and now at least five out of six will be coproductions this coming season. There’s also a lot of experimentation with collaboration, which is heartening. Theaters that once saw themselves either as competitors or just strangers are much more interested in finding ways to help one another.Your article touches on a number of potential solutions. Which seem most promising?There’s a coalition forming of theaters in Connecticut that is talking about whether the theaters might be able to share set-building functions. Those kinds of approaches might have promise. A lot of theaters are talking about the possibility of either more government assistance or for more foundations to take seriously the challenges facing this field. There’s a shared sense that box-office revenue, which has never been enough to sustain these organizations, is not going to be a primary part of the solution.How will we see an effect on Broadway, which depends on nonprofit theaters to develop material and support artists?The situation means less work for artists, actors, writers, directors and designers. Fewer shows are being staged, and those shows are often smaller and have shorter runs, which is a challenge both for the people who are already established in the field and the people who are seeking to enter it. There’s just less work to go around. More

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    ‘Oppenheimer’ Fans Are Rediscovering a 40-Year-Old Documentary

    “The Day After Trinity,” made available without a subscription until August, shot to the top of the Criterion Channel’s most-watched films.One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.After the Criterion Channel made “The Day After Trinity” available without a subscription until August, it shot to the top of the streaming service’s most-watched films this month, alongside movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Paul Verhoeven, Michael Mann and other typically Letterboxdcore filmmakers.“We have seen a huge increase in views,” Criterion said in a statement, “and we’re very happy with the success of the strategy as a way to make sure this film found its rightful place in the conversation around ‘Oppenheimer.’”In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.The Oppenheimer of “Oppenheimer” (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus”), and the Oppenheimer of “The Day After Trinity” are the same brilliant, sensitive, haunted soul. “This man who was apparently a completely nonviolent fellow was the architect of the most savage weapon in history,” Else said.The movies feature some of the same characters from the life of Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, including his brother, Frank (played in “Oppenheimer” by Dylan Arnold), his friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) and the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz). Both films build to Trinity and then document the conflict between some of its inventors’ hope that the bomb would never be used in war and its deployment in Japan, the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.A central plot point in each movie is a closed hearing in 1954 at which Oppenheimer was stripped of his government security clearance, partly because of past left-wing associations. David Webb Peoples, a co-editor and co-writer of “The Day After Trinity” — whose later screenwriting credits include “Blade Runner,” “Unforgiven” and “12 Monkeys” — even proposed structuring the film around the hearing, as Nolan did with “Oppenheimer.”“The closest he ever came to an autobiography is his personal statement at the beginning of the hearing,” said Else, who focused on interviews with firsthand witnesses, old footage and still photographs rather than trying to recreate the hearing.“It’s also a courtroom drama,” Else added, “and who is not going to pay attention to a courtroom drama?”One place “The Day After Trinity” goes that “Oppenheimer” does not is Hiroshima. In the documentary, Manhattan Project physicists recount wandering the wrecked Japanese city. The narrator explains that the Allies had not bombed it beforehand to preserve a place to demonstrate the new weapon.Else returned to the topic in his 2007 documentary, “Wonders Are Many: The Making of ‘Doctor Atomic,’” which chronicles the composer John Adams’s opera about Oppenheimer. Else is currently working on a book about nuclear testing. And in 1982, he made a one-hour episode of the public-television series “Nova” about the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum that was founded in 1969 by none other than Frank Oppenheimer.“Making ‘The Day After Trinity’ was a pretty rugged ride — it’s pretty rugged subject matter,” Else said. “After I finished it, it was such a joy to spend a year with Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, and celebrate the joy of science.” More

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    Julian Barry, Who Made Lenny Bruce Into ‘Lenny,’ Dies at 92

    Mr. Barry’s scripts for a hit Broadway play and later a Hollywood movie about that rule-breaking comic helped give Mr. Bruce a lasting place in pop culture lore.Julian Barry, whose scripts for a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce, both titled “Lenny,” became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against American hypocrisy, was found dead on Tuesday morning at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Julia Barry said he had died overnight in his sleep. He had been receiving medical treatment for congestive heart failure and, in recent weeks, for late-stage kidney disease.Like Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, Mr. Bruce died young (he was 40) and became a figure of continually renewed pop-culture lore. His comedy career and his criminal prosecutions on drug and obscenity charges inspired museum exhibitions, one-man theatrical performances and biographies. From 2017 until this year, a fictionalized version of Mr. Bruce was a recurring character on the Amazon Prime television show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Barry’s play, which opened on Broadway in 1971, five years after Mr. Bruce’s death, proved that Mr. Bruce could draw an audience posthumously. The 1974 movie version, which starred Dustin Hoffman in the title role, has endured as a classic of the Lenny Bruce mini-genre. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, best actor and best adapted screenplay. (Mr. Barry lost to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo for “The Godfather Part II.”)Cliff Gorman in the title role and Jane House as his wife in the original Broadway production of “Lenny” in 1971.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIn both scripts, Mr. Barry paid homage to Mr. Bruce by including lengthy passages of his stand-up comedic material. His Lenny Bruce is crude but winningly so — more forgiving human frailty than mocking it, and skillful in using earthy common sense to attack the prejudices of his day.Clive Barnes of The New York Times called the play a “dynamite shtick” of theater, and reflected on the irony that Mr. Bruce had been arrested after using language in nightclubs that by 1971 seemed unexceptional when declaimed from a Broadway stage. “The last laugh,” he concluded, “is with Mr. Bruce.”The Broadway star of “Lenny,” Cliff Gorman, won the 1972 Tony Award for lead actor in a play. As Mr. Gorman told The Times in an interview after the play opened, his performance roused Mr. Bruce’s mother, Sally Marr, to visit his dressing room and address him as a “genius.”Mr. Barry’s script compared Mr. Bruce to Aristophanes and Jonathan Swift. Some people rolled their eyes.“The story Julian Barry has extracted from Bruce’s life tends to sanctify and, in the end, even to solemnize Bruce rather than to explore his obsessions,” another Times theater critic, Mel Gussow, wrote in a 1972 review, when Sandy Baron replaced Mr. Gorman.But Mr. Barry found a powerful fan in Bob Fosse. After directing the movie version of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” (1972), for which he won the Academy Award for best director, Mr. Fosse decided that he wanted “Lenny” to be his next film project. He hired Mr. Barry to write the script.“In the play, I mythologized Lenny Bruce,” Mr. Barry told Rolling Stone in 1974. In contrast, he said, the movie offered “a cold, objective approach.”Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce and Valerie Perrine as his wife, Honey, in the 1974 film “Lenny,” directed by Bob Fosse and written by Mr. Barry.United ArtistsMr. Barry was perhaps referring to the film’s depiction of Mr. Bruce’s decline — ranting onstage about his arrests, shooting heroin, speechifying pathetically in court and finally dying of a morphine overdose naked on his bathroom floor in Los Angeles.Yet in “Lenny,” filmed in arty black and white, Mr. Bruce’s flaws are redeemed. He cheats on his wife, but he shows himself to be faithful to her when she needs him most. His idealism about racial slurs — that by using them people can sap them of their malign power — goes unquestioned. His enemies in the legal system do not explain their defense of conservative social mores.Mr. Barry saw Mr. Bruce as a tragic hero.“The whole beauty of Lenny,” he told Rolling Stone, “is his message: We’re all the same schmuck.”Julian Barry Mendelsohn Jr. was born on Dec. 24, 1930, in the Bronx and grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood. His father struggled as a salesman during the Depression but eventually rose to become an executive at the Hudson Pulp and Paper Company. His mother, Grace (Fein) Mendelsohn, donated time and money to Jewish causes and the theater.Julian began acting as a teenager while attending Horace Mann, a day school in Riverdale, where, he wrote in his memoir, “My Night With Orson” (2011), he was a “townie” — not as privileged as wealthier fellow students who lived in uptown Manhattan. Believing it would aid a future career in show business — and following the advice of Philip Burton, a British director who taught at a summer acting camp that Julian attended — he modified his name to sound less Jewish while still just a teenager.He was briefly an undergraduate at Syracuse University and Emerson College in Massachusetts. After serving in the Army and fighting in Korea in his early 20s, he established a career as a Broadway stage manager. He then took a risk at the age of 35, turning down steady work to focus on writing.Mr. Barry’s first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play starring Gene Wilder, left, and Zero Mostel.Kino InternationalMr. Barry found success in television writing scripts in the 1960s for popular shows like “Mission: Impossible.” His first screenplay to be filmed was “Rhinoceros” (1974), an adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s play, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder.Mr. Barry’s four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Julia, from his third marriage, to the film producer Laura Ziskin, he is survived by his longtime partner, Samantha Harper Macy; two daughters, Sally and Jennifer Barry, from his second marriage, to Patricia Foley; a son, Michael, also from that marriage; five grandchildren; and one great-grandson.In his autobiography, Mr. Barry described years of meeting stars and starlets. He and Frank Sinatra spent hours telling old stories and imagining a movie they might make together.Summing up his life in the mid-1980s, he wrote, “I was still bumming a ride on my Academy nomination.”Yet project after project of his did not get made, lost in the Hollywood purgatory known as “development.”To some extent, Mr. Barry wrote, it was his own fault for becoming too hip for his own good. He grew his hair long, and he name-dropped in the offhand style of a “Hollywood Phony,” he wrote. Discussing a script of his with Robert Redford and the director Sydney Pollack in Mr. Redford’s hotel room, he suddenly lit up a joint. He was later told that the two men did not like him.“I had to live up to my reputation,” Mr. Barry recalled, “as the man who wrote about Lenny Bruce.” More

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    At Soho Rep, Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons to Join Leadership Team

    Following the departures of Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, the two will join Cynthia Flowers as the company continues its shared leadership model.Eric Ting and Caleb Hammons will join Cynthia Flowers as the next directors of Soho Rep, the Lower Manhattan theater announced on Thursday.They will replace Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who had directed the Off Off Broadway company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019 under its shared leadership model. (Both women, who departed in June, have said they wanted to focus more on their own creative output.)“The spirit of the theater centers risk and experimentation,” said Ting, 50, who made his New York City directorial debut with the Jackie Sibblies Drury play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915” at Soho Rep in 2012 before becoming the artistic director at the East Bay theater company Cal Shakes, a position he held until 2022. “There’s a boldness to the work and a kind of artistic rigor that I’ve never found anywhere else.”The size of the organization — with a 65-seat theater that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work — was part of the appeal for Hammons, who comes to the theater from the Fisher Center at Bard, an incubator for commercially promising new work in the Hudson Valley. (He has been the director of artistic planning and producing since 2020, after joining the organization as senior producer in 2013.)“After working at a larger organization outside the city, I knew I wanted to return to my roots in the smaller, scrappier and more experimental realm of theater,” said Hammons, 38, who previously served as a producer for Soho Rep from 2011-13.Flowers, who has been with the theater since 2012, said Hammons not only shares Soho Rep’s vision of trying to make its producing practices more equitable and sustainable, but also “has the practical experience to put those values into action.”And Ting, who recently directed the world premieres of Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country” at the Atlantic Theater Company and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “The Comeuppance” at the Signature Theater, has long worked “to make theater more anti-racist and humane in a very intense way,” she said.Ting said he was drawn to Soho Rep, which produced Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018, because of the premium the theater places on having practicing artists in leadership positions. He said he still plans to direct one or two shows each year at theaters in New York, “and also hopefully for Soho Rep from time to time.”As for Hammons, he said he plans to continue his career-long focus on sustainable and humane producing practices, including pay equity. That includes the continuation of Soho Rep’s Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. But he also wants to prioritize crew members.“We can’t put all our focus on just making strides to provide sustainable wages to artists when we aren’t taking the same consideration to providing sustainable wages to folks who work behind the scenes,” he said.Both men will start their roles in September. More

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: Reunited

    Valentine’s Day drama abounds in this week’s episode, but the most important involves a major figure from Carrie’s past.Season 2, Episode 7At least one aspect of “the old Miranda” is still very much intact. She told us back in Season 2 of “Sex and the City” that when a romance ends, she “would love to be one of those people who’s all: ‘We loved, thank you. You enriched my life. Now, go, prosper.’” But that’s just not her vibe. In her own words, she is much more: “We didn’t work out, you need to not exist.”And so things go with Che.In last week’s episode, Che somewhat abruptly (in my opinion, anyway) ended things with Miranda, and Miranda, self-sufficient and headstrong as ever, is done. She will not be taking Che’s calls, thank you very much, nor will she be having any further emotions about the breakup. She is on to whatever, and whoever, might be next.No one is more impatient for Miranda to move on than Charlotte, the ever-enthusiastic cheerleader for coupledom, who tells Miranda she had better hurry up and figure out if she is gay or straight so that she can find a new person to love, as if that were something anyone could just do on a tight deadline. After all, Miranda rebuts, she was drawn to Che as a person, and that doesn’t necessarily mean she is a full-on lesbian, especially considering Che is nonbinary. Sexuality is complex! Labels shouldn’t define us! Gender is a construct!Except that, in one impromptu shopping trip, Miranda figures out pretty darn fast that sexy sapphic ladies are her thing.At a cosplay-laden reading in the curtained-off back room of Books Are Magic, Miranda comes upon Amelia (Miriam Shor), a woman she has heard read Jane Austen audiobooks many times over. Miranda has always been entranced by that voice, and immediately, she is entranced by Amelia. That’s that. It’s figured out. Hot women get Miranda hot, and she is very down to heed that siren call.Unfortunately, Miranda’s fantasy of how much better dating women will be doesn’t quite live up to the reality. She shows up to Amelia’s apartment for their first date — which just so happens to be on Valentine’s Day — and finds it is grungier than a frat house bunk room. While Miranda is decked out in a tight dress cut just so to expose the tiniest amount of underboob, Amelia is in sweats and caked in cat litter.Miranda sits on the unmade bed waiting for Amelia to return from the bodega when an emergency phone call with Carrie helps her realize that 50-something lesbian Miranda doesn’t have to put up with the same baloney she tolerated in her 30s, so she ghosts. It stands to reason that Miranda will soon be ghosting all the Austen audiobooks in her queue as well.That’s not the only Valentine’s Day chaos ripping through this crew. The holiday is especially taxing for the moms and dads in the group, whose kids are kicking them out of their own homes on the big night. Lisa, who can’t stand her son’s handsy girlfriend, Baxter (Lucie McKenzie), puts the kibosh on his going to the suite Baxter’s parents booked for them, but agrees to let them stay in while she and Herbert go out.The worst fate Lisa can imagine is coming home to discover Herbert Jr. (Elijah Jacob) and his girlfriend have had sex in her bed. She doesn’t anticipate the far worse outcome of returning to discover the kids in her walk-in closet, taking photos with her prized fashions for Instagram. Turns out, that’s a far more egregious invasion of space.Charlotte and Harry are also asked by Lily to excuse themselves, as she is throwing a lonely hearts party of sorts for a crew of “cool girls” from school. Charlotte throws her full support behind her heartbroken daughter (last episode’s condom run was all for naught, apparently) and grabs a homemade brownie on the way to her Early Bird Special date with Harry.It turns out, though, that the little confection was a pot brownie, and Charlotte ends up in the back of an ambulance, full-on freaking out, convinced that she can “feel her blood.”Surprisingly, that little whoopsie with a space cake was the best thing that could have happened to Charlotte. As she comes to in the emergency room, she tells Harry that her life flashed before her eyes, and she wasn’t a fan. Charlotte realizes she has poured her entire self into serving her family and hasn’t left anything for herself. To my personal delight, she announces she is going to take a job in the art world. Boss Lady Charlotte is back.The most important Valentine’s Day date of the episode, of course, is the one Carrie almost doesn’t have with Aidan (John Corbett). The ellipses-laden email she sent last week worked, and Aidan asks to meet Carrie for dinner when he is in town for a meeting.Somehow they both end up at different restaurants right next door to each other, and both spend the better part of an hour thinking the other has stood them up.Honestly, I was sick during this entire scene. It had the feel of the whole Il Cantinori/El Cantinoro fiasco from Carrie’s 35th birthday from “Sex and the City” Season 4, in which everyone did, in fact, stand Carrie up, and I feared the teased appearance of Aidan was nothing more than a hoax yet again.Eventually, finally, Aidan texts Carrie. (What in the world was he waiting for? Much like Charlotte, I thought I was having a stroke.) Soon they find each other on the street. Dinner is lovely, and Carrie invites Aidan back to her place.Standing outside her door, beneath an apartment that was briefly theirs, Aidan momentarily becomes unglued, feeling that he can’t relive all that pain. It once again looks as if it might be over for them before it begins, and the Aidan stan in me once again died a tiny death. Thankfully he remembers there are plenty of hotels in New York, and he and Carrie can simply go knock boots there.Carrie and Aidan are back on, and at least for me, this has made both movies and every cringey scene of this latest series entirely worth it. Let’s go.Things still taking up space in my brain:As roomies, Miranda and Nya are the modern-day “Golden Girls” we need, especially considering Miranda is in her Blanche era. I hope Miranda never moves out.Of the oodles of wordplay this franchise has cranked out over the years, “Mevening” is by far the most usable example, and I’m stealing it. More

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    Ato Blankson-Wood on Playing a Hamlet Who ‘Leads With Love’

    The actor is starring in a modern-dress production of the play through Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.As a veteran of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park productions, Ato Blankson-Wood is used to contending with the elements. “The bugs, the helicopters flying overhead: There’s an intense focus that is necessary,” he said.But for this summer’s production of “Hamlet,” he has had to dig deeper: Not only is he feeling the weight of the title role, but, as he put it, “the world is on fire” and air-quality issues have forced the cancellation of four “Hamlet” performances so far.Still, Blankson-Wood is undeterred.“I remember that there’s a person in that audience who is maybe seeing a play for the first time, or who was very excited to come see a show,” he said during a recent interview at a cafe in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. “That’s what I’m focused on. This is not about my experience, it’s for them, and for my scene partners.”This alfresco staging of “Hamlet,” directed by Kenny Leon, is Blankson-Wood’s fifth production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. His first, “Hair,” in 2008, was also his New York professional stage debut. Then he played the narcissistic Orsino in “Twelfth Night” in 2018, and Orlando in “As You Like It,” in 2017 and 2022. He’s also had notable turns in more hospitable environments on Broadway and off, including his Tony-nominated run in “Slave Play.”The actor as Hamlet this summer at the Delacorte Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd as Gary, a man questioning his interracial relationship (with Dustin, played by James Cusati-Moyer, left) in “Slave Play” at Broadway’s Golden Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn Leon’s modern-dress production of “Hamlet,” Blankson-Wood opted for a contemporary take on the tragic prince: a sad boy dressed in military fatigues, flowy white shirts and a dark hoodie that he said the show’s costume designer, Jessica Jahn, created after learning of his inspiration.“I had this thought that our most Hamletian modern figure is Kanye West,” he said. “We witnessed him losing a parent in the public eye, he’s been called a genius, and he has behaved in ways where people are like, ‘Is he OK?’ I think it’s exciting to imagine his moments of uncertainty, what his soliloquies might be.”The actor, 38, said West’s recent controversies, are less interesting to him. Which is not surprising. In speaking with Blankson-Wood, the sense emerges of an artist with little time for psychic clutter. Each morning, he recites daily affirmations (one he goes back to, borrowed from his “Slave Play” character, is, in part, “I am the prize”) and makes sure to engage his body (workouts at the gym), mind (post-workout podcasts, like “Spark & Fire” or Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday”), and spirit (“morning meditation, in a section of my room where I have a little cushion, altar, and a remembrance of my grandmother”).“I like to engage with the spiritual world,” he said. “It’s a part of my understanding of life on this planet, so I have to touch that every day to center myself.” Since “Hamlet,” he’s added a nightly bubble bath.He came to the production after participating in a collaborative online reading of the play’s “To be or not to be” speech, which was performed by Black actors, and released in 2020 by the Public to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday that year. Leon, a consultant on the piece, said he was struck by the strength and softness of Blankson-Wood’s performance.“I get to purge emotionally every night,” Blankson-Wood said of playing a Hamlet who is begging to be understood. “I can take bits of my day and pour it in there to release, if I need to.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“When it came time to cast Hamlet, I wanted to tell it through the eyes of the young people who felt hurt, betrayed, and unloved in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder,” Leon said in a phone call. “Like Ato, this Hamlet leads with love, and is begging to be understood. We talked a lot about the mental health issues that young people are dealing with, because I wanted this production to have some hope, small as it is, by the end.”Leon made a deal with the cast: Once the Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro completed his edits, the actors would be allowed to add lines back in — though they would need to give up some of their own in exchange. The approach helped trim the five-hour play to two hours and 45 minutes, excising the military and royal aspects to focus on the family dynamics.“We’ve been talking a lot about how Shakespeare is often cut by academics, and sometimes I wonder if there would be a benefit to it being cut by artists; seeing what’s really necessary from an actor’s standpoint,” Blankson-Wood said. “I have my issues with this cut. A lot of the meta-theatricality is gone, and that’s one of the things I love about the character, like his line about holding a mirror up to nature. I did fight to get some things back.”The actor added that Leon’s “fiery” technique, on and off the page, took some getting used to, but credited Leon with pushing him further than he thought he could go. (In his review for The Times, the theater critic Jesse Green credited his performance with bringing “a vivid anger to the role.”)“I get to purge emotionally every night,” he continued. “I can take bits of my day and pour it in there to release, if I need to, and I knew this production would be good for that.”His love of theater, and his drive to define his relationship to it, extends to his childhood.Born the middle of five siblings in Silver Spring, Md., to two Ghanaian immigrants, Blankson-Wood grew up watching movie musicals with his mother. While his home was “culturally, very traditionally Ghanaian,” he said musicals created a cultural bridge to his American interests, which led to acting.He studied acting at New York University and was soon cast as a member of the tribe in a production of “Hair” at the Delacorte — which, coincidentally, shared the 2008 summer season with another “Hamlet,” starring Michael Stuhlbarg. He remained with “Hair” when it transferred to Broadway and then London’s West End but, following a run in the 2011 musical “Lysistrata Jones,” the actor said he felt a gap, “between the work I was doing and what I felt I was capable of.”“The ethos and energy behind commercial musical theater feels like it is really about the product,” he explained. “I don’t think that’s good or bad, but I do think my interests are always in process and craft, which I feel are more valued in plays. That’s where the impulse to go to grad school came from.”“I now really understand what it means to take ownership of my process,” the actor said, “and have found my voice in that way.”Elias Williams for The New York TimesHe enrolled in the Yale School of Drama, where he became friends with James Cusati-Moyer (who would later be his “Slave Play” scene partner). The two became “like a traveling act: this duo that everyone knew of,” Cusati-Moyer said. “And then we started doing drag together.”In 2013, they performed in Yale Cabaret’s inaugural “Yale School of Drag” show as well as a drag play written by their classmates — titled “We Know Edie La Minx Had a Gun” — which later had a 2016 presentation in Brooklyn. Blankson-Wood couldn’t reprise his role; he was giving what Charles Isherwood described as a breakout performance in “The Total Bent” at the Public. His replacement? An incoming Yalie named Jeremy O. Harris.The three became friends, and Harris took inspiration from the friendship of the other two as he developed the characters of Gary and Dustin, one of three interracial couples undergoing dubious sex therapy in “Slave Play.”“We had to navigate very difficult territory, as these characters were inspired by us, but were specifically not Ato and I,” Cusati-Moyer said. “But there’s no one else I can imagine doing that role with. He brings every corner of his heart, and that comes with an innate care and appreciation for his own work, as well as the work of those around him.”The show opened on Broadway in 2019 and garnered 12 Tony nominations, including nods for both actors; Harris; and the director Robert O’Hara, who later directed Blankson-Wood in a 2022 Covid-era adaptation of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at the Minetta Lane Theater.“I’m not necessarily drawn to these internal, isolating roles, but something happened when I went to grad school where it felt like a faucet turned on, and emotional availability became my go-to,” Blankson-Wood said.After “Slave Play,” he continued, “I was very aware of my inherent value, because that’s the journey my character was on. I now really understand what it means to take ownership of my process, and have found my voice in that way.“After that, and ‘Long Day’s,’ and this, I’m ready for something that has levity and is heart-forward.” More

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    Kevin Spacey Is Acquitted of Sexual Assault Charges

    A British jury on Wednesday found the actor not guilty of nine charges.A jury in London deliberated for more than 12 hours, and ultimately cleared the actor of nine charges.Susannah Ireland/ReutersKevin Spacey, the two-time Oscar-winning actor known for his movie and TV roles including “House of Cards,” was on Wednesday found not guilty by a jury in Britain of nine counts of sexual assault.Almost six years after allegations of inappropriate behavior began to emerge against Mr. Spacey on both sides of the Atlantic, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London took just over 12 hours to reach its decision.As the verdicts were announced, Mr. Spacey, 64, stood in a transparent box in the middle of the courtroom, wearing a dark blue suit and looking unemotional as he faced the jury.But when the final “not guilty” was read out, the actor, whose birthday falls on Wednesday, began to cry and sighed heavily with relief.Shortly after the verdict, Mr. Spacey walked out of the courthouse — shaking the hands of several jurors on the way and kissing two security guards on the cheek — and gave a brief statement to a throng of waiting reporters.“I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said. “I’m enormously grateful to the jury for having taken the time to examine all of the evidence.”“I am humbled by the outcome,” he added, before getting into a taxi.During the almost monthlong trial in London, the court heard from four men who said that Mr. Spacey assaulted them between 2001 and 2013. For most of that time, the actor was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater, a major London playhouse.One complainant told the British police that Mr. Spacey touched him multiple times without his consent. The complainant described incidents included once in either 2004 or 2005 when he said the actor grabbed his genitals so hard that he almost veered off the road as they were heading to Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara Ball.During the trial, Mr. Spacey — who appeared under his full name, Kevin Spacey Fowler — said that the pair had a consensual “naughty relationship.” The actor added that he felt “crushed” by the complainant’s characterization of their encounters. Elton John, giving evidence for Mr. Spacey’s defense, said that Mr. Spacey only attended his ball once, in 2001, several years before the complainant said he was groped.Another complainant said that he wrote to Mr. Spacey hoping that the actor would mentor him, and eventually went for a drink at Mr. Spacey’s London home. That complainant said that he fell asleep in the apartment, and later woke up to discover Mr. Spacey on his knees, performing oral sex on him. Mr. Spacey said during the trial that the pair had consensual oral sex, then the man “hurriedly left,” as if he regretted the encounter.On July 20, Patrick Gibbs, Mr. Spacey’s legal representative, claimed that three of the complainants were lying and only made their accusations in the hope of financial gain. Mr. Spacey’s promiscuous lifestyle made him “quite an easy target” for false allegations, Mr. Gibbs added.The trial in London was the latest that Mr. Spacey has successfully defended. In 2022, a federal jury in Manhattan found Mr. Spacey not liable for battery after the actor Anthony Rapp filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Spacey of climbing on top of him and making a sexual advance in 1986, when Mr. Rapp was 14.But what Wednesday’s verdict will mean for Mr. Spacey’s career was not immediately clear. In June, Mr. Spacey said in an interview with Zeit Magazin, a German magazine, that he intended to return to acting after the trial. “I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges,” he said. More