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    The Culture Desk: Alicia Keys on Reimagining “Fallin” for Broadway

    Alicia Keys was only 20 years old when her 2001 single “Fallin’” became an international sensation, topping the Billboard charts, winning multiple Grammys and helping propel her to stardom. Now, more than two decades later, the song appears in the new Broadway musical “Hell’s Kitchen.”The show — which draws from Keys’s life story and her discography — presents ”Fallin’” in a totally new way: as a song of seduction sung by a middle-aged man. Keys joins our theater reporter, Michael Paulson, to discuss the history of “Fallin’” and what she has learned from adapting the song for the stage.On today’s episodeMichael Paulson, a theater reporter for The Times. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Dunks on Trump’s Billion-Dollar Stock Bonus

    “Donald Trump somehow made a lot of money from a company that makes none,” Kimmel said.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.Taking StockFormer President Donald Trump is set to receive an additional stake in his social media company after Truth Social’s stock price stayed high and hit certain benchmarks. The additional shares were valued at about $1.3 billion.“It’s nice when good things happen to good people, isn’t it?” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Wednesday.“Donald Trump somehow made a lot of money from a company that makes none.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Honestly, how can this farting dementia patient be making a billion dollars on a company that has $4 million total in revenue? What kind of con artist Wall Street wizardry is this?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (World Peace Edition)“Yes, Taiwan. Now, they’re not at war yet, but you’ve got to make a reservation in advance just to save your spot.” — JORDAN KLEPPER, referring to President Joe Biden signing an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, calling it “a good day for world peace”“A good day for world peace? I’ve wanted one of those!” — JORDAN KLEPPER“I wonder what happened — did the nations of the world finally band together to outlaw war? Did they finally buy everyone a Coke? Is there finally peace between Kendrick and Drake? ” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Oh, ‘world peace.’ OK, is peace the one with the tanks?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingThe Mexican singer-songwriter Christian Nodal performed “La Mitad” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightKyle Chayka, a writer for The New Yorker, will discuss his book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutNicole Kidman in “The Hours.” “She is fearless in the characters that she plays,” said the movie’s director, Stephen Daldry.Paramount PicturesThe filmmakers Baz Luhrmann, Stephen Daldry, Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion and Karyn Kusama discuss what makes Nicole Kidman a dream actor for any director ahead of her life achievement award from the American Film Institute. More

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    Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

    The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Bud Shaffner, a board member who had come under fire for introducing the motion at the April 15 meeting to cancel the speech, apologized for his comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle.” He later introduced the motion to reinstate the speech and voted for it.“I will accept the blame because of the insensitive word I spoke on April 15,” he said at the beginning of Wednesday’s meeting. “I fully understand the interpretation of my poor word choice.”Many community members who spoke during the public comment period of Wednesday’s meeting rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.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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    Review: Steve Carell as the 50-Year-Old Loser in a Comic ‘Uncle Vanya’

    Sleek, lucid, amusing, often beautiful, it’s Chekhov with everything, except the main thing.Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself. The money he makes, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s exquisitely languorous young wife, who, reasonably enough, finds the moper pathetic.In short, he is the opposite of the bold, laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play for. That’s probably just why Chekhov did it, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience having turned squalid and absurd, he could no longer paint it for audiences as heroic. So how could his protagonist be a hero?The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it. If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all. He despairs and disappears.That would seem to be quite a trick, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, perhaps more relevantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while also worrying about his mental health. He makes jokes that aren’t. He gets excited over all the wrong things. Rain coming? He called it.Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much more attention; in Heidi Schreck’s smooth, faithful yet colloquial new version, his first words, naturally, are complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”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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    Carrie Robbins, Costume Designer for Dozens of Broadway Shows, Dies at 81

    She made a classic wig and poodle skirt for “Grease” (using a bath mat and a toilet cover) and turned actors into Spanish inquisitors, British highwaymen and more.Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died on April 12 in Manhattan. She was 81.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December.In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Ms. Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as the syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie.Ms. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink poodle skirt out of her own bath mat and furry toilet seat cover.To prepare for designing the costumes for “Grease,” Ms. Robbins studied high school yearbooks from the 1950s.Betty Lee Hunt AssociatesThe poodle skirt practically became a mandatory feature of “Grease” shows. And when, years later, Ms. Robbins visited a production of “Grease” backstage, she saw a man taking a red Magic Marker to a wig. Baffled, she told him that the wardrobe department surely could afford a high-end custom hairpiece. He replied that only a Magic Marker would be authentic.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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    Improv Is Making a Comeback in New York

    The pandemic dealt a major blow to the once-thriving comedy form, but a new energy can be seen in performances throughout the city.Improv comedy became so influential in the first two decades of this century that you could make an argument it mattered more to popular culture than stand-up.Lines regularly ran down the block outside Upright Citizens Brigade. Students who once would have studied Method acting took classes in “Yes, and.” The author Sam Wasson described it as “America’s most popular art,” and its major theaters were training grounds for stars like Tina Fey, Jordan Peele and Stephen Colbert.Then, all of a sudden, the boom went bust. The pandemic hurt every live art, but arguably none more than improv. Not only did struggles force the sale of three of its biggest institutions (Second City, iO and U.C.B.), but the prestige surrounding the form faded as criticism mounted over business models built on free labor and racist treatment of artists. The title of the new book “Winging it: Improv’s Power and Peril in the Time of Trump” captures its new mixed reputation.From left: Drew Reilly, Jordan Savusa, Ashley Leisten and Ben Rameaka at Second City.Carlos PerezBut with a flurry of improv theaters opening or moving into new homes in this city, one of the major questions hovering over comedy today is: Can improv make a comeback?“Second City” began as a New Yorker’s insult, then became a Chicago institution, so its arrival in Brooklyn is a return home of sorts. Not only is its vast Williamsburg complex fancier than any other improv house in town — the Manhattan Theater Club to everyone else’s La MaMa — but its first revue represents an aesthetic shift and possibly a changing of the guard.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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    How a Broadway Theater Was Remade Into a Queer Cabaret

    Scutt set up the theater so the audience enters through a neon-lit alleyway rather than through the main entrance. “For me, design is about how the story is meeting the public,” he says. “I want to open up new possibilities of theater-going.” Coming out of the pandemic, he felt the need to celebrate “the joy of being together — a group of people experiencing something alive.”

    The arch also features images of a blue comb and hat, a golden key and a scarlet drop of blood — symbols derived from a plaque on the theater’s cornerstone, dating to 1925, which says, “Within these walls the human mind shall once again celebrate with gaiety, with pity and with truth the divine pageant of the human soul.” As Scutt thinks of it, “That’s ‘Cabaret,’ full stop.” More

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    ‘Oh, Mary!,’ a Surprise Downtown Hit, Will Play Broadway This Summer

    Cole Escola’s madcap comedy about the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln will begin performances in June.“Oh, Mary!,” an outrageously madcap comedy that imagines the former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln as an oft-inebriated chanteuse-wannabe, will transfer to Broadway this summer after becoming a surprise hit downtown.The show, which is gleefully tasteless and also ahistorical, is the brainchild of Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who built a cult following with a series of YouTube sketches and reached a wider audience with a role on Hulu’s “Difficult People.”The Broadway run is scheduled to begin previews June 26 and to open July 11 at the Lyceum Theater. It is scheduled to run until Sept. 15.“Oh, Mary!” began its life in January at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. That commercial Off Broadway run has been extended twice and is scheduled to end May 12. The run has been sold out, and has attracted a stream of celebrities, including Bowen Yang, Timothée Chalamet, Amy Schumer and Jessica Lange; one night Steven Spielberg, who directed the 2012 film “Lincoln,” showed up with Sally Field (who played Mary Todd Lincoln in the film) and Tony Kushner (who wrote the screenplay).“Oh, Mary!” was written by Escola and is directed by Sam Pinkleton. The Broadway run will feature the same cast as the Off Broadway run, including Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln; it is being produced by Kevin McCollum, Lucas McMahon, Mike Lavoie and Carlee Briglia. More