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    Jordan Klepper Isn’t Wild About the ‘First Buddy,’ Elon Musk

    “Trump’s been getting something that Elon’s 11 children will never receive: his full attention,” Klepper said on “The Daily Show.”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.Buddy BuddyDonald Trump keeps making news with his appointments, choosing Kristi Noem, the governor famous for shooting her dog, to run the Department of Homeland Security. Elon Musk, who’s also been promised a post, seems to have the president-elect’s ear; on Monday, Musk posted on X, “I’m happy to be first buddy!”“Since the election, Trump’s been getting something that Elon’s 11 children will never receive: his full attention,” Jordan Klepper said on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”“Oh, good. Good! The world’s richest man is helping the president-elect run the country. I’m sure by the time Elon’s done, his businesses will be unregulated, he’ll have billions in new government contracts, and it’ll be illegal to point and laugh at a Cybertruck.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“‘First Buddy’ sounds like a sequel to ‘Air Bud’ where we elect a golden retriever to be president — which, frankly, I’d take at this point. Looks nice. It looks nice! Just keep it away from Kristi Noem, you know?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Hide Your Dogs Edition)“Kristi Noem shouldn’t be in charge of a PetSmart, let alone homeland security.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“One of his main messages during the campaign was about killing the pets: ‘They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!’ He goes out and hires the woman who shot her puppy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“She’s supposed to get the border under control? She couldn’t even train her dog.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“This woman has no national security experience. She’s the governor of South Dakota. That isn’t even the best Dakota. It goes North, Fanning, Johnson, then the building John Lennon was shot outside of, then South Dakota.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Noem has an impressive résumé. She was a congresswoman, a governor, and during the campaign, she was Trump’s most trusted backup dancer.” — JIMMY FALLON, playing a video of Noem dancing next to Trump onstage“I know, I know — it’s important not to focus on that one time Kristi Noem shot a dog, because it’s just as important to remember that she also shot and killed her family’s goat.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmber Ruffin, a “Late Night” writer, struggled to get through a post-election edition of her regular segment, “Amber Says What.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe stand-up comedian Emma Willmann will appear on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutWith the Gits, who became part of Seattle’s punk scene in 1989, the singer Mia Zapata was a formidable stage presence.Charles PetersonOn Nov. 13, Sub Pop will release remastered recordings by the Gits, the Seattle punk band whose frontwoman, Mia Zapata, was murdered in 1993. More

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    ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Review: Darren Criss and Helen J Shen Are Robots in Love

    A supersmart musical about making a connection arrives on Broadway in a joyful, heartbreaking, cutting-edge production.Claire is low on energy, so she pops across the hall to Oliver’s pad for a pick-me-up. But Oliver, a creature of routine, doesn’t like being interrupted while listening to jazz and waiting for mail. She insists, he gives in, and a spark, maybe a literal one, is ignited.Never was a meet cute as cute — and as quietly ominous — as it is in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending,” which opened Tuesday at the Belasco Theater. That’s because the pair are robots, and Claire’s battery is running down fast. Hooking her up to his charger may signal, for Oliver, the beginning of love. It may also signal the end of it.That we nonrobots also connect, pair and empower one another to share a too-brief lifetime is the surprising double vision that makes “Maybe Happy Ending” a ravishing addition to the catalog of Broadway nerdicals. The term is high praise, honoring supersmart, usually small-scale shows — like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo” — that nevertheless have big emotional impact. This one, directed with breathtaking bravura by Michael Arden, gets bonus points for difficulty, too: Under cover of sci-fi whimsy, it sneaks in a totally original human heartbreaker.The sci-fi elements are handled lightly and humorously in the book by Hue Park and Will Aronson, thus dodging the invidious scrutiny that the genre often elicits. By 2064, when their story takes place, Helperbots — android servants like embodied Siris — have been assisting humans with daily tasks for decades. But Oliver (Darren Criss) and Claire (Helen J Shen) are now obsolete, living out their days in a pleasant retirement home in Seoul as their operating systems antiquate and replacement parts become scarce.Still, they remain fully sentient and distinct. Oliver, an early model Helperbot 3, is more stylized and herky-jerky than Claire, a later model Helperbot 5. His lips are pursed, his feet splayed, his language not quite natural (he can’t stop saying “thank you”) and his hair a hard helmet like a Playmobil figurine’s. Even so, he spent enough years with his former owner, James Choi, to have absorbed some human analog tastes — the jazz LPs especially — and to miss him fiercely. Surely Choi (Marcus Choi, excellent) will reclaim him one day.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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    ‘The Vegetarian’ Review: Putting a Nobel Prize Winner’s Work Onstage

    After Han Kang won the Prize in Literature last month, a stage version of her novel “The Vegetarian” sold out its run at a struggling Paris theater.Other Paris theaters may be a little envious of the Odéon this fall. In a stroke of good luck, long before the Nobel committee met to decide its 2024 honorees, the playhouse had scheduled a new stage adaptation of a work by Han Kang, the South Korean novelist and surprise winner of this year’s Prize in Literature.Now, Parisians are flocking en masse to “La Vegetariana,” an Italian-language version of Han’s “The Vegetarian,” directed by Daria Deflorian. The sold out run, through Nov. 16 at the Ateliers Berthier, the Odéon’s second stage, is a welcome opportunity to dive into Han’s surreal style, by way of a thoughtful, if at times muted, production.“La Vegetariana” is tightly focused on the novel’s central characters. Yeong-hye, whose sudden conversion to vegetarianism bewilders everyone around her, is watched closely by her nameless husband, sister and brother-in-law. In the novel, each of the three narrates a section. Here, too, they introduce Yeong-hye and comment on her directly to the audience in long monologues.In that sense, Deflorian, who coadapted the novel with Francesca Marciano and also appears in the role of the sister, treats the source material with reverence. Onstage, Yeong-hye remains an enigmatic figure, speaking as little as she does on the page. Initially afraid of meat, she later stops eating altogether. She requires no food, she says at one point, because she believes she is morphing into a tree.Unfortunately, without directorial intervention, an impenetrable heroine can also make for dull theater. As Yeong-hye, Monica Piseddu wanders the near-empty stage like a sleepwalker, dressed in an oversize T-shirt. While each scene is announced through projections with the abruptness of a movie script (“Couple’s House. Inside at Night.”), the shadowy lighting traps the characters in a kind of perpetual twilight, with gray walls as their cheerless background.Deflorian, left, in the role of the unnamed sister of Yeong-hye, played by Monica Piseddu.Andrea PizzalisWe 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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    Italian City in Amanda Knox Case Wants to Move On. A New Series Won’t Let It.

    When a show produced by Ms. Knox about the murder of Meredith Kercher was filmed in Perugia, an outcry by residents led the mayor to apologize.Seventeen years after Amanda Knox, the American exchange student, was arrested and charged with killing her roommate in Perugia, a picturesque university city in central Italy, some of its citizens are outraged that their city is once again being dragged into a tragedy that they would prefer to forget.This month, when cast and crew arrived there for a two-day shoot for a Hulu series about the case — a show for which Ms. Knox and Monica Lewinsky are executive producers — Mayor Vittoria Fernandi felt obliged to write a heartfelt letter of apology to the city for the hurt caused by their presence.One resident, honoring the memory of Meredith Kercher, the slain roommate, draped a sheet from a balcony with “Respect for Meredith” painted in bold red letters. A council member questioned on social media whether the mayor should have allowed the production to shoot in Perugia, where the crime has long overshadowed the city’s “history, art and beauty.”An editorial in the daily newspaper La Nazione wrote, “Perhaps Meredith and Perugia would have deserved more respect without having to sacrifice the dignity of a murdered student and a brutalized city to business.”It hardly mattered that after spending four years in prison, Ms. Knox was acquitted for the death of Ms. Kercher, a 21-year-old student from England who was murdered in the house they shared.People forget “that she, too, is a victim in this case,” said Luca Luparia Donati, the director of the Italy Innocence Project, who is representing Ms. Knox in a slander case.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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    ‘Say Nothing’ Asks: What Would You Do?

    The FX series strives to capture the complexity of its subject: the long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.The actor Anthony Boyle (“Manhunt,” “Masters of the Air”) grew up in West Belfast. On the way to school he would walk past murals of hunger strikers, of murdered children. He was a child, he said, during “the hangover” of the Troubles, the sectarian conflict between Protestant unionists, who were British loyalists, and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland that lasted into the late 1990s.“The history is so recent,” he said. “You feel the pressure of it always.”So when the director Mike Lennox (“Derry Girls”) reached out to him about starring in the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” Boyle was hesitant. The nine-episode series is adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which is set primarily in Belfast during and after the Troubles. Radden Keefe is American, as is Joshua Zetumer, the showrunner. FX, which produced the series, is a division of Disney Entertainment.All of this gave Boyle pause. In a recent interview, he described his thinking at the time: “When brothers have killed each other over which splinter group of the paramilitary they belong to, a show on Disney isn’t going to get this right.”But reading the scripts convinced Boyle to play Brendan Hughes, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In “Say Nothing,” which premieres Thursday on Hulu, he stars alongside Lola Petticrew, as Dolours Price; Hazel Doupe, as Marian Price; and Josh Finan, as Gerry Adams.The actors play young versions of these real-life figures, who engage in or sanction acts of violence in pursuit of a political goal. (Adams has consistently denied his involvement with the I.R.A., though Hughes, who died in 2008, and Dolours Price, who died in 2013, both disputed this.) The series captures both the youthful excitement that fighting for a cause can kindle and the devastating reverberations that come after.“It felt like a lot of the questions that were raised were questions that I, as a young adult, have about how we heal and move on from a traumatic recent past,” said Petticrew, who is also from West Belfast.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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    Late Night Weighs in on Trump’s Cabinet Picks

    Jimmy Kimmel called President-elect Trump’s choices thus far “a real cast of no character.”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 Stocks His CabinetLess than a week after winning the election, President-elect Donald J. Trump has begun announcing members of his next cabinet.Jimmy Kimmel called them “a real cast of no character” on Monday, saying they would “soon be hired and then fired by Trump.”“President-elect Trump has named Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff, making her the first woman in history to ever have that role. Yeah. She’ll also make history as the first female chief of staff to quit after three weeks and write a tell-all book.” — JIMMY FALLON“Wiles has Trump’s trust because she was his 2024 campaign manager. So she was the mastermind who put Trump in a garbage man costume and had him dance to ‘Ave Maria’ — and it worked. And I don’t know what anything means anymore.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The thing is, Wiles may not be the worst choice for this job, and not just because the worst choice was elected president. Reportedly, reportedly, during the campaign, Wiles worked to keep particularly divisive fringe conservatives out of Trump’s orbit. For instance, she lured Rudy Giuliani away from Trump using a bottle of Cabernet dressed up as a sexy lady.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Former Congressman Lee Zeldin of New York is Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. According to the League of Conservation Voters, of 26 House representatives from New York, Lee Zeldin had the worst record on environmental issues by far — so he’ll be in charge of protecting the environment, of course.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“In a new post to Truth Social, President-elect Trump said that he will not invite former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to join his administration. Well, he did offer her the position of secretary. That’s it — just secretary.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (POTUS Confab 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

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    ‘A Wonderful World’ Review: Blowing Louis Armstrong’s Horn Isn’t Enough

    The great jazz trumpeter and sandpaper vocalist gets the old jukebox treatment in a new Broadway musical starring James Monroe Iglehart.Who, having lived through 20th-century pop culture, could fail to recognize that voice like a truck without a muffler? That piercing trumpet and embracing spirit?Who could fail to recognize Louis Armstrong?Yet he is something of a blur in “A Wonderful World,” the Armstrong jukebox musical that opened Monday at Studio 54. Not for lack of a precise embodiment. In the leading role, James Monroe Iglehart has every Satchmo detail perfectly tuned: the rumble, the chortle, the hankie, the beam, the satchel-like cheeks that inspired the nickname. If drama were merely a tribute concert, there would be nothing to complain of.But with such a major figure we want something deeper. And though subtitled “The Louis Armstrong Musical,” the show, with a book by Aurin Squire, spends too little time exploring its subject’s interior life while plumping for his greatness as if the point were in doubt. The score, drawn from songs he performed but (with two exceptions) did not write, makes the case irrefutably already, encompassing the astonishing range of a man who grew up with the blues, changed the course of jazz, excelled at swing, perfected scat and won a Grammy for “Hello, Dolly!”To balance such a rich and varied artistic life, let alone a chaotic personal one, Armstrong deserves more than the standard jukebox bullet-point biography he gets here. Offering little you would not learn from a good obituary, or from a visit to the terrific museum at his home in Queens, “A Wonderful World” compresses 60 years, from youth to death and even beyond, into four discrete chapters defined cleverly but overneatly by decade, locale and wife.The 1910s segment, set in Armstrong’s native New Orleans, introduces wife No. 1, Daisy Parker (Dionne Figgins), a prostitute with a “Kiss of Fire.” After leaving her to join the jazz scene of Chicago in the 1920s, he falls for the pianist and arranger Lil Hardin (Jennie Harney-Fleming), who polishes his musicianship along with his wardrobe. Nevertheless, he leaves her too; she and Daisy bring down the first act with a furious medley of “Some of These Days” and “After You’ve Gone.”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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    Paul Mescal Rides ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ to Brooklyn

    The award-winning production will begin performances in February as part of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s next season.Brooklyn Academy of Music next spring will present an Olivier Award-winning revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” starring Paul Mescal, the Irish actor, in the role made famous by Marlon Brando.The production is the high point of the next season at BAM, which, like many nonprofit arts organizations, has been struggling to rebuild after a period of economic challenges and leadership change.“Streetcar,” one of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, imagines a down-on-her-luck Southern woman’s disruptive visit to the New Orleans home of her sister and brother-in-law. It was first staged on Broadway in 1947, and this latest revival began at London’s Almeida Theater in 2022, and then transferred to the West End in 2023. Not only did the production win an Olivier, but so did Mescal and Anjana Vasan for their portrayals of Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Vasan will join Mescal in Brooklyn, as will Patsy Ferran, reprising her London performance as Blanche DuBois.The critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the London production “an electrifying ensemble production.”Mescal, an Oscar nominee for “Aftersun,” is also known for the series “Normal People” and the film “All of Us Strangers,” but he is likely to become much better known this month because he is starring in “Gladiator II.” “Streetcar” is his American theater debut.The production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, will return to the West End from Feb. 3 to 22 at the Noël Coward Theater before transferring to BAM where it is scheduled to run from Feb. 28 to April 6. The producers of the West End production, led by ATG Entertainment, a large British theater company with a growing presence in New York, are credited as presenting partners at BAM.Among the other highlights of the BAM season is a production of “The Threepenny Opera” performed by the Berliner Ensemble under the direction of Barrie Kosky. Joshua Barone, reviewing the production in Berlin for The New York Times, called it “hauntingly enjoyable.”BAM will also present “Macbeth in Stride,” Whitney White’s reimagining of Lady Macbeth “as an indomitable Black female icon.” The production was at Washington’s Shakespeare Theater Company last year; in The Washington Post, Celia Wren called it “an ingenious meditation on ambition and the Bard.”Both of those shows will be in April; the opera is being presented with St. Ann’s Warehouse, and the play is a co-production with Shakespeare Theater Company and Philadelphia Theater Company, both of which staged it last fall, and Yale Repertory Theater, which is staging it next month.There will also be dance (including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Batsheva Dance Company and the annual DanceAfrica event), music (including Max Richter), films and children’s programming. More