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    ‘Ted Lasso’ Taught Phil Dunster How to Play Nice

    The charismatic English actor, who stars as the cocksure footballer Jamie Tartt, had to trust the writers to transform him from villain to hero.As Jamie Tartt in “Ted Lasso,” Phil Dunster began as a bratty showboat and is ending as an emotionally mature team player.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe new Jamie Tartt is very different from the old Jamie Tartt. As played by Phil Dunster, the 31-year-old English actor, the Tartt that closes out the third and probably final season of “Ted Lasso” is earnest, candid and emotionally mature — a far cry from the bratty, egotistic playboy and soccer star we were introduced to in Season 1.That Tartt was selfish and preening, a ball-hog on the pitch and a thorn in the side of those forced to put up with him, including his AFC Richmond coach, Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis); his professional rival turned personal trainer, Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein); and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). Recent episodes of the hit Apple TV+ comedy have found Tartt opening up to those characters, among others, and learning to forgive his abusive father (Kieran O’Brien). Most surprising of all, he’s leading the Premier League in assists: The showboat is now a team player.In Wednesday’s finale — light spoilers start now — Jamie lands a Nike commercial in Brazil, shares a long-brewing heart-to-heart with Roy and visits his father in recovery, showing how much progress he’s made over the last three years.Dunster credited Jason Sudeikis, the star and co-creator of “Ted Lasso,” with helping him with his character’s evolution.Apple-TV+It has been a drastic reinvention for a character once known strictly for bad-boy smarm. And Dunster, faced with making this transformation convincing, had doubts that he could pull it off.“I was terrified constantly,” he admitted in a video call last week from his flat in London. “Every time I read a new script, I would think, [expletive], I don’t know how to do that.”He credits Sudeikis, as the star and co-creator of the series, with helping him through it, especially in a major scene in Episode 11 in which Tartt breaks down and weeps over the stress of an impending game before his hometown crowd. “There are some lovely things people have said after that episode, and the honest answer is that it was Jason’s idea,” Dunster said.Affable and boyish, with a thoughtful air that often had him gazing off into the middle distance before he spoke, Dunster seemed eager to look back on “Lasso,” as it drew to a close. (While no official announcement has been made about the show’s future beyond Wednesday’s Season 3 finale, there are currently no plans for more episodes or for spinoffs.) He reminisced about the casting process with a wistful glee, speaking in a tone of well-mannered English refinement that contrasts sharply with Jamie’s Manchester brogue.At the time, he said, the character of Jamie Tartt was called Dani Rojas, who was “what the character of Jamie is now, but maybe European or South American, representing where lots of footballers come from that might have a diva-y spirit.” (Dani Rojas later became a separate character, a soccer-loving Pollyanna from Mexico played by Cristo Fernández.)“It was easier to make him unlikable and trust the writing to show that he was redeemable,” Dunster said of Jamie. With, from left, Kola Bokinni, Charlie Hiscock and Cristo Fernández.Apple TV+Dunster auditioned “in a sort of Spanish accent,” he said, which was “not quite what they were looking for.” He assumed that was the end of it. But one afternoon some time later, while playing volleyball, Dunster got a call from his agent telling him that the producers wanted him back — only this time without the Spanish.“The note was, find an accent that would represent footballers in the U.K., that doesn’t sound like me,” he said. As a lifelong soccer fan, his mind went straight to Manchester — home of the vaunted Manchester United and the Premier League’s current juggernaut, Manchester City. Instead of “myself,” Jamie says “me-self”; “Keeley” becomes “Kee-lah.”“I did my best to make a fairly bold choice of who he was,” Dunster said. “It was a pretty broad brush stroke: a fame-hungry young man with a warped idea of celebrity who thinks longevity in this industry is to be as ostentatious as he can be.” He was careful, in the early going, not to soften Jamie’s harsher edges too much — he had to let himself be the bad guy, at least for a while.“It was easier to make him unlikable and trust the writing to show that he was redeemable,” he said. “It’s about getting out of the way of the text, isn’t it?”Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent went from being Jamie’s rival to being his mentor.Apple TV+But his take on the character, informed by his deep soccer fandom, came to dictate much of how the character was written, he explained, right down to jokes that hinge on Dunster’s twanging accent. (One of the most memorable lines in Season 3 revolves around his singular pronunciation of a colloquial term for excrement.) Sudeikis encouraged the actors to “massage the text” so that it felt right for each of them, Dunster said, “whether that was to Anglify it, or Jamiefy it, whatever it needed.”Dunster, who grew up in Reading, England, was drawn to acting from an early age, appearing in school productions that won him much-sought attention in class and at home. “I don’t want to put it down solely to my performance as Oliver in a Year 3 production at school, but that laid the foundation of me being a show-off,” he said.Though he comes from a military background — both his brother and father served in the armed forces — he said his family supported his decision to pursue acting professionally by enrolling at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School. This was in part because, as he dryly explained, “they also knew I had zero academic skills, so they were like, ‘Yeah, mate, you’ve got nothing else going for you.’”After graduating, Dunster took a job as a waiter at an Asian restaurant in Brixton, but after a single trial shift, he could tell it wasn’t for him. “I flocked, man — I had someone who was looking after me, and I still managed to screw everything up,” he said. On the bus ride home, he was dismayed: “I remember thinking, ‘What am I doing? I can’t be an actor if I have to do this.’”Fortunately, he didn’t have to: He was offered a major role in the British period gangster film “The Rise of the Krays” (2015) almost immediately afterward, and just like that, Dunster went from anxious graduate to professional actor and has worked steadily ever since.Before “Ted Lasso,” Dunster won notice in “Murder on the Orient Express,” among other titles.20th Century FoxHe went on to earn notice with parts in the dark parenting comedy “Catastrophe” (2015-19) and in the Kenneth Branagh film “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017). But joining the cast of “Ted Lasso” in 2020 raised Dunster’s profile to new heights as the series became a pandemic-era phenomenon, wooing audiences and critics with its sweetly comic sincerity. Yet despite the show’s stratospheric stateside success, it has not gained a notable cultural foothold in Britain.“I’m constantly telling my friends, like, ‘Guys, I promise you I’m famous in America,’” Dunster joked. While he’s managed to persuade them to watch the show, the overall effect of its popularity on his career has been difficult to gauge.Dunster’s initial conception of Jamie was “a fame-hungry young man with a warped idea of celebrity.” In his real life, he tries not to worry about such things.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesOn the one hand, he said, “it’s slightly easier to come by meetings in America than here, which is not something I take for granted.” On the other, the whole notion of success and viewership at home versus abroad can be an unnecessary distraction.“It’s easy for that to be the focus rather than doing the actual work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the whole point of that stuff is to hopefully aid in me doing more interesting work.”“It’s an insidious thing,” he continued. “You can see it work its way through people — the desire to follow that stuff. It’s important not to fly too close to the sun, as some Greek dude once did.”“Ted Lasso” is above all a show about goodness — about finding the goodness in others and bringing out the goodness in ourselves. That includes Jamie Tartt, who Dunster said came to be “driven by love rather than driven by hate,” which he “never thought he would choose.” It’s perhaps unsurprising that his time on “Lasso” has taught Dunster the importance of “working with good people” — as the series wraps up, at least for now, that’s what he’s looking for again.“The part can be whatever — big or small, a nice guy or a bad guy, a prime minister or the opposite of a prime minister,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter, as long as the people making it are good.” More

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    Book Review: ‘Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style,’ by Paul Rudnick

    Following a neurotic writer and a wealthy aesthete over four bumpy decades, “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is a gay rom-com that tugs at the heart.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE, by Paul RudnickNate Reminger, a New Jersey-born, gay, Jewish and unabashedly horny virgin, shows up at Yale University in 1973 and instantly sets his sights on the one man he’ll be gazing at for the next four decades.As a budding writer with a knack for shrewd description, Nate spends the length of Paul Rudnick’s life-filled rom-com trying to find ways to describe that man, Farrell Covington: He is a “blinding sun god,” a “blank check,” an “unhinged cipher” and more. In so doing, Nate also reaches for a new way of seeing himself and what he believes to be possible for two men in love.To Nate’s surprise, Farrell returns his gaze with an even stronger intensity. It supersedes the look of a crush — it’s an appraisal, a reverie.And of the pair, Farrell is the one with an eye for beauty. A devastatingly handsome, unimaginably wealthy aesthete, Farrell considers style his armor — “a form of protest, against gross inhumanity or inclement weather.” As the scion of an ultraconservative family, he is not so much the black sheep as the gilded one. He speaks in a mid-Atlantic accent that sounds “as if a person had been raised by a bottle of good whiskey and a crystal chandelier.” He is, as the kids would later say, everything.He and Nate quickly become everything to each other, and though Farrell has the kind of charmed life that allows him to avoid such inconveniences as Yale’s housing rules — he has a townhouse, with an original Hockney and a butler — it will not shield him from bigoted parents hellbent on keeping their son on the straight and narrow. Nate and Farrell are separated against their will, sending Nate spiraling downward and beginning a pattern of estrangement and reunion that recurs throughout the novel.The irony of Farrell’s charmed life is that it serves as the complicating factor in the couple’s relationship, as they move from college to New York to Hollywood and beyond, all while navigating the AIDS epidemic, crises of faith and a family that rivals the Ewings of “Dallas” for wealthy wickedness.While the endeavor is quite epic in scope, it’s made deliciously bite-size by Rudnick’s densely funny writing style and the gimlet eye he has given Nate, a clear avatar for the author in this semiautobiographical tome. “I had vague theatrical ambitions,” he tells us, “as an actor or playwright or simply someone who’d call other people ‘darling.’”Though Rudnick delivers the multiple-laughs-per-paragraph pace that fans of his sendups in The New Yorker might expect, the aim of “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” is closer to heart-tugging than to rib-jabbing. This does create tonal whiplash in spots, as when an emotional hospital sequence is capped by the sudden arrival of a sari-wearing acolyte from Mother Teresa’s order. Rudnick’s worldview is so effortlessly, gleefully campy that even when he plays it straight — please allow the world’s largest quotation marks here — it can feel like a setup to a punchline.This tendency also directs one’s gaze to the smallest of quibbles. Farrell is a glittering bauble of a man, an architecture-loving manic-pixie dreamboat, a walking interrobang, but he’ll never be more captivating than his creator and, by extension, his creator’s stand-in. We’re in Nate’s point of view, and we spend long stretches separated from Farrell altogether. And even without Farrell’s privilege, Nate’s path from college to Broadway to a successful screenwriting career is relatively frictionless, which gives some sections the desultory feeling of a light memoir rather than a novel.Another way of considering it, however, frames the central question around neither Nate’s nor Farrell’s individual obstacles but rather their shared destiny. If we encounter the true subject in those first pages — that mutual gaze — then this novel is more about their ways of seeing each other and the world’s way of seeing their possibility.Consider what Rudnick offers almost without comment: the comparatively rare opportunity to spend decades watching two men navigate love. Like so much of the author’s work in other media — the play “Jeffrey,” the film “In and Out” — “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style” seems less interested in serving as a gay museum piece than as a filigreed statement.Turn your gaze, it beckons, and you’ll see we were more than simply here; we made this place beautiful.R. Eric Thomas’s latest book of essays, “Congratulations, the Best Is Over!,” will be published in August.FARRELL COVINGTON AND THE LIMITS OF STYLE | By Paul Rudnick | 368 pp. | Atria Books | $28.99 More

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    ‘Succession’ Series Finale Recap: The Dotted Line

    Who won? Who lost? Who was left staring off into the sea?Season 4, Episode 10: ‘With Open Eyes’Whenever a show as talked-about and admired as “Succession” reaches its end, fans and critics start coming up with lists of the biggest questions that still “need to be answered” in the finale. More often than not, the finale itself answers some of those questions but leaves others dangling, because the stories TV creators want to tell do not always line up with what the viewers expect. And that’s fine. That’s entertainment.Somewhat surprisingly though, this last “Succession” episode resolves a lot. The only major plot thread from the season that remains open by the closing credits involves the outcome of the presidential election. We do learn that the Democratic candidate Daniel Jiménez has filed legal challenges regarding the burned ballots in Wisconsin; but ultimately the winner of that particular contest is insignificant to the “Succession” ending that the creator Jesse Armstrong has in mind.What does matter is whether the Waystar board approves the GoJo deal; and who Lukas Matsson will name as the company’s new CEO. We will get back to both, but for those who want what Logan Roy would call “the protein,” the answers are: Yes, the board votes for the sale; and in a stunning upset, Tom Wambsgans steals the C.E.O. job from his wife. (Wild, right?)Yet what makes this such a satisfying finale is that Armstrong and his cast and crew also grapple with one of the series’s most divisive questions: All things considered, is there anything redeemable about the Roys?The answer: Yeah, sometimes. Kendall, Shiv, Roman and even Connor are at their best when they are away from the pressures of business and politics and are just swapping memories and jokes, while talking about how strange their lives are. These riff sessions do not compensate in any way for all the destructively selfish decisions they have made or the people they have hurt. But they do show some real humanity.Matsson and Tom — and, unexpectedly, Cousin Greg and Lady Caroline — have a lot to do with restoring that sibling bond, at least for a little while. When Shiv and Kendall find out their mother is sheltering the humiliated and bruised Roman at her island estate, the two Waystar rivals race down to talk to their brother, to try to win his vote at the upcoming board meeting.Shiv, who thinks that she has secured Matsson the votes he needs (and herself the top job), is already trying to soften the blow for Kendall and Roman, talking about how maybe the boys can revive their plans for their bespoke information hub “The Hundred.” Unbeknown to Shiv though, Kendall is being fed inside information by Greg, who is hovering around Matsson and using a translator app to find out what the Swede is secretly saying. That is how Greg learns Matsson has soured on Shiv.Greg doesn’t get the whole story, but we do. We know Matsson doesn’t think he needs Shiv’s political expertise and that he definitely doesn’t want her ideas. (Also, though he insists it does not bother him, Matsson maybe starts wavering after seeing a magazine cartoon showing Shiv pulling his strings.)Early in the episode, Shiv lets Matsson know that when it comes to Tom’s future with the company, she considers him “a highly interchangeable modular part.” This ends up being a selling point. After an awkward visit to an art exhibit (where Tom praises a painting by saying “the colors go well”) and an equally bad dinner (where Tom says, “Those cod cheeks were a worthy opponent”), Matsson asks Tom to pitch himself.The ATN head immediately shifts tones and starts touting his willingness to cut heads and harvest eyeballs. He says he does not want to give his ATN customers “dietary advice” about what kind of news they consume. He wins over Matsson, who needs a “pain sponge” — someone who does what needs doing and does not mind being hated.Kendall does not know Matsson has chosen Tom; but he does know Shiv is out. So he uses that info to try to persuade her to vote no on GoJo. He tells a sweetly sad tale about Logan naming him as his successor at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton when Kendall was 7 years old. Between that story and Roman’s honest assessment that no one with any real power sees Shiv or himself as the new Logan, she relents.Kendall thought it was finally his time. Jeremy Strong in the series finale of “Succession.”HBOThat’s where this episode becomes fun. United at last, these three get hilariously sardonic, whether it’s Roman expressing his anxiety about swimming in the sea (which he calls “a huge water subway for things that want to eat me”) or Shiv doing her impression of how Kendall’s deadpan monotone would sound if she ever tried to kill him. The good vibes continue when they return to New York to hear Connor explain his plan to distribute their father’s personal effects to whomever places the most stickers on what they want, following the strict guidelines of his “stickering perambulating circuits.”Everything eventually starts breaking down again, of course. When Tom learns Shiv is going to vote against GoJo, he confesses to her that he is Matsson’s CEO of choice and she rages, calling him an empty suit. (Tom responds to this by getting into a silly-looking smack-fight with Greg, while Greg is still clutching a roll of Connor’s inheritance stickers.)But no matter how much Shiv and Roman hate Matsson and Tom, when the time comes to cast their vote for Kendall, both hesitate. They simply do not feel good about seeing Kendall in Logan’s chair, in an office filled with memorabilia of their father’s amazing accomplishments.Roman starts to wobble first, realizing he does not want to compound the embarrassment of his funeral meltdown by appearing with a bandaged head in front of the board (including Gerri) and conceding to Kendall. Roman is brought back into line by Kendall embracing him in a brotherly fashion and then grinding his wounded forehead into his shoulder. But Shiv? With the vote tied 6-6 and her as the deciding “yea” or “nay,” she flees the boardroom, with Kendall and Roman following.Kendall makes one last pitch, asking Shiv to have some pity on a man who is “like a cog built to fit only one machine.” But when she brings up his confession back in Italy about causing the death of a cater-waiter in a drunk-driving incident — an unforgettable moment of realness and sibling compassion for all three of them — Kendall botches his response, lying that he made up the whole story. Roman then makes some unforgivable comments about Kendall’s children not really being part of the Roy “bloodline” like Shiv’s unborn baby will be; and Kendall turns violent. By the time the dust settles, Shiv has already cast her vote.And so we leave our three broken Roys, one by one. Roman reassures Kendall that nothing Waystar produces (“broken shows,” “phony news”) really matters, and then he reluctantly participates in the big publicity photo of Matsson signing the acquisition papers. Shiv perhaps admits to herself that she was just as willing to sell out Tom as he was to betray her; and when he asks her to ride with him to the post-signing celebration, she agrees, and even lays her hand lightly — very lightly — atop his in the back seat of the car.As for Kendall … Well, throughout this series we have seen Kendall either swallowed up by water or buoyed by it, depending on whether or not he is thriving. As “Succession” ends though, he is merely staring dead-eyed at the water, stubbornly off in the distance. He did not really lose, because he is still obscenely rich. But he definitely did not win either. If anything, he has been kicked out of the game altogether.Are these three redeemable? Absolutely. That’s what makes it all the more punishing that they are never redeemed.Harriet Walter in the series finale of “Succession.”Sarah Shatz/HBODue diligenceI wonder if Jesse Armstrong knows somebody like Lady Caroline, because there is such a specificity to her lousy mothering. Part of what makes the island scenes such a hoot is the way Harriet Walter plays them. Caroline talks about how human eyes — or, as she refers to them, “face eggs” — revolt her. She asks her kids to stay for dinner and then serves them a paltry meal with the excuse that she “knew you wouldn’t be hungry in this heat.” (Later though, Caroline does allow her kids to tap into her supply of “knobbies,” which is how she refers to the bread heels from her husband Peter’s sandwich loaves that she saves in the freezer.)Roman, upon hearing from his mother that they are not allowed to touch Peter’s special cheese: “I’m going to eat his cheese.”One last warmly human moment before everything falls apart at the board meeting: At Logan’s home, Connor is playing a video he calls “virtual dinner with Dad,” in which Logan cracks jokes and Karl sings a Scottish folk song. Sometimes, when these people weren’t doing terrible things, they could be kind of nice. More

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    Robin Wagner, Set Designer Who Won Three Tony Awards, Dies at 89

    He created sets for more than 50 of Broadway’s most celebrated productions, including “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “On the Twentieth Century” and “The Producers.”Robin Wagner, the inventive Tony Award-winning set designer of more than 50 Broadway shows, including the 1978 musical “On the Twentieth Century,” in which a locomotive appeared to be racing toward the audience with the actress Imogene Coca strapped to the front of it, died on Monday at his home in New York City. He was 89.His daughter Christie Wagner Lee confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the specific cause. She did not say in what borough he lived.Mr. Wagner designed sets on Broadway, Off Broadway and for regional theater, for operas and ballets, and, in 1975, for the Rolling Stones’ Tour of the Americas. His stage for those concerts was shaped like a six-pointed lotus flower that was raked upward to the back in a delicate curve.On Broadway, his work included the sets for the transcendent 1968 rock musical “Hair” (in The New York Times, Clive Barnes described a “beautiful junk-art setting”) as well as “The Great White Hope,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “42nd Street,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Dreamgirls” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” and “Angels in America: Perestroika.”Mr. Wagner’s stage designs could be elaborate or simple, depending on the story and what the director wanted. He viewed scenic design as problem solving.“When I’m reading the script, I can see it, how it fits together and how you get from one scene to another,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I guess that’s what makes designers designers — they visualize things a certain way.”For the musical “City of Angels,” which opened on Broadway in 1989, he created dual color schemes to match the interconnected stories that the show’s writer, Larry Gelbart, set in a world of mansions, sound stages and solariums in 1940s Los Angeles. In sequences involving an author who was turning his novel into a screenplay, everything was in color, while those involving a private eye movie character were in black and white, befitting the show’s homage to film noir.In his review in The Boston Globe, Kevin Kelly wrote that Mr. Wagner’s set design was “brilliant, with flats moving on and off in a rhythm that is nothing if not movie-ish and with a final pull back to a Hollywood sound stage that is Cecil B. De Mille breathtaking.”Mr. Wagner’s sets for the musical “City of Angels” after it opened in 1989.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryMr. Wagner won a Tony Award for “City of Angels,” his second for scenic design following one in 1978 for “On the Twentieth Century.” He won a third in 2001, for “The Producers,” Mel Brooks’s hit about a scheming pair who try to make a financial killing by purposely staging a Broadway flop.One of his most enduring designs, which did not receive a Tony nomination, was his simplest. For “A Chorus Line,” the producer Joseph Papp’s ultimately long-running musical about dancers auditioning for a Broadway musical, Mr. Wagner’s design consisted only of mirrored walls, black velour drapes and a white line on the floor.“That was the result of two years’ work of Michael Bennett and I trying to distill things,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill in 2007, referring to the director and co-choreographer of the show, which opened on Broadway in 1975. “We started with big things for visualizing scenes, and as we went through the show’s workshop period, they got smaller and smaller.”He added, “And then we knew we needed a black box, which represents theater, and that we needed the mirrors, because they represent the dance studio.”Robin Samuel Anton Wagner was born on Aug. 31, 1933, in San Francisco to Jens and Phyllis (Smith-Spurgeon) Wagner. His father, who had immigrated from Denmark, was a maritime engineer and, for a time, the keeper of two lighthouses where the Wagners lived until Robin was 10. His mother had been a pianist in New Zealand before moving to the United States, where she was a homemaker.One of Mr. Wagner’s simplest sets was for the musical “A Chorus Line.” The scene, in 1990, was the finale of the last performance of the show in its original Broadway run.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs a boy, Robin was enamored of Disney films like “Fantasia” and hoped to be an animator, creating the backgrounds of cartoons, not the characters. “I actually thought I was Pinocchio, trying to find my way into some kind of real life, which I still think I sometimes am,” he said in an oral history interview with Columbia University in 1992.He created comic books in junior high school and, after high school, attended the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1953 to 1954. While there, and after, he worked on set design with theater and opera groups, like the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco; built window displays for a clothing store; and got a paying design job in summer stock with the Sacramento Music Circus.Mr. Wagner moved in 1958 to New York, where he became an assistant to one Broadway designer, Ben Edwards, and then another, Oliver Smith. From 1964 to 1967, he was the set designer for Arena Stage, the renowned regional theater in Washington.Returning to New York, he designed the sets for “Hair,” which Clive Barnes, in The Times, described as “masterly.”A scene from “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” in 1992. Mr. Wagner designed the sets for it and its sequel, “Angels in America: Perestroika.”John Haynes/Bridgeman ImagesGeorge Wolfe, the director who worked with him on several shows, including the “Angels in America” productions, said that Mr. Wagner had a talent for finding the essence of a story. He recalled one of Mr. Wagner’s small, but effective, touches on “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the 1992 musical about the jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.“Jelly was dying in L.A., and Robin created three jagged neon lines that looked like the graphic of an earthquake,” Mr. Wolfe said in a telephone interview. “It was so breathtakingly simple; it was along the lower part of the back wall.”He added, “Just those three lines, you knew it was L.A.”But there was also a complex engineer’s side to Mr. Wagner, which was on view with “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Bennett’s 1981 musical based loosely on the career of the Supremes. Mr. Wagner designed five aluminum, spotlight-studded towers that moved in various configurations to create — with minimal use of props — the illusion that the setting was changing from a nightclub to a recording studio to a Las Vegas show palace.“And all the lighting bars were basically platforms,” Mr. Wagner told Playbill, “so the actors could climb up on those things and fly out, which they did.”Mr. Wagner’s “Dreamgirls” design earned him a Tony nomination and one of his six Drama Desk Awards.His final Broadway credit was for “Leap of Faith,” a musical about a fraudulent evangelist, in 2012.In addition to his daughter Christie, he is survived by his partner, Susan Kowal; another daughter, Leslie Wagner; a son, Kurt; and a granddaughter. His marriages to Joyce Workman and Paula Kauffman ended in divorce. The train that Mr. Wagner designed for “On the Twentieth Century” was one of his great creations, with its long, elegant, streamlined interior consisting of adjoining compartments that were open on one side to let the characters be seen. Train exteriors that slid in front of the compartments let the audience look at the actors from the outside, after they had peered inside at them.“This gesture,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times, “aside from notably enhancing the cinematic quality of the show — nothing is more movie-like than quick cuts from inside to outside — is also a gentle and pleasing play on the traditional description of the stage set as a room in which the fourth wall has been removed.” More

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    In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets

    Three new plays at theaters in Washington explore how the past is both erased and inescapable.Although James Ijames does not specify the setting of his new play “Good Bones,” it sure seems like Washington. For one thing, a character says it “used to be a swamp.”That checks out; when I paid a visit to the capital last week, the summer humidity was already settling in. And hasn’t Washington become, as Ijames writes of the play’s locale in an introduction to the script, one of those places “that is now too expensive for most people to live”? It has: My older son, an elementary schoolteacher in D.C., is just squeaking by.Well, lots of cities are wet and pricey. But when two characters in “Good Bones” — one a new homeowner renovating a townhouse and the other a contractor intimately familiar with its former incarnations — discover that they both grew up in a nearby project called Dunbar Gardens, local bells may ring. The Paul Laurence Dunbar apartments are less than a mile from the Studio Theater, where the play is running through June 18.Of course, there are apartment complexes named for Dunbar, one of the country’s first Black poets to gain widespread recognition, in several American cities. Still, anyone who spends even a little time observing Washington’s glassy new high-rises squeezed up against its squat Federal piles, many built by enslaved people, will recognize Ijames’s spiritual geography: a place where history is both erased and inescapable.So even if it was a coincidence that the tension between past and present informed all three plays I saw during my visit, it was a telling one. “Good Bones,” Ijames’s follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fat Ham” (now on Broadway), examines the theme through the lens of contemporary gentrification — though the gentrifiers and the gentrified are, in this case, both Black. The familiar knots of privilege and appropriation become even more tangled when the people raising the property values grew up in the same neighborhood as the people they’re pricing out.From left: Joel Ashur, Johnny Ramey and Cara Ricketts in “Good Bones” at Studio Theater in Washington.Margot SchulmanThe other plays look further back, and at other forms of erasure. “Here There Are Blueberries,” which I saw at the Shakespeare Theater Company, concerns the discovery in 2006 of an album of 116 photographs that depict daily life among the residents of Auschwitz. Mind you, these are not the concentration camp’s prisoners, who are never seen, but the jolly-looking Nazis who ran it. Why such an album survived, and what should be done with it, are questions that bedevil the archivists who narrate the story.Our responsibility to the past is also the crux of Kenneth Lin’s “Exclusion,” at the Arena Stage. The title refers, in part, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers; designed to last 10 years, it was not repealed until 1943. The law, as well as the anti-Asian violence it in essence sanctioned, is, in the play, the subject of a celebrated book by a Chinese American historian named Katie who sells the television rights to Hollywood.You could almost write the next beat yourself: Katie finds herself participating in egregious falsifications, as a terrible injustice is turned into entertainment by the dumbing-down machine. It’s a heavy if sadly believable irony that the mini-series created by a smarmy producer sidelines its historical conscience (Katie gets fired) and eventually excludes the Exclusion Act itself.But because Lin’s play, running through June 25, is a satire, the curtain does not come down on that downer. In a comic turnaround that could be motivated more clearly, Katie comes to believe that the producer’s rewrites are justified. Yes, he has turned a doctor who in real life was lynched by a mob into a kung fu expert who lynches the mob instead. And yes, he has transformed a humble seamstress into a prostitute to make the role more attractive to the actress who will play the role. Still, when the show becomes a huge critical and popular success, providing visibility to Asian actors and a boost to her career, Katie accepts the strange trade-off of being seen by being erased.As directed by Trip Cullman with the bright colors and swift pacing of situation comedy, “Exclusion” is instantly legible and accessible. Still, its emotional high point is just the opposite: a halting conversation between Katie and the actress that takes place in unsubtitled Cantonese. And though what they say is thus incomprehensible to those who do not speak the language, it dramatizes with great poignancy the power of what we can sense but not understand.Tony Nam, right, and Karoline in “Exclusion” at the Arena Stage in Washington.Margot SchulmanThere are moments like that in “Good Bones,” too. The homeowners, Aisha and Travis, hear sounds in their house they cannot explain. Are they the voices of ghosts whose lives are being painted over by the beautiful pale blue of their new kitchen?Yet the plot turns, somewhat squeakily, on sounds they can explain all too well: booming music from a late-night party nearby. When Travis, over Aisha’s objections, calls the police to complain about his neighbors, the conflict is set in motion, pitting the entitlement of new wealth against the traditions of old community.The questions Ijames raises in “Good Bones,” directed by Psalmayene 24, are profound: How can cities feel welcoming to people whose ideas of welcome are incompatible? What is the responsibility of newcomers to the surviving structures, both physical and emotional, of the past? And though those questions do not yet coalesce into a tight narrative — the tacked-on happy ending is a carpentry job their contractor would redo immediately — “Good Bones” is a house in progress. By the time it gets to New York (the Public Theater plans to present it in an upcoming season) it may well look and feel completely different.“Here There Are Blueberries,” a Tectonic Theater project conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman, also approaches history as a living process. Like previous Tectonic works, including “The Laramie Project” and “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” it proceeds in the form of an investigation based on interviews and relevant documents.In this case, the interviews begin with archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — not far from the theater — as they process the astonishing trove of photographs sent to them by a possible donor who says little about how he got them. The images of Auschwitz leaders and workers enjoying outings and singalongs and rewards for their “accomplishments,” including bowls of fresh blueberries, seem to say almost too much.By the time the play introduces another Auschwitz album — one that fills the historical and emotional gaps of the first with images of inmates — you understand why, as a former Nazi propagandist explains, “One must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering.”Yet I’m not sure plays should. “Blueberries,” which closed on Sunday in Washington but will be presented next spring at New York Theater Workshop, is so brisk and unsentimental it sometimes feels merely clinical, or perhaps surgical, its unbearable topic opened up for autopsy.That’s effective, but the more powerful moments for me are those in which characters vitally and morally involved in the story — descendants of Nazis, a survivor of the camp — speak from painful experience about the ways history implicates them, and all of us, even as it starts to fade from collective memory. The procedural mysteries of the albums are, after all, less important than the living fact of their irrefutable testimony.Theater is its own kind of testimony. “Blueberries,” like “Exclusion” and “Good Bones,” uses drama (and comedy) to extend our thinking about the legacies of prejudice and resistance, power and deprivation. But then so does any tour of this history-rich, antihistorical city. As our teacher son walked us back to our hotel after seeing “Blueberries,” I asked him about a particularly impressive Beaux-Arts building we passed. “The Carnegie Library,” he said. “It’s now an Apple store.”Good BonesThrough June 18 at the Studio Theater, Washington D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.ExclusionThrough June 25 at Arena Stage, Washington D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Succession’ Finale Drew 2.9 Million Viewers Sunday, a Series High

    The acclaimed HBO drama ended on a high note, with its largest audience for a season closer.The series finale of “Succession” drew 2.9 million viewers on Sunday night, a viewership high for the decorated HBO drama, the network said on Tuesday.That audience was a considerable improvement from the Season 3 finale, which had 1.7 million viewers on the night it premiered, in December 2021. For the fourth and final season, HBO said that “Succession” was averaging 8.7 million viewers per episode, including delayed viewing, also a new high for the show.The ratings put an exclamation point on an improbable 39-episode run for “Succession,” which debuted in 2018 to modest expectations and turned into a critics’ favorite and an awards show beast. In addition to multiple Golden Globes wins, “Succession” has won 13 Emmys, including best drama (2020 and 2022), acting honors (Jeremy Strong, Matthew Macfadyen) and best writing (three times for the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong).Even with those highs, “Succession” remains somewhat of a niche series, particularly compared with some of HBO’s other recent hits. The second season of “The White Lotus,” which concluded in December, averaged 15.5 million viewers per episode, nearly double the viewers for the final season of “Succession.” The second season of “Euphoria,” which premiered in early 2022, averaged 19.5 million viewers. And mega-hits like “House of the Dragon” and “The Last of Us” averaged roughly 30 million viewers per episode, according to the network.But “Succession” is already the early favorite to take best drama honors at this year’s Emmy Awards for a third time. Shows eligible for this year’s Emmys had to premiere between June 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023. Voting for the Emmy nominations begins on June 15, and the nominees will be announced in July.The viewership figures are compiled by HBO and tallied up from a combination of views from Max, HBO’s streaming service, and of ratings from the live airing and repeat telecasts on traditional cable television. Many entertainment companies, like Netflix, release internal numbers to tout the popularity of their biggest series, though they are difficult to verify. During the live 9 p.m. broadcast of “Succession” on the HBO cable network, for instance, 789,000 viewers tuned in, according to Nielsen. More

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    ‘Succession’ Clears the Air: Here’s What to Read

    Still sorting through the finale? Here’s a broad range of hard and soft takes to help you out.This article includes spoilers for the series finale of “Succession.”When a great and wealthy brute of a man such as Logan Roy dies, one expects there to be some kind of reading — a last will and testament, formal instructions to the executor of the estate, something that tells the family about his feelings. But Logan, never big on feelings, didn’t update his will, leaving in doubt his thoughts on a worthy successor and leaving his friends, family and associates to do “Sticker Perambulating Circuits,” or SPCs, to lay claim to any physical inheritance. (As for the Waystar Royco company itself? None of his children could manage to put a sticker on that.)In lieu of a reading of a will, we are instead treated to a variety of readings from the “Succession” Thinkpiece Industry, as Daniel Fienberg, a TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter, called it. Below, we put stickers on some of the noteworthy recent features on the series coming to its end.‘“Succession” Is Over. Why Did We Care?’ [NY Times]The “billon-dollar question,” as Alexis Soloski puts it, has been answered — none of the Roys won the prize. A companion question, however, is why did we care so much?“Writers have argued that we love ‘Succession’ because of what it says about America, what it says about class, what it says about money, family, trauma and abuse,” Soloski writes. “These characters are just like us. They’re not like us at all. They’re fake. They’re real. We hate them. We love them. We’re rooting for them. Are we? Did we? Why?”‘The Great Genius of “Succession” Was Hovering Two Inches Above Reality’ [NY Times]“Succession” did something none of its prestige-TV predecessors did, Kurt Andersen writes. In blurring fiction and reality in a fictional world, it created spot-on commentary about the same dance of fact and fantasy in the real world at a pivotal and disorienting time.‘Critic’s Notebook: The “Succession” Series Finale Was a Brilliant Family Nightmare’ [The Hollywood Reporter]The reason “Succession” will endure is because of things like “Sticker Perambulating Circuits,” argues Daniel Fienberg. “You might think you relate to the comic tragedy of their lives, to the quaint process of adhering stickers to the things that helps you remember the things and people you love, but their stickers aren’t your stickers and their tragedy isn’t your tragedy.”‘Can You Have a Powerful Career and Still Be a Good Parent? “Succession” Has a Clear Answer’ [Politico]When Tom unwittingly tells a pregnant Shiv, “I think you are maybe not a good person to have children,” it speaks to a recurring theme in “Succession” that “power and parenthood are incompatible,” writes Joanna Weiss.“Ultimately, ‘Succession’ suggests that an intergenerational transfer of power is doomed by definition,” Weiss writes.‘In the “Succession” Series Finale, the Poison Drips Through” [The Ringer]Logan Roy didn’t just promise each of his kids — well, except for Connor — the chance to inherit his throne. He also made sure that they never could, Miles Surrey writes. “If anything, all Logan did was poison them — just as he poisoned the world.”‘Who Was Bill Wambsganss, and Was He a “Succession” Spoiler?’ [NY Times]Thanks in part to a viral video on TikTok, Tom’s surname — Wambsgans — became a talking point before the finale. Was Shiv’s husband named for an otherwise unremarkable second baseman known for making an unassisted triple play in a World Series?“Whether the connection was intentional or not,” Benjamin Hoffman writes, “it shined a light on a player who has been all but forgotten beyond one outrageously good play.”‘What Was ‘Succession’ Actually Trying to Tell Us?’ [Vox]Did “Succession” show us how to be rich, the way Tom showed his protégé Greg? Whizy Kim argues that it did so, but in a cynical way that revealed the collateral damage.“Many popular TV shows have portrayed the lives of the wealthy as glitzy and glamorous,” Kim writes, “but few have so deftly used the real symbols and language of wealth to tell a story of greed and abuse of power that’s also a microcosm of a society suffering under the weight of an increasingly unequal, undemocratic economic landscape.”‘“Succession” Finale Review — A Perfect, Terrible Goodbye’ [The Guardian]“Perhaps the success of an ending can best be judged by how much it seems, as the credits roll, that it could have turned out no other way,” Lucy Mangan writes. The series finale succeeds on that front.‘“Succession” Season 4 Was a Mess — Until the Series Finale’ [Variety]The show’s final season had problems with pacing and focus, but “Succession” righted itself at the end, writes Daniel D’Addario. “These are, finally, not characters who are endlessly adaptable, easily able to be plugged into just any dramatic scenario; when Kendall pleads in the finale that he doesn’t know what he was meant to do beyond work at Waystar, we believe him.”‘What Was “Succession” About?’ [Vulture]Vulture has a few fun riffs on the ultimate meaning of “Succession,” ranging from Wolfgang Ruth’s opinion that the show was about “Stewy being bi all along” to Choire Sicha’s art-inspired observation that “Succession” was really a bunch of “noisy large-scale public art” of the characters’ “interior landscapes.”“Succession” is also about the “linguistic baubles” that emerged, profane, profound and otherwise, according to Genevieve Koski. Or, as Jackson McHenry writes, “Succession,” like “Seinfeld” is about nothing.‘Miss “Succession” Already? Here’s What to Watch Next” [NY Times]It’s been less than a day since the series finale, but “Succession” addicts could suffer withdrawal symptoms already. To ease the pain, Margaret Lyons curates a watch list for every possible “Succession” craving, including series like “The Righteous Gemstones,” “I Hate Suzie” and “Quiz.” More

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    Rosalind Franklin’s Role in DNA Discovery, Once Ignored, Is Told Anew in Song

    “Double Helix,” at Bay Street Theater, illuminates the British scientist’s contributions, which became the basis for James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 breakthrough.During the summer of 2020, the composer and lyricist Madeline Myers spent hours at the piano in her Manhattan apartment as she struggled to write three songs for her new musical, “Double Helix,” about the British chemist Rosalind Franklin. The challenge wasn’t strictly about marrying words to a score, but conveying the science of a crucial moment in the discovery of DNA’s structure — and making the songs entertaining.Franklin’s experiments, in which she successfully used X-ray crystallography to create images of DNA, became the basis for James Watson and Francis Crick’s groundbreaking 1953 discovery of the double helix structure. The breakthrough underpins our modern understanding of genetics and biology, but for years Franklin received none of the credit. (She died of cancer in 1958 at the age of 37; her male colleagues were later awarded the Nobel Prize.)Fast forward to a recent afternoon, when Myers and the show’s director, Scott Schwartz, were in a rehearsal room high above 42nd Street facing a new hurdle: how to stage those science-focused songs, including one number fittingly called “The Problem.” In this scene, six actors are in a lab using an X-ray crystallography machine to try to capture an image of DNA. As they turned their focus from a makeshift cardboard contraption to a screen positioned upstage, Schwartz called out: “We’re suspending reality in making the photograph immediately show up on the projection screen.”Schwartz and Myers faced a hurdle: how to stage those science-focused songs.Lenny StuckerThey were just weeks away from the first previews of “Double Helix,” which begin May 30 at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. And though a certain level of make-believe is intrinsic to theater, getting this illusion right was especially tricky: Myers and Schwartz are trying to balance history and science with an emotional and multidimensional portrait of Franklin, who attacked her work with zealous dedication while being subjected to misogyny and antisemitism.While Myers knew “the play should not be about science,” she was committed to science being “the vehicle for this story.” That was Franklin’s worldview, after all. “There were dramatic liberties I could take with the history, but I just felt like I could not fudge the science.”Yet she also needed “the science to be simple because what we’re trying to show is the emotional conflict,” she added, “and all the power dynamics and the gender dynamics.”The production team also enlisted a few advisers, including Sonya Hanson, a research scientist at the Center for Computational Biology, to provide feedback on the script and the staging.“They’re doing a lot of work really incorporating the lab environment into the set,” Hanson said. Which is important, she explained, because “Rosalind was an amazing experimentalist” and any portrait of her life should make that clear.Massell, who plays Rosalind Franklin, was Hodel in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.”Lenny StuckerAlthough Franklin (portrayed onstage by Samantha Massell, who played Hodel in the 2015 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof”) was involved in the race to discover the structure of DNA, she was the only scientist not to write her own version of the story. “All of these accounts of what happened are certainly filtered through the biases that these people had,” Myers said. “And the only voice that we really just don’t hear from is Rosalind’s.”Myers began reading about the scientist in 2018, and felt an immediate kinship. “We’re both women. We’re both Jews. We’re both about the same age,” she said. But the biggest connection “was the way she felt about her work as a scientist was how I felt about my own work as a musical dramatist.”From left, Anthony Joseph Costello, Massell, Thom Sesma and Tuck Sweeney in the show.Lenny StuckerThis isn’t Myers’s first experience with bringing history to the stage. She was an original member of the “Hamilton” music department, and witnessed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s approach to creating an “arresting and moving” show about a historical figure, Myers explained. So when she started writing “Double Helix,” she wanted to ensure “the emotional stakes were greater than the actual historical stakes.”A central question: “Is life definable as biological matter or is life what we live and what we experience? And is Rosalind Franklin sacrificing what we live and what we experience in order to find that biological matter?” To heighten the choices that Franklin has to make in the musical, Myers turned what might have been, in real life, just a crush on the scientist, Jacques Mering, into a relationship. Franklin then has to choose whether to prioritize the relationship or her work.Schwartz, Bay Street Theater’s artistic director, said he was drawn to the project for its potential to fill in the blanks of Franklin’s inner world. “That’s what musicals are for,” he said. To use songs “to crack open the psychology of a character.”As for Franklin’s scientific snub, Myers isn’t looking for the audience to be “up in arms.” Instead, she wants people to leave the theater thinking: “What are the two strands in my own life that are competing for my time?” she said. “That is what the play is about. It’s about how we use our time not knowing how much of it that we have.” More