Eliana Willis

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    Janice Burgess, Nickelodeon Executive and ‘Backyardigans’ Creator, Dies at 72

    Ms. Burgess oversaw the production of “Blue’s Clues” and drew on her own childhood for “The Backyardigans,” in which five cartoon animals imagine their yard as a place of otherworldly adventure.Janice Burgess, a longtime Nickelodeon television executive who sought to promote children’s curiosity and sense of play for decades, overseeing popular shows like “Blue’s Clues” and “Little Bill” and creating her own musical children’s show, “The Backyardigans,” died on Saturday in hospice care in Manhattan. She was 72.Her death was confirmed by Brown Johnson, a longtime friend and the creator of Nick Jr., who said the cause was breast cancer.In “The Backyardigans,” five cartoon animals — Tyrone, Tasha, Pablo, Austin and Uniqua — imagine their backyard as a place of adventure, traversing deserts, oceans, jungles, rivers and outer space while dancing and singing to music.With the series, Ms. Burgess hoped to help children use their imaginations to have fun. In 2004, Ms. Burgess said in an interview with The New York Times that the idea for the show stemmed from memories of playing in her own childhood backyard in Pittsburgh.“I really remember it as a wonderful, happy, safe place,” she said. “You could have these great adventures just romping around. From there, you could go anywhere or do anything.”Ms. Burgess drew on her own experience playing in her childhood backyard in Pittsburgh to create “The Backyardigans.” “I really remember it as a wonderful, happy, safe place,” she said.Nick Jr.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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    Edward Bond, Playwright Who Clashed With Royal Censors, Dies at 89

    His brazen first play, “Saved,” though it drew outrage, led to the end of more than 200 years of state control over the theater.No modern British dramatist polarized his countrymen as much as Edward Bond, who died on Sunday at age 89.To some, he was an unholy terror, relentless in his doctrinaire socialism and disconcertingly fond of violent theatrical effects. To others, he was almost a secular saint, a writer of unflinching integrity in a world of compromise and so sensitive to human frustration that he invariably peopled his plays with characters suffering, often graphically, from extreme forms of oppression and exploitation.But both parties would agree that his first important play, “Saved,” precipitated the end of theatrical censorship in Britain.In 1965, the Royal Court Theater submitted “Saved,” a graphic portrait of mostly young and sometimes violent no-hopers adrift in London’s lower depths, to the Lord Chamberlain, who had held absolute power over British drama since 1737. The response by a functionary was widely thought of as absurdly anachronistic: A scene in which hooligans stone to death a baby in a pram could not be publicly staged.Mr. Bond refused to alter a line, and the Royal Court supported him by temporarily becoming a private club, and thus, as the law then stood, no longer needing the Lord Chamberlain’s sanction.This was a tactic that had been used in London before, notably for Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1956 and Arthur Miller’s “View from a Bridge” in 1958, both of which hinted at the then-taboo subject of homosexuality.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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    ‘Shogun’ Episode 3 Recap: The Not-So-Great Escape

    Lord Toranaga, John Blackthorne and Lady Mariko draw closer as they battle enemy forces.Episode 3: ‘Tomorrow Is Tomorrow’A lovely scene is taking place at sea. After a daring escape, Lord Toranaga and his newfound English associate John Blackthorne are free from captivity. Much has been lost in the attempt. Toranaga’s wife, Lady Kiri no Kata (Yoriko Doguchi), remains in the clutches of the hated Lord Ishido, having fulfilled her part in the ruse that allowed her husband to flee. Lady Mariko’s husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), sacrifices himself to prevent enemy soldiers from thwarting the escape. Or at least he appears to: Until we see a dead body, it’s probably wisest to consider this character still in play.As far as Mariko, Toranaga and Blackthorne are concerned, a lot of people gave all they had in order to safeguard them. There’s much for which the survivors can be grateful. How does Lord Toranaga choose to celebrate? With a diving lesson from the Anjin, the barbarian, John Blackthorne.Blackthorne rolls with the odd request. He’s becoming increasingly adept at acclimating himself to Japanese customs, and equally adept at knowing when to break them. Throwing a theatrical fit about the propriety of inspecting women’s quarters in light of European chivalric ideals is, after all, what enabled Toranaga to escape Ishido’s clutches while wearing his wife’s clothes. Toranaga names Blackthorne hatamoto, an honorific indicating high status earned through his courage in effecting Toranaga’s escape.If this lord, who has very obviously taken a shine to him, wants to learn to dive, then John Blackthorne will see it done.And so the episode ends, with the actors Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada leaping from the vessel in their skivvies, racing each other to shore. It’s a delightful moment of recreation and repose, in a series driven by physical peril and paranoia. This is the kind of enriching material that makes a show worthwhile.Would that the same could be said for the rest of the episode. Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.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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    Book Review: ‘The House of Hidden Meanings,’ by RuPaul

    Chronicling the high-heeled path to drag-queen superstardom, the new memoir also reveals a celebrity infatuated with his sense of a special destiny.THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir, by RuPaulAs “The House of Hidden Meanings” is RuPaul’s fourth book and his first straightforward memoir, it’s understandably being marketed as an opportunity to see the pop culture icon in a new light. The striking, almost intimidating, black-and-white cover photograph notably subverts the expectation of seeing Ru in glamorous technicolor drag. All the artifice has been stripped away, we’re being told: This is RuPaul stripped bare.But the meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions.About 70 pages in, RuPaul — at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit — declares without irony, “Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States.”I wearily recalled an earlier section of the book. Explaining the conservative environment of his childhood in San Diego, RuPaul summarizes the Great Migration in a paragraph that would be considered too concise even for a Wikipedia entry, then declares, “All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear.”Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who “hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity.”The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous. And given RuPaul Charles’s truly extraordinary talent, that would be fine if the book (and his brand) weren’t so invested in trying to convince the rest of us that he has unique insight into the joke called life.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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    Stephen Colbert Has a Few Questions for the Supreme Court

    Colbert joked that justices were “again shoving their gavels up the election” by ruling that former President Donald Trump can appear on all state ballots in 2024.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.‘The Only Place Where Trump Can Win the Popular Vote’On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that former President Donald Trump can appear on all 2024 election ballots.Stephen Colbert said the justices were “once again shoving their gavels up the election.”“Yes, the Supreme Court knows you can’t just let states decide who goes on their ballots,” Colbert said. “States are too busy deciding that life begins in the freezer section, next to the pearl onions.”“The majority says that disqualifying a candidate for insurrection can only occur when Congress passes legislation. OK, quick question: If Congress does decide to pass that legislation to disqualify a candidate for insurrection, what if he sends his mob to storm Congress to stop them from passing that legislation? Does that count as insurrection? Or do they have to pass more legislation about that before the next mob shows up? I’m just asking because, clearly, you guys haven’t put any thought into any of this stuff.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s right, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot keep Trump off their ballots, which means that the Supreme Court remains the only place where Trump can win the popular vote.” — SETH MEYERS“Speaking of former President Trump, today the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Colorado is not allowed to remove him from the 2024 ballot. Then out of habit, Trump immediately appealed the decision. He’s like, ‘This is a witch — oh, wait a minute, OK.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump celebrated the ruling, calling it a big win for America. That’s also what he said when McDonald’s brought back the McRib.” — JIMMY FALLON“Let that be a lesson to all you out there who might be thinking about subverting the Constitution in a presidential election. You go, boy!” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rally Flubs Edition)“Donald Trump had two rallies this weekend, one in Virginia and one in North Carolina. But the two speeches had one unifying theme: His brain is broke.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Suddenly, Trump turned into a Spice Girl: ‘I really want to zig-a-zay ah.’ It sounded like his brain got a flat.” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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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    Tony’s Booth From ‘Sopranos’ Finale Sets Off Online Bidding War

    The New Jersey ice cream parlor where “The Sopranos” abruptly cut to black in 2007 put the booth on eBay, hoping to fetch $10,000. Within days, bidders had pushed the price above $82,000.Tony Soprano puts a quarter into the jukebox to play “Don’t Stop Believin’” and orders onion rings for the table. His wife and son join him as his daughter struggles to parallel park outside. A bell chimes every time a customer arrives, deepening Tony’s anxiety: Will the next person to walk through the door kill him?What happens next has kept fans guessing since the final scene of “The Sopranos” abruptly cut to black in 2007. It has also kept a few of them energized enough to bid tens of thousands of dollars to own the diner booth where the much-dissected sequence was shot.Holsten’s in Bloomfield, N.J., which is preparing for a renovation, put the burgundy booth and yellow Formica tabletop up for auction on eBay on Feb. 28. Chris Carley, a co-owner of the ice cream parlor, set the opening bid at $3,000, hoping he might get $10,000 for it to help cover part of the estimated $60,000 cost for a new floor and new booths.Within 24 hours, the price had jumped to $52,000. By Monday afternoon, there had been more than 230 bids, pushing the price above $82,000.James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano cuing up “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey on the jukebox.Will Hart/HBOThe auction ends just after 10 p.m. Monday.The winning bidder will get the booth, the table, the divider and the family plaque that reserves the seats for the Soprano family. (Not included: the jukebox, which was added by the film crew.) The buyer is responsible for pickup.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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    Bringing ‘Teeth,’ a Feminist Awakening With a Lethal Bite, to the Stage

    Michael R. Jackson is helping adapt the darkly comic horror film into a musical. But can a show about a teenager with vagina dentata sing?Michael R. Jackson doesn’t have a vagina. He also doesn’t not have one.“While I’m not a teen evangelical with teeth in my vagina,” he said, “spiritually I am.”Jackson’s spectral self-identity was a guiding light as he and the composer Anna K. Jacobs collaborated on “Teeth,” a new musical based on Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 indie scary movie of the same name. It’s about a high school student named Dawn who discovers to her horror that she has vagina dentata — a myth, found across cultures and eras, about a vagina that has a lethal set of chompers. (The film is streaming on Tubi, and the show is in previews Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons before a March 12 opening.)If you’re going to musicalize a horror movie, “Teeth” is a doozy, and a gamble. Darkly comic and at times stomach-churningly gory, it’s a touchstone of feminist body horror and an exemplar, along with “I Spit on Your Grave” and “Jennifer’s Body,” of a rape-revenge film that indicts misogyny and body shame for the grip they have on women’s sexual autonomy.Jackson, the show’s lyricist, and, with Jacobs, co-writer of the book, said he was drawn to adapt “Teeth” because of how it frames horror and dark comedy around sex and conservative Christianity — two themes that also raged through his 2022 Broadway musical, “A Strange Loop,” a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner.“I know what it’s like to be afraid of your own body and to feel like somebody’s going to catch you masturbating and what that means, that you’re going to go to hell,” said Jackson, who grew up in the Baptist church. “I immediately glommed onto Dawn because I’ve had that internal experience.”That last line got a laugh from two other members of the “Teeth” creative team who, with Jackson and Jacobs, sat for an interview at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan before a recent matinee: the director, Sarah Benson, and the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly.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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    Wanted: Writers for Awards Show Jokes. Must Be Skilled at Diplomacy

    Hosts who have to entertain insiders at the ceremony and outsiders watching at home. Presenters who change their minds. No wonder the bits are awkward.In the middle of struggling through the opening monologue of the Golden Globes in January, the comic Jo Koy did something unusual, if not unprecedented, for the host of a major awards show: He blamed the writers.“I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at,” he said of his jokes, prompting writers across the country to grind their teeth.Koy, who later apologized, endured some light mockery a week after the show, when his ex-girlfriend Chelsea Handler followed up a successful joke in her monologue at the Critics Choice Awards by saying, “Thank you for laughing at that. My writers wrote it.”If something positive came from this episode, it’s that a spotlight was put on a corner of the showbiz work force that tends to remain in the shadows: the joke writers for awards shows like the Oscars on Sunday.“It’s a small fraternity, and they always remained anonymous,” said Bruce Vilanch, the best known of this breed, who said his acclaim for the job, which included starring in the 1999 documentary “Get Bruce!,” had spurred resentment among his predecessors. “They were not personalities in their own way. They never talked about this stuff. I think there was almost a code.”Chelsea Handler made sure to acknowledge her writers when she hosted the Critics Choice Awards.Kevin Winter/Getty Images For Critics ChoiceWe 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