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    ‘Six’ Creators Announce Their Second Act

    Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow spent years working out how to follow their hit musical about Henry VIII’s wives. “Why Am I So Single?” is their answer.In January 2019, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, the creators of the musical “Six,” were on a writer’s retreat in Connecticut, wondering how to follow up their celebrated first show.That month, “Six” — in which Henry VIII’s wives tell their stories via pop songs — was starting a major West End run, and a Broadway transfer was on the horizon. The show had already been a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a growing number of American fans were streaming the show’s soundtrack. More and more, people wanted to know what the pair would do next.During the Connecticut retreat, they struggled to come up with new ideas, Marlow recalled in a recent interview, and instead gossiped about their love lives. Then, they had a breakthrough: “Maybe this is what we should write about,” Marlow said.On Wednesday, Marlow, 29, and Moss, 30, announced that their second musical, “Why Am I So Single?,” will open at the Garrick Theater in London on Aug. 27.The show, which has a 12-person cast, follows two friends struggling to write a musical and asking each other why they’re chronically single. That idea may sound similar to the creators’ time in Connecticut, but Moss, laughing nervously, said it was “definitely not a complete autobiography.”Marlow said that the musical, which includes songs inspired by Dua Lipa hits and numbers from “Singin’ in the Rain,” was “about friendship and love and loneliness and everything that goes with it.”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 Chides Donald Trump for His Pick for the R.N.C.

    “Oh man, poor Eric,” Jimmy Kimmel said after Trump recommended that his son’s wife, Lara, be named co-chair of the Republican National Committee.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 Best Trump for the JobIn a statement released on Monday, former President Donald Trump endorsed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, becoming co-chair of the Republican National Committee, saying, “Lara is an extremely talented communicator and is dedicated to all that MAGA stands for. She has told me she wants to accept this challenge and would be great.”“Oh man, poor Eric,” Jimmy Kimmel said about Trump’s son. “His wife got more compliments in one post than his father gave him in his entire life so far.”“You know what? His son-in-law totally fixed the Middle East. Why not let his daughter-in-law fix the Republican Party?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, that had to be an awkward phone call. It’s like, ‘[imitating Trump] Eric, I need a smart family member for this job — put your wife on the phone.’” — JIMMY FALLON“In the same statement, former President Trump said that his daughter-in-law Lara Trump should be the co-chair of the R.N.C. and that her husband Eric should be ‘ambassador to wherever’s farthest.’” — SETH MEYERS“They’re entrusting the party’s future to the wise judgment of someone who married Eric.” — JIMMY FALLON“When asked how he landed on Lara, Trump was like, ‘Ivanka said no.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I say, why stop with Lara? A future Trump administration could have Jared as chief of staff, Ivanka as ambassador to the U.N., and Don Jr. as the head of the D.E.A., the Drug Enjoyment Agency.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Super Numbers Edition)“According to the latest numbers, Sunday night’s Super Bowl surpassed the moon landing to become the most-watched U.S. broadcast of all time. And it can’t be a coincidence that the two biggest broadcasts of all time were faked by the C.I.A.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, 123.4 million people watched the Super Bowl, making it the most watched television broadcast ever. Yet another successful boycott by Trump supporters.” — SETH MEYERS“The game was watched by 123.4 million average viewers, and who knows how many really hot ones.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJordan Klepper spent time with supporters of former President Trump and the presidential hopeful Nikki Haley for Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe comedian and actor Fortune Feimster will appear on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutJeffrey Wright, center, with Sterling K. Brown, left, and Erika Alexander.Claire Folger/Orion PicturesThe veteran actor Jeffrey Wright finally gets his due with his starring role and Oscar-nominated performance in “American Fiction.” More

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    Review: In ‘The Apiary,’ the Bees Have a Troubling Tale to Tell

    Worldwide colony collapse is the subject of a bright, strange, upbeat thought experiment about insect hives, and our own.Here’s a pitch you haven’t heard before. It’s 2046. Bees in the wild have succumbed to a planet-wide die-off, taking almonds, avocados and honey down with them. But in a subterranean lab, three women doing “palliative care” with four remaining broods make a hopeful if gruesome discovery.Also, it’s a comedy. Call it “Little Hive of Horrors.”That’s the setup, if nowhere near the payoff, of the “The Apiary,” a bright, strange and mesmerizing marvel by Kate Douglas, making her professional playwriting debut with this Off Off Broadway production. Unlike most such debuts, though, “The Apiary,” which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater, is receiving a nearly perfect, first-class staging under the almost too good direction of Kate Whoriskey.I say “almost too good” because a staging so sensitive yet confident could disguise whatever flaws may lurk in the text. So be it: “The Apiary” flies by with so much good humor and novel eye candy (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bee lab represented onstage before) that you barely register the way the playwright’s thematic focus comes dangerously close to obsession.The insects are everywhere. To begin with, Walt Spangler’s set is dominated by four hive boxes and a gigantic gauze-walled chamber filled with little prop bugs I could swear were swarming. The backdrop features a honeycomb pattern. The floor, the railings and even the paper in the beekeepers’ desktop inboxes are bumblebee yellow.It’s not just the visuals, though. The characters talk bees, live bees, dream bees. Gwen (Taylor Schilling) is perhaps the least emotionally attached: As the lab’s manically insecure manager, she’s freaked out by the decline of the broods under her care less because it might mean ecological collapse than because it might mean funding cutbacks from “upstairs.” Countering her, the relentlessly optimistic Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) fully stans the critters: They are “very sensitive and so so smart,” she explains merrily to a newcomer. “They dance! They tell jokes.”We don’t hear those jokes, but between scenes we do see Stephanie Crousillat, in yoga wear and a gas mask — the costumes are by Jennifer Moeller — performing Warren Adams’s creepy bee choreography.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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    Shakespeare to Hit the Road While Central Park Theater Is Closed

    The Delacorte is being renovated, so this summer will instead bring a mobile production and then a filmed play to outdoor sites in the city’s five boroughs.Free Shakespeare in the Park, one of the longtime treasures of summer in New York City, will be smaller-scale and itinerant this year because a gut renovation of the program’s Central Park home is underway.The Public Theater, the nonprofit organization that presents the annual Shakespeare festival, announced Tuesday that, instead of its usual large-scale productions at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, this year it would send a smaller production of “The Comedy of Errors” to parks and plazas around the city between Memorial Day and the end of June, followed by outdoor screenings of a filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in July, August and early September.The production of “The Comedy of Errors” is a 90-minute bilingual musical adaptation from the director Rebecca Martinez and the composer Julian Mesri that the Public staged last year at city parks and recreation centers as part of the theater’s mobile unit. This summer’s five-week touring production will have a slightly larger company, and will visit some larger venues than last year’s production. It will start in Manhattan, with a week on a plaza in front of the New York Public Library’s flagship building in Bryant Park, followed by a series of dates at Hudson Yards and other locations in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. All performances will be free.“It’s not a replacement for the Delacorte — it’s not intended to be a replacement — but my hope is that it will be successful enough as an experiment that this expanded version of what the mobile unit does can keep going indefinitely,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public, said in an interview.The filmed production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Kenny Leon and starring Danielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman, was shot during a run in Central Park in 2019; it will be screened outdoors, free, at sites in all five boroughs.“Much Ado About Nothing,” filmed for the PBS series Great Performances, will also be among four Shakespeare in the Park productions that can be streamed online during May and June. The others are a 2023 production of “Hamlet,” a 2022 production of “Richard III” and a 2021 production called “Merry Wives.” Streaming the Great Performances films will be free.The Delacorte has been closed since last fall for a $78 million renovation. A groundbreaking was held in October and the project is scheduled to finish sometime next year, and the summer of 2025 is expected to include Shakespeare back in Central Park. More

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    Jon Stewart Returns to ‘The Daily Show’ Telling Jokes You Might Not Want to Hear

    The comedian returned to “The Daily Show,” claiming the prerogative to tell his audience jokes they don’t want to hear.“Why am I back?” asked Jon Stewart, returning to “The Daily Show” chair as Monday night host after leaving the program in 2015. It was a fair question.He was there in part because Comedy Central ended a yearlong search unable to pick a full-time replacement for Trevor Noah. He was there because his Apple TV+ show “The Problem” ended, after Apple discovered that when you hire a famous political comedian, he’ll want to talk about topics that upset people.And he was there because his fans — including a studio audience that greeted him with a standing ovation — have spent eight years and change wondering what he would have said about all the hell that broke loose since he left.His timing was so sharp, his comic exasperation so familiar, you’d think he’d been away for a long weekend instead of more than two presidential terms. Now he was back to tell us that the two likely candidates for president are super, super old.It was not exactly the most daring, outside-the-box topic. Stewart, who has adopted a plant-based diet, apparently has a particular taste for low-hanging fruit.More interesting, however, was the implicit message his first new monologue built to. You may have spent years wishing that Stewart would come back to dunk on your antagonists, but he considers himself free — and maybe obligated — to joke about things you wish he wouldn’t.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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    ‘Izzard Hamlet New York’ Review: A Solo Show That’s More Noble Than Wise

    Eddie Izzard is a wildly witty ad-libber, but a play straitjackets this gift — especially in this new staging that is short of ideas.To laugh, or not to laugh? That is the question.Or at least one you may consider early in Eddie Izzard’s “Hamlet,” in which the comic portrays all the roles herself.Something is certainly a little silly about dramatizing Hamlet fighting with his mother by having a left hand wrestle with the arm of the right, evoking Peter Sellers’s scientist who struggles to restrain himself from raising his arm in Nazi salute in “Dr. Strangelove.” And solo sword fights have possibilities that a brilliant comedian like Izzard might exploit.Yet, as Izzard darts around the stage, from role to role, hopscotching in and out of the audience declaiming speeches, what becomes clear is this frenetic staging is earnest, surprisingly traditional and deadly serious. A wildly witty ad-libber, Izzard can make two-hour monologues feel like a stream-of-conscious eruption. A play straitjackets this gift. Except for a few flourishes, this staging, directed by Selina Cadell, is short of ideas. (Imagine sock puppets without the socks and you get an idea of her Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)Inside a modern, minimalist set (designed by Tom Piper) with no props, Izzard, who mounted a solo theatrical adaptation of “Great Expectations” last year, sometimes represents changing characters by spinning, other times by just moving a few feet. If there is method here, I did not detect it. If you don’t know “Hamlet,” there is no chance you are going to follow the play within a play. If you do, you might wonder why Izzard doesn’t spend more time playing the characters watching, not talking.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Taylor Tomlinson Nailed the Closing Joke in her Netflix Special

    Images: The New York Times (Taylor Tomlinson in Boston, Dallas, Tucson and Seattle); Margaret Norton/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images (Bob Newhart); Martin Mills/Getty Images (Shelley Berman); Cable Stuff Productions (George Carlin “Complaints and Grievances”); Columbia Pictures (Richard Pryor “Live on the Sunset Strip”); Netflix (Taylor Tomlinson “Have It All”).Produced by: Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. Video editor: Caroline Kim. Senior video producer: Jeesoo K. Park. Production manager: Caterina Clerici. Additional production: Shane O’Neill, Rumsey Taylor, Josh Williams and Lucky Benson. Cinematography: Allie Humenuk, April Kirby, Stephanie Rose and Emily Rhyne. Additional cinematography: Manuel López Cano and Alex Miller. Additional editing: Stephanie Goodman and Alicia Desantis. More

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    Inside a ‘Hadestown’ Star’s Home in Harlem

    ‘I’ve been here a while,’ said Lillias White, who plays Hermes in the Tony-winning musical. ‘Hence the clutter.’Lillias White may pay the rent, but her rescue dog, LaKee, is inarguably the host and star of the house, a very packed one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a building in Harlem.LaKee (pronounced “Lucky”), a Chihuahua mix, is the first to respond to a knock on the door — way ahead of Ms. White or the resident Bengal cat, Mr. Jaxson Ifya Nasty. And she is first in the entryway to greet visitors. Effusively.To be clear, Ms. White, 72, a star of the Tony-winning musical “Hadestown,” is warm and welcoming. (See the show now; she’s leaving March 17.) But it’s a daily battle not to be upstaged by LaKee, even considering Ms. White’s many Broadway credits (“Fela!,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” “Once on This Island” and “Chicago,” among others); her awards, notably a Tony for her performance as a streetwise hooker in the 1997 musical “The Life”; and her experiences as a solo act (she’ll be teaching a cabaret master class at the 92nd Street Y in early March).Ms. White moved into the apartment more than 30 years ago, at a difficult time in her life. “My two kids and I were living with my mother in Coney Island, because I’d lost my apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. “I’d gotten divorced, and I lost everything.”That’s Mr. Jaxson Ifya Nasty, the cat, next to a statue bequeathed to Lillias White by the proprietor of the Hell’s Kitchen bakery Amy’s Bread.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe 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