Eliana Willis

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    The World Needs Love. Hallmark Is Cashing in.

    When more people are watching the Hallmark Channel than CNN, you know we’ve reached a new level of interpersonal isolation.In this lull between perhaps the most successful slate of the Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas films ever and the Jane Austen-drenched debut of Hallmark’s Loveuary 2024, it’s time to admit that Hallmark movies are actually just Hollywood movies — and specifically rom-coms. Straight couples dance, in well-lit venues, to the music of real instruments. Wrenching decisions are suffered through. Misunderstandings abound. Soulful kisses are for denouements. Happy endings feel required by law. Call it vapid if you will, but the culture of the Hallmark universe has been around since the 16th century, when a shrew apparently needed to be tamed. Since 2015 (when Hallmark started its own production arm), the network has been filling a slot that used to hold date-night and slumber-party films like “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995), “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1998), “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002) and “The Notebook” (2004). The people who love those films, like readers of romance fiction (which has led the print growth category), want quantities of quality storytelling, and Hallmark, whose company values include creating “a more emotionally connected world,” understands the assignment. The network’s holiday programming, along with its films in general, continues its pine-scented journey toward cultural domination. Hallmark rose from the sixth-most-watched cable network at the top of October to the third-most-watched the week of Nov. 20, when it won out over CNN and MSNBC in total eyeballs. Decisions about who gets to be quaint can seem mawkish and basic, but they have far-reaching impact. In 2019, Bill Abbott, the president and chief executive of Hallmark’s parent company at the time, said, “Until we get to ‘Walking Dead’ numbers, I’m not going to be happy.” Almost 300 Hallmark Christmas films have aired since 2002, including “The Christmas Card” (2006), for which Ed Asner received an Emmy nomination. One of Hallmark’s strategies — elevating television actors who are either aging gracefully or were tapped out at co-star level — is especially potent. As an example: 23 years after the Salinger siblings Bailey (Scott Wolf) and Claudia (Lacey Chabert) were accepted to college in the series finale of the acclaimed teenage drama “Party of Five,” Hallmark’s “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” starring Wolf and Chabert, made its debut. Portraying a different (estranged) sister and brother (who not only repair their relationship but also discover they are Scottish royalty), the duo fall into the camaraderie of their Golden Globe-winning days.Hallmark, like various systems of artificial intelligence, is learning, and easing up on its compositional jargon. In “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” Chabert’s character has a love interest, and in Hallmarkian (and Sirkian) tradition, he is hunky, sensitive and handy. Yet unlike so many Hallmark heroines, she is not leaving a high-powered career in the big city for an ostensibly more substantial small-town life. Chabert’s character thinks she can stay in Scotland if she can run her own medical practice. And the “Party of Five” reunion overperformed. Taking into consideration all ad-supported cable, “A Merry Scottish Christmas” was the most-watched movie of 2023. The core viewers included women in key advertiser-prized categories, and the demographic details go broader than what many perceive to be Hallmark’s viewership: crotchety and cane-shaking “N.C.I.S.” fans.What has become a cultural juggernaut began as a plan to market postcards. Joyce, Rollie and William Hall were born into Nebraska poverty in the late 19th century, and by 1911, they owned and operated a tiny venture called the Hall Book Store. There they sold, among other printed goods and gifts, “Christmas letters.” One advertisement from the time described the letters as “neat dainty folders of beautiful Christmas sentiments and mottos.” This snow-globe spirit is alive in Hallmark to this day. By the late 1940s, the company was sponsoring a Reader’s Digest radio show on the CBS network, but it soon went into the entertainment business on its own. Its radio show “Hallmark Playhouse” morphed into “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” a series of television specials that began in 1951. 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?  More

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    The Queer Kids Are All Right. And Now They’re Making Me Better.

    Here’s a list of every openly queer person I knew when I was 15:That’s it. None. Not even myself.Oh sure, Paul Lynde and Liberace were flouncing on television; closer to home, a boy I kept my distance from decoupaged his notebooks. But even if they really were what people whispered or snarled about them, it was not then an identity they would dare to acknowledge.Nor would I. Unable to see through their closet doors to the truth of what their lives might be, I did not have the benefit of their stories, which meant not having the benefit of my own.Cut to today, 50 years later. Another 15-year-old boy — like me intense, unathletic and bullied — is the lead character on “Heartstopper,” a hit teen romance. But this boy, Charlie, knows all about queerness. He is, after all, growing up in the 2020s and, more to the point, in 2020s pop culture. In that magical land, also known as Netflix, adolescence for people like him is not only survivable but often a lovefest, all closet doors blown off their hinges.And I do mean all. Charlie (adorkable Joe Locke) is happy to be gay, and why not: When he crushes on a dreamy and apparently straight rugby player, the rugby player promptly comes out as bisexual. Their romance is supported by a cute teenage lesbian couple they hang out with. Also in the group is a bookish nerd who realizes he’s asexual — or “ace,” as he explains, pinning a fun new name on that identity. Even the straight boy, vastly outnumbered, gets a queer love story when he falls for his best friend, a beautiful trans girl.Welcome to the classic lifeboat plot, checking boxes on a diversity agenda. But this time it’s mostly calm seas and clear sailing.Do I sound envious? I am. Also slightly embarrassed.Don’t get me wrong: My husband and I devoured the first two seasons. (The third is expected in the fall.) I’ve also been watching, with or without him — for these are guilty pleasures — a slew of other queer youth stories, all the while trying to sort out my feelings.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?  More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Breaks Down MAGA’s Super Bowl Conspiracy Theories

    Is the N.F.L. rigged? Is Taylor Swift a psy-op? Kimmel says that “this nonsense is now everywhere your angry grandpa goes.”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.Chief ConcernsSupporters of former President Donald Trump are spreading conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs and his girlfriend, Taylor Swift.“Even this clown who ran for president, Vivek Ramaswamy, added his nut voice to the chorus of cuckoos,” Kimmel said on Tuesday. He pointed to the former G.O.P. candidate’s suggestion that Kelce and Swift were “an artificially culturally propped-up couple” and that the Super Bowl would be rigged, all to get President Biden re-elected.“And it’s not just on Twitter — this nonsense is now everywhere your angry grandpa goes,” Kimmel said, calling the conspiracy theorists “not-too-Swifties.”“The same people who believe Joe Biden has dementia and needs Kamala Harris to feed him butterscotch tapioca every night also believe that he has somehow planned and executed a diabolically brilliant scheme to fix the N.F.L. playoffs so the biggest pop star in the world can pop up on the Jumbotron during the Super Bowl in between a Kia and a Tostitos commercial to hypnotize her 11-year-old fans into voting for Joe Biden. I mean, it makes sense. It makes total sense. These people — these people think football is fake and wrestling is real.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The average price for a ticket to see the Chiefs play the Niners is a little over $12,000 right now. But here’s the thing, it’s not just a football game; it’s also a live game of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ starring Taylor Swift, if you can spot her.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ten grand’s a lot for a football game, but it’s dirt cheap to see Taylor Swift live, I will say that.” — JIMMY FALLON“Nothing like being down ten grand before stepping foot in Vegas, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Where Credit Is Due Edition)“I saw that Trump just took credit for the record-high stock market under Biden. Trump was like, ‘If I had not not lost the election, this never would have happened.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even crazier, Trump said, ‘Eric and Don Jr.? That’s all Biden’s fault.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Chaos in the Middle East? Biden’s fault. Booming economy? All Donald Trump, three years after he left office! It’s incredible. You know, I’m starting to feel like he might be making some of this stuff up.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Late Show,” Emma Stone explained why she wants to compete on the noncelebrity version of “Jeopardy.” What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightLola Tung, star of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” will sit down with Seth Meyers on Wednesday night ahead of her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Also, Check This OutKlaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the artist Kandis Williams, a co-curator, at the opening of the exhibition.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesAn exhibition in Berlin, “Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion,” highlights the groundbreaking entertainer’s life, career and influence. More

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    Chita Rivera: A Life in Photos

    The dancer Chita Rivera, who “dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater,” has died at 91. Her influence can be seen in many Broadway productions over the years, including “West Side Story” (1957), “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), “Chicago” (1975) and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993).As Anita in “West Side Story,” she took “a part equivalent to the nurse in the Shakespeare play,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in his review for The New York Times.She worked with the choreographers Bob Fosse and Jerome Robbins, the composer Leonard Bernstein, the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and the playwright Terrence McNally, among others.Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, 1933, she was a quick study. After auditioning, she won a scholarship to George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in Manhattan, and lived with family in the Bronx. She wrote in her autobiography, “Chita: A Memoir,” that she dealt with the overwhelmingly white spaces she found herself in by becoming a class clown. Her feelings of being an outsider lessened on Broadway but persisted.Her ballet training stayed with her. “Her finesse comes in the gracious way she shows every angle of her body, the attention to épaulement — the carriage of the arms and shoulders — all the while talking up space,” Gia Kourlas writes. “Dancing big and with intention.”Here are a selection of images from her remarkable life onstage.Rivera and company in “Chita & All That Jazz,” a musical celebration of her life in theater, in Philadelphia in 1988.Joan MarcusRivera, left, and Gwen Verdon during a rehearsal of the musical “Chicago” in Philadelphia in 1975.Associated PressRivera, third from left, in a scene from the Broadway musical “West Side Story,” with Carmen Gutierrez and Lynn Ross. John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRivera accepts a special Tony award for lifetime achievement in the theater in 2018 at Radio City Music Hall.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLiza Minnelli, left, and Rivera attend the 38th Annual Tony Awards in 1984 at the Gershwin Theater in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesRivera gets a standing ovation at the 10th Anniversary celebration of the musical “Chicago” at the Ambassador Theater in Manhattan in 2006. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” was created by Mark Hummel, written by Terrence McNally, with direction and choreography by Graciela Daniele.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreographer Jerome Robbins, second from left, goes through rehearsals for “West Side Story” in 1957. Rivera, center, played the role of Anita.Associated PressRivera at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Manhattan in 2023.Philip Montgomery for The New York Times More

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    Chita Rivera’s Ballet Roots Shaped Her Dancing

    Chita Rivera saw herself as a dancer, and that’s fitting: Her early ballet training was her secret weapon — and it never left her body.Chita Rivera grew up to be a Broadway queen, but you can’t leave out that she was a ballet kid. Her training began after a botched jump at her family home in Washington, D.C. Rivera — still Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero at the time — landed on the coffee table. It shattered.Her energy needed to be more than merely contained; it needed to find a release. It was her mother’s idea that the release might come in the form of dance, specifically ballet. She took Rivera to the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, where she was introduced to Doris Jones, the esteemed teacher who became like a second mother. Jones, she wrote in her memoir, changed her life. “Are you willing to work hard, Dolores?” Rivera recounted Jones asking her at that meeting. “Harder than you’ve ever worked before?”She was. And she did. Rivera, who died on Tuesday at 91, always considered herself more a dancer than a musical-theater star. (She even called her 2005 musical revue “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life.”) “The natural inclination of dancers is to keep to themselves,” she wrote. “It’s the work that matters.”And a dancer is never satisfied. Broadway may be where Rivera flourished, but her foundational home was ballet. She and another Jones-Haywood student, Louis Johnson — who went on to have a spectacular career as a choreographer and dancer — were taken to New York for an audition at the School of American Ballet. They both got scholarships.The School of American Ballet, formed by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in 1934, is the training ground of New York City Ballet. Rivera didn’t know it at the time, but the man auditioning her was Balanchine himself. “Something about the instructor made me want to please him,” she wrote.At first joining City Ballet was her dream, but that changed when she became aware of Janet Collins, then the only Black teacher at School of American Ballet. Her classes were a mix of modern dance, ballet and the technique of the choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Rivera also started going to the Palladium Ballroom, the Midtown dance hall, for its Latin Nights. Soon she was, as she writes, “out on the dance floor fusing my ballet training with the salsa, mambo and rumba steps I was learning.”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?  More

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    Chita Rivera, Electrifying Broadway Star, Is Dead at 91

    Appearing in scores of stage productions, she dazzled audiences for nearly six decades, most memorably starring as Anita in “West Side Story” and Velma Kelly in “Chicago.”Chita Rivera, the fire-and-ice dancer, singer and actress who leapt to stardom in the original Broadway production of “West Side Story” and dazzled audiences for nearly seven decades as a Puerto Rican lodestar of the American musical theater, died on Tuesday in New York. She was 91.The death was announced in a statement by her daughter, Lisa Mordente. It gave no other details.To generations of musical aficionados, Ms. Rivera was a whirling, bounding, high-kicking elemental force of the dance; a seductive singer of smoky ballads and sizzling jazz; and a propulsive actress of vaudevillian energy. She appeared in scores of stage productions in New York and London, logged 100,000 miles on cabaret tours and performed in dozens of films and television programs.On Broadway, she created a string of memorably hard-edged women — Anita in “West Side Story” (1957), Rosie in “Bye Bye Birdie” (1960), the murderous floozy Velma Kelly in “Chicago” (1975) and the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993). She sang enduring numbers in those roles: “America” in “West Side Story,” “One Boy” and “Spanish Rose” in “Bye Bye Birdie,” and “All That Jazz” in “Chicago.”Ms. Rivera, foreground, led dancers in a rehearsal for “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957, the same year she married a dancer in the production. Leo FriedmanCritics thumbed thesauruses for hyperboles to rhapsodize about her pyrotechnics. In 2005, Newsweek called her “only the greatest musical-theater dancer ever.” Reviewing her performance in “Bye Bye Birdie” in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her “a flammable singer and gyroscopic dancer.” Of her Tony Award-winning romp as Anna in “The Rink” (1984), Richard Corliss in Time magazine wrote: “Packing 30 years of Broadway savvy into the frame of a vivacious teenager, the 51-year-old entertainer could by now sell a song to the deaf.”Ms. Rivera was a hard-working perfectionist who rarely missed a beat, let alone a performance. Trained in classical ballet before joining the musical stage, she was beloved on Broadway, where she began performing in the early 1950s. With her showstopping voice and eloquent body language, she radiated a charisma rooted in solid song and dance techniques and in the pleasures she derived from them.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?  More

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    Chita Rivera Found Her Emotional Voice for Shows Like ‘West Side Story’

    Her dancing sometimes overshadowed her thrillingly dramatic way with a song: husky yet clarion, unaffected but full of comment and character.Yes, the legs. Yes, the line. Yes, the look.But also, less commented on, the voice.Chita Rivera, who died on Tuesday at 91, was a Broadway star as long as anyone — and maybe longer. At first, making her way up in the 1950s, from the chorus of “Guys and Dolls” to Anita in “West Side Story,” dancing was her calling card. In the ’60s and ’70s, comedy and satire followed, with “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Chicago.” Later, in works like “The Rink” (1984), “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “The Visit” (2015), her sense of drama prevailed.Yet for me, it’s her voice that remains indelible.It almost didn’t emerge. Back when she started, dancers stayed in their own lane. (There were often separate ensembles for dancers and singers.) Like many people exceptionally intent on mastery, Rivera was single-minded. At her audition for the School of American Ballet at 15, she kept tossing off fouetté turns despite a burst blister that was bleeding through her toe shoe. George Balanchine himself dressed the wound. (She was accepted.)Mastery is not what she felt about her singing. As she relates in “Chita: A Memoir,” written with Patrick Pacheco, she always “hung back” when cast members went out after shows to drink and flirt and belt out show tunes. But while she was on tour with “Call Me Madam” in the early 1950s, a piano player at a theatrical hangout in Chicago overheard her and offered lessons. “Chita, you can sing,” he said.“I could sing? Really? That was news to me.”There are singers who make sure it’s news — they’re great. And then there are those who just sing naturally, with little break from their speaking voices. Rivera, perhaps because she at first felt less confident in song than in movement, never got fussy about the border between dialogue and lyrics. She plowed right past it, sounding exactly alike in both: slightly reedy, husky yet clarion, unaffected but full of comment and character.You can hear all of that in her Anita, whose furious lyrics for “A Boy Like That” (by Stephen Sondheim) are essentially prose dialogue anyway. (“A boy like that, who’d kill your brother!”) And indeed, anger was always a good key for Rivera. Even in a comic role — even in a comic song — she worked the edge of the notes and emotions.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?  More

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    ‘Passport’ Review: A Master of Comedy in a Migrant Camp

    The new show by Alexis Michalik, a star of commercial theater, wades into political battles in France, where immigration restrictions have been at the forefront of the government’s agenda.Badly injured from a fight, a man wakes up in the Calais Jungle, a ramshackle camp for migrants in northern France. His memory is gone, and all he has on him is an Eritrean passport with the name “Issa.”That’s the premise of Alexis Michalik’s brisk, effective new play “Passport,” which was greeted with a standing ovation last weekend in Paris. Until it was demolished in 2016, the overcrowded Jungle encampment stood as a symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis, which hasn’t entirely subsided. While the site itself is gone, migrants still regularly attempt to cross the English Channel from the Calais area and reach Britain.Many in the French theater world publicly supported the people living in the Jungle, and a handful of small-scale productions in France took the camp as inspiration. Still, the first major play about it came from Britain, in 2017: Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s immersive “The Jungle” was inspired by the directors’ time in Calais, where they set up a theater with migrants. It went on to become a trans-Atlantic hit, and was revived last year at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.In some ways, Michalik was an unlikely name to follow suit. A star of the commercial theater sector in France, he has built his reputation on accessible, fast-paced comedy dramas like “Edmond,” a “Shakespeare in Love”-style spin on the life of the French playwright Edmond Rostand. His last stage endeavor was a French-language adaptation of the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.”Yet Michalik has tiptoed into heavier subject matters in recent years — first with “Intra Muros,” a play set in a maximum-security prison, then with “A Love Story,” which centered on a lesbian couple’s I.V.F. journey.“Passport,” which is playing at the Théâtre de la Renaissance through June 30, wades even more openly into current political battles in France, where immigration restrictions have been at the forefront of President Emmanuel Macron’s agenda. In response, Michalik, who wrote and directed the play, invokes the audience’s empathy. “Imagine if a war started here, in your country,” one actor tells us near the beginning. “Your life is threatened, so logically, you decide to leave.”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?  More