Eliana Willis

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    in Theater

    Natalie Dessay Stars With Her Daughter in a French ‘Gypsy’

    The soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, team up to explore one of theater’s most toxic mother-daughter relationships.That “Gypsy” is finally making its debut in France would be noteworthy enough: It took 66 years for one of the most acclaimed works in the musical-theater canon to get there.But there is an extra twist.The production running Thursday through Saturday at the Philharmonie de Paris stars the soprano Natalie Dessay and her daughter, Neïma Naouri, as Rose, the stage mother to end all stage mothers, and Louise, Rose’s long-suffering older child.“Well, that’s acting,” Dessay, 59, said when asked if there was baggage involved with bringing the show’s psychodrama to life with her daughter. “I can play the evil witch and she can play Snow White — it’s theater.”“Yes,” Naouri, 26, interjected, “but sometimes you lose yourself in the character, and I can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction.”They laughed before Dessay jumped back in. “It’s not any more complicated than anything else,” she said. “But above all it’s more pleasant since we know each other very well and we already have this mother-daughter relationship, so we don’t have to create it. We actually have fun with it.”Their bond was clear in a joint video conversation from France as the pair huddled over a phone — Naouri had helped her mother turn on the camera — keeping an animated banter going the entire time.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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    in Television

    ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Creator Discusses His New Anime ‘Lazarus’

    In an interview, Shinichiro Watanabe discusses his latest anime, “Lazarus,” a pharmaceutical mystery set in the near future.Shinichiro Watanabe’s first anime, “Cowboy Bebop,” was quite an opening act. A story of space bounty hunters trying to scrape by, its genre mash-up of westerns, science fiction and noir, with a jazzy soundtrack, was a critical and commercial success in Japan and beyond. Its American debut on Adult Swim, in 2001, is now considered a milestone in the popularization of anime in the United States.Not one to repeat himself, Watanabe followed up “Bebop” with a story about samurai and hip-hop (“Samurai Champloo,” 2004); a coming-of-age story about jazz musicians (“Kids on the Slope,” 2012); a mystery thriller about teenage terrorists (“Terror in Resonance,” 2014); an animated “Blade Runner” sequel (“Blade Runner Black Out 2022,” 2017); and a sci-fi musical show about two girls on Mars (“Carole & Tuesday,” 2019).Now, he has returned to the kind of sci-fi action that made his name with “Lazarus,” streaming on Max and airing on Adult Swim, with new episodes arriving on Sundays. The show is set in 2055, after the disappearance of a doctor who discovered a miracle drug that has no side effects. Three years later, the doctor resurfaces with an announcement: The drug had a three-year half-life, and everyone who took it will die in 30 days unless someone finds him and the cure he developed.Watanabe has never been shy about being a fan of cinema. “Cowboy Bebop,” for instance, makes specific references to films like “Alien” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For “Lazarus,” Watanabe went further, teaming with a Hollywood filmmaker, the “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski, to design the thrilling, kinetic action sequences of the anime.In a video interview, Watanabe, speaking through the interpreters (and co-producers on the series) Takenari Maeda and Saechan, discussed the making of “Lazarus,” the timeliness of the show’s story and how watching the original “Blade Runner” inspired his multicultural and inclusive anime casts. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Unlike your previous sci-fi projects, “Lazarus” takes place not on a distant planet or far into the future, but in our world just 30 years from now. Why was that important?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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    in Television

    ‘White Lotus’ Star Aimee Lou Wood Criticizes SNL for ‘Mean’ Sketch

    The actress in HBO’s “The White Lotus,” said she had received thousands of messages of support after “Saturday Night Live” mocked her smile.Aimee Lou Wood, a star of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” has criticized “Saturday Night Live” for a sketch that mocked her smile, calling it “mean and unfunny.”Ms. Wood, a British actress, posted on Instagram on Sunday objecting to the sketch, in which the S.N.L. cast member Sarah Sherman impersonates Ms. Wood’s character while wearing large prosthetic teeth.“I am not thin skinned,” Ms. Wood, 31, wrote in one of a series of posts on her Instagram stories, adding that she loves being joked about when “it’s clever and in good spirits.” But “the joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth not bad teeth,” she wrote.In a subsequent post, Ms. Wood said she had received “apologies” from S.N.L. but did not elaborate. Representatives for Ms. Wood and NBC, which broadcasts S.N.L., did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The sketch, titled “The White POTUS,” imagined the show’s characters replaced by President Trump and members of his cabinet. Ms. Wood, who is from Manchester, England, also criticized Ms. Sherman’s impersonation of her Mancunian accent.After her initial posts, Ms. Wood said that she had since received thousands of messages of support. She shared what appeared to be one such message, which said: “It was a sharp and funny skit until it suddenly took a screeching turn into 1970’s misogyny.”The third season of “The White Lotus,” which concluded this month and was the series’s most popular yet, follows wealthy guests and staff members at a wellness resort in Thailand. Among the guests is Chelsea, played by Ms. Wood, a young romantic British woman who is dating an enigmatic older American.Ms. Wood has been celebrated for her natural smile, especially at a time when many celebrities are opting for veneers to achieve “perfect” teeth. But in a recent interview with GQ magazine, she said that the news media’s focus on her appearance in coverage of the most recent season of “The White Lotus” had made her feel uncomfortable, even if the attention was intended to be positive.“It makes me really happy that it’s symbolizing rebellion and freedom, but there’s a limit,” she told the magazine. “The whole conversation is just about my teeth, and it makes me a bit sad because I’m not getting to talk about my work.”“I don’t know if it was a man would we be talking about it this much?” she added. More

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    in Television

    Isabela Merced Is Ready to Slay (and Not Just Zombies)

    On a cool morning in late March, the actress and singer Isabela Merced was walking BonBon, her Chihuahua, on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. “He likes to be behind you,” she warned after we became tangled. Her dog Pluto, whom she adopted in Australia while shooting “Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” had stayed home that morning. Pluto was rescued with three legs.“He tried to jump over a fence that wasn’t completely done,” she explained.In Season 2 of the hit HBO series “The Last of Us,” which began on Sunday, Merced plays the new character Dina, a wry, flirty, tough-talking orphan who loves killing clickers, the most afflicted of the show’s fungus-infected zombies. “That’s her hobby!” Merced said.Dina also has a thing for Ellie (Bella Ramsey), her killing partner. In the season’s first episode, their relationship heats up with a kiss during a dance at a holiday party, as Dina’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Jesse (Young Mazino) — and much of the rest of the town — watches from the sidelines. Dina seems positively gleeful to play the provocatrice.“I’d like to imagine that’s how I would be in the Apocalypse,” Merced said of her character.Isabela Merced, left, and Bella Ramsey in a scene from the Season 2 premiere of “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOWill Ellie and Dina’s love last? “I would love to tell you everything!” she said. Because of some major plot twists, however, HBO has kept a tight rein on what it shares with journalists about the new season — and on what its stars can talk about.“I love talking,” she said, “So yeah, it’s been very hard for me.”After a run of critically applauded but less-visible roles, Merced, 23, may be at a turning point with “The Last of Us,” a hugely popular and award-winning series in which she plays a starring role. (Its first season became HBO’s most watched debut season and garnered 24 Emmy nominations, winning eight). Dina is central to the second season’s vengeance-driven plot, her humor and sarcasm a coping mechanism in a postapocalyptic world overrun by hordes of mushroom-headed zombies.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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    in Theater

    How ‘Stranger Things’ Scaled Up for Broadway

    The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood.Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main characters and get moving.Not so for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.” The new Broadway play, based on Netflix’s hit horror-science fiction series, starts with a bold five-minute cold open of loud gunfire, marauding Demogorgons and no leading characters. It’s a coup de théâtre, and it swiftly signals that the lead producers, the Broadway heavy-hitter Sonia Friedman and Netflix, are betting their big-money gamble will knock theatergoers’ socks right off.The scene begins with audiences glimpsing a ship’s crew members via two rectangular boxes. It look straight out of a graphic novel. “We always wanted to open with a big scene and a big moment, something that’s going to shock the audience,” said Ross Duffer, who, with his twin brother, Matt Duffer, created the “Stranger Things” series. Both are credited as the play’s creative producers.The play is a prequel to the 1980s-set TV series, and gives an origin story about a shy teenager named Henry Creel (played by Louis McCartney) who became an important figure in Season 4. It’s set in small-town Hawkins, Ind., mostly in 1959.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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    in Television

    ‘WrestleMania 41,’ Plus 8 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    John Cena continues his farewell tour, and ‘Abbott Elementary’ concludes its fourth season.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, April 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.They’re baaaaaack.The next installment of “Ghost Adventures” is here. In a hair-raising two-hour special, paranormal investigators Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Jay Wasley and Billy Tolley confront mysterious occurrences and possibly supernatural entities lurking within the walls of the suburban house where the 1982 cult-classic film “Poltergeist” was filmed. Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Discovery and streaming Thursday on Discovery+ and Max.“Ghosts” stars Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar, foreground.Bertrand Calmeau/CBSAdapted from the original British comedy and now in its fourth season, “Ghosts” follows a young couple after they inherit a dilapidated estate — but they soon discover there’s much more than just mice and mold hiding in the shadows. With a few trapped souls in their midst, the couple finds that running a bread-and-breakfast is more complicated than they’d originally thought. Thursday on CBS.This next show introduces a different kind of haunted house into the mix: a sterile suburban home with white walls and no personality. Through clever renovations, house flippers and skilled designers — Jonathan Knight, a member of the boy band New Kids on the Block and host of HGTV’s “Farmhouse Fixer,” among them — resurrect a set of drab, identical homes as they compete for bragging rights and the highest appraisal on “Rock the Block.” The sixth season premieres Monday on HGTV at 9 p.m. and streaming Tuesday on Discovery+ and Max.Field trips and life lessons.Sheryl Lee Ralph, left, and Quinta Brunson in “Abbott Elementary.”Gilles Mingasson/Disney, vía Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 1: Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

    It seems this season will be driven by one simple idea: that when Joel saved Ellie at the end of Season 1 and then lied to her, he made a mess.‘The Last of Us’ Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Future Days’“The Last of Us” began with a prologue that set up everything about to happen, in the episode and in the series. In a scene set in 1968, a scientist explained that his greatest fear was that a warming planet would provide the perfect incubating conditions for a mind-controlling fungus that could turn humans into brainless killers. There is obviously more to “The Last of Us” than just, “What if there were mushroom zombies?” But that idea put the plot in motion.The second season of “The Last of Us” begins with two prologues. In one, we meet Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), one of the surviving Fireflies from the Season 1 finale’s Salt Lake City massacre. Abby and her fellow resistance-fighters gather around their loved one’s graves to discuss a plan to retaliate against Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), the man who slaughtered so many of their people. (“Slowly,” Abby says, when her allies say they will kill Joel.)In the other prologue, we flash back to the final scene from that finale, when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) made Joel swear that he took her away from the Fireflies because they had given up on finding a cure for the cordyceps plague. Joel gave Ellie his word, which she warily accepted.I expect there to be as many twists, turns, new characters and new story lines in Season 2 as there were in Season 1. But based on the premiere, it seems this season will also be driven by one simple idea: that when Joel saved Ellie from the Fireflies and then lied to her, he made a godawful mess.After the prologues, the episode jumps ahead five years. Joel and Ellie are now settled in Jackson, Wyo., the edenic survivor colony run in part by Joel’s brother, Tommy (Gabriel Luna), and Tommy’s wife, Maria (Rutina Wesley). Joel is making himself useful with his fix-it know-how, and Ellie has been honing her fighting skills and going on patrols, to gather supplies and to winnow down the numbers of the infected in the area. But while they seem reasonably content, something has soured between them.As I mentioned in my reviews last season, one of my great fascinations with any postapocalyptic story is in seeing how people make fortresses for themselves, sealed off from the surrounding mayhem — and also seeing how they try to build fulfilling lives inside their hidey-holes. So it’s a pleasure early in this episode to get reacquainted with Jackson, a place that has electricity, agriculture, law, and even culture in the form of music and dancing.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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    Jean Marsh, Actress Who Co-Created ‘Upstairs, Downstairs,’ Dies at 90

    She not only helped develop the hit 1970s show, but also acted in it, and had a decades-long career in film, TV and theater.Jean Marsh, the striking British-born actress who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died on Sunday at her home in London. She was 90.The cause was complications of dementia, the filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend, said.“Upstairs, Downstairs” captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before “Downton Abbey” was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’s eye.The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant Bellamy family and the staff of servants who kept their Belgravia townhouse running smoothly, according to the precise social standards of Edwardian aristocracy. Ms. Marsh chose the role of Rose, the household’s head parlor maid, a stern but good-hearted Cockney.The New York Times review, in January 1974, was affectionate. John J. O’Connor described the show as “a charmingly seductive concoction” and a “frequently marvelous portrait.” He praised Ms. Marsh for playing Rose with “the perfection of a young Mildred Dunnock.”By the time the show ended its American run, it had won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys. Ms. Marsh herself took home the 1975 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.Robert Blake and Ms. Marsh hold up their Emmys for best actor and best actress in a drama series at the Emmy Awards in 1975.Associated PressWe 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