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    ‘Happy Days’ Cast Looks Back on 50th Anniversary of Hit Show’s Premiere

    In an interview, the surviving members of the original cast — Ron Howard, Donny Most, Anson Williams, Henry Winkler and Marion Ross — look back on the nostalgic hit, which premiered Jan. 15, 1974.On Tuesday night, Jan. 15, 1974, Richie, Potsie, Ralph and Fonzie entered our living rooms for a visit that would end up lasting more than a decade.Created by Garry Marshall, “Happy Days” arrived as a comic but earnest chronicle of adolescence in 1950s Milwaukee. It revolved around Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and his equally hormonal pals — Warren “Potsie” Weber (Anson Williams) and Ralph Malph (Donny Most) — along with the rest of the Cunninghams: Richie’s younger sister, Joanie (Erin Moran); mother, Marion (Marion Ross); and father, Howard (Tom Bosley). (Chuck, an older brother played by a series of actors, disappeared early in the show’s run.)“Happy Days” didn’t really take off with viewers until a couple of seasons later, when it was retooled into a broader multicamera sitcom oriented around the local tough turned mentor and guardian angel, Arthur Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler), known the world over as the Fonz. In the 1976-77 season, “Happy Days” became the most-watched show on television, supplanting “All in the Family.” It ran until the summer of 1984, a total of 11 seasons, while generating multiple spinoffs — “Laverne & Shirley,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Joanie Loves Chachi” — and untold tons of Fonzie merchandise.In December, the surviving members of the original core cast — Howard, 69; Most, 70; Williams, 74; Winkler, 78; and Ross, 95 — met in a video chat to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Happy Days.” (Bosley died in 2010, Moran in 2017.) They reminisced about the special bond they felt at the time and have felt ever since, and how the elevation of Fonzie was integral to the show’s popularity. (Disclosure: I helped Williams on his campaign for mayor of Ojai, Calif., in 2022, and we are friends.)These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were some of the factors that helped “Happy Days” become a hit?RON HOWARD We had great chemistry, and the writers knew how to write for that, but I also think that this collision of Garry Marshall’s sense of young guys and fun and energy and [the executive producer] Tom Miller’s sense of what an American family meant at that time was the secret sauce of the show.HENRY WINKLER We were telling the same stories of the actual time, of the ’70s, but because it was placed in the past, it never felt as if the moral of the story was hitting you on the head.ANSON WILLIAMS When they changed to live audience, three camera, that’s when the chemistry really came in, when we could work together as a team every day.HOWARD And Henry created this amazing character that captured everybody’s imagination. There was an older guy called Fonzie, but he had six lines in the first episode. Henry, from the first moment, began offering the show, the writers, the actors, this other possibility.Early in its run, “Happy Days” was retooled into a broader multicamera sitcom.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesThe show arrived during Watergate and the waning years of the Vietnam War. Do you think people were eager to re-embrace what they saw as the values of the past?WINKLER It is exactly what everybody is looking for all the time: They’re looking for warmth and peace, some comedy, some relief. Anson said Tom and Garry created a team by creating a baseball team. We traveled all over the world. We played together, and the person who plays together stays together.How would you describe Garry Marshall’s role as the series progressed?MARION ROSS He was so important to the show. He was the father of this whole group.WILLIAMS Garry was also very influential for all of us to wear other hats in the industry. He wanted us to use the Paramount lot as a college: Learn other areas, watch other directors, come to the writers’ room. I think the reason all of us today are still involved and productive is because of Garry. He wanted us to have the best lives we could possibly have.HOWARD I’ve been around a lot of very talented people over my career, even before “Happy Days.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better boss, a better creative manager of people and ideas than Garry Marshall.WINKLER He was generous but also was structured. He took no bad behavior. One time, when he was announcing the guest cast, I said, “Garry, we have to hurry up because I’m flying to Arkansas.” He nodded, put down the microphone, grabbed me by my shirt, put me against the wall and said, “Don’t ever do that again, because they have every right to be recognized like you.” He kept us in line.Beginning in its second season, “Happy Days” aired opposite “Good Times,” which also premiered in 1974 and became a big hit with its own pop culture phenom, Jimmie Walker. Were you ever concerned that your show might not make it?HOWARD We slipped a lot in our second season, and the decision was made to move to a three-camera show in front of an audience. I had never done that. It terrified me, but it turned out to be an exciting experience. The other idea was to move the Fonzie character front and center. It was kind of a reckoning for me because the focus of the show shifted, and yet that was our way to win. The only thing I ever said to the bosses or the executives is, “What’s happened here with Fonzie is great. Just make sure that you understand, too, that we have a real chemistry here, and we think of ourselves as an ensemble.” I’m glad that they made the moves they made, whether I was 100 percent comfortable with them at the time or not. It was thrilling to see the show take off.WINKLER They came to me at ABC and they wanted to change the title to “Fonzie’s Happy Days.” I said, “If you do that, it is an insult to everybody I’m working with. Why fix something that isn’t broken? We are really good. I live in the family and that’s why I’m successful. I’m asking you, if you never listen to me again, leave it alone.”Winkler and Scott Baio, center, during a rehearsal in 1981. “Happy Days” ran until 1984, a total of 11 seasons.Richard Creamer/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesRon, is it true that had they done that, you would have left the show?HOWARD I told them I would leave. I don’t think I contractually could have. But I told them if you really want to change the name of the show to that, I would rather go back to USC and film school and what I was doing before the show launched.How do you look back on the experience now?WINKLER I thank God I was part of this ensemble. It is a gift from heaven that fell in my lap.DONNY MOST I used to stay [on the set] and people would say, “You’re done, you can go home.” Because we were one-camera then. I wouldn’t go. Marion and Tom [Bosley], I’d be watching them in the kitchen scene and watch Henry in his scenes. I wanted to stay and absorb it all.Donny, how did it shape of the rest of your life and career?MOST I met my wife on the show my last season. She was an actress and we’re married 42 years. People say, “What do you remember most about the show? Which episode? Which scenes?” What I remember are the conversations we had in between shooting or before a show.I heard the four of you guys are on a text chain.HOWARD Yeah, it really kicked off in Covid. We’ve always stayed in touch — gotten together, had a meal, emails and so forth.Is it rare for co-stars in a TV show to remain close for decades?WINKLER I always thought if you work with somebody for six months, you make a movie, you’re going to have dinner with them when it’s over. Then you call them, and you’re still waiting for them to call you back. That didn’t happen with our show. Anson is an entrepreneur, has created products. Marion has gone on to act and do plays. Ron is a billion-dollar director. Don Most has a combo and travels the country as a crooner.WILLIAMS And a great crooner.It has to be at least partly because of the time of life when you got to know each other, right? If you had met in your 30s or 40s, it might not have happened that way.MOST I remember Ron comparing us to army guys who had been in the trenches together.HOWARD We were transforming together. We were growing up. Tom Bosley was teaching us how to get life insurance, homeownership loans. We had our first children and marriages.At the peak of the show’s popularity in the late 1970s, the Fonz was one of the most popular characters in the world. Wasn’t there some moment at a Dallas mall when the scale of it became clear?WINKLER There were 25,000 people. Don kept saying, “How are we going to get out of here? What happens if they all start moving forward?” For the first time, I used the character off the show. I looked at the crowd and said, [in the Fonz voice] “All right, listen up, you’re going to part like the Red Sea.” They honestly did. We got into the limousine and were able to take off.Henry, how did you deal with the popularity and when it was over?WINKLER I wrote about it in my memoir. I think there is an emotional component to dyslexia. For me, anyway. When everybody was talking to me, I knew it was practically good to keep the show going and we’re all making a living, but I couldn’t believe they were talking to me. My sense of self was so damaged from when I was younger. When the show was over, I sat in my office at Paramount and I had psychic pain. Because I had just lived Plan A. I didn’t have a Plan B. I didn’t even think about a Plan B. I’m sitting there not being able to be hired.In the heyday of “Happy Days,” the Fonz was one of the most popular characters in the world.ABC Photo Archives/Disney, via Getty ImagesAs the rest of you saw Henry getting so big and taking over the show, did it ever make you jealous?WILLIAMS People ask me that question and I’d say, “Are you kidding? The Fonz bought me a house.” He was probably the most popular actor in the world for a while but it never came to the set. As popular as he was, it didn’t change anything as a team. That’s a big deal.HOWARD You couldn’t be jealous of it because it was 1,000 percent earned. Here’s this guy who created this character, a guy we all immediately loved working with and were inspired by, and audiences dug it. Anything other than maximizing that character wouldn’t have made sense.Ron, what did you see on the show that helped you become a better director?HOWARD [The director] Jerry Paris. Brilliant at staging us, and when you’re doing a three-camera show in front of an audience, it is all about character movement and staging. He knew I wanted to direct and so it was a tutorial.MOST You cannot underestimate the contributions Jerry made to our show. He directed most of the episodes and was in there day in and day out. He was a genius at what he did.At the center of the show was the relationship between Richie and Fonzie, the strait-laced kid and the guy with the jacket. How did that develop?WINKLER We were brothers on the set. I could go somewhere, in my imagination — in the middle of a show — Ron would go with me like we were attached by a thread. It was unspoken.HOWARD I grew up on “The Andy Griffith Show” and used to see Andy playing the straight man role, whether it was with the Barney Fife character, Don Knotts, or with Frances Bavier [Aunt Bee]. I witnessed somebody who took a lot of pleasure and joy out of riding along with people who were going to get the laughs but needed it to be a partnership. I intuitively built upon that experience.WINKLER Ron, you were an unbelievable partner.HOWARD It was a blast. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Emmy Awards and ‘Fargo’

    The television awards show that was postponed from 2023 airs on Fox, and the FX drama wraps up its season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 15-21. Details and times are subject to change.MondayFrom left: Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin in “Succession.”HBOEMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on Fox. This awards show was postponed from the fall because of actor and writer strikes, and now it is finally time for the television academy to hand out awards (by way of presenters including Jon Hamm, Quinta Brunson and Pedro Pascal). Because this is the 75th annual ceremony, distinguished shows from the past — “Cheers,” “All in the Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Game of Thrones,” among others — will be celebrated with homages and cast reunions. It is looking like it will be a big night for “Succession,” whose 27 nominations are the most of any show. Anthony Anderson will host.TuesdayTOP GUN (1986) 8 p.m. on Paramount. Since the 2022 remake of this film didn’t take home the only award it was nominated for at this year’s Golden Globes, maybe it’s time to revisit the original. Tom Cruise stars as Maverick (his pilot name), an arrogant and reckless fighter pilot who is sent to Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School, where he develops an enemy (Iceman; Val Kilmer) and a crush (Kelly McGillis). “The snappily edited sequences of battle and mock battle sweep us in and out of the cockpit,” Walter Goodman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “You can’t always be sure exactly what’s going on, but it’s exciting anyhow.”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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    ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Season Premiere Recap:

    The new season, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, moves north of the Arctic Circle. Unsurprisingly, the crimes are as bleak and chilly as the setting.Season 4, Episode 1: ‘Part 1’In the absence of any other connective tissue, the “True Detective” series continues to move forward on bad vibes and attitude, a darker-than-dark noir ambience propped up by gruesome crimes, hard-living sleuths and philosophical discourse that dances on the edge of self-parody. When Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a state trooper in the Arctic hinterland of Ennis, Alaska, is asked whether she believes in God, it doesn’t seem very “True Detective” for her to affirm that she does. “Must be nice,” says her inquisitor. “Knowing we’re not alone.”“No,” she answers. “We’re alone. God, too.”There we go. Some franchises have Freddy and Jason. This one has existential malaise.In this first episode of “True Detective: Night Country,” the series’s new showrunner, the Mexican filmmaker Issa López, succeeds in making Navarro’s words ring true. (The show’s creator and previous showrunner, Nic Pizzolatto, is no longer creatively involved, retaining only an executive producer credit this season.) As another imposingly dense mystery starts to unfold, with past and present horrors cross-contaminating one another alongside supernatural events, López sketches a vivid, menacing community that lives in darkness.Her Ennis is the mirror image of the daylight noir of the 1997 Norwegian thriller “Insomnia” and Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Hollywood remake, which took place in a season where the sun never set and the endless days exacted a psychological toll. Here, in permanent darkness, the town “at the end of the world” lives up to billing.There are many questions, some of them metaphysical, to sort out after this premiere, but it’s a promising sign that the backdrop is at least as compelling as anything that happens in the fore. As the two main characters, Navarro and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the current police chief, delves into two cases simultaneously, López gives Ennis interesting dimensions of its own, pausing to watch the town drunk slide across the intersection to collect her latest D.U.I. or noting the tenuous state of the drinking water. Most of the population in this working-class outpost is the native Inupiaq, who coexist uneasily with settlers who have turned a mine into a pollutant and cash cow.On the fringes of the fringe, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, eight researchers go missing from the Tsalal research station, and it’s made to seem like either black magic or an extremely ill-advised walkabout. We get a few glimpses into their last moments together: One scientist kicking back to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with a bowl of popcorn, another doing a video call in Spanish, and still more on a treadmill, in the laundry room, in the lab or constructing a ham sandwich. Then we see another man shake uncontrollably and utter the words, “She’s awake.”Later, when a delivery truck pulls up with supplies, the driver finds an empty building. The camera finds a tongue on the floor.As Danvers, Foster can’t help but suggest a thoroughly disillusioned version of her most famous character, Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but there’s a little of Kate Winslet’s “Mare of Easttown” to her cynical, slightly discombobulated regional sleuth. She’s Liz of Snowtown. At the research facility, she’s able to estimate the time these men disappeared based on the mayo consistency in the uneaten ham sandwich. (“Mayo doesn’t go runny until a couple of days out of the fridge, but your processed cold cuts will survive the apocalypse.”) When she examines the severed tongue, the one piece of unsettling evidence they have, Danvers can deduce by subtle striations that it belonged to an Indigenous woman who licks the threads of fishing nets. She’s good.Navarro is skeptical of Danvers, to put it mildly — not so much her skill as her initiative. While serving as a detective, Navarro obsessed for months over the savage murder of a young Indigenous activist who had attracted a lot of “haters” for her protests against the mine. Danvers inherited the case and let it go so cold that one of her deputies, Hank (John Hawkes), wound up keeping the file box tucked away in a spare bedroom. Hank’s son, Peter (Finn Bennett), Danvers’s baby-faced protégé, smuggles it out the window to get it to her.In classically grotesque “True Detective” fashion, the two cases are connected by the severed tongue, which was an aspect of the earlier murder that was kept from the public. So when Danvers starts laying out photos from the research facility on the floor, the old file gets cracked open, too, and sized up like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that were in the wrong box. She finds a possible thread in a patch that was torn from a parka, but that’s enough to pique her attention and settle Navarro’s concerns about how much Danvers cared about the investigation that derailed her career. Their frosty partnership is already starting to thaw.The same cannot be said of the frozen bodies found jutting out of the ice in the episode’s final moments. How they got there and the manner in which they were found are among the many loose threads left dangling for Reddit subthread conspiracists to tie together. The supernatural aura of the season so far may well be explicable, tied to the fears and anxieties of a community that spends the winter padding around in the dark. But López isn’t in any hurry to dispel the illusion, not when she can leave us jumping at shadows.Flat CirclesThe wildlife doesn’t seem to have it any better in Ennis, judging by the herd of howling elk that rumble off a cliff or the one-eyed polar bear that parks itself in front of Navarro on the street.The Billie Eilish song in the opening credits, “Bury a Friend,” written from the perspective of a monster under her bed, has a line in the chorus that doubles as the title of her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” Seems like a sound thesis for the season.“WE ARE ALL DEAD” on the whiteboard seems notable. Include that in your case notes.An underdressed young man named Travis showing Rose (Fiona Shaw) the bodies in the ice also seems significant, in that Travis is dead.John Hawkes is a character actor ringer for any TV show or movie, and it’s exciting to see him cast here against type as a flawed, lonely, seemingly dull-witted cop with a mail-order fiancée en route from Vladivostok. More

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    Beverly Johnson, ‘the Model With the Big Mouth’

    In her new one-woman show, she details her 50-year modeling career, her tumultuous relationships — and an unsettling encounter with Bill Cosby.She was 18, new to New York, a tenderfoot in an industry said to eat its young. But Beverly Johnson was not short on brass.She had been quick in the early 1970s to sign with the formidable model agent Eileen Ford — and just as swift, at 19, to inform her, “I want to be on the cover of American Vogue.” When Ms. Ford asked her curtly, “Who do you think you are, Cleopatra?” Ms. Johnson was as curt with a comeback, murmuring, audibly enough, “That’s exactly who I think I am.”Ms. Johnson revisits that moment in “In Vogue,” her one-woman show set to open in Manhattan on Sunday. The play, largely derived from her 2015 memoir, “Beverly Johnson: The Face That Changed It All,” and written with the playwright Josh Ravetch, is by turns an upbeat and cautionary account of Ms. Johnson’s adventures — and hairy misadventures — in the mannequin trade.Onstage she tells of defying expectations and defecting to a competing modeling agency, despite the warnings of peers that such a move would amount to professional ruin.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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    Joyce Randolph, Last of the ‘Honeymooners,’ Is Dead at 99

    Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton, the wife of a guffawing, rubber-limbed sewer worker forever mired in a blowhard neighbor’s get-rich-quick schemes and other hazards of life on the classic 1950s sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99. Her son, Randy Charles, confirmed her death.She was the last survivor of a cast of four that dominated the Saturday night viewing habits of millions in the golden age of live television, and for decades afterward on rerun broadcasts and home video. Jackie Gleason (Ralph Kramden) died in 1987; Audrey Meadows (Ralph’s wife, Alice) in 1996; and Art Carney (Ed Norton) in 2003.Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows and Ms. Randolph in a scene from 1954. While her character was less developed than the others, Ms. Randolph was revered by aficionados as the last link to a show that had a cultlike following.CBSIn an age when status symbols in a gritty Brooklyn tenement were telephones, television sets and refrigerators, the Kramdens had none on a bus driver’s $62 a week. Reflecting America’s working-class experience, they struggled for a better life, shared disappointments and had fun, even if there was no uranium mine in Asbury Park and no market for glow-in-the-dark wallpaper, no-cal pizza or “KramMar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer,” which turned out to be dog food.As Trixie, Ms. Randolph played the upstairs wife who crossed her arms and commiserated with her best friend, Alice, over addlepated husbands who somehow got drunk on grape juice, found a suitcase of the mob’s counterfeit cash, invented a “handy” kitchen tool that could “core a apple” and, after waiting all year for the convention of their International Order of Friendly Raccoons, took the wrong train.While her character was less developed than the others, Ms. Randolph was revered by aficionados as the last living link to the inspired lunacy of a show that had a cultlike following, with fan clubs, esoteric trivia contests and memorabilia sales. At a 1984 Long Island meeting of the Royal Association for the Longevity and Preservation of the Honeymooners, or RALPH, one could buy a size-52 bus driver’s uniform or a coveted Trixie apron.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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    Opera Greets the Morning at the Prototype Festival

    The offerings at this annual presentation of new opera and music theater tend to be politically charged, scrappy and stirring.“These people are not drunk,” a choir in quirkily customized blue robes sang on Saturday, “because it’s nine in the morning.”Watching these smiling performers in the light-flooded Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, I was surprised to discover that this startlingly contemporary sentence was a translation of a biblical verse, Acts 2:15. And it was an appropriate sentiment at, yes, about 9 a.m.In “Terce,” presented as part of this year’s Prototype festival of new opera and music theater, about three dozen choir members were praying, as Christians have done at that hour from the era of the early church. The work adapts and takes its name from the traditional liturgy for 9 o’clock, the time when the Holy Spirit is believed to have appeared to the apostles on Pentecost.In Brooklyn, there’s a twist, if not a wholly unfamiliar one: The divinity being celebrated in this folk-soul-gospel-medieval amalgam is, according to the script, a woman, a mother, “an undeniably female creator.”The singers of “Terce” celebrate “an undeniably female creator.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPolitically charged, scrappy, stirring, deeply earnest: “Terce,” created and led by Heather Christian, embodies Prototype, now in its 11th season and organized by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, the arts center in SoHo. (The festival runs through Sunday.)The hourlong performance had the intimacy that is crucial to this year’s best festival offerings. The members of the community choir that Christian has organized sing, dance and play instruments only steps from the audience that surrounds them. And, whether it’s the cold weather or the constant bad news, that closeness feels sweet and reassuring this January.It’s sweet and reassuring, too, in even cozier confines at HERE, where Prototype is presenting “The Promise,” a rock-cabaret song cycle that Wende, a Dutch singer, conceived with a group of collaborators.Wende’s “The Promise” at HERE.Raymond van OlphenAmong those creators is the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge, perhaps best known for scoring her sister Phoebe’s hit TV show “Fleabag.” And the lyrics of “The Promise” — the work of five writers — do reflect a kind of “Fleabag” sensibility. They are the voice of a modern woman, single, funny, dissatisfied, morbid, ambivalent at best about having children, prickly yet vulnerable. “I’m a lonely bitch,” goes one song’s rueful refrain.Restlessly stalking the tiny space and moving among the three other musicians, Wende has a mischievous grin that can swiftly give way to sneering anger and quiet despair. Her voice is tautly powerful yet quivering, a little like Fiona Apple’s — sometimes sultry, sometimes airy and wry. With resourcefully varied lighting by Freek Ros, the 19-song, 100-minute cycle keeps shifting its tone and pace; songs with pounding, propulsive jungle beats exist alongside vocals half-spoken to a piano.If the final minutes come close to being cloying without quite tipping over, they have that in common with “Terce.” But just as the physical proximity of the performers feels welcome this season, some sentimentality does, too. Wende somehow manages to create that rarity: anthemic crowd singalongs that even a hardened critic feels compelled to join.“The Promise” and “Terce,” the Prototype presentations that are sticking with me most this year, are both plotless and characterless. Also leaning abstract, but in a far wilder and more surreal mode, is “Chornobyldorf,” a sprawling production of well over two intermissionless hours at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater. It has bravely traveled from Ukraine as a kind of nostalgic reminder of the loud, messy, nudity-filled, often self-serious, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.“Chornobyldorf,” at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater.Valeriia LandarThe many-page synopsis describes a convoluted genesis for this “archaeological opera in seven novels,” created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. But the premise is similar to “Station Eleven,” the book turned TV show, and the play “Mr. Burns”: After an apocalypse — the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the specter here — a society tries to rise from the ashes though whatever fragments of culture remain.In the case of “Chornobyldorf,” this takes the form of revived yet still-distant memories of Baroque opera and polyphonic chant, shot through with eruptions of blastingly amplified punkish rage. The texts are difficult to decipher. The costumes are cut in ornate antique styles, but dolled up with bits of electrical wiring, and the instruments, many hand-built, are seemingly a collection of whatever was left over when the world ended: percussion, trombone, fluegelhorn, flute, folk string instruments like the bandura and dulcimer, sighing accordions.The sonic landscape creaks and roars, squeals and simmers, as this little society puts on eerily robotic, intensely solemn rituals, building to a screaming Mass and a climactic, hysterical danse macabre around a huge medallion of Lenin hanging from the ceiling. On a screen behind the performers, film footage pans through outdoor scenes, with nature looking majestic — and almost entirely abandoned by humans.“Chornobyldorf” is reminiscent of the loud, nudity-filled, generally baffling shows that were once fixtures of downtown New York.Artem GalkinThe slow, stylized pace and insular symbolism, together with the vivid film element and arcane eroticism, evokes Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle. And though the work is baggy, a dreamlike atmosphere takes hold; it’s hard to tell the exact meaning of a statuesque naked woman being stripped of the cymbals that hang from her arms, but the sequence is nevertheless arresting.“Adoration” is the most standard-issue, proscenium-theater opera Prototype is presenting this year. Based on a 2008 Atom Egoyan film, the 90-minute piece — being performed at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in Manhattan — trudges through a complicated plot involving a teenage boy’s announcement to his classmates that his father is a terrorist. (It turns out he’s not telling the truth, though to what narrative or emotional end is never quite clear.)Setting the story to music offers the promise of delving into the nuances of a group of troubled people. But the drearily expository monologues go on and on in Royce Vavrek’s leaden libretto. And while Mary Kouyoumdjian’s score offers some sinuous music for string quartet, its fevered quality feels generic and eventually tiresome; the drama, shapeless.More compelling than any character in “Adoration” is Dominic Shodekeh Talifero, the performer-protagonist of “Vodalities,” one of Prototype’s three short, online streaming offerings — and he doesn’t even speak words or sing pitches.Joined for the piece’s 16 minutes by the quartet So Percussion, he virtuosically yet subtly explores what he calls breath art, a delicate form of beat-boxing that inevitably, painfully suggests the Black Lives Matter rallying cry “I can’t breathe.” (The other digital presentations are “Swann,” a longing aria based on the true story of a 19th-century Black man who wore drag, and the antic, voice-processed “Whiteness.)Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Maria BaranovaHuang Ruo’s “Angel Island,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, delves into the dark history of American discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom were processed on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.The 90-minute work’s structure is elegant: Sections of historical narration, as in a Ken Burns documentary, alternate with poetic pieces for chorus, with members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street singing the words of writings found on the walls of the island’s immigrant processing center. Filling the back wall of the stage is a screen for the film artist Bill Morrison’s trademark, haunting manipulations of scratchy, blurry archival footage, its ghostliness echoed by the choir’s floating, elegiac sound.The slow-burning patience of Huang’s score is a virtue, even if the sections tend to linger too long — particularly the nonchoral ones, with the narration on top of a string quartet sawing away as accompaniment to balletically aggressive duets for two dancers, an Asian woman and white man.But the gradual build to a hypnotic conclusion was moving, with choral repetitions as relentless as waves on a beach, punctuated by the slow, steady beat of a gong. It was reminiscent of “Terce,” which ends with the metallic shimmer of a gently shaken chandelier made of keys and cutlery.There was a sense, in both finales, of the potential of music and performance — of community — to cleanse. To help us both remember and move forward. More

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    Peter Crombie, Actor Known for ‘Seinfeld’ Appearances, Dies at 71

    Crombie was perhaps best known for playing “Crazy” Joe Davola on the hit television sitcom.Peter Crombie, the actor who was probably best known for playing the role of “Crazy” Joe Davola on five episodes of the hit television sitcom “Seinfeld,” died on Wednesday in a health care facility in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 71.Crombie had been recovering from unspecified surgery, said his ex-wife, Nadine Kijner, who confirmed his death.In his role as Davola, Crombie played a temperamental character who stalks Jerry — a semi-fictionalized version of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld — and develops a deep hatred of him.Tall and lanky, Crombie’s character had a flat, borderline menacing affect and an unblinking 1,000-yard stare. In the series, he also stalked the tough New Yorker Elaine, in one case plastering a wall of his apartment with black-and-white surveillance photos of her.Aside from his part in “Seinfeld,” Crombie also had roles in the movies “Seven” (1995), “Rising Sun” (1993) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), among other acting television and movie credits.Crombie was born on June 26, 1952, and grew up in a neighborhood outside of Chicago.His father was an art teacher, and his mother taught home economics, Ms. Kijner said. Crombie trained at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York.Crombie and Kijner met in Boston in the late 1980s before marrying in 1991. Though they divorced after about six years of marriage, the two remained friends.“He was like a rock,” she said. “He was someone you could always call and lean on.”Kijner said Crombie is survived by a brother, Jim. She said Crombie stepped back from acting around 2000, and worked on his other passion, one of which was writing.The comedian Lewis Black commemorated Crombie on social media, calling him a “wonderful actor” and an “immensely talented writer.”“More importantly he was as sweet as he was intelligent and I am a better person for knowing him,” Mr. Black wrote.Larry Charles, a “Seinfeld” writer, also mourned Mr. Crombie.“His portrayal of Joe Davola managed to feel real and grounded and psychopathic and absurd and hilarious all at the same time,” Mr. Charles wrote on social media. “This was a juxtaposition I was always seeking on my Seinfeld episodes and reached a climax of sorts with ‘The Opera.’ Seinfeld was a sitcom that could make you uncomfortable and no guest actor walked that line better than Peter.” More

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    What Inspires Peter Capaldi: Vermeer, ‘Demon Copperhead,’ ‘The Wire’

    Seeing “A Maid Asleep” at the Met, he said, “without wishing to sound pretentious about it, it was the first picture that I developed a relationship with.”Sometimes it pays to stick close to home.The more Peter Capaldi heard as his wife, the producer Elaine Collins, and the writer Paul Rutman hashed out the story line for the new Apple TV+ thriller “Criminal Record,” the more he hinted that he was their man.They cast him as Daniel Hegarty, a veteran detective on the police force, who has a murky past. As Rutman wrote the script, Capaldi’s voice and face were front and center.“That’s the first time that has really happened to me,” said Capaldi, whose adversary, June Lenker — a younger detective contending with misogyny and racism within the force — is played by Cush Jumbo. “I know that that’s who they’re visualizing, so I was able to respond to the material from quite an early date.”Capaldi also had to veil his emotions, a rather tall order for an actor who starred as the 12th Doctor in “Doctor Who.”“I had to hide what was really going on, but at the same time, you still have to have something going on,” he said in a video interview from London, before chatting about the Scottish artist John Byrne and walking in the footsteps of the Romans. “You can’t just sit there.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Vermeer’s ‘A Maid Asleep’Without wishing to sound pretentious about it, it was the first picture that I developed a relationship with. I was in New York doing a show and perhaps going through some melancholic times and carousing too much and enjoying Broadway, but not really that happy myself. So I would often go to the Met and sit and look at that picture if I was feeling anxious. There was a spirit of wisdom and calmness that reached out.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