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    With ‘Echo,’ Alaqua Cox Smashes Boundaries, and Bad Guys’ Faces

    The actress almost didn’t audition for the Marvel superhero role that now has her playing the lead of a new Disney+ series. Thank goodness for peer pressure.“I thought in the back of my head, There’s no way I’m going to get this.”Alaqua Cox was in her home office in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, recalling the moment in early 2020 when some friends forwarded her an online link to a casting call for a deaf Indigenous woman in her 20s. At the time, Cox, now 26, had been hopping from job to job — at a nursing home, at Amazon and FedEx warehouses — and had never acted outside a couple of plays in high school.She could scarcely envision clinching any regular TV gig, let alone the role of a Marvel superhero: Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, a Marvel comic book character. But Cox did get it, and soon she found herself flipping and punching her way through the 2021 Disney+ series “Hawkeye” alongside the stars Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld.Now, just over two years after her professional acting debut, Cox is taking the lead in the five-episode spinoff miniseries, “Echo,” which premiered Tuesday night on Disney+ and Hulu. Picking up where “Hawkeye” left off, “Echo” sees Maya transform herself into a motorcycle-revving, roundhouse-kicking, one-woman army hellbent on vengeance against her former mentor, the criminal boss known as Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio), for his role in her father’s murder.Cox, an Indigenous woman who is deaf, played a Marvel superhero with similar attributes in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye,” her first professional acting gig.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosGrowing up on the Menominee Tribe reservation in Keshena, Wis., Cox, who was born deaf, couldn’t fathom the idea of seeing someone like herself onscreen. She was used to seeing deaf roles being portrayed by hearing characters — “which was such B.S.!” she said in a video call last month, aided by an American Sign Language interpreter, Ashley Change. She rarely saw Indigenous roles onscreen at all.She wasn’t particularly attuned to the superhero genre. Long before sharing scenes with a full-fledged Avenger, Cox mainly consumed Marvel movies passively, as a means of bonding with her Marvel fanatic father, William.“I remember watching with him, sitting on the couch, chilling on my phone,” she said. “My dad would be like: ‘No, no, look! Something cool is about to happen!’”It was peer pressure that ultimately got Cox to submit her audition video. She recalled lying on a raft on the lake at her parents’ house when yet another friend contacted her, forwarding a screenshot of the casting call.“I knew it was a sign for me to give it a shot,” she said. “I went: ‘Oh, fine! Let’s just try it out.’”Cox’s self-recorded video was one of hundreds that by June 2020 had landed on the desk of Sarah Finn, who has been the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s main casting director going back to the 2008 film “Iron Man.” In search of the perfect fit, she had contacted Native American and deaf schools, organizations and cultural centers across the country. Cox’s tape piqued her interest.“She has this beautiful, open, smiling face, and then she showed us her reading, which made it almost impossible to believe it was the same person,” Finn said. “She was able to switch on a dime and channel this other much more powerful and intense character.”“I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on,” Cox said of her father, who died on the same week that Maya’s father’s death was portrayed in “Echo.” Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesOnce Finn had narrowed down her selection to Cox and a few others, she got the studio to assign Cox an acting coach, personal trainer and A.S.L. consultant, all of whom were deaf, to help her prepare for her “Hawkeye” screen test. (“It was just so nice to be able to have those one-on-one encounters with people,” Cox said, “and everything went so smoothly.”)The investment paid off; “Hawkeye” had found its Echo — someone with, as Finn put it, the “mental emotional, physical fortitude to go through the rigors of playing a character like this.”But there was still a lot to learn — on all sides. Of all the new experiences that came flying Cox’s way, she most enjoyed stunt training, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab. Cox is an amputee who uses a prosthetic leg, but that had never stopped her from roughhousing, she said.“I have a brother that’s a year older than me, and we were always rough with each other growing up,” she said. “I had to get him; I was very stubborn! He toughened me up a little bit, so it was easy for me to pick up those kinds of stunts.”By the time Finn was casting for “Hawkeye,” there was already talk of a potential spinoff for the character, Finn said. Cox didn’t learn a new series was in the works until she was halfway through filming her “Hawkeye” scenes. The news came as a surprise, to say the least. Filming for “Echo” began in April 2022, and Cox jumped right in.“One of the very first questions she asked when we first talked was ‘Can I do my own stunts?’” Sydney Freeland, the series showrunner, said of Cox. “I was like, ‘Yeah, go for it!’ She was down to get in there, take some lumps and take some bruises.”“Her entire filming experience before ‘Echo’ was a few days on ‘Hawkeye,’” added Freeland, who also directed episodes. “For her to go from that small sample size to being the lead of a Marvel series, that is a tremendous ask for even the most seasoned actor.”Cox did extensive stunt training to prepare for her role as Maya Lopez, better known as Echo, learning five days a week how to deliver a swift kick and a powerful jab.Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel StudiosWhether Cox was peeling out on a motorcycle or leaping from a moving freight train (while wearing a safety harness, of course), Change or another interpreter were positioned in her sightline, ready to relay the director’s next instructions.But Cox had another key preproduction request of Freeland and her team: Take A.S.L. classes.“I said, ‘Be able to communicate in basic sign language with me,’” Cox said. Many of the cast members learned, taking signing classes a few times a week, she said — several characters use A.S.L. onscreen to communicate with Maya — as did many key members of the crew, including Freeland. “It was really nice when we got on set,” Cox added. “They were able to sign ‘How are you?’ and ‘Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ — those kinds of simple things.”Freeland was reluctant to give herself too much credit: “She’s very generous to say that I learned A.S.L.,” she said. “It was probably like talking to a toddler for her. But she’s beyond gracious and beyond patient.”“Echo” was shot in and around Atlanta, far from Cox’s tight-knit community in Wisconsin. Filming took about three months, and Cox didn’t have any family or friends in the area. It helped being surrounded by a predominantly Indigenous cast, which included Tantoo Cardinal, Graham Greene, Devery Jacobs and Cody Lightning. “It just felt so homey,” she said. “They were like cousins or sisters immediately.”Cox considers it an honor to play Marvel’s first deaf Indigenous superhero, and to provide mainstream representation for amputees. But the success has been bittersweet. Her father — the ultimate fan of both Marvel and his daughter — died in 2021, the same week her character’s father (Zahn McClarnon), who is also named William, was shown meeting his untimely demise in “Hawkeye.”“All of a sudden, these two worlds have collided,” Cox said. “And it was so heart-wrenching.”“But he was so proud of me,” she went on, speaking of her father. “I know he’s looking down on me from heaven, and he’s just cheering me on. I absolutely know it and feel it.” More

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    The EGOT Winner Behind Sondheim’s Signature Sound

    To understand the role of the Broadway orchestrator, seek out the composer Stephen Sondheim’s piano demo for the song “Losing My Mind” from the musical “Follies” and then compare it to the version on the original cast recording. The demo’s tone is wistful and resigned, with a touch of the whiskey bar about it. In the finished version, the song sounds transformed: Ascending notes on the strings, interjections from the brass and crashing cymbals build to a powerful climax, evoking the heartache and inner turmoil contained in the lyric.What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick.“I seem to have a nose for the theater, and it’s really like that,” Tunick, the prolific Broadway orchestrator, said during an interview in his book-lined study on the Upper West Side. “If something works, you can almost smell it.”Sondheim himself called Tunick the “best orchestrator in the history of the theater” during a 2011 video interview with Sony Masterworks. His work can be heard in three very different Sondheim musicals on New York stages right now: “Sweeney Todd,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.”In fact, Tunick, 85, has orchestrated nearly every Sondheim musical since 1970, including “Company,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Into the Woods” and “Passion.” For other composers, he orchestrated “A Chorus Line,” “Nine,” “The Color Purple” and “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.” An EGOT winner (that rare recipient of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards), Tunick won a Tony for his “Titanic” orchestrations in 1997 (the first year the award was presented) and an Academy Award for the film version of “A Little Night Music.” Last fall he became the first orchestrator to have his portrait hung at Sardi’s.Sondheim and Tunick, in 2003, at the City Opera sitzprobe for the musical “A Little Night Music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the Sardi’s event, at least a couple of guests could be heard wondering aloud: What does a Broadway orchestrator actually do?Typically, for a Broadway show of the kind Tunick might orchestrate, the composer provides the vocal part along with some form of accompaniment. That accompaniment can be a basic chord sheet, a fully realized piano part or anything in between. It’s the orchestrator’s task — a long and lonely one, Tunick said — to turn that accompaniment into something an orchestra can perform.There are, of course, more poetic descriptions. In Steven Suskin’s book “The Sound of Broadway Music,” the original “Carousel” orchestrator, Don Walker, likened orchestration to “the clothing of a musical thought”; Hans Spialek, who orchestrated “On Your Toes” and numerous other Rodgers and Hart shows, compared it to “painting a musical picture.”Tunick’s preferred analogy is “lighting for the ears.” He often confers with a show’s lighting designer to determine which colors and shadings will be used onstage. The orchestra, he said, has the ability “to provide its own shadings of light, darkness, warmth and texture to the music and lyrics.”For the Broadway premiere of “Company” in 1970, Tunick fashioned a crisp, gleaming sound that was the aural equivalent of the chrome-and-glass set by Boris Aronson. Tunick conjured a hellacious soundscape for the macabre “Sweeney Todd”: agitated strings, blazing horns and frantic xylophones that evoke the scurrying of rats. For “Merrily We Roll Along,” he replicated the bold, brassy up-tempo sound of 1960s Broadway overtures.From left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff in the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” at the Hudson Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTunick sees to it that the instruments never get in the way of the words. “He is always aware of the lyric and the dramatic moment,” said Joel Fram, the music director of the Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along.” He pointed to that show’s “Our Time” as an example, with its twinkling piano, simple woodwind solos, gentle rhythmic figure on the bassoon and pizzicato cello — a suitable soundtrack for the youthful optimism of the show’s protagonists at that point. “It serves the song rather than overwhelms it.”Charlie Alterman pointed to a favorite orchestration in “Company,” for which he served as the music director of the recent national tour. “It’s a bubbling up of emotion somewhere inside the character of Bobby,” he said, referring to the moment in the final number, “Being Alive,” when, unexpectedly, the melody of “Someone Is Waiting” — an earlier song filled with a yearning for companionship — sneaks in like a dawning realization.“Deep down there’s something that remembers the feeling of ‘Someone Is Waiting’ and wants to be heard,” Alterman said. The choice is intriguing on an intellectual level, “but at a gut level, it does that incredible thing that good music does, where you can’t quite explain it in your mind, but it’s clear as day in your heart.”Tunick remembers sneaking those few notes into “Being Alive” — and that Sondheim was pleased with the addition. “At least it showed him that I was paying attention,” Tunick said.More than merely making the music sound pretty or palatable, a great orchestrator “is also a playwright, telling the story and reflecting character in orchestral sound,” said Michael Starobin, who orchestrated Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” and “Assassins.”As the “Being Alive” example above demonstrates, orchestration “can hint at unspoken secrets,” Tunick said. “Things that the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”ONE PIECE OF MUSIC made a big impression on the young Jonathan Tunick: “Tubby the Tuba,” the 1945 children’s song, centers on a forlorn tuba who longs to play the melody instead of just the bass line. Much like “Peter and the Wolf,” the song highlighted the distinct characters of the individual instruments of the orchestra. “This idea penetrated my growing brain,” he said. “It developed into a lifelong obsession.”Tunick had some perfunctory piano lessons as a youngster growing up in New York — “I sailed through the Diller-Quaile book in a week” — but it was a clarinet, a gift from his amateur clarinetist uncle, that kept his interest.While a student at what is now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, he started his own band and played in the school orchestra as well as in the All City High School Orchestra. He started writing music, majoring in composition at Bard College, before paying his way through Juilliard by performing with the school’s orchestra.He was considerably more interested in what was happening at Birdland than on Broadway. “Musicals at the time were a little stodgy,” he said. “It was disposable popular entertainment. You’d throw it out like a used Kleenex. I was a little hipper than that.”While in college, a girlfriend introduced him to Frank Sinatra — and the possibilities of orchestral arrangement. He was struck by the way Nelson Riddle’s arrangements on Sinatra’s breakup album “In the Wee Small Hours” provided commentary, color and context. “He was tone painting,” Tunick said.College was followed by 10 years of fitful work as an arranger and orchestrator before a big break: orchestrating “Promises, Promises,” whose jazz-inflected score by Burt Bacharach brought a refreshingly contemporary sound to Broadway.Emboldened by that show’s success, Tunick called up Sondheim, whose originality and wit as a composer he had admired since hearing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Tunick offered Sondheim his services for his next project.When he first heard the piano renditions of the songs that would become “Company,” Tunick was taken aback. With a few exceptions — “Barcelona” sounds like Erik Satie by way of Brazil, he observed — the score had a sound entirely of its own. “If anything it was sort of like Stravinsky, but not quite,” Tunick said, citing the peculiar melodies and rhythm of “The Little Things You Do Together” as an example of Sondheim’s startling originality. “What is that? In every case I had to give it careful thought.”Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, and will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.James Estrin/The New York TimesInitially, Tunick wasn’t overly confident in his ability to do justice to the material. “I was terrified,” he said. But, starting with “Company,” Tunick helped define the characteristic Sondheim sound. In contrast to the sumptuous blare of an entire orchestra at full blast, this was a sound defined by crisper lines, purer colors, more instrumental solos, more variation and contrast of tonal effects.That sound is certainly present in “Here We Are,” the new musical about privileged urbanites trapped in an existential nightmare. Befitting the sinister surrealism of the source material — the Luis Buñuel films “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” — Tunick’s underscoring at times resembles the effervescently weird music of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And, once again, the orchestra knows something the characters don’t, greeting the happy exclamation “What a perfect day!” with notes that jar and thud.Orchestrating that show after Sondheim’s death in 2021 was “like going through the letters of a deceased friend,” said Tunick, “editing them for publication.” Tunick was happy with the result. “We went out on a high note,” he added.The musical collaboration will carry on, though.Having already reorchestrated several Sondheim shows — not just the ones he orchestrated originally — Tunick is adapting the score of “A Little Night Music” for full orchestra, rendering it more suitable for performance by symphony orchestras and in opera houses. He will conduct a concert and recording of the new version this year.In an even more profound and lasting way, of course, through cast albums and successive productions, the Sondheim-Tunick collaboration will continue to inspire generations of musical theater lovers — and reward ever closer listening.Tunick’s last meeting with Sondheim turned out to be only weeks before the composer’s death, at a concert of Tunick’s work at Sharon Playhouse in Connecticut. Tunick took the opportunity to say a few words to his longtime collaborator: “I know you hate sentimentality. But I have to tell you how much it’s meant to me, working with you all these years.”As Tunick tearily remembers it, Sondheim put his arm around him, saying, “Jonathan, we’re lucky we met one another.” More

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    Late Night Recaps Donald Trump’s Latest Day in Court

    Jimmy Fallon joked that Trump has so many trials that “at this point, the courtroom sketch artist doesn’t even draw him — she just traces the grooves in her desk.”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 Violent Overthrow of the Government One’Former President Donald Trump attended a court hearing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, where his lawyer argued for presidential immunity for what Stephen Colbert called “the violent overthrow of the government one.”Jimmy Fallon joked that Trump has been part of so many trials that “at this point, the courtroom sketch artist doesn’t even draw him — she just traces the grooves in her desk.”“Trump spends so much time in court, the sketch artists are running out of orange pastels.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump is in court so often he enrolled in PreCheck so he can zip through security.” — JIMMY FALLON“During the hearing, Trump appeared visibly agitated and several times he abruptly became anxious and upset. Eventually, his lawyer handed him an iPad that was playing his favorite episode of ‘Bluey.’” — JIMMY FALLONOne judge pressed Trump’s lawyer on whether presidential immunity would extend to cases such as ordering special forces to kill a political rival.Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump better lock the doors at Mar-a-Lago “because Bazooka Joe Biden has every reason to blow it to kingdom come.”“To recap: Trump’s lawyers are arguing that the president, who is currently Joe Biden, could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rival, who is currently Donald Trump.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So to recap — or to re-recap — Trump and his lawyers are arguing that the president ought to be able to murder his political opponents and then cannot be prosecuted unless he gets impeached. Our commander in chief has godlike powers over life and death as long as his party controls the Senate — and I just wanna say, please vote.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Missing Bolts Edition)“A man in Portland recently found a working iPhone along the side of a road that is believed to have been onboard the Alaskan Airlines plane that had a door plug blow off mid-flight. And, honestly, I’m not sure what’s scarier: having the door blow off your plane, or losing your phone.” — SETH MEYERS“The NTSB, or ‘nut-sub,’ has released its preliminary findings on the door popping off, announcing the panel on the plane may not have been properly attached. Ya think? It reminds me of the NTSB’s groundbreaking report on the Hindenburg: ‘Kaboom.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, the good news is that the bolts that should have held the door in place may not have come loose as was previously feared, OK? The bad news is that it’s possible the bolts were never even installed. Now, I know that sounds like a major screw-up, but they were just following the instructions: Put door on plane. Wonder why you have leftover bolts. Enjoy unlimited leg room.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, in response to this fiasco, the F.A.A. has grounded all 200 Boeing Max 9 planes in the United States, saying it could take four to eight hours to inspect each plane. Well, I think I speak for all travelers when I say take your time! OK? Do not rush. Be thorough. We’ll be at the Chili’s Too, pounding Spice-A-Ritas.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingSeth Meyers skewered his writers’ worst jokes of the new year in Tuesday night’s “Surprise Inspection” segment.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightReneé Rapp will promote her role as Regina George in the new musical movie version of “Mean Girls” on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutJane Curtin, Harriet Sansom Harris, Ben Kingsley and Jade Quon in the 2023 film “Jules,” directed by Marc Turtletaub.Linda Kallerus/Bleecker StreetFrom books to movies to art shows, aliens are having yet another pop culture moment. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 9 Recap: Cowboy Hitler

    “The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman,” Roy confesses. It’s safe to wager Dot never felt the same.Season 5, Episode 9: ‘The Useless Hand’“You Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?”You never want to get a question like that from your father-in-law, even when you’ve been using your post as the county sheriff to funnel money into their far-right militia for some imagined holy war against “the deep state.” But the question itself, posed to Roy Tillman, suggests the answer: Roy has always been Hitler in the bunker — just as Hitler himself was inevitably Hitler in the bunker — yet he has flashed enough tough-guy charisma to bring other “patriots” into his orbit. He has been cosplaying Ammon Bundy for votes, money and unchecked power, but sometimes an actor immerses himself too deeply into a role. And now he has the feds surrounding his ranch.Throughout the season, we have seen examples of Roy’s brutality and psychopathy, the ease with which he follows his impulse toward extreme violence. But Dot, in a scene where she is cornered by his current wife and trying to speak to their shared experiences, has it right: “He’s weak.” If anything, that weakness makes him more dangerous, especially as his options start to become more limited and he evokes the Masada, an ancient fortress where Jewish rebels made their last stand against the Roman Empire. (As the legend has it, the two-year siege ended in a mass suicide by the rebels.) Last week, Dot was correct in saying that Roy had no plan for what to do after bringing her back to the ranch, other than treating her like a horse that needed to be broken.Much of this week’s episode takes place during this last stand at Tillman Ranch, as federal agents roused by Danish’s disappearance and Dot’s kidnapping finally have urgent cause to hold Roy accountable. Amid the chaos that follows, the show takes full stock of Roy as a fake cowboy, driven by feeling rather than calculation, despite the power he has been able to accumulate. A rational leader would know that shooting the lawyer and right-hand of Minnesota’s billionaire debt queen would not go unanswered, but he was embarrassed and angry and wanted to put this smug slickster in his place.As for Dot, he confesses, “The most I ever felt, I felt for that woman.” That’s when he decides to kill her, too.Of all the fine casting choices this season, Jon Hamm may be the savviest, because memories of “Mad Men” have us trusting in his relative infallibility on the job, even if his Don Draper proves dramatically less certain off the clock. Hamm is such a magnetic cult of personality that comedies like “30 Rock” and the underrated “Confess, Fletch” have made a point of turning him into a grinning buffoon. “Fargo” has done likewise, but much more gradually, as Roy’s biblical authority over Stark County has loosened along with his grip over his emotions. His plea to his patriots, “After they murder me, they’re coming for you next,” has the ring of Trumpian victimization to it. And they will dutifully follow him off the cliff.Roy’s desperation raises the stakes for a thrilling penultimate episode that finds Dot scrambling for safety on the ranch, having seen where he buries the bodies. She can’t have anticipated being in the crossfire between the feds and a militia stocked with heavily armed weekend warriors, but she knows enough about Roy’s state of mind to see where things might be headed. When she works her way back into the house, which is full of little trap doors and hidden passageways that she knows enough to exploit, she gets a call in to Wayne before Karen puts a rifle on her.Given how much the season has been about adversarial women finding common cause, it’s a relief that Dot’s attempt to bond with Karen fails. The show has already gone perhaps too far in softening up Lorraine, and it risks flattening the female characters if they’re all of a similar mindset. The threat that Dot represents to Karen, who rages about how the bedroom hasn’t changed since she left (“We sleep in your filth”), suggests that Roy is bored by his current wife’s compliance. That’s why he needs her to role-play in bed.As Dot finds herself the bleakest possible hiding spot while Witt Farr and a band of agents strike out to locate her, poor Gator comes stumbling back into the picture, led along by Ole Munch, who enacts his own version of biblical justice for when Gator killed his host-of-sorts and made off with his money. Roy knows right away that his son has made a grave mistake, but shows only disappointment when Munch drags Gator back to the ranch by his neck, having carved out his eyes with a hot knife. With no mother or mother-figure left in his life, Gator had opted to please his father, and his reward is to be abandoned in the fog, unable to summon any sympathy from a hard, narrow, narcissistic idol. His childlike pleas for “daddy” are carried off into the mist.Munch does show mercy to the woman who mangled his ear, however. With Roy’s men closing in on the “grave” where she imagines no one will find her, Munch does his part to liberate her by taking them out and lifting her to freedom. “To fight a tiger in a cage is not a fair fight,” he tells her. His beef with Roy appears to be settled. Or maybe he just respects her agency. And prowess.3 Cent StampsA very small Coen reference of note in this episode: While negotiating for his life at Munch’s shack, Gator offers all sorts of illicit goods, including drugs, a flamethrower and finally prostitutes. “Sure gets lonely out here,” he says, echoing a line from a witness in “Fargo,” who remembers Steve Buscemi’s character soliciting prostitutes for himself and his cohort in their lake hide-out.“An old woman watches young men play a game. She drinks. She drinks because her own son has spit the nipple from his mouth. She bothers no one. And yet, you killed her.” Munch’s centuries-old, biblical sense of justice is also quite stilted.“What’s the point of being a billionaire if I can’t have someone killed?” Lorraine probably isn’t the first person to say a line like that.Funny advice for Dot on the phone. Lorraine: “Now put your big-girl pants on and get in the fight.” Indira, with the saner follow-up: “Dorothy, don’t get in the fight.”The Trump-era commentary comes through in Meyer’s clarifying the meaning of the term “witch hunt” to Roy: “You know what a ‘witch hunt’ is, right? Not witches hunting men, but men killing women to keep them in line.” More

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    Review: For Jews, an Unanswered ‘Prayer for the French Republic’

    In Joshua Harmon’s play about the legacies of antisemitism, a Parisian family must decide when it’s time to get out.Such is the sadness of our world that plays about antisemitism, however historical, cannot help but be prescient. Take “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s sprawling family drama about the Salomons, Jews who have “been in France more than a thousand years,” as one of them puts it, still sounding provisional. With violent incidents on the rise, and a fascistic, Nazi-adjacent party gaining in the polls, should they finally seek safety elsewhere?When it ran Off Broadway in 2022, “Prayer for the French Republic” already seemed painfully timely, with the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the murder of a Holocaust survivor in Paris and other antisemitic atrocities barely in the rearview mirror. Two years later, with so much more awfulness to choose from, Harmon, revising his script for Broadway, has cut references to those events. What is too much for the world is way too much for the play.And the play, for all its urgency, is already way too much. Running just over three hours, “Prayer for the French Republic,” which opened on Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is still not long enough to do justice to the multiple histories it wants to tell. In the manner of prestige television series, but compressed for the stage to the point of confusion, it tries to dramatize the largest and most intractable world issues within the microcosm of a single family, creating an impossible burden on both.The play also revisits an earlier time, alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s with, from left, Daniel Oreskes, Nancy Robinette, Ethan Haberfield and Ari Brand.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat this Manhattan Theater Club production, directed by David Cromer, remains mostly riveting is the result of the richness of Harmon’s novelistic detail — and the exceptional skill of the principal actors in realizing it. Chief among them is Betsy Aidem, as Marcelle Salomon Benhamou, a psychiatrist living in Paris in 2016 who seems to need a psychiatrist herself. Overprotective and yet hypercritical of her two children, she loses control when one of them, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), is beaten up by antisemitic thugs near the school where he teaches.Marcelle’s frenzied response creates a fissure in the family that the play then proceeds to pry wide open. Her husband, Charles Benhamou (Nael Nacer), a physician who emigrated to France from Algeria when conditions became impossible for Jews in the early 1960s, eventually concludes that, like his native country then, his adopted one now is profoundly unsafe. Familiar with sudden uprootings, he wants to move as soon as possible — to Israel.Pointing out that Israel is no one’s idea of a safe haven, Marcelle is at first inalterably opposed to the idea. But it is less her fear of the Middle East than her connection to France that compels her to stay. Her elderly father, Pierre (Richard Masur), runs the last of the piano stores that the Salomons built into a national brand, with 22 stores, over five generations starting in 1855. A gorgeous, amber-colored grand, with “Salomon” spelled in gold on the fallboard, is the first and last thing we see in the show.There are few pieces of furniture harder to pack than a grand piano, which here becomes symbolic of the gift Jews have made to French culture and the expectation of permanent welcome the gift would seem to have earned them. That it hasn’t is the story’s heartbreak.But France is hardly the whole story, as Harmon shows us in alternating scenes set in the mid-1940s. Somehow left untouched by the German occupation of Paris, Marcelle’s great-grandparents Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes) await word of the fate of their family at the end of the war. Soon, their son Lucien (Ari Brand) returns with his son, Pierre (Ethan Haberfield) — the old man of the later scenes but then just 15. Both father and son are obviously traumatized by their time in Auschwitz. And where is everyone else?You can probably guess. But if the scenes from the earlier period lend pathos to the later one, with which they frequently interpenetrate, little flows back from the later to the earlier. The 1940s material is sad but dutiful. Similarly, three characters who take up a lot of the play’s energy in the 2010s do not actually contribute much to its central conflict. One is Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Anthony Edwards): aggressively atheistic, disdainful of Sabbaths and seders, nasty without apparent cause except to provide cover for his otherwise contextless presence as the narrator.Ranson, left, and Benhamou clash over their opposing views about Israel.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSlightly more integrated, and much more entertaining, is Marcelle and Charles’s daughter, Elodie (Frances Benhamou), a frequently pajamafied, hilariously logorrheic, self-involved know-it-all riding out the tail end of a two-year manic-depressive episode. (If you saw Harmon’s 2012 play, “Bad Jews,” she’ll remind you of Daphna Feygenbaum, an early version of the type.) Her punching bag is Molly (Molly Ranson), a distant cousin who visits Paris during her college year abroad. Both Marcelle and Elodie lay into Molly constantly, as if her naïveté, which they attribute to her being a pampered American, were a crime against Judaism.Though Ranson makes as good a case on Molly’s behalf as the script will allow — she played the object of Daphna’s fury in “Bad Jews,” so she knows the territory — her conflict with the Benhamou women, like her budding romance with dreamy Daniel, is a loose end and a diversion: a season-two development in a one-season story. She is, at least, more likable than the Parisians. Marcelle’s frenzies and Elodie’s diatribes (one lasts a withering 17 minutes) tip the tone into psychiatric cabaret, leaving the antisemitic trauma to jostle for dramatic space with the garden-variety antisocial kind, eventually to be overwhelmed by it.Is it Harmon’s point that “bad” Jews like the Salomons in the 2010s, perhaps made neurotic in the first place by antisemitism, have as much right to the protection of their homeland as unimpeachably “good” ones, like their forebears in the 1940s? In any case, a right to our attention is a different matter, especially as the characters’ fiercely defended opinions grow repetitive and perseverative — and then flip radically, without apparent motivation. By the third act, the arguments have stripped their gears completely, and the play ends in sentimental exhaustion.That exhaustion is one of the few elements of naturalism (to be a Jew is to be morally exhausted) in a mostly expressionistic production. Like many Cromer stagings, “Prayer for the French Republic” is richly and darkly lit (in this case by Amith Chandrashaker) and moves among periods and locations with exquisite smoothness on tracks and turntables (sets by Takeshi Kata). The original music, by Daniel Kluger, sounds like Jewish memory, led by the cheerful-baleful tang of a clarinet.But like Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” “Prayer for the French Republic” (its title the name of a blessing recited in French synagogues for 200 years) gets lost in its central question: How can Jews know if it’s time to leave yet another home, in a history of hundreds, where they think they are safe but may soon find out otherwise? The prayer that they might not have to leave at all — the prayer for the end of antisemitism itself — has not been answered yet.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 18 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes. More

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    Roundabout to Stage ‘Pirates of Penzance’ and ‘Yellow Face’ on Broadway

    Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit on Broadway, said it would produce the three shows next season.Roundabout Theater Company, the biggest nonprofit operating on Broadway, is planning to stage a jazz-inflected production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Gilbert and Sullivan’s famed 19th-century comic operetta, in the spring of 2025, the organization said Tuesday.Next season it also plans to stage the first Broadway productions of two plays: “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s work about a group of Iranians trying to learn English, which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama, and “Yellow Face,” David Henry Hwang’s semi-autobiographical play sparked by the controversy over the casting of a white performer as a Eurasian character in the original production of “Miss Saigon.”All three shows will be staged at the Todd Haimes Theater, which is currently called the American Airlines but is about to be renamed for the Roundabout chief executive and artistic director who died last year after four decades with the organization.The announcement, which also includes plans for two Off Broadway plays and the promise of an Off Off Broadway work, indicates that Roundabout is planning its most robust season since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a financially devastating period that, for Roundabout, has been followed by fewer productions and smaller casts. Although revivals of classic musicals were once Roundabout’s bread and butter, “The Pirates of Penzance” will be the first musical production to begin at Roundabout in six years.“We’re here, and we’re producing, and we’re producing some exciting stuff,” said Scott Ellis, a longtime Haimes collaborator who is serving as Roundabout’s interim artistic director, and who is expected to stay in that role for at least two years. “It felt important to say that we’re committed to producing as many shows as we used to.”“The Pirates of Penzance,” a comedy about an indentured pirate apprentice who falls in love with a military officer’s daughter, was once a staple of American theater, and it has been staged a whopping 26 times on Broadway, starting in 1879. But the last Broadway revival was in 1981.This new production, directed by Ellis, features a reconceived book, score and setting — it is to be set in New Orleans, with a framing device imagining that Gilbert and Sullivan staged “The Pirates of Penzance” there. The script has been adapted and updated (the female characters are more capable than in historic productions, for example) by Rupert Holmes, who has also written some new lyrics; the score has been reorchestrated with jazz stylings by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters.The show is to star Ramin Karimloo, last seen on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “Funny Girl,” and David Hyde Pierce, best known for the television show “Frasier” and now featured Off Broadway, at the Shed, in Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous musical, “Here We Are.” Karimloo will play the Pirate King, while Pierce will play Major General Stanley as well as Gilbert, who is now a character explaining to the audience the adaptation’s conceit. The two test-drove the roles at a one-night Roundabout benefit concert in 2022.The production of “Yellow Face,” which is to start performances in September, will star Daniel Dae Kim, who in 2016 played the King of Siam in a Broadway revival of “The King and I” and is an alumnus of the television shows “Lost” and the “Hawaii Five-0” reboot. The play is to be directed by Leigh Silverman, who in 2007 directed productions of it in Los Angeles (at the Mark Taper Forum) and New York (at the Public Theater). Kim recently recorded an audio version of the play for Audible, also directed by Silverman.“It feels more relevant now than it did even when it was originally produced, so we made a big push to give the play its due,” Kim said in an interview. “Representation has been a big issue in my career and my life, and this play’s subject matter is really the issue of representation. In some sense it’s a time capsule, but it’s also a barometer for where we are today. And it’s also very funny and entertaining, because no one goes to theater to be taught a lesson — we go to theater to be entertained.”The production of “English,” which is to start performances in December, is to be directed by Knud Adams, who also directed the Off Broadway production in 2022 at Atlantic Theater Company.Roundabout is also planning to stage two new plays Off Broadway next season: “The Counter,” about a friendship between a waitress and a customer at a small-town diner, written by Meghan Kennedy and directed by David Cromer, and “Liberation,” about a friendship among six Ohio women, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White. And the company said it would stage an Off Off Broadway production in its underground space, but that it has not yet chosen that show. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Isn’t Expecting an Apology From Aaron Rodgers

    Kimmel said although the N.F.L. star may believe that Kimmel is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, it’s more likely that Rodgers “is mad at me for making fun of his topknot.”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.Flag on the PlayOn his first show of the new year, Jimmy Kimmel addressed recent comments that the N.F.L. quarterback Aaron Rodgers made about him in connection with Jeffrey Epstein. During an appearance on ESPN’s “The Pat McAfee Show” last Tuesday, Rodgers insinuated that Kimmel was nervous about the publication of some court documents because they would reveal a link between Kimmel and Epstein.On Monday night, Kimmel said Rodgers might actually believe his “false and very damaging statements,” but that the more likely scenario is “he doesn’t actually believe that — he just said it because he’s mad at me for making fun of his topknot and his lies about being vaccinated.”Kimmel cited Rodgers’ “Thanksgiving Day Parade-sized ego” as part of the problem and said he wasn’t expecting an apology, but he did want to differentiate between the jokes made on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and flat-out lies.“We say a lot of things on this show — we don’t make up lies. In fact, we have a team of people who work very hard to sift through the facts and reputable sources before I make a joke, and that’s an important distinction. A joke about someone — even when that someone is Donald Trump. Even a person who lies from the minute he wakes up until the minute he’s smearing orange makeup on his MyPillow at night — even he deserves that consideration, and we give it to him. Because the truth still matters, and when I do get something wrong, which happens on rare occasions, you know what I do? I apologize for it, which is what Aaron Rodgers should do, which is what a decent person would do. But I bet he won’t. If he does, you know what I’ll do? I’ll accept his apology and move on.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But here’s the thing: I spent years doing sports. I’ve seen guys like him before. Aaron Rodgers has a very high opinion of himself. Because he had success on the football field, he believes himself to be an extraordinary being. He genuinely thinks that because God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he’s smarter than everyone else. The idea that his brain is just average is unfathomable to him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We learned during Covid somehow he knows more about science than scientists. A guy who went to community college then got into Cal on a football scholarship and didn’t graduate; someone who never spent a minute studying the human body is an expert in the field of immunology.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Aaron got two A’s on his report card — they were both in the word ‘Aaron,’ OK?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“They let him host ‘Jeopardy’ for two weeks, now he knows everything.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Revisionist History Edition)“Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is facing criticism after she recently failed to cite slavery as the leading cause of the Civil War. Not only that, she’s facing a D in social studies.” — SETH MEYERS“Judges? Oh, no, I’m sorry. The answer we were looking for was ‘slavery.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Oh, yes, she had Black friends, but then they heard her opinion on what caused the Civil War.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yes, slavery is the obvious answer to ‘What caused the Civil War?’ Just like ‘Donald Trump’ is the obvious answer to ‘What caused Civil War 2?’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Monday’s “Tonight Show,” the “America’s Got Talent” host Mel B shared her plans to commemorate the Spice Girls’ 30th anniversary with a postage stamp featuring her face.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe pop star Dua Lipa will stop by Tuesday’s “Late Night,” one month after day drinking with Seth Meyers.Also, Check This OutPrince, bathed in purple light and rainy weather, performed at the Super Bowl in 2007.Doug MillsForty years after its release, Prince’s Oscar-winning rock musical film “Purple Rain” is being adapted for the stage. More

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    Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ Is Becoming a Musical

    Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is lined up to write the book, and Lileana Blain-Cruz will direct.“Purple Rain,” Prince’s breakout rise-of-a-rock-star film, is being adapted into a stage musical featuring some of the pop musician’s best-loved songs.Orin Wolf, the producer who previously shepherded the Tony-winning adaptation of “The Band’s Visit” to the stage, and who is currently backing the theatrical adaptation of another music industry movie, “Buena Vista Social Club,” announced on Monday that he is developing the musical, based on the 1984 film.The stage adaptation will feature a book by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner whose family drama, “Appropriate,” is now running on Broadway. The director is Lileana Blain-Cruz, whose revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” (with new material contributed by Jacobs-Jenkins) had a short run on Broadway in 2022.“Purple Rain” is about an ambitious musician, called the Kid, facing strife with his parents, his love interest, and his fellow musicians. The film won an Academy Award for best original song score.Wolf did not announce any other details, including when or where there might be an initial production (most musicals have runs either Off Broadway or outside New York before braving the high costs and intense glare of Broadway). Prince died in 2016; representatives of the rightsholders to his music were quoted in a news release describing themselves as supportive of the production. More