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    Sondheim Was a Critical Darling. Since His Death, He’s a Hitmaker, Too.

    The musicals of Stephen Sondheim often struggled at the box office during his lifetime, but since his death several have become huge hits on Broadway.Stephen Sondheim, the great musical theater composer and lyricist, was widely acclaimed as a genius, but during his lifetime he had a bumpy track record at the box office, with many of his shows losing money.In death, however, his shows have flourished.A revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — which was so unpopular when it debuted in 1981 that it closed 12 days after opening — is now the hottest ticket on Broadway. A lavish revival of “Sweeney Todd” that opened in March is already profitable, and at a time when almost everything new on Broadway is failing.Meanwhile, Sondheim’s unfinished and existentialist final work, “Here We Are,” is now the longest-running show in the brief history of the Shed, a performing arts center in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, where luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Lin-Manuel Miranda signed up as producers to make sure no expense was spared on the Sondheim send-off.“There just seems to be an unbounded appetite for him,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed.The posthumous Sondheim bump appears to have resulted from a confluence of factors.The big Broadway revivals feature fan-favorite talent — the “Merrily” cast includes Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame, while “Sweeney” is led by the celebrated baritone Josh Groban — reflecting a desire by top-tier entertainers to champion, and tackle, Sondheim’s tricky but rewarding work.The revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with, from left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso: The outpouring of praise for Sondheim upon his death, when he was hailed as a transformational creative force, seems to have spurred new interest in his work. And his shows, some of which felt challenging when they first appeared, are now more familiar, thanks to decades of stage productions and film adaptations. Plus, according to most critics, the current revivals are good.“Sondheim went from being too avant-garde to being a sure bet, like you’re doing ‘A Christmas Carol’,” said Danny Feldman, the producing artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, a Southern California nonprofit that won this year’s Regional Theater Tony Award. The playhouse devoted the first half of 2023 to Sondheim: A production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” a show once seen as esoteric, became one its best-selling musicals ever, and a production of “A Little Night Music” was not far behind. “The interest was shocking,” Feldman said.One side effect of his popularity: Ticket prices are high. “Merrily” is facing strong demand from Sondheim lovers and Radcliffe fans, but its capacity is limited; it is playing in a theater with just 966 seats. That has made it the most expensive ticket on Broadway, with an average ticket price of $250 and a top ticket price of $649 during the week that ended Dec. 17. “Sweeney” is also pricey, with tickets that same week averaging $175 and topping out at $399. (Both shows offer lower-priced tickets, particularly after the holidays.)“We shouldn’t be criticized for being a hit and paying back investors who have taken a big punt in New York,” said the “Merrily” lead producer, Sonia Friedman. “Most shows right now are not working, and therefore when something comes along that does, let’s get the investors some money back.”In life, Sondheim was often seen as more of an artistic success than a commercial one — a critical darling with a passionate but finite fan base, leading to short runs for many of the shows whose scores he composed, especially during their first productions. A few shows, particularly “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” were hits from the start, but some musicals that are now viewed as masterpieces, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” did not recoup their costs during their original productions.“It’s not like he fell out of favor and has been rediscovered. He’s always been revered and valued and prized by everybody who loves theater, but we also have to recognize that several of his shows, when they first premiered, were not understood and were not embraced,” said Jordan Roth, the producer who brought “Into the Woods” back to Broadway in the summer of 2022, seven months after Sondheim’s death. Now, Roth said, “The grip on our hearts seems to have tightened.”“Into the Woods,” a modestly scaled production, featured the pop singer Sara Bareilles and a troupe of Broadway stars. It recouped its costs and then had a five-month national tour.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” did not recoup its investment, but the current revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford is making a profit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn February, seven weeks after “Into the Woods” concluded on Broadway, “Sweeney Todd” began previews. It’s a much bigger production — big cast, big orchestra — that was capitalized for up to $14.5 million. It has sold strongly from the get-go (during the week that ended Dec. 10, it grossed $1.8 million) and has already recouped its capitalization costs.“I’m sorry that I can’t call him and say look at these grosses. He definitely would have had a sarcastic statement in response, but he would have liked it secretly,” said the show’s lead producer, Jeffrey Seller. “Who doesn’t want to be affirmed by the audience?”Groban and his co-star Annaleigh Ashford are ending their runs in the show on Jan. 14; the show’s success has prompted the producers to extend the run, with Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster taking over the lead roles on Feb. 9.“It has morphed into being under the umbrella of an enormous and deserved celebration of Sondheim’s work and legacy and life,” Groban said. “All of a sudden there’s grief involved, and wanting to do him proud, and what-would-Steve-do feelings.”“Merrily,” which began previews in September, is the biggest turnabout, given that its original production is one of Broadway’s most storied flops. The current revival, capitalized for up to $13 million, has been selling out.“Of all the things he wanted, he wanted as many people as possible to be in the theater watching the shows, and he just missed it,” said Maria Friedman, the director of the “Merrily” revival and a longtime Sondheim collaborator.In November, 10 members of the company of the original ill-fated “Merrily” attended the revival and marveled at the reversal of fortunes.“It’s thrilling to see the show finally get its due,” said Gary Stevens, who was an 18-year-old in the original “Merrily” ensemble, and who is now 60 and works an executive at a chauffeuring company in Florida. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there was a sense of bittersweetness. We look at this revival’s success as, in some ways, our success, because the day after closing, even with how exhausted we were and how sad we were, we recorded a kick-ass album that kept that show alive, so that it became a legendary flop and cult classic that kept going and going, and now this.”Another member of the original “Merrily” cast, the actress and singer Liz Callaway, was nominated this year for a Grammy Award for a live album of Sondheim songs, one of two collections of Sondheim songs nominated in the 2024 Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. “I think a new generation is falling in love with Sondheim now,” she said.“Here We Are” is a little different. It is not expected to recoup its costs, or to transfer to Broadway, but both the leadership of the Shed and the commercial producer who raised money to finance the production proclaimed it a success.“It was always about honoring Steve’s legacy,” said the producer, Tom Kirdahy. “And we hope that it has another life, in London or on the road.”In London, there are also two Sondheim shows running. “Old Friends,” a revue of Sondheim songs with a cast led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is in the West End. And at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a revival of Sondheim’s rarely staged “Pacific Overtures” opened earlier this month to critical praise.“For those of us who wanted to do right by him, this is a year I’ll never forget,” Groban said. “I just hope he’s smiling down.” More

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    ‘The Crown’ and What the U.K. Royal Family Would Like Us to Forget

    Netflix’s sprawling drama has never been about revealing anything new, but instead speaks to several furtive truths about the British monarchy.Over the last seven years, “The Crown” has been criticized by numerous prominent Britons on behalf of their royal family.After former Prime Minister John Major described the show as a “barrel-load of nonsense,” and the actress Judi Dench — who is friends with Queen Camilla — accused it of “crude sensationalism” in 2022, Netflix labeled the show a “fictional dramatization.” But these complaints misunderstood the sprawling drama’s appeal for many British fans and, for the real royal family, its usefulness.The show has never been about revealing anything new. Instead, it has resurfaced what the royal family would most like us to forget. “The Crown” has, over six seasons, spoken to several furtive British truths: the public perception of the monarchy, the self-preservation strategies of a family preoccupied with becoming irrelevant and the family’s rigorous quashing of internal dissent.In Seasons 1 and 2, Matt Smith played Prince Philip and Claire Foy was Queen Elizabeth II. Des Willie/NetflixThe glossy dramatization of these truths is partly why the popularity of “The Crown” has endured, finding an audience in Britain even among people who want to end the monarchy or are indifferent to it. I am one of the former.On the show’s premiere in 2016, I was captivated by Claire Foy’s depiction of a young Elizabeth thrust onto the throne prematurely following tragedy, entertained by Olivia Colman’s more confident queen who had more challenging relationships with her prime ministers, and have stayed loyal to her story as Imelda Staunton closes off “The Crown” as a pious matriarch and meddling parent.Much of the show has been devoted to the royals’ romantic woes, but over the years I have been more interested in its depiction of the extent the crown will go to protect its power and traditions.In Season 4, Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) begins her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles. Des Willie/NetflixThis was clear in episodes in which Elizabeth, as a princess, traveled to Kenya to try to counter the country’s independence movement (Season 1); the family hid the queen’s disabled cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, in an institution (Season 4); and a 20-year-old Diana becomes trapped in a loveless marriage so that the future king can have a chaste-seeming bride (Season 4).Still, the show has often neglected to explore the monarchy’s true wealth and political influence. The crown’s real estate portfolio is valued at 16.5 billion pounds ($21 billion), and the monarch enjoys a broad exemption from most taxes, as well as many other laws. Under official rules, members of the royal family must not be criticized in Parliament, even as, according to a report from The Guardian, Charles has written directly to the country’s top politicians to ask for changes to national policy.In June 1981, members of Britain’s royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London after attending an annual parade to celebrate the monarch’s birthday. Bob Dear/Associated PressIn Britain, what the public sees of the royal family is carefully stage-managed: We are presented with recorded Christmas broadcasts and gentle waves from chariots and balconies to fawn over as we wave our little Union Jacks. The “Palace,” as the royal institution is known, would like us to know the family through their carefully curated charity work, patronage, garden parties, weddings and jubilees.So there is something thrilling about the depiction of such a powerful family onscreen without their control. It’s the same pleasure that many of us will have gotten from watching Oprah’s interview by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, or reading Harry’s memoir, “Spare.”Britons eager for an unvarnished view of the royal family have, in previous decades, pored over the intrusive paparazzi shots of Princess Diana on a yacht or Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, having her toes sucked on vacation. But because “The Crown” is a “fictional dramatization,” it can be enjoyed guilt-free, without having to engage with the sleaze of Britain’s tabloid newspapers.Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) in Season 5.Keith Bernstein/NetflixPerhaps it is no surprise that anonymous sources have relayed accounts of the royal family being upset by a show that dramatizes moments they would rather forget. But this doesn’t take into account the degree to which “The Crown” has humanized the people sitting at the top of Britain’s rigid class system.Louis Staples, a Harper’s Bazaar columnist and frequent commenter on “The Crown,” points out that, these days, “intimacy is one of the most valuable currencies in our culture. When people share with us deeply enough — their flaws, their failures, their ups and downs — we form a connection with them.”Queen Elizabeth was famous for not sharing the messy, human and emotional parts of herself with her public, and for encouraging the rest of her family to do the same. The public relations strategy “never complain, never explain,” considered a core principle of her reign, holds that silence is dignified and public expression damaging.In the final season, the queen asks Prince William (Ed McVey), left, and Prince Harry (Luther Ford) for their thoughts on whether Prince Charles should be able to marry again. NetflixBut story lines on “The Crown” — like the suggestion of infidelity between Prince Philip and Penelope Knatchbull or young William and Harry’s heartache after losing their mother — may have served to humanize people generally kept at a distance from the public.Given that the real existential threat to the royal family is not public hatred, but total irrelevance — especially since the queen’s death — “The Crown” has given the Windsors an invaluable kind of outreach, even if they have had to swallow it like bitter medicine.Once the show has ended and viewers are no longer gripped by discovering the (yes, fictionalized) stories of the real people behind the onscreen characters, the royal family might find themselves wishing for one more season. More

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    Best TV Episodes of 2023

    “Bob’s Burgers,” “Frontline,” “Killing It” and “A Spy Among Friends” were among the series that gave us some of the best episodes of television this year.Great TV series can run for dozens or hundreds of hours, but we still experience them a piece at a time. This list is dedicated to those pieces: a handful of the best episodes that Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I saw in a year of professional viewership.As usual, this list isn’t comprehensive — it wouldn’t be if it were 10 times as long. And as usual, I avoided repeating shows that were on my Best of 2023 list. So I could have, but didn’t, include standout installments from “The Last of Us” (“Long, Long Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding”) and “The Bear” (for me, “Forks” not “Fishes,” nothing against the latter). Consider it a starting point, and feel free to add your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Australian Survivor’Season 8, Episode 7: ‘Return of the King’“Australian Survivor” has been outplaying the U.S. version for a while now, and nowhere was that more evident than in this jaw-dropping episode from the “Heroes vs. Villains” season. The episode’s final tribal council featured a masterstroke of psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as one of the most telegenic antagonists of any version of the show. American “Survivor” is still a delight, but this iteration currently wears the crown. (Streaming on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 14, Episode 2: ‘The Amazing Rudy’It’s a rare comedy that can maintain quality, and even improve, going into its 14th season. It’s an even rarer one that, this long into its run, can pull off a striking and effective departure from form like this side-character spotlight. Shunting the Belcher family to the wings for most of the episode, this half-hour dove into the family history of the anxious grade-schooler Regular-Sized Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he searched for a magic trick that could save an awkward dinner with his divorced parents. Funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting, “The Amazing Rudy” showed that this burger joint can pull off a distinctive special of the week. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIKA scene from the “Amelia” episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” where Louise takes a class assignment personally.Fox‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 13, Episode 22: ‘Amelia’You could fill this list with episodes of “Bob’s Burgers”; from the past 12 months, “The Plight Before Christmas” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” also come to mind. The Season 13 finale typified the Fox comedy’s embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generosity of spirit, as the compulsively competitive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonized over a multimedia report on her hastily chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her eventual triumph was a satisfying and gently comic victory for all ambitious, difficult, undervalued girls and women. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE’Carol & the End of the World’Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisters’To the burgeoning genre of big-hearted apocalypse stories (“Station Eleven,” “The Last of Us”) add this adult animated series, set in the months before a looming planetary collision, which arrived too late for my annual best-TV list. Through a series of home-video snippets, this episode follows the introverted Carol (Martha Kelly) on a hiking trip with her exuberant sister, Elena (Bridget Everett), as the mismatched siblings try to bond before doomsday. (Streaming on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK‘Cunk on Earth’Season 1, Episode 3: ’The Renaissance Will not be Televised’I could probably have picked any of the five ridiculous episodes of this history mockumentary, but I’m partial to the Renaissance installment. In it, Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) walks us through some of the major events between 1440 and 1830 or so, with her dopey and bizarre questions. She and a da Vinci expert look at “The Vitruvian Man,” and she asks, “What’s it for?” In praising the artist’s Last Supper, she marvels, “You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.” As for the French Revolution, she explains that “The guillotine was specifically designed to be the most humane way to decapitate someone in front of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is dorky buffoonery at its best. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSDave Burd, seated, as Dave, with child-actor versions of himself.Byron Cohen/FX‘Dave’Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy about the rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) can be raunchy and scatological and outrageous. This third-season episode, however — well, it was still all that but also insightful and sweet. As the title character returns home to shoot a video about a childhood romance — cast with a slew of child-actor versions of himself as well as his actual young love, now grown up — the ensuing chaos becomes a reflection on celebrity, memory and the responsibilities of memoir. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Extraordinary’Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Surprise!’In “Extraordinary,” everyone on earth gets a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn’t gotten hers yet. While the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives some of the show, it is secondary to the loving but bickering friendship with her roommate and bestie, her tense relationship with her mother and her budding romance with a shape-shifter who entered her life as a stray cat. This all comes to a head in the season finale, when a big, messy party pulls together all the show’s quirky characters and plot lines — and then just when things are feeling happy and resolved, it ends with a perfect record-scratch twist. Ah, the best kind of hurts so good. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONSIn a scene from “Frontline,” the photographer Evgeniy Maloletka picks his way through the aftermath of a Russian attack in Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022.Mstyslav Chernov/Associated Press‘Frontline’Season 42, Episode 5: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’This unaffectedly brutal documentary, filmed by the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, belongs on every list of the year’s best movies; through the good offices of “Frontline,” which was involved in its production, it can be included here. In backyards, on debris-strewn streets and in the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov records the anger, despair and utter bewilderment of Ukrainian civilians during the early days of the Russian invasion. And as he and his team sprint across open areas and hunker down in flimsy stairwells, he narrates their desperate efforts to get the news to the world. (Streaming on PBS.org.) HALE’Killing It’Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Mallory’Claudia O’Doherty gave one of 2023’s best comedic performances in Peacock’s capitalism satire, as Jillian Glopp, a gig worker turned partner in a struggling saw palmetto farm. In the second season’s second episode, the theft of her beloved car — a budget Kia she’s named “Mallory” — cracks her sweet disposition, turning her into a raging vengeance seeker and unleashing the frustration of years scraping by in a dog-eat-dog economy. O’Doherty filters her character’s crackup through a blazing beam of Aussie sunshine. (Streaming on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK‘A Spy Among Friends’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Snow’Alexander Cary’s miniseries dramatizing the last days of friendship between the traitorous British spy Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) and his fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) emphasized subtle, complex psychology over spy craft (though it had that too). This may be why it didn’t receive the notice it should have. The penultimate episode, in which the full dimensions of Philby’s downfall became apparent, was — like the entire series — a clinic in naturalistic acting by Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Streaming on MGM+.) HALEIn its attempts to understand some of the victims, Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events more opaque.Hulu‘Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Larryland’Everything about the case of the middle-aged dad Lawrence V. Ray and the group of bright young college students he drew into a cultlike miasma of mind control, sexual exploitation and indentured servitude is hard to fathom. Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events both more comprehensible and, in its attempts to understand some of the victims, more opaque and mysterious. The final episode, which came out during Ray’s trial (he is serving a 60-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes), was a heartbreaking, mesmerizing summation of the case’s contradictions. (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Telemarketers’Part 1From its opening moments, HBO’s “Telemarketers” is all about shaggy veracity: When we meet our protagonists, Sam Lipman-Stern (also one of the show’s directors) is shirtless in bed, and Patrick J. Pespas is high in the front seat of a car. The two worked together at a telemarketing company, small cogs in a despicable grift, but the office itself is home to real camaraderie — and real chaos, thanks in part to pervasive drug use. Lipman-Stern’s grainy footage from his teenage years captures the outrageousness of his workplace but also Pespas’s intense, charismatic vitality. While the subsequent episodes expose more of the telemarketing industry’s shadiest work, the first installment is an instant, startling immersion into its subjects’ perspectives. (Streaming on Max.) LYONSHaley J in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series with a mother and daughter match that includes folding chairs. Netflix‘Wrestlers’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Mother’There are dozens of poignant, personal moments in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series about a low-level professional wrestling league. Humor, passion, ambition — plenty of all of those, too. But one episode is a genuine jaw-dropper, and its climax is a death match between a mother and daughter. Marie was a young mom and went to jail while her daughter, Haley, was a child. They never really reconciled, but now they’re in the same wrestling league, where Marie is a doting veteran and Haley, now also a young mother herself, a fast-rising star. Marie says Haley is a “carbon copy” of her; Haley does not see it that way. But they both like turning one kind of pain into another kind of pain, and they bring all their anger and grief into the ring. They also bring folding chairs, a trash-can lid and thousands of thumbtacks, and by the end of the match, they’re both battered, and Marie’s face is covered in blood. It is perhaps the most visceral catharsis I have ever seen. (Streaming on Netflix.) LYONS More

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    On QVC, Shawn Killinger Can Help You Sell Yourself

    On a Saturday night earlier this month, the QVC host Shawn Killinger kicked off another episode of “Shawn Saves Christmas,” the seasonal series she hosts live at QVC’s gargantuan 24/7 broadcast center in West Chester, Pa., about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. But by the end of the first segment, it seemed like Shawn was going to sink Christmas instead.As I watched from behind the cameras, she accidentally tipped over a rolling tote bag, shattering a wine bottle loudly enough to be heard on air. “We are going to need a mop,” she said with a cringe and levity, owning the oopsie, as did the camera, which lingered on the aftermath for several seconds. As the screen cut to a photo of the product, Killinger hustled to another part of the set to talk about mascara as the crew, panicked-looking but resolute, made the mess disappear in minutes.Having talked to Killinger quite a bit by that point, I suspected she was mortified by the disaster. When she is presenting on QVC, she had told me earlier, she feels like she is “pedalling a unicycle uphill through a rancid windstorm while juggling flaming swords while chewing gum and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.”But if she was, she didn’t show it. And the secret to that friendly composure is what brought me to QVC HQ.“I’m not a salesperson,” Killinger said. “I’m a storyteller.”Christopher Leaman for The New York TimesMost TV shows are trying to sell you something, whether it’s the Lexus in a conventional ad, a product-placed luxury watch or just a Netflix subscription. But on QVC — it originally stood for “Quality Value Convenience,“ in case you’ve ever wondered — the selling is the entire point, and many of the products verge on the nutty.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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    What’s on TV This Week: New Year’s Eve Specials and ‘Time Bomb Y2K’

    Several networks air countdown-to-2024 specials. And HBO releases a documentary about mass hysteria in the final days of 1999.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, Dec. 24-31. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMariah Carey and Billy Porter during last year’s “Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All!”James Devaney/CBSMARIAH CAREY: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL! 9 p.m. on CBS. In November 2022, Mariah Carey went on a mini-tour performing a show with some holiday songs, featuring (obviously and most importantly) her hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The concert she performed at Madison Square Garden is returning to small screens to liven up the Christmas mood after all the presents have been unwrapped, the spiked hot cocoas are kicking in and the tension with a relative over a politics has eased to a silent simmer.TuesdayTHE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). If you’ve ever wondered how the prince actually got put into the nutcracker, Alan Cumming is here to tell you. This version of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” takes the story from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 book, and Cumming recounts it as an orchestra plays along.WednesdayTHE 46TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. These honors took place on Dec. 3 in Washington, but now we get to see snippets of the ceremony and some of the performances. This year’s honorees are Dionne Warwick, Billy Crystal, Queen Latifah, Renée Fleming and Barry Gibb; as is tradition, each star was treated to special performances by others, including Missy Elliott, Rob Reiner, Dove Cameron and Michael Bublé.Robin Roberts on the set of ABC News’s “Year 2023” special, which airs on Wednesday.Jennifer Pottheiser/ABCTHE YEAR: 2023 9 p.m. on ABC. This recap show, hosted by Robin Roberts and other ABC News anchors, dives into some big moments from 2023, such as the Eras Tour, Barbenheimer, the actors’ and writers’ strikes and the “Vanderpump” Scandoval. Ronald Gladden, our sweet Everyman from “Jury Duty,” Missy Elliott (she’s everywhere this week!) and some of the cast of “Dancing With the Stars” are set to make appearances to discuss a year that, for me at least, has simultaneously felt like it just started and also won’t end.Thursday27 DRESSES (2008) 3 p.m. on FX. Now that Christmas is behind us, I can get back to my regularly scheduled romantic comedy viewings. Katherine Heigl stars as Jane, who has a crush on her boss, George (Edward Burns), and also happens to be a hopeless romantic who religiously reads the vows section of the newspaper. When her pesky younger sister comes to town (my words, not hers) and starts dating George, Jane has to decide just how good of a sister she wants to be. James Marsden also stars as Kevin, a wedding reporter, who is somehow charming despite the fact that he always pops up at the most inconvenient times.FridayTHE WORLD ACCORDING TO FOOTBALL 8 p.m. on Showtime. This show, hosted by Trevor Noah, is closing out its run with an episode about the football — or soccer for us Americans — culture in Qatar. The episode will look specifically at the $220 billion the country, which drew criticism over its treatment of migrant workers and its anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies, spent hosting the 2022 World Cup.SaturdayA still from “Time Bomb Y2K.”Brian Langley/HBOTIME BOMB Y2K 10 p.m. on HBO. At the end of the 1990s, a fear started to arise about a computer bug that came to be called “Y2K.” According to the theory, one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, computer software could malfunction because the last two numerals of the year were 00, which could wreak havoc such as power failures, grounded planes and inoperative life support machines. People were loading up on guns and water; President Bill Clinton appointed a Y2K czar. In the end, computers easily adjusted to the 2000 date stamp. But this new documentary examines the concerns of the time through interviews with computer experts, survivalists, scholars, militia groups, conservative Christians and pop stars.SundayCNN NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE WITH ANDERSON COOPER AND ANDY COHEN 8 p.m. on CNN. To tequila or not to tequila — that has been the question surrounding this special for the past couple of years. This will be Cooper and Cohen’s seventh year doing this show together, but the executives at CNN banned them from drinking alcohol during the live broadcast last year, to Cohen’s vocal displeasure. It is unclear if the two old friends will be slinging back shots, but what we do know is that Jeremy Renner, Neil Patrick Harris, the Jonas Brothers and Enrique Iglesias are set to make appearances.DICK CLARK’S PRIMETIME NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2024 starting at 8 p.m. on ABC. The traditional ball drop may be in New York City, but this New Year’s Eve show takes it all around the world. NewJeans is set to perform in South Korea, Post Malone will be at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Las Vegas and Ivy Queen will be live in Puerto Rico. And of course, cameras will be rolling in Times Square to count down to midnight. More

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    The Great Experiment That Is ‘The Color Purple’

    A new adaptation shows how rich Alice Walker’s novel is and how the source material can lend itself to unconventional storytelling.Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week.I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widow, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.Beyoncé on a Toronto tour stop. “Renaissance,” which she also directed, arrives in an ecosystem partly created by the first adaptation of “The Color Purple.”The New York TimesCentered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with the blues singer, Shug Avery and journeying to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making this one of the most prized narratives in American history.Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Steven Spielberg released his adaptation in 1985, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.Led by Black organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., the Nation of Islam and the now defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the N.A.A.C.P.”And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for these new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to reimagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprisingly, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding new cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.In the number “She Be Mine,” Celie imagines that she has left Pa’s store and walks through a Southern landscape that is paradoxically lush and marred by the exploitation of Black laborers. As she passes a group of Black men working on a chain gang and Black laundry women washing clothes by a waterfall, we recognize that her escape is limited and illusory and that she is as oppressed in her home as they are in their work.But when adult Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) tends to the bodacious blues singer Shug (Taraji P. Henson), her interiority takes over even more. As Shug falls asleep in the bathtub while listening to a record, Celie suddenly imagines a gramophone that’s larger than life, and standing on a spinning vinyl album that doubles as a concert stage, she belts an empowering song.Later, Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ball gowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize that her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.Taraji P. Henson and Barrino-Taylor working on “The Color Purple” with Blitz Bazawule. Eli Ade/Warner Bros. PicturesAs Celie finds her voice, rejects the abuse from Albert and gains more and more agency, her flights of fancy seem to disappear. But, by the time we reach the showstopper “Miss Celie’s Pants,” in which she, Shug and other women celebrate Celie’s separation from Albert and her newfound entrepreneurialism, the bold color palette, uplifting music and lively dancing associated with her dreamlike sequences dominate.Unlike other movie musicals in which the songs distract from the dramatic action, the numbers and the composer Kris Bowers’s score are woven together in a way that makes the soundscape feel like the film’s true setting. This might be because Bazawule was one of several filmmakers who collaborated with Beyoncé on “Black Is King,” the visual companion to the soundtrack for the live-action “Lion King” (2021); he understands how to make an entire film sing rather than string together a series of scenes.And yet the original song Bazawule co-wrote for the movie, “Workin’,” for Celie’s stepson, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), stands apart for giving this man more multidimensionality than he had in the previous adaptations.In this scene, Harpo rejects Albert’s authority by building his own house, and it’s a harbinger of his evolution. He goes from being a sensitive young adult to an abusive husband to a man who finally breaks his family’s intergenerational cycle of violence against women. Walker’s novel partly shows this metamorphosis, but Bazawule fully realizes it here, nullifying any lingering controversies about Harpo’s fate or flaws in his representation.Growth, I suspect, was always the point. It took a while for Winfrey and Scott Sanders to convince their fellow producer Spielberg that the Broadway musical could lead to a new adaptation. “I didn’t really know if ‘Color Purple’ had another movie in it,” he told Variety. That Bazawule breathes new life into these characters reminds us of what a masterpiece Celie’s story remains for us today. More

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    in Theater

    Fantasia Barrino-Taylor on ‘The Color Purple’ and a Painful Role

    Throughout the six months of production on the new film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, who plays the protagonist Celie Johnson, often called on God for strength.“There were times that I just felt like I’m not going to make it. I cannot do it. I would cry going to set. I would cry leaving set,” she admitted sadly. “I would talk to God, and I would tell him, ‘You’ve got to make this make sense. Make it make sense. There’s got to be something out of this.’ It was so hard.”The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, details the transformative journey of a rural Georgia woman in the early 20th century. First adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, then reinterpreted for Broadway in 2005, it has once again been retrofitted as a musical, complete with dance. The role of Celie, however, remains consistent — one of inveterate trauma, stretched over decades of abuse by first her stepfather, then her husband, until she manufactures the strength to stand on her own. Onstage, when Barrino-Taylor took over the part in the original Broadway run, and then on film, that meant enduring endless verbal attacks, physical abuse and lovelessness, which was difficult to manage on a daily basis. Barrino-Taylor would often leave the set deflated and bruised from doing her own stunts.Before production began, she had “started traumatic therapy, where you tap into the younger person, the younger Fantasia, and you try to heal things that you either suppress or are literally forgotten,” she said in a video interview. A wife, mother of four, grandmother and owner of two dogs, Barrino-Taylor, now 39, was committed to being her best self to those around her. “I wanted to take this healing journey. So, I had to stop therapy, and I had to allow Celie to be my life coach. Girl, that wasn’t easy.”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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    in Television

    Just How Formulaic Are Hallmark and Lifetime Holiday Movies? We (Over)analyzed 424 of Them.

    The Hallmark and Lifetime networks are known for their prolific output of made-for-television holiday movies each year. Even in the age of streaming, they bring in impressive cable television ratings, perhaps aided by how easy they are to leave on while, say, baking several batches of gingerbread for a tree lighting ceremony. They also have […] More