Eliana Willis

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    The Trouble With Reboot TV

    The reboot that changes nothing will be uncanny and lifeless; the one that thinks itself more clever than its predecessor will turn out cynical and sour. In life, you rarely get a second chance to do something right — so goes the shopworn cliché. Contemporary Hollywood is a different matter. If a property was even glancingly popular in the 1980s or ’90s, it seems, it’s either in the process of being resuscitated or has been already. “Reboot” is one of those coinages that burrows into the lexicon without ever being fully explained (at least to me), but it has clearly supplanted “remake,” migrating over from the language of computing such that you now imagine the entertainment industry pulling every last item from its junk drawer and plugging it in to see if it still works. So startlingly large is the number of rebooted series that the phenomenon has even inspired an original show: Hulu’s very funny “Reboot,” about a fictional garbage ’80s sitcom being brought back to life.Hollywood’s dependence on old intellectual property has been a source of hand-wringing for at least the past two decades, but a majority of those complaints have centered on the film world and its parade of blockbusters. It’s on television and streaming services, though, that all this grasping at the familiar has really reached an apotheosis, with three recent shows yielding some of the strangest gambits yet. One of them is distinguished by the threadbare rationale for its existence. Gen Xers like me sacrificed untold I.Q. points on the shoals of ’80s television, but even I look at the new incarnation of “Night Court” — among the less-remembered of NBC’s classic Thursday sitcoms, about a Manhattan judge who was also an accomplished magician — and marvel at its pointlessness. The original, which ran between 1984 and 1992, felt like a supersize sketch show and depicted weirdos and reprobates dragged before the court after hours, a parade of old-timey jokes about winos, flashers and sex workers. Later I would have occasion to learn firsthand that there is no such magical judge to slap you on the wrist and send you on your way when you get arrested at night.The labored premise of NBC’s hit new version puts us right back where we started: The now-deceased Judge Harry Stone (played by the great Harry Anderson in the original) has been replaced on the bench by his daughter. The show strikes a sort of nonaggression pact with the audience: It won’t be funny, but neither will it challenge or rearrange any of the psychological furniture of the original. Its selling point is stasis. When Dan Fielding — John Larroquette, returning from the original — finds himself “surprised” by fake snakes exploding from a box, an old Harry Stone gag, even he seems vaguely disappointed. Whom exactly is this show for? What is the point of making it about Stone’s daughter, rather than any judge in any night court? How do you generate nostalgia for something that wasn’t especially missed? This is the reboot at its most indecipherable, a miasma of reflexive nostalgia and boardroom guesswork. HBO Max’s new “Velma” operates on the opposite logic: It interrogates and deconstructs its source material so aggressively that it often turns abrasive. The program is an animated spinoff from the “Scooby-Doo” franchise — first produced for television in 1969 and then in various forms since, with a talking Great Dane and a group of young detectives traveling around in a van solving mysteries (Arthur Conan Doyle meets “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”) and unmasking ornery criminals who curse about how they “would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” (a Watergate-era mantra). This isn’t an especially offensive premise, which makes it difficult to understand the level of contempt “Velma” seems to have for it.One simple explanation may be that “Velma” sits in a lineage of dorm-room pop-culture deconstruction that became popular, during the 1990s, among a generation seized by the misapprehension that it was the first to discover irony. (This was my generation; in my early 20s, I briefly thought I was a genius for recognizing subtext in the cartoon “He-Man” that was actually just text.) The core of this aesthetic position is condescension — a belief that you, the astute modern viewer, are equipped with a sophisticated grasp of the medium, and the world, that eluded the credulous rubes who came before you. Programs that pander to this fantasy often skew mean, and “Velma” is meaner than most. There are some funny jokes, and Mindy Kaling voices the lead role with dyspeptic panache, but the series on the whole oozes molten hostility: It is viciously satirical, festooned with disturbing imagery, full of slapdash violence and kneejerk nihilism. Within its first two episodes, the original characters Fred and Daphne appear as a possibly psychopathic man-child and a glamorous drug dealer. Scooby-Doo makes no appearance at all. There are needling remarks about television’s checkered history of minority representation, and the showrunners seem to treat their reconception of Velma — making the character South Asian and moving her to the center of the story — as an act of bold subversion, but it’s not clear “Scooby-Doo” is a cultural monument of such gravity as to make those choices particularly brave. “Velma” mostly just wants to bite the hand that feeds it.Netflix’s reboot of “That ’70s Show” makes some rational sense, at least. The original sitcom chronicled the escapades of a group of cheerfully stoned and horny Wisconsin teenagers across the Carter administration. Its reincarnation, “That ’90s Show,” follows a parallel cabal of stoned and horny Clinton-era teenagers, who through some tortured story machinations end up pursuing their indolence in the very same Wisconsin basement, under the watch of the very same authority figures. All this is tactically coherent: It revives a cozy period piece while also capitalizing on the current youth vogue for all things ’90s.Unfortunately, the subtle warping of the space-time continuum is by orders of magnitude the most interesting thing about the show. Like so many family reunions, the overarching vibe is one of obligation. The pilot features a large swath of the original cast, but no one radiates much happiness at being back. Saddest of all is the return of Kurtwood Smith and Debra Jo Rupp as the roost-​ruling adults. Unlike the younger actors reprising their roles, these two never get to leave; their characters are now tasked with spending their golden years still wisecracking at a bunch of teenagers.The logic of the television industry suggests that so many reboots exist for the simple reason that they stand a high chance of being popular, using a familiar idea to cut through a glut of programming. Distant number-crunching concludes that some substantial segment of NBC’s prime-time viewers, a demographic whose median age is around 60, may sooner revisit “Night Court” than sample something more novel; excellent Nielsen ratings bear that out. Judging by Netflix’s rush to reboot everything from “Full House” to “Lost in Space,” streaming services’ internal data must say similar things.These shows face a clear creative bind. The reboot that changes nothing will be uncanny and lifeless; the one that thinks itself more clever than its predecessor will turn out cynical and sour. Either way, the market will keep serving them to us. So often, on TV as in apps, research and algorithms seem to manifest our lowest impulses as an audience, even the ones we would rather not have — say, a weakness for stupefying predictability, a smug feeling of superiority or a comforting retreat into fuzzy-blanket familiarity. They know what makes us click, even when the answer isn’t pretty.Source photographs: Patrick Wymore/Netflix; Robert Sebree/20th Century Fox Film Corp., via Everett Collection. More

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    Jimmy Fallon Sounds Off on State of the Union Applause

    “It was a tough night for all of Biden’s staffers watching from the White House, because every time people clapped, the lights went on and off,” Fallon said.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.Clap HappyPresident Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address on Tuesday night.Despite having filmed “The Tonight Show” before the address, Jimmy Fallon accurately predicted that “Democrats spent the night clapping for Biden.”“It wasn’t for anything he said, they were just trying to keep him awake.” — JIMMY FALLON“It was a tough night for all of Biden’s staffers watching from the White House, because every time people clapped, the lights went on and off.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s the same thing every year: One side stands and claps, the other side sits still, not having any fun. It reminds me of my cousin’s wedding: [imitating a shouting relative] ‘I give it six months!’” — JIMMY FALLON“Now, Biden also talked about his achievements. He said, ‘We passed an infrastructure bill, we reduced inflation and we finally convinced Tom Brady to retire, so I think it’s a great year.’” — JIMMY FALLON“In his speech, Biden called for bipartisanship and unity. He was like, ‘As Democrats and Republicans, we have one common goal to mishandle classified documents.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Balloon Assassination Victory Lap Edition)“President Biden delivered his second State of the Union address tonight. Oh, you mean his balloon assassination victory lap?” — SETH MEYERS“Now Biden’s speech took place after we taped this show, but according to a preview from the White House, Biden used the opportunity to call for a so-called ‘billionaire tax,’ at which point, billionaires yelled ‘Good luck with that!’ and blasted off to Mars.” — JAMES CORDEN“There was wall-to-wall coverage of the State of the Union on all the major networks, like NBC, ABC and CBS. Meanwhile, Netflix is, like, ‘ka-ching!” — JIMMY FALLON“And according to reports, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy personally requested that Biden not use the phrase ‘extreme MAGA Republicans’ during the State of the Union address. He asked Biden to please use a more inclusive term, like ‘insurrectionist Americans.’” — JAMES CORDEN“That wasn’t all. McCarthy also asked Biden not to call George Santos an ‘extremely delusional Republican,’ but instead refer to him by his correct title, ‘seven-time Grand Slam winner George Santos.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingThe model and entrepreneur Ashley Graham stopped by “The Daily Show” to “keep it real” in a conversation about body confidence with the guest host Chelsea Handler.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe singer-songwriter Regina Spektor will perform on Wednesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutAMC said its new pricing system would not apply to tickets for discounted Tuesday screenings or screenings before 4 p.m.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesThe AMC theater chain has announced a new pricing structure that will charge moviegoers based on their seat location. More

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    In Russian Plays, Don’t Mention the War

    Paris productions of Chekhov, Turgenev and Ostrovsky avoid current events and focus on profound truths. But the plays’ message is clear: If you rebel, you will be crushed.Since Russia invaded Ukraine almost a year ago, cultural institutions in Europe and the United States have contemplated what to do with Russian art. Tchaikovsky’s militaristic “1812 Overture?” Potentially offensive, and dropped from many concerts. Dostoyevsky? One of President Vladimir V. Putin’s favorite authors, cross-examined, in Ukraine and elsewhere, for his expansionist views.Chekhov’s plays, on the other hand? So far, nobody is pulling them from the stage.The Russian dramatic repertoire, more widely, has flown under the radar. In Paris, no fewer than four Russian plays were on at prominent playhouses in late January and early February, including Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and “Uncle Vanya,” as well as lesser-known works, such as pieces by Turgenev (“A Month in the Country”) and by Ostrovsky (“The Storm”).And the artists involved appear to be staying away from mentioning the war. While the Ukrainian flag was unfurled regularly on French stages in 2022, it made an appearance just once at the performances I saw of those four plays: At the end of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country,” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, an actor brought it out and held it during the curtain calls. Only one playbill, for “The Seagull” at the Théâtre des Abbesses, mentioned Ukraine.In a country like France, where support for Ukraine is steadfast, this is hardly for lack of sympathy. It probably has more to do with Russian theater’s reputation for universalism — the belief that a playwright like Chekhov revealed profound truths about the human condition that went far beyond Russia’s borders. As the performer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected from Soviet Russia in 1974 and has spoken against the war, told The New York Times last year: “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture.”The directors of these four Russian plays presumably didn’t select them in connection to geopolitical events. The sets for all the productions I saw were tastefully vague, and the costumes mostly modern. Since theater productions in France are typically planned at least two years before they reach the stage, all would most likely have been scheduled before the invasion of Ukraine last February.Sébastien Eveno and Cyril Gueï in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe.Marie LiebigStill, watching 19th-century plays by Chekhov, Turgenev and Ostrovsky in short succession offers a fascinating window onto Russian culture, which has long prized the performing arts. After a few nights in a row, the characters started to feel connected. The unhappily married Natalya Petrovna, in “A Month in the Country,” had a kinship with Helena in “Uncle Vanya” and Katerina in “The Storm.” All three suffer from ennui and neglect in the countryside; all three seek solace in affairs that end badly.The State of the WarA New Offensive: As the war intensifies in Eastern Ukraine, doctors struggle to handle an influx of injuries and soldiers fret over the prospect of new waves of conscripts arriving from Russia.Russia’s Economy: Shunned by the West, Russia was for a time able to redirect its oil exports to Asia and adopt sanction evasion schemes. But there are signs that Western controls are beginning to have a deep impact on the country’s energy earnings.Leadership Shake-Up: President Volodymyr Zelensky’s political party will replace Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov. The expected move comes amid a widening corruption scandal, although Mr. Reznikov was not implicated in wrongdoing.Nuclear Fears Abate: U.S. policymakers and intelligence analysts are less worried about Russia using nuclear weapons in the war. But the threat could re-emerge, they say.It’s no coincidence, of course. Ostrovsky and Turgenev were acquainted, and Chekhov, who came of age later in the 19th century, knew his predecessors’ work and name-checks both in “Uncle Vanya.”The themes they explored speak to social rifts that manifest across cultures. Class struggles, such as landowners’ power over regular workers or the disdain of urban professors and artists for country life, underpin the characters’ relationships, as does this patriarchal society’s hold over women. (Bad weather and alcohol also feature prominently.) Patriotic wars don’t come calling for local men, unlike in many Russian novels.Pauline Bolcatto and Naasz in “The Seagull.” The production makes an impassioned case for Chekhov as a vessel for the world’s feelings rather than for any specific sense of Russian-ness. Gilles Le MaoBrigitte Jaques-Wajeman’s “The Seagull” makes the most impassioned case for Chekhov as a vessel for the world’s feelings rather than for any specific sense of Russian-ness. She has opted for a very spare production at the Théâtre des Abbesses, the second stage of the Théâtre de la Ville: Beyond a painted backdrop evoking the lake mentioned in the play, the cast only has a small elevated stage made of wooden blocks and a few tables and chairs to work with.Yet every element is used beautifully. One of Jaques-Wajeman’s great strengths lies in the precision of her work with actors, and here, she brings individual color out of each. As Nina, the country girl who dreams of becoming an actress, Pauline Bolcatto starts off as a ball of innocent enthusiasm, while Hélène Bressiant brings a touch of goth nihilism to the resigned Masha. As Arkadina, the successful and snobbish actress visiting her country home, Raphaèle Bouchard rocks improbable turbans and fuchsia pants.This “Seagull” brought out a constant from Russian play to Russian play: Practically everyone in them, no matter how rich or successful, feels emotionally stunted.It is true, too, of “A Month in the Country” and “The Storm,” two plays that are seen much less often in the West. The plot of Ostrovsky’s “The Storm,” which had its premiere in 1859, is perhaps better known outside Russia through “Kat’a Kabanova,” the 1921 Janacek opera named after the play’s central character. Kat’a, or Katerina, is saddled with a husband she doesn’t love and an overbearing mother-in-law. She starts a covert relationship with Boris, who has recently arrived in her small town, only to become overwhelmed by the moral implications.Denis Podalydès brought a sensitive, visually elegant production of “The Storm” to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, led by the arresting Mélodie Richard as Katerina. A photograph showing the Volga River is reproduced in the background on wooden panels, which are later turned over to create a simple, two-tiered structure for Katerina and Boris’s nighttime escapades in the bushes.Stéphane Facco and Clémence Boué in “A Month in the Country” at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet.Juliette Parisot“The Storm” and “A Month in the Country” both show humans chafing against curtailed horizons. In “A Month in the Country,” Natalya Petrovna, a woman who falls for her son’s young tutor, isn’t the only one to suffer. Like Masha in “The Seagull,” the young Vera, an orphan who lives with Natalya’s family, sees her options in life for what they are and resigns herself to a joyless marriage.Juliette Léger conveys Vera’s arc with admirable ease in Clément Hervieu-Léger’s captivating production of “A Month in the Country.” The entire cast, in fact, struck a bittersweet, realistic balance between comedy and tragedy, from Clémence Boué (Natalya) to Stéphane Facco (wondrous in the role of Rakitin, Natalya’s platonic companion).Yet for all the emotional truth in these characters, from Turgenev and Ostrovsky to Chekhov, the sentence for those who stray is harsh. They all fail. At best, they return to a dull life; sometimes, suicide is their preferred option.It is a bleak outlook for domestic dramas. Nobody is calling for these plays to be canceled, but to call them “universal” is a little too easy. In Russian theater, if you rebel against social norms, you will be crushed.That, in itself, is a message. More

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    On ‘Pictures From Home’ on Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets

    The actor Nathan Lane had been planning to play the American anti-father Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) when that production fell apart. Restless during the pandemic and casting about for his next project, he read a draft of Sharr White’s “Pictures From Home,” which recalled “Salesman” to him: The two scripts share an almost incessantly angry, backward-looking gaze at the glory days of midcentury American masculinity, embodied by a discontented businessman. Now, as White’s play opens on Broadway this week, Lane, 67, will star as Irving Sultan, a former Schick razor executive who’s supported both emotionally and financially by his doting if frustrated wife, Jean Sultan (Zoë Wanamaker), while sparring with their childish 30-something son Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein, also doting, also frustrated), both of whom tend to Irv in their artichoke-colored Southern California ranch home even as he struggles to return their affection.The show, says Lane, is “about parents and mortality,” the latter of which has been on the actor’s mind since his 2020 cancer treatment. “They’re all fighting to tell their own story, and certainly Irv is fighting to protect this fantasy of his success.” Indeed, many arguments unfurl over 100 or so minutes, often in the form of direct audience address — it’s “part family dramedy, part documentary, part three-way TED Talk,” as Lane describes it — and the sorts of overlapping conversations native to people, like the Sultans, with Brooklyn roots and Palm Springs aspirations.Jennifer LivingstonWhat moves the play beyond that living room drama tradition is the source material: It’s based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same name, which the Bay Area-based artist published after dozens of visits to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home in the 1980s. Sultan then combined a decade’s worth of staged photographs and recorded interviews of his mother and father, both of whom died soon after the book’s release, with stills from home movies taken during his childhood to create a vulnerable family portrait that’s as much about aging as it is about accountability — and loyalty — to those we care about most. Photographers like Alec Soth and Stephen Shore still venerate the project, a longer version of which was republished in 2021; White discovered it in 2015, six years after the photographer’s death, as part of Sultan’s first career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afterward, the playwright contacted the artist’s widow, Kelly Sultan, and, over dinner, convinced her to let him option the book. She also agreed to open the archives so that White might achieve a new kind of bioplay, one that its director, Bartlett Sher, signed on to for its “multivariable potential,” he says, using found footage from the Sultans’ garage and photographic projections that, onstage, heighten the divide between truth and fiction.White, who also writes for television and has had two other plays on Broadway, both in different styles, says the half-decade he spent finishing this script was, from the start, an “investigation” into the Sultans’ power dynamics. In memoir and play alike, Jean and Irving are willing subjects … until they become skeptical co-conspirators, wondering why their son seems obsessed with chronicling them so harshly. “There’s lots of conflict, but it’s not the end,” adds White, 52, who had a strained upbringing with his own parents and is now raising two teenage sons in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, Evelyn Carr White, an artist and interior designer. “I was fascinated by this idea that you can say the worst thing, and ultimately nothing breaks.”And yet it’s Irv — depicted by Lane with jocular, egotistic bravado that barely masks his deep fear of irrelevance — who always seems to get the last word: “I’ll tell you about mess, Larry,” he says near the show’s conclusion. “You know what mess is? It’s intimacy. Intimacy is a big fat [expletive] mess. But I’ll tell you another thing. It’s love, too. OK? This thing you think you’re capturing. This evidence? This mess? It’s love.” More

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    A ‘Bag of Helium’ Helps Chelsea Handler Start Her ‘Daily Show’ Guest Stint

    Handler poked fun at the Chinese surveillance balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.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.I SpyChelsea Handler kicked off her week of hosting “The Daily Show” with jokes about the Chinese balloon that a U.S. fighter jet shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.Handler said she felt bad for President Biden: “Obama got to order the assassination of bin Laden, and all he gets to do is murder a bag of helium.”“But, hey, why not shoot it when you have a trillion-dollar defense budget and all of these rock-hard missiles lying around? Trump must be so jealous.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And, as you heard, this balloon was the size of three buses. I love measuring things in buses. And for the rich people out there who don’t know what a bus is, they’re those big yellow vehicles that bring Matt Gaetz’s girlfriends to school.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“What I don’t get is, why does China even need to send this balloon in the first place? They’re already spying on us with TikTok. Is it possible that the Chinese spies became the first people ever to get sick of TikTok? Were they like, ‘I swear to God, if I see one more basic [expletive] make lasagna in a slow cooker.’” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And, by the way: China, if you’re listening, which you obviously are, next time, why you don’t make your balloon the color blue, so we can’t see it in the sky? Or if you’re going to make it white, at least write ‘the moon’ on it. No one here will know the difference. I certainly won’t.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“So the balloon went over Alaska, and then it went through Canada and then into U.S. airspace. And, by the way, Canada, thanks for the heads up on that.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Canada saw the balloon, and they were like, ‘Oh, look, one of those Chinese lanterns!’” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Big Balloon Edition)“The only way this balloon could have had a higher profile is if it had its own Instagram account.” — SETH MEYERS“This balloon did more traveling than a high school senior taking a gap year before college. True story: It already has diamond medallion status on Delta.” — SETH MEYERS“Just to screw with Fox News, Biden should have announced that he was inviting the balloon to appear in this year’s Thanksgiving Day parade.” — SETH MEYERS“The balloon floated from Montana to South Carolina. Somehow it got across the country faster than someone flying Southwest.” — JIMMY FALLON“But the U.S. really didn’t have a choice. The only other option was to rub the balloon on Bernie Sanders and stick it to Canada.” — JIMMY FALLON“On the bright side, from now on when your kid’s birthday balloon pops and they’re upset, you can just go, ‘No, it was a Chinese spy balloon, Timmy. The Chinese can’t spy on us anymore, you’re a patriot!’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden shared his thoughts on Grammys fashion on Monday’s “Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe comedian Tig Notaro, who stars in the film “Your Place or Mine,” will appear on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutWith her fourth victory on Sunday, Beyoncé set the record for most Grammy wins by any artist.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesShe may not have walked away with Album of the Year, but Beyoncé broke the record for most Grammy victories ever after adding four more trophies on Sunday. More

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    Jesse Tyler Ferguson Tips His Cap to ‘Take Me Out’

    The actor, who won a Tony Award for playing a baseball star’s business manager in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, called the role the most personal of his career.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday night, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, standing in front of the black outline of a baseball stadium silhouetted against a pink, orange and yellow sky, closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the lights went dark.“Right before that moment, I was like, ‘If I say these last words, it’s really over,’” Ferguson said later, after returning to his fifth-floor dressing room after his final performance in the Tony Award-winning revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “Take Me Out.” “And that hit me hard. I was just trying to hold it together.”The sold-out show capped a 15-week return by Ferguson to the role that won him a Tony Award last spring, for best featured actor in a play.The curtain call on Sunday evening at the final performance of “Take Me Out.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesFerguson played Mason Marzac, a business manager for a player portrayed by Jesse Williams.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s definitely the most personal role of my career,” said Ferguson, 47, who played Mason Marzac, a fanboy business manager for a player (Jesse Williams) who comes out as gay. “It’s a role that meant something to me before I started learning it myself.”The revival, which was originally slated to debut in spring 2020, finally opened last April at the Helen Hayes Theater and ran through June 11. It received near-universal acclaim from critics and won two of the four Tonys for which it was nominated (it also took home best revival of a play).After the initial run, which was produced by Second Stage Theater, the producers Barry and Fran Weissler announced in August that they would bring it back for a limited encore at the Schoenfeld starting last October, with most of the original cast of the revival — giving Ferguson his first chance to walk onto a Broadway stage as a Tony winner.“We just felt like there was unfinished business with this play,” Ferguson said in a conversation in the Blue Room at the Civilian Hotel before his final performance, surrounded by Broadway memorabilia like a pair of women’s Emerald City boots from “Wicked.” Ferguson saw the play during its original Broadway run in 2002, with Denis O’Hare in his role. “To take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special,” he said.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThough Ferguson is best known for playing the high-strung lawyer Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” he was a regular on New York’s Off Broadway stages before turning to the small screen.“I just love the intimacy of an audience,” he said. “I love being in a room and whatever happens, happens that day, and it’s just for these people.”In conversations before his final performance and then after the curtain call — life-size cutouts of the show’s cast lined the stairwell up to his dressing room — Ferguson discussed the role’s personal meaning, how the show changed his relationship with baseball and what’s next for him. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.How are you feeling? I’m having a lot of heartbreak right now, being done. And Mason is not — he’s the opposite of heartbreak, his heart’s been cracked open. So I was fighting against this thing happening inside me, with what my character needs. In a few hours, I’m probably going to have a really good cry about this.How did you first become involved with “Take Me Out?”I was approached almost three and a half years ago. I was getting ready to do my last season of “Modern Family,” and it worked out that I was going to go right from that into this show.What appealed to you about it?I saw this play 20 years ago, and Denis O’Hare, who originally played the part, was so wonderful and spectacular in it, and that performance reinforced my desire to be a theater actor. So to take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special.“I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had,” he said of the show’s second engagement.George Etheredge for The New York TimesHow has your performance changed in the encore run?When we all came back, the performances were so much richer and deeper. I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had.Did you play or watch baseball growing up?No, though I certainly appreciate it more from working on this. It’s an infectious thing, and I’ve fallen in love with it in a way I never anticipated.Your character’s sudden baseball fandom is largely a means of redirecting an impossible crush. What is a time you’ve similarly become obsessively devoted to something?I’ve felt that way about theater, certainly. I sometimes use that as a replacement when I’m doing a show. I think about being on the stage at the Delacorte Theater, and I can replace that with being on a field by myself and looking at all these empty seats.It’s hard to believe this play was written more than 20 years ago. Are you surprised it’s still so relevant?It’s heartbreaking that it feels so relevant. We all kind of assumed that this play was going to feel like a relic after a while because it was like, “Oh, 20 years from now, that’s not going to be a thing, and people are going to be very open about who they are in professional sports.” And we haven’t gotten there yet. So few professional athletes have come out of the closet. The actor Eduardo Ramos joined Ferguson on the fire escape of the Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday in order to greet the actor Bill Heck who was unable to perform that night.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBecause the play has nude scenes, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches during the performance. Have you noticed that people are more attentive?I do notice that, in the second act, they’re immediately with us because they haven’t been spending 15 minutes scrolling through Instagram. They’ve spent that time discussing the play with the people they’ve come with and just staying in the moment. I wish more theaters would do this.You are one of the few cast members who remain clothed in “Take Me Out.” But have you ever been naked onstage?When I was 21 or 22, I did a production of “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” which is a Paul Rudnick play. It was terrifying, and the internet wasn’t what it is now and social media didn’t exist. I really look up to these guys who are doing this. It takes a lot of bravery. There’s three actors in this show who don’t have to get naked and we’re all looking at one another like, “Oh, we can have carbs!”What have you learned about yourself through this role?My last few times on Broadway, I played a kid in a spelling bee, or I did this quirky one-man show about reservations. I just never thought of myself as an actor who had the ability to take on a part as meaty as this.You recently became a father to your second son, Sullivan, in November. And your oldest, Beckett, is 2. How are you sleeping?My kids are in Los Angeles right now. So I’ve been going back and forth to see them in L.A., which has been a series of red-eyes to get back in time for the Tuesday night shows. And that’s been taxing. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of my husband.What’s next for you?I’m in “Cocaine Bear,” which is my first studio film. I saw a screening of it a few weeks ago, and it’s absolutely bonkers. I’m so excited to see it with a big audience. And they’re talking about doing “Take Me Out” as a mini-series or an ongoing series, so we’ll see if that gets any traction.OK, before I let you go get some food, let’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.OK!Next up for Ferguson is a role in the film “Cocaine Bear,” which is scheduled to be released later this month.George Etheredge for The New York TimesYou know all the lyrics to “Miss Saigon.”All the lyrics? There was a time when I did. I don’t know if I still have it in my head. So what is that, a confirm and a deny?“Shake It Off” is the best Taylor Swift song.No, though I love “Shake It Off.” My favorite changes daily, but I’m currently obsessed with “Champagne Problems.”If your options to save your life were to either hit a Major League fastball or fight off a cocaine bear, you would —I don’t think I’d survive either. But because I have been mauled by a cocaine bear, I’m going to have to try the baseball.You own a pair of dad shoes, a.k.a. white New Balance sneakers.(Sighs) Yes, I can confirm that.New York is basically Los Angeles now.Deny. There are a lot more juice bars, but beyond that — I don’t think so.If you could guest star on either “The White Lotus,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Yellowjackets” or “The Gilded Age,” you would choose — Oh, shoot! [thinks for a minute] “Schmigadoon!”You can also throw in a wild card if you want —“Severance!” Something dark or different — I need to crawl out under the rock of Mitchell Pritchett and surprise people. More

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    Book Review: ‘Up With the Sun,’ by Thomas Mallon

    In his name-dropping novel “Up With the Sun,” Thomas Mallon fictionalizes the minor career and tabloid murder of the Broadway actor Dick Kallman.UP WITH THE SUN, by Thomas MallonAlfred Hitchcock liked to talk about the MacGuffin, a plot device of great interest to the characters onscreen that keeps the story moving along, yet turns out to be of little consequence. “In crook stories it is almost always the necklace,” he said, “and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” (Famous MacGuffins: Rosebud, from “Citizen Kane”; the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction”; the Maltese Falcon.)In Thomas Mallon’s nostalgic new showbiz novel “Up With the Sun,” the MacGuffin is a fraternity pin: a prop from a real, if forgotten, 1951 Broadway musical called “Seventeen,” worn by an actor who was a success in it (and not much else): Dick Kallman. Kallman presses a fine-jewelry version on his cast crush, the male lead, who refuses the gift. The pin will also pop up as a tie clip worn in friendship; a token of love on a lapel; a tool of sadomasochistic sex; and — most Hitchcockishly — an object of value sought by murderous thieves. Mallon specializes in animating imagined versions of historical figures, and ambitiously so; he recently wrapped up a Washington trilogy about three different Republican presidencies. Unlike Nixon or Reagan or George W. Bush, Kallman clears the bar of “historical” only because the internet, as they used to say of elephants, never forgets. In 1975, his acting career on the rocks, Kallman was quoted in The New York Times’s fashion column advising women to wear terry-cloth dresses designed by a business partner. The next time he was mentioned, five years later on the front page of the paper’s Metropolitan report at age 46, was not because he’d switched to dealing art and antiques. It was because he and a “business assistant” 20 years his junior had been killed in cold blood while in various states of undress in a luxury apartment off Central Park.Mallon swipes the story of Kallman’s short life and shocking end and runs with it like Cary Grant under the crop duster in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (where the MacGuffin was the government microfilm hidden in a Tarascan warrior statue). Grant doesn’t make a physical cameo in “Up With the Sun” — even in death, he’s maybe too major for this, a book that’s about making one’s peace with minorness.But many other celebrities of all gradations do, including Grant’s ex-wife Dyan Cannon, her ring finger smashed into a piece of scenery after Kallman felt she was upstaging him on the tour of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “You sick bastard,” she hisses at him when he’s seat-filling at the Golden Globes years later.The recreated Cannon is onto something: In Mallon’s well-researched imagining, Kallman is, if not a sociopath, a doomed cipher on whom “ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience’s complete belief in almost any character he was playing.” He’s good-looking, like “a less perfect Tony Curtis,” but has a belligerent, possibly misogynistic streak that puts off casting directors and colleagues.In a short-lived TV show, “Hank,” he plays an orphan sneaking college classes (the novel’s title is taken from a lyric in Johnny Mercer’s theme song). It’s canceled after he becomes what his agent calls “the first person in history to be the subject of a takedown profile in TV Guide.”“Did he have a soul?” wonders Lucie Arnaz, Lucy and Desi’s daughter, in whose workshop Kallman unfruitfully participated. One pit musician imagines the actor beating the female lead of “Seventeen” to death with her parasol.His foil is that production’s (so far as I can tell wholly fictional) pianist Matt Liannetto, whose story Mallon counterposes to Kallman’s in alternating chapters rendered in sans-serif typeface. A divorced father who’s slowly emerging from the closet, Liannetto is also, in his way, doomed — a cough, diminished appetite and night sweats hint why — but morally secure, a walking indictment of fame. “I’d been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did,” he thinks, comparing himself to Salieri in “Amadeus,” “rather than mediocre at something bigger that I tried to do.”As a drive down the highway of old-style entertainment (theater, movies, books, music, TV) — with gossip columns on the shoulder — “Up With the Sun” is an unqualified success. It’s replete with amusing walk-ons, most notably the underused actress Dolores Gray, Kallman’s partner in a décor concern called Possessions of Prominence; with knowing, affectionate references (Hal Hastings! “They’re Playing Our Song”! Manhattan Plaza!); and with sidelong observations of cultural change.Kallman, for example, hates “A Chorus Line,” disgusted by the “backstage sweat-stink and poor-me agonizing put out in front of the audience. No more hitting your mark with a big grin and singing, full-out, a joyful lyric.” Liannetto, more deeply as is his wont, mourns the “eternal orbits” of an analog watch. We time-travel to Judy Garland’s 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and Billy Rose’s funeral. Who could ask for anything more?A coherent crime story, maybe. The man convicted IRL of Kallman’s killing, Charles Lonnie Grosso — whatever happened to him, I found myself wondering, tilting inexorably back toward fact. The perpetrators here are given other names, and so many stock characters tromp through in the investigation and courtroom scenes — a Columbo-like detective, a “no-nonsense” judge — it’s hard to understand the particulars or why the main character met his untimely end, other than getting mixed up with a bad drug crowd. The murder was lurid; the motive seems mundane and not fully explained, and Liannetto’s relationship with a police assistant a little too neat.What he and the antihero Kallman have in common is that they’re both “throwbacks,” he soliloquizes. “All my life I’ve loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world, sleeping and finished, that can’t push you around.”“Up With the Sun” raises the drapes on a weird corner of this past, rousing and rummaging through. We’re left rubbing our eyes.UP WITH THE SUN | By Thomas Mallon | Illustrated | 353 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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    in Television

    Mushrooms Aren’t Here to Destroy Us — Or to Save Us

    The fictional fungus in “The Last of Us” touched a collective nerve. When it comes to mushrooms, we just can’t keep our cool.It’s grim, but in every post-apocalyptic story line, I wait for the moment when the characters float their theories about how the world fell apart, hoping to glean something useful.In HBO’s series “The Last of Us,” survivors of a global pandemic live in harsh, government-controlled quarantine zones to evade a parasitic fungus that turns them into zombies. Joel, a smuggler in what remains of Boston, believes that the ophiocordyceps mutation was delivered through the food system — contaminated batches of globally shipped flour or sugar spread the disease too quickly and efficiently for any kind of recall. Over the course of a long weekend, humanity was wrecked.The setup sounds pretty conventional for the zombie-thriller genre, but since the series premiered in January, the response has been a bit sweaty — panicked, even. Mycologists, fungal biologists and other mushroom-world experts have been called on, over and over, to assure us that while cordyceps species that zombify insects are real, a cordyceps mutation that thrives in humans is pure fiction.What got us so rattled?The fictional cordyceps mutation in HBO’s zombie-thriller series “The Last of Us” takes fear of fungus to the extreme.Warner MediaPaul Stamets, one of the country’s best-known mycologists, enjoyed the first two episodes of the show, but posted afterward on Facebook to emphasize the fact that no, cordyceps really aren’t capable of all that. “It is natural for humans to fear that which is powerful, but mysterious and misunderstood,” he wrote, wondering if the show played on our deep-seated fear of mushrooms.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.There are around 1.5 million species of fungi, a kingdom that is neither plant nor animal, and they’re some of the strangest and most marvelous life-forms on the planet, both feared and revered. But our relationship with mushrooms, particularly in the West, can be fraught — and not just because misidentifying one might be dangerous.In nature, mushrooms happily appear under the grossest and most fractious circumstances, when little else will. They can signal death, thriving in damp, dark rot, blooming in decomposition and nimbly decaying organic matter. Nevermind that this process is vital and regenerative (and, witnessed in a time-lapse, weirdly beautiful), it really freaks us out.When the artist Jae Rhim Lee wondered if it was possible for us to make a collective cultural shift, to approach death and its rituals differently, and to make smaller environmental impacts when we die, she designed a burial suit seeded with mushrooms. Nothing could be more natural — or more horrifyingly taboo — than, instead of eating mushrooms, inviting the mushrooms to eat us.Bioluminescent mushrooms, seen here in Gangwon Province, South Korea, glow in the dark.Video by Imazins / Getty ImagesMushrooms have a way of making us consider the things we prefer to avoid. Though this hasn’t stopped us from eating them — mushrooms are an ancient food source.The “stoned ape theory,” which imagines fungus as central to our evolution, was animated in Louie Schwartzberg’s terrifically pro-mushroom documentary, “Fantastic Fungi.” One scene shows how early humans might have eaten mushrooms, including psychedelic ones, off animal dung as they tracked prey across the savanna, then collectively tripped their way toward language, weaponry, music and more.Small, round buttons are the most cozy, familiar and recognizable of our edible mushrooms now, but there are hundreds of varieties we can eat (without tripping). In the pockets of wilderness around my home in Los Angeles, you might find brownish-orange candy caps, wild, yellowish frills of chanterelles and clusters of long-gilled oyster mushrooms. After rain, in the shady nooks of my own backyard, I see shaggy parasols pop up from time to time, as if by magic.In “The Last of Us” a warming climate weaponizes mushrooms against humans — a global disaster of our own making. But in reality, if you scratch just below the surface of our fear, you’ll find quite the opposite: an almost unreasonable expectation that mushrooms will rescue us, clean up our messes, do our dirty work and reverse all of the damage we’re doing to the earth. It’s true that there are species capable of breaking down oils in saltwater, absorbing radiation and cleaning toxins from the soil, though it’s also true that they might have better things to do.A handful of shaggy parasols, a common mushroom with a tousled cap.Deagostini Picture Library / Getty ImagesMushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, rootlike threads that connect underground in a vast mycorrhizal matrix so complex, intelligent and essential, Mr. Stamets has called it “the neurological network of nature.”That material, which also stores large amounts of carbon underground and can help plant life survive drought and other stress, is being used to develop alternatives to leathers, plastics, packaging and building materials. (Adidas made a concept shoe using a mycelium-based material last year, which led the company to discuss its “journey to create a more sustainable world.”)Lately, we expect mushrooms to save us, too. The zealous interest in adaptogenic mushrooms — fungi species used medicinally for centuries in China and other parts of Asia — has created an international market for lion’s mane, reishi, chaga and cordyceps. We turn to mushrooms to ease our anxiety, to help us focus, to make us happier and more open-minded, to make us horny, to make our skin glow, to enhance our memory, to get us to sleep.Mushrooms are magnificent. But maybe anxiety over a fictional fungus reflects a flickering awareness that we are, in fact, asking a bit too much of them.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More