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    With ‘Floyd Collins,’ Jeremy Jordan Finds Another Challenge Onstage

    In “Floyd Collins,” playing a hardscrabble Kentuckian trapped while exploring a cave, the actor finds inspiration in the claustrophobic restrictions.When Jeremy Jordan played a young, naïve cop in the Broadway show “American Son” alongside Kerry Washington, in 2018, he was fresh off several seasons on the “Supergirl” series. And so he tried to apply some of the techniques that worked for him on TV to a taut drama about police violence.“I had been making it work for so long, trying to mine gold from every moment, and I think that had stuck with me,” Jordan said. The director Kenny Leon intervened, with advice that Jordan still carries with him. Literally.“He gave me this note on some old piece of script,” Jordan said, fishing a tiny scrap of paper from his wallet and carefully unfolding it. “It says ‘you are good enough to just say these words.’”Leon’s counsel may be evergreen, but it particularly resonates with Jordan’s new project, where he is often unable to use many physical acting techniques.In “Floyd Collins,” which is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Jordan portrays the title character of Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s musical, a hardscrabble Kentuckian who becomes trapped while exploring a cave in 1925. As a media circus forms on the surface, Floyd withers away underground, stuck between rocks. (The musical is based on a true story, which also inspired the Billy Wilder film “Ace in the Hole,” from 1951.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kimmel Likens the Selection of a New Pope to ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’

    The late night host also described the papal conclave as determining “who will be handed the keys to the popemobile” on Tuesday.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.Shantay, You StayWith Pope Francis’ funeral on Saturday, the selection of his successor will quickly follow.On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel discussed the traditional process of determining “who will be handed the keys to the popemobile.”“Over the next few weeks, 135 flamboyantly dressed cardinals will gather to pass judgment on a series of aspiring candidates. In a lot of ways, it’s the Catholic version of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And nobody’s going to be more insufferable this week than your friend who saw the movie ‘Conclave’ and now knows everything about how it works.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The Vatican has published images of the pope laying in an open casket. A surprise, Jill Biden said, ‘I’d hit that.’” — GREG GUTFELD“The funeral will be held Saturday for people who want to see something less depressing than ‘S.N.L.’” — GREG GUTFELD“We won’t know for at least a couple of weeks who will succeed Pope Francis, but this guy, to me, this is the guy at the top of my list. One of the candidates is an Italian cardinal stationed in Jerusalem. His name is Pierbattista Pizzaballa. ‘For a limited time only at Papa John’s, the Pizzaballa!’ How much fun would that be? In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a minute to pray. Please bow your heads.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Earth Day Edition)“Today, of course, is Earth Day. Nancy Pelosi said, ‘I remember the first one, 7 billion years ago.’” — GREG GUTFELD“Think about this: One planet produced dinosaurs and the iPhone and Fig Newtons and Kid Rock. Isn’t that something?” — JIMMY KIMMEL”The Environmental Protection Agency did their part to honor our planet today, with a round of reassignments and mass layoffs. I can’t help but wonder how different things might be if Donald Trump’s father had taken him camping even one time.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingIn his Tuesday monologue, Greg Gutfeld targeted the city of San Francisco while discussing dark woke.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday Night“The Bear” star Ayo Edebiri will appear on Wednesday’s “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney.”Also, Check This OutA first-edition copy of “The Great Gatsby” at Princeton University. In honor of the book’s 100th anniversary, the university has mounted the exhibit “Living Forever: The Archive of The Great Gatsby,” which runs through November. Karsten Moran for The New York Times“The Great Gatsby” will celebrate its 100th anniversary with special exhibitions in New York, Minnesota, New Jersey and South Carolina. More

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    ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’: An Origin Story for the Broadway Stage

    This Broadway production delivers lots of spectacle as it winds back to the teenage years of Henry Creel, an antagonist from the Netflix series.If the economic point of entertainment franchises is to generate new forms of interconnected content, then theater is merely another logical outlet for a property, alongside movies, TV shows, comic books, video games and theme parks. So now here we are with “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the latest pop-culture phenomenon to manifest into the Broadway dimension.As far as its plot is concerned, the play that just opened at the Marquis Theater fits neatly into the lore of “Stranger Things,” a wildly popular Netflix series about a fictional Indiana town at the juncture of terrifying government experiments and supernatural forces. This production is big, loud, often ingenious and occasionally breathtaking, in a “how the hell did they do this?” kind of way.In other words, “The First Shadow” fulfills its franchise requirements in terms of spectacular art direction and compliance to the series’ canon (to which it adds tantalizing tidbits). Whether it is satisfying as a piece of theater is a dicier proposition.Based on a story by the Duffer Brothers (who created the series), Jack Thorne (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a co-creator of the current Netflix phenomenon “Adolescence”) and Kate Trefry, “The First Shadow,” written by Trefry, is a prequel to the series. More specifically, it piggybacks on Season 4, which is set in 1986, and tells the origin story of that season’s primary antagonist, Vecna — the teenager Henry Creel in 1959, when the main plot of the Broadway play takes place.If Vecna doesn’t ring a bell, or if you don’t know that Eleven is better than One, don’t fret: It’s possible to follow the show anyway, and to enjoy it. But it’s hard to deny that audience members who understand those references will have access to more layers of “The First Shadow.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Andor’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Rebel Rebel

    The “Star Wars” series, back for its final season, shows how a revolution takes hold and how even in times of radical change, people have to keep living their lives.Episodes 1-3: ‘BBY 4’Want to escape from the real world by watching a “Star Wars” TV show? Can I interest you in Season 2 of “Andor,” which begins this week with stories about refugees being evicted from a safe haven, resistance fighters tearing each other apart, and the obscenely powerful plotting to destroy a whole planet?Maybe a touch too real? I get it. But let me add that the first three episodes of the season, the show’s last, are remarkably entertaining and thoughtful television. It’s provocative stuff, but satisfyingly stirring.This series is about how a revolution takes hold, in fits and starts, with a lot of disagreement about how to proceed. Season 2’s first set of episodes also shows how even in times of radical change, people have to keep living their lives.In Season 1, the show’s creator, Tony Gilroy, divided his saga into multiepisode arcs, each presented in a slightly different style. Gilroy and Disney+ are retaining that structure for Season 2 and leaning further into the “movie of the week” concept by releasing three episodes at a time.But the first thing fans may notice about the opening three episodes (of 12 total) is how they jump around between locations and genres, to tell essentially four different stories, all set over the course of a few days one year after Season 1 ended. The date is “BBY 4,” four years before the Battle of Yavin, the big space-fight in the original “Star Wars” that ends with the Death Star exploding. Reminder: That triumphant rebel attack was made possible by the events of the film “Rogue One,” for which “Andor” is a prequel. (Rampant franchise expansion can make for confusing timelines.)The series’s namesake, the mercenary-turned-rebel Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), bounces between two of these stories. The new season gets off to a strong start in its opening sequence, in which Cassian steals an imperial fighter ship, posing as a test pilot. After a lot of dramatic buildup to him getting into the pilot’s seat, Cassian pushes the wrong button and goes rocketing backward instead of forward. He then accidentally engages the ship’s blasters, shooting laser bolts indiscriminately around the hangar. It’s a funny bit of slapstick, but also exciting, filled with the fine design and special effects “Star Wars” is known for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Gardener’ Is a Great Pop-Goth Spanish Murder Series

    This Netflix series has plenty in common with slick, dark shows like “Dexter” and “You,” though it more often feels like “Wednesday.”A lot of foreign murder shows are about misery, about agony. Bereft parents bicker in muted kitchens while determined detectives avoid but inevitably confront their own personal failings; grim neighbors offer ominous condolences. Let us gaze at the violent, morose ocean. And then, let us gaze at the violent, morose ocean within.The Spanish series “The Gardener” (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed), on Netflix, takes a campier, soapier approach. It still has ample bloodshed and intrigue, but it is a lot more soda than scotch. “The Gardener” has plenty in common with slick, dark shows like “Dexter” and “You,” though it more often feels like “Wednesday,” not only in its pop-goth vibes but also in its reliance on its protagonist’s wide-eyed stare.Elmer (Álvaro Rico) is a young man with a passion for horticulture. Well, maybe not “passion”: He has no emotions, according to his witchy mom, China (Cecilia Suárez), a fount of Freudian oddities. They were in a car accident when Elmer was little, which caused brain damage that affected his ability to experience and interpret feelings. China has had to teach him how to emote, how to fake it, practicing facial expressions with him as a child and directing his speech and behavior as an adult.Sure, there are downsides to raising a blank sociopath. But the upside is that you can craft him into a perfect hit man, which is what China has done. They use their gardening business as a cover for their murder-for-hire work, and they use the literal gardens to bury the bodies — superb fertilizer, the characters say.And then one day Elmer is dispatched to dispatch Violeta (Catalina Sopelana), a young schoolteacher, and suddenly he wonders if maybe he isn’t so empty inside. Maybe he has a lot of feelings, and maybe those feelings are mostly about Violetta and how much he likes her. Maybe instead of killing her, he’ll woo her. Maybe this is love! Or … maybe it’s a brain tumor.You don’t have to know all the #boymom lore to guess that China is no fan of Violeta and that, in fact, Violeta could never understand Elmer the way she does, never love him for who he truly is, as she does. A boy’s best friend is his mother and all that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Sisyphean Beach Balls

    “I hate large beach balls,” Celia Rowlson-Hall said at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week.A director, choreographer and performer best known for her quirky and surreal work in film, Rowlson-Hall was rehearsing “Sissy,” an idiosyncratic hybrid of dance and theater. It draws on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down. The boulder is represented by a giant beach ball, and in rehearsal the performers were having trouble lofting it into a net suspended above the stage. After failing a few times, they succeeded, only to have the ball bounce back out again.This Sisyphean moment was not planned, but it might easily have been part of the choreography. “Sissy,” which runs at the Baryshnikov Center Thursday through Saturday, is the kind of production that playfully blurs the line between real life and make believe. It’s about a director-choreographer (Zoë Winters), a new mother who is making a dance piece that uses the metaphor of Sisyphus to symbolize the difficulties of balancing motherhood with her artistic life. Rowlson-Hall came up with the idea while she was pregnant and working on a feature film.From left, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Ida Saki and Marisa Tomei at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “Being with the dancers, I’m in heaven,” Tomei said, adding she has relished the opportunity to be physically expressive, “thinking in shapes and body sculpture.”Thea Traff for The New York Times“It was a camera movement in my head,” she said during a rehearsal break. “I saw the camera coming around and revealing this woman who had been hiding behind the rock the whole time. And I was like, ‘Oh, what’s her story?’”Much of the story that Rowlson-Hall wrote is drawn from her life, but it’s nested in layers of fiction and art making. In “Sissy,” which alternates between scenes of dialogue and dance, Winters’s character presents a work-in-progress set in a rock quarry. (Lucas Hedges plays a quarry worker.) A dancer (Ida Saki) pushes the beach ball around, dances out childbirth, then pushes a slightly smaller beach ball (representing the moon) while holding her child — a child played by Saki’s own 1-year-old son.The showing seems to be going fine when it’s interrupted by a paleobotanist, who announces that she has made a “once in a millennium” discovery in the parking lot: the fossilized root system of the world’s oldest forest. It seems the boulder that is the director’s show is rolling down the mountain again, and she will have to adjust to the new circumstances — a process made more farcical because the paleobotanist is played by the gifted physical comedian and actress Marisa Tomei.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘Ransom Canyon,’ Minka Kelly Enjoys the Ride

    There were times when Minka Kelly assumed that her acting career was over.Kelly, 44, had never planned on becoming an actress. Before breaking out in her mid-20s as the sassy cheerleader Lyla Garrity in the football weeper “Friday Night Lights,” she worked as a scrub nurse. A decade ago, during a slow period, she graduated from culinary school.So later, when fallow months turned into fallow years, she would tell herself this was fine. If Hollywood had finished with her, she would survive it.But recently, having published a sensitive, unsparing memoir, “Tell Me Everything,” a New York Times best seller, Kelly found herself again in demand. An offer came for “Ransom Canyon,” a Netflix neo-western series with romance elements. Kelly would fill the cowboy boots of Quinn O’Grady, a concert pianist who runs a dance hall in the Texas Hill Country. Quinn’s enthusiasms include soap making, love triangles, looking wistful in prairie skirts.Kelly didn’t think a romantic lead would be available to a woman in her 40s. But it was. And audiences have been enthusiastic: “Ransom Canyon,” based on the novel by Jodi Thomas, has been one of Netflix’s most popular shows since it debuted last week. And there is also more to come. After Kelly finished shooting “Ransom Canyon” in June, she flew to Paris to film her first romantic comedy, “Champagne Problems.” That movie will debut in November, also on Netflix.Josh Duhamel and Minka Kelly in a scene from “Ransom Canyon.” “This is Lyla 20 years later,” Kelly said of her new role, comparing it with the one she played in “Friday Night Lights.”Anna Kooris/Netflix“I’ve gotten to a place in my life where I am my best, and now the best thing has happened,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Macbeth in Stride’ Review: A Leap and Stumble Into a Classic

    One of the most performed and reimagined works of English literature becomes a fourth-wall-breaking musical revue.“You gon’ rework a 400-year-old play just for your ego?” asks one of three witches in the new show “Macbeth in Stride.” Whitney White, who stars as Lady Macbeth in this quasi-feminist concert reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, smugly responds: “Yup. Sure did! Sure did!”I don’t fault “Macbeth in Stride,” which is now running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for its ego. We can always use work exploring what it means for a woman to proudly assert herself, to show her agency, to dare to grasp at power in spaces where she is meant to be secondary to a man. In this show, the artist invites us to see her through the role of Lady Macbeth, breaking the fourth wall to bring us into her process of recreating a character from one of the most frequently produced and remade works of English literature. But “Macbeth in Stride” is more ego than execution, more gestures than statements. And White’s heroine is much less substantial than the very character she’s critiquing and reworking in her own image.White, who wrote and performs this piece, is one of the city’s essential director-performers and is having an extended moment on New York stages this spring. Throughout her career she has focused on directing works by and about women and Black artists, including Bess Wohl, James Ijames and Aleshea Harris.In this work, White is centered as a kind-of Lady Macbeth (she’s just called “Woman” in the script) who’s a glam queen, a lead singer in a black bodysuit. She’s on a concert stage with a live band (the effortlessly talented Bobby Etienne on bass; Barbara Duncan, a.k.a. Muzikaldunk, on drums; and Kenny Rosario-Pugh on guitar), and those three witches (played by Phoenix Best, Holli’ Conway and Ciara Alyse Harris) are her backup singers and commentators.The main medium here is song, and “Macbeth in Stride” is an almost perilously eclectic mix of genres. The first song, “If Knowledge Is Power,” features the show’s music director and conductor, Nygel D. Robinson, on piano singing with glossy John Legend-style vocals. The melody suggests something lush and romantic, like a nocturne, but when the witches join in, they evoke the TLC days of 1990s R&B, with matching dance moves courtesy of Raja Feather Kelly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More