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    Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

    The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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    In ‘Shrinking,’ Jason Segel Does the Work

    Jason Segel knows that you like him.It’s the sad eyes. The pained smile. The shambling 6-foot-4-inch frame that he diminishes by caving in his chest. It’s his single season on the critics’ darling “Freaks and Geeks,” playing a puppyish high schooler; his nine seasons on the audience favorite “How I Met Your Mother,” as a loving, excitable husband and dad; his slate of rom-coms. If you saw the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he also wrote, you spent 73 frames opposite his exposed penis during a mortifying breakup scene. And, most likely, you came out still liking him.“I’ve built up some currency, some good will,” Segel said. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do anything intentionally mean.’” This was on a January video call, and Segel was recounting an early conversation he’d had with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about their Apple TV+ sitcom “Shrinking.” The first two episodes premiere on Friday; eight more follow weekly.Segel, 43, who joined the series as a writer, executive producer and star, opposite Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, plays Jimmy, a cognitive behavioral therapist crushed by personal grief. A year after the sudden death of his wife, Jimmy self-medicates with pills, booze and some very polite sex workers. He is a neglectful father and a bad neighbor. His approach to patient care would make an ethics panel weep. Another comic actor might have tried to protect his likability. Segel, in this role, wanted to squander it.“We have to use that for evil,” he recalled telling Lawrence and Goldstein. “We should spend that currency.”Segel, who grew up in a comfortable, beach-adjacent neighborhood of Los Angeles, became a professional actor by inclination and deceit. He was an anxious kid, burdened from an early age, he said, by “a sense of impending doom.” Acting classes were a rare space in which he felt comfortable. By high school, though, his basketball schedule (he was, as his height suggests, a star) kept him from auditioning for most school plays. His theater teacher persuaded him to star in a three-night run of Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story.” Without telling Segel, that teacher invited a leading casting director from Paramount, who liked what she saw.“I’m baffled by people who take the bus to L.A. and say, ‘I’m gonna make it,’” Segel said, moving his thickly stubbled face closer to the camera. He wore a gray plaid shirt, his brown hair cresting high above his forehead, a wave that never broke. “That’s bravery. Me, I got really lucky.”Segel and Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” which only lasted one season but remains a critical favorite.Chris Haston/NBCHe landed a role on “Freaks and Geeks” not long after. Precocious, he had a quarter-life crisis at 20, when that series ended after 18 episodes. He was too old and too tall to play more high schoolers and too young for anything else. Judd Apatow, the executive producer of “Freaks and Geeks,” encouraged him to write. A few years later, just after he was cast in “How I Met Your Mother,” he had begun “Sarah Marshall.”Nicholas Stoller, who directed that movie, admired the script’s sweetness and Segel’s sweetness, too. The character Segel played, like many he had played and would play, verged on creepy and pathetic without tumbling over. “He’s willing to have his characters do bad stuff because it’s human, it’s relatable,” Stoller said. “But he just grounds it in kindness.”That movie set the template for the next six years: Film the sitcom for eight months and then make a movie during the hiatus, often one that he had written or co-written. But when “How I Met Your Mother” ended in 2014, Segel, then 34 and still precocious, had his midlife crisis. This one felt more existential. He’d been acting for half of his life and figured he was good at it. And he’d written films he was proud of, like “Sarah Marshall” and the 2011 Muppets movie. But was this his purpose? Writing and delivering joke after joke after joke?Segel explored the alternatives. Newly sober, he left Los Angeles, moving several hours north, to a property with orange groves. He chose projects more sparingly. To begin, he signed on to star in “The End of the Tour,” a movie about the writer David Foster Wallace. He hadn’t really done a drama since “The Zoo Story.” But he recognized parallels between himself and the film’s version of Wallace, who has just published his masterwork, “Infinite Jest.”“It’s this moment where everyone is saying, ‘You’ve won life,’” Segel said. “And you are feeling so scared. Like, Oh, no. What’s next?”“An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift,” said Brett Goldstein, one of the “Shrinking” creators.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesHe didn’t know. He wasn’t writing, and he didn’t find anything funny. But maybe he just didn’t want to write comedy, he realized, which led him to create “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” a 2020 limited series about four adrift souls ensnared by an alternative reality game.“While it wasn’t the most commercial thing I’ve ever written, it was maybe the most meaningful,” Segel said. “I proved I could make something again.” He began to theorize that maybe he needed to make work that let him use more of himself — the comedy stuff and the not-so-comic stuff. He sought projects that encouraged him to be what a therapist might describe as “integrated.”“Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said. “That’s maybe what the point of all of this has been about.”That revelation led him first to “Winning Time,” the flashy drama about the Los Angeles Lakers (Segel plays an unflashy, melancholic coach), and then to “Shrinking.” Lawrence and Goldstein, who met on “Ted Lasso,” had each been roughing out separate shows about grief and therapy before deciding that they should make a show together. Segel was their first choice to lead it.“Because he has that thing: He’s funny, he’s a great actor, inherently likable,” Goldstein said, adding a few expletives. “An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift.”Lawrence, on a separate video call, agreed. “He’s got this underlying vulnerability and it makes him so empathetic,” Lawrence said. “Even when he does something lousy, as his character, you go, ‘Oh, I wonder why he did that. Is he OK?’” Lawrence, who has multiple projects in the works, also liked the idea of an actor who could do some heavy lifting in the writers’ room.Segel and Harrison Ford on the set of “Shrinking.” The show’s creators valued Segel’s ability to write as well as act.Apple TV+In the series, Segel wanted to subvert his inherent likability. (With Luke Tennie.)Apple TV+They pitched him the show. Segel was quiet on the call, so quiet that Goldstein worried that he didn’t like the idea. After a day or two, Segel accepted. He explained this delay as the upside of that midlife crisis: Now he takes his time choosing his jobs. But he knew he would take the part as soon as he heard the pitch. “Shrinking,” he realized, would require both nanosecond comic timing and deep sensitivity. He would have to make an audience believe that this was a man overwhelmed by grief, and then make that grief funny without ever cheapening Jimmy’s pain.Pain interests him. It’s often the first question he asks himself about a character: How is this person suffering? And he figured that years into a pandemic, the audience for “Shrinking” might also be in pain. He has always seen himself as the kind of actor who functions as an audience surrogate — he mentioned Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Kermit the Frog. If a viewer could see Jimmy working through his pain, maybe that viewer could do some work, too.“What a crazy, sad couple of years,” he said. “To find a way to laugh about this together is really hard and potentially really special.”This is where the evil comes in — Segel didn’t want to make safe choices. The character had to feel volatile, even dangerous, if only to himself. Only by showing Jimmy at his absolute worst could he show the character starting to build himself back up again. On set, Segel leaned into this, so far that he sometimes fell over. Lawrence recalled shooting a scene in an early episode, in which Jimmy shouts at his next-door neighbor Liz (Christa Miller, Lawrence’s wife).“He was, like, ‘I feel like I can yell at her more here,’” Lawrence recalled.That antagonism was only for the camera. “I was surprised at how comfortable he is to act with,” Williams, his co-star, said. “There was nothing that I could do that he didn’t understand and that he wasn’t able to catch.”Segel has increasingly sought out projects that blended his comic and dramatic abilities. “Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesNearly everyone I spoke to described Segel as a man who had “done the work”: who had become comfortable enough in his own skin, with or without professional help, that he could extend generosity and compassion to himself and others. He didn’t speak much about his personal experience of therapy (which suggests the kind of healthy boundaries that a good clinician would encourage), except to say that it had helped alleviate some of that existential dread and that he was thankful for it.James Ponsoldt directed Segel in “The End of the Tour” and in several episodes of “Shrinking.” Looking at Segel through the camera’s lens, he said, “I see someone who’s grateful to be alive, someone who has lived and knows that being alive is better than not being alive.”An actor is not necessarily the characters he plays, but Segel understands nearly all of his roles, Jimmy included, as versions of himself. He views his life (and this is arguably a little less healthy) as a series of minor and major embarrassments that he can funnel into art. The other day, he said, on vacation, he’d gone for a run on the beach and fallen on his face in front of several onlookers. Another man might have felt shame; Segel figured he could probably use it.Probably he will. The stage and the set are the places where he has always felt best able to transmute dread or low-key humiliation into something that might make someone else feel a little better. It makes him feel better, too.Williams recalled their first day of shooting. It was a tense scene and she felt nervous, awkward. But Segel reassured her. Soon they were riffing.When “cut” was called, she turned to him and said, “Acting is really fun.”He looked at her, she recalled, and thought about it for a while. And then he said, “Yeah, it really is. It’s like the funnest thing on earth.” More

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    Review: In ‘Field of Mars,’ a March Toward Oblivion

    Presented by Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the two-act play tries to measure humanity’s progress.“Field of Mars,” written and directed by the experimental playwright Richard Maxwell, is mainly set in a chain restaurant with a menu globalized to the point of comedy, where a character is asked if he’d like to upgrade his “Blue Hawaiian” drink to “mucho” size.The play, titled after an ancient Roman training area, gestures blandly and indistinctly at themes of mankind’s history across two very long acts at NYU Skirball. Presented by Maxwell’s New York City Players as part of this year’s Under the Radar Festival, the play, starring 11 actors with mostly unnamed roles, offers a number of themes and variations without cohesion or novelty.It begins with two Adam and Eve figures waking up before the setting shifts (helped with Sascha van Riel’s lighting) to a generic, present-day eatery in Chapel Hill, N.C., where Kaye Voyce costumes its employees in half-worn face masks and van Riel’s set recalls the insipidness of a Panera Bread. There, three staff members discuss its music playlist while, in a nearby booth, two songwriters (Jim Fletcher and Brian Mendes) attempt to collaborate with two younger industry figures (Nicholas Elliott and James Moore). Both groups are prone to lengthy discussions about music, the reactions specific genres have inspired, the way they’ve made them feel, and how the songs have advanced our culture. It’s through these chats that Maxwell’s main theme is laid bare: how have humans grown from, subverted, or undermined their past, and what will come from it?But the theme remains a blank evocation, as these conversations, with their glacial, incongruous tempos, are more Maxwell’s excuse for distancing experiments than actual meditations. He compellingly blurs lines between the mundane and grander visions of our origins, but haphazardly sprinkles religious imagery and scientific theory into the dialogue. The vague suggestion of these ideas and their presentation are banal enough already, let alone stretched to two-and-a-half hours with intermission, and the interminable listing of musical acts, from The Beatles to Tina Turner to Throbbing Gristle, doesn’t seem to make any larger point. We are creatures of and obsessed with lineage, yes; next.The cast is a Who’s Who of downtown New York performers, including Eleanor Hutchins and Tory Vazquez, but they are cornered by the work’s pretensions and forced, experimental aesthetic. They deliver their lines in an emotionless, crystal-clear manner that verges on the unrehearsed; not entirely affectless, but rather with the slightly enunciated flatness of an audio tutorial.The strongest sign of life comes from the restaurant’s young bartender, played by the choreographer Gillian Walsh. We learn the most about her life — she plays in a cover band with her married boyfriend, to whom she refers as her “BF” because she is also the play’s stand-in for the internet age — and Walsh delivers her lines with a droll mix of bemusement and resignation reminiscent of Aubrey Plaza. With a certain amount of emotion finally at play, her blunt admission that, “It feels about 200 years too late to sing the praises of the natural world, and that’s fine,” even as it comes with little preparation, makes one of the play’s few direct strikes toward something beyond rudimentary icebreakers.The rest is a loosely assembled medley of purposefully alienating silences and conversations about human advancement, one of which brings together Roe v. Wade, Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus in one speech. It’s meant to shrink monumental events into the galactic blip they truly are, but the play is too intent on being experimental to make an effect. Here, what Ben Brantley once called Maxwell’s “Olympian calm of a playwright with a god’s-eye view” seems to bump its head on the ceiling, repeating its distant observations from a cold distance.Field of MarsThrough Jan. 29 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes, including an intermission. More

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    Late Night Riffs on Mike Pence and His Classified Documents

    Jimmy Kimmel said the papers were found in a box with “a four-pack of Zima and Polaroids of Mother dressed in her swimming costume.”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.Not So Classified After AllLast week, a lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence found a dozen classified documents at Pence’s home in Indiana.On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel joked that the documents were found “in a box with some of his other secret items, including a four-pack of Zima and Polaroids of Mother dressed in her swimming costume.”“According to his lawyer, they discovered the documents in January. Pence, they say, immediately alerted the National Archives, and the F.B.I. came to pick them up. The lawyers found the documents in, of all places, Mike’s kitchen, behind the Pence family mayonnaises.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The craziest part about these documents that were found: They were found stuffed between a dozen Wu-Tang albums.” — JIMMY FALLON“These are crazy times. Right now, Walgreens has deodorant behind a locked case, while classified documents are laying around like J. Crew catalogs all over the house.” — JIMMY FALLON“I’m starting to wonder if I have classified documents in my house.” — JAMES CORDEN“Wow. That is tough news for Mike Pence and fantastic news for Joe Biden.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“OK, so they’re just in every home? That’s the only thing that makes sense anymore. When you buy a new house and you move in, there’s just classified documents sitting on the counter next to that half-roll of paper towels and box of baking soda?” — SETH MEYERS“Is everyone just handed a box when they leave the White House? Like, ‘Thanks for coming, here’s some state secrets.’” — JAMES CORDEN“He says he took them home by accident, and they were found by one of his lawyers, who Pence asked to conduct the search of his home out of an abundance of caution. An ‘abundance of caution’ is also why Mike Pence leaves the room when TV commercials come on.— STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (And the Nominees Are Edition)“Today, the nominations were announced for the 95th Academy Awards. Yeah. Leading the way with 11 nominations is the movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once.’ It’s a film about all the places they found President Biden’s classified documents.” — JIMMY FALLON“The film that scored the most nominations was ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ which is up for best picture along with ‘Top Gun,’ ‘Avatar 2,’ ‘Elvis’ and six movies no one has seen, including a movie called ‘Triangle of Sadness,’ which I always thought was a slice of Papa John’s pizza.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Now, as usual, there was good news and bad news. Good news: Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman nominated for best actress. But, bad news: No women were nominated for best director. Yeah. But remember, they gave it to Jane Campion last year, so I guess this year, they thought, ‘Eh, that should hold you broads for the next 50 years.’” — WANDA SYKES“James Cameron’s ‘Avatar 2’ didn’t get a best director nomination for Cameron, even though his movie was nominated for best picture, which is what you get for making us put on those dumb glasses for four hours.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“With his nomination for ‘The Fablemans,’ Steven Spielberg extended his record as the only person nominated for best director in six different decades. Yeah. Yeah. Six different decades. But what has he done besides that?” — JAMES CORDEN“This is a big movie for him. In fact, Spielberg is already spinning the film off into its own franchise. Look out for this in theaters this summer: ‘2 Fast, 2 Fablemans.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingThe recurring “Leave Him Alone Guy” zeroed in on George Santos on Tuesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightKeke Palmer will appear on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutA few protesters, including plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster, gathered outside the Capitol during the hearing Tuesday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTaylor Swift fans gathered outside the Capitol to protest Ticketmaster during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about anticompetitive behavior in the ticketing industry. More

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    ‘Small Talk’ Review: The Art of Meaningless Banter

    In his brisk, low-maintenance Off Broadway show, the workhorse comic Colin Quinn extols the virtues of idle chitchat.After creating solo shows on the American constitution (“Unconstitutional”), the looming civil war (“Red State Blue State”) and the history of the world (“Long Story Short”), the workhorse comic Colin Quinn has decided to take on a subject of real consequence: small talk.It’s not as sharp of a pivot as you might think. Small talk is dismissed as shallow, but I was persuaded by Ruth Graham’s defense of it in Slate as a social glue in an increasingly divided world, or as she puts it, the “solid ground of shared culture.” Quinn clearly believes this, too. Whether you agree or not, there is little doubt we are currently facing a chitchat crisis. As Quinn deadpans in “Small Talk,” a brisk mix of charming comedy, thin history, self-help guide and various digressions that runs through Feb. 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, “Between phones, air pods and self-checkout, small talk is down 87 percent.”That doesn’t even account for the isolation of the pandemic that made us all rusty at saying hello to neighbors and jawing about the weather. Meaningless banter, a subgenre of small talk according to Quinn, is its own art. Ease into conversations, and don’t be abrupt, Quinn advises; he also suggests beginning with an exhale and “whoo.” Dressed casually in button-down shirt and sneakers, Quinn is big on the virtue of long vowel sounds. He also likes nicknames, nodding and starting conversations with “Is it me, or …”Part of his take on America is that while we may not be the most astute, we are the country with the best, or at least the most, personality, an empire built on charm, talk and salesmanship. This is why the decline of small talk matters. Quinn has no time for the idea it’s inauthentic. Its fakery is part of the appeal. Small talk has rules, and following them is more important than being your true self. Like improv, you need to listen and agree. Unlike improv, never escalate.This might be where Quinn runs into problems, because after a promising start, he can’t help but move outside the lines of his framework to ride hobby horses. He digs into social media, how the left and right are their own cults and the distorting dangers of technology. It’s almost as if he doesn’t believe small talk is big enough.Quinn has always been a wandering performer, with an intuitive grasp of openings and closers, but structurally messy in between. James Fauvell directs this piece with a light hand, and the production, on a bare stage, has a stripped-down aesthetic of a comedy club.Quinn once sarcastically mocked those who tell comics to evolve with the times. But he’s done just that, moving from game show hosting to political chat (“Tough Crowd”) to “Saturday Night Live” to Twitter. He has now settled into an essential part of the Off Broadway landscape, adding a much-needed bounty of jokes to the regular theatrical menu. His material doesn’t tend to be personal, though you see hints of a shift in the end of this show, when he movingly brings up Norm Macdonald, whom Quinn rightly describes as a “master small talker,” and briefly mentions a heart attack he suffered a few years ago that nearly killed him. He’s not one to get sentimental (is it me or does that kill small talk?), but, like his last solo show, he ends by imagining how people will look back on us as a civilization when we’re gone.He also speculates that if our country ended tomorrow, our epitaph might sound like something on a Myrtle Beach T-shirt: “America: If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.”It’s a reminder that while Quinn favored sweeping ambitious subjects, his real gift, and greatest comic subject, is the comedy of language: clichés, slogans, slang. Is this stuff small? It depends on how you look at it.Small TalkThrough Feb. 11 at Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; colinquinnshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    ‘The Appointment’ Review: A Chorus Line at the Abortion Clinic

    After its original New York outing in 2019, the trippy musical returns in the post-Roe era with an updated script and sharpened fangs.The singing fetuses giggle and taunt, adorable and naughty like a gang of baby clowns. Umbilical cords dangle from their bellies, and when the fetuses break into song, they like to hold those cords up like make-believe microphones.If you wanted to nudge someone’s memory of “The Appointment,” the wild and wily abortion musical that was first seen in New York in 2019, you’d start by mentioning those vividly imagined womb dwellers. In this show by the Philadelphia company Lightning Rod Special (“Underground Railroad Game”), they’re the rowdy, trippy part.What’s most arresting about “The Appointment,” though — even more now, in its current engagement at WP Theater on the Upper West Side — is the contrasting quiet calm of its realistic scenes set inside a clinic, where a composed, 30-something woman named Louise (Alice Yorke, credited as the show’s lead artist) has come to get an abortion.She actually has two appointments, as all the patients do: first an ultrasound, during which the doctor is required by law to ask if she wants to hear the fetus’s heartbeat. Then there’s some legally mandated medical misinformation — which he reassuringly debunks on the spot — and a compulsory 24-hour waiting period before she can end her pregnancy. The show follows her all the way through, demystifying the process with a keen straightforwardness. Nothing about Louise’s experience fits a trauma narrative.That is a major point of this daring, clear-eyed work of political theater, which pits the unambiguous humanity of Louise and the other clinic patients against a sentimental, fever-pitch fantasy of walking, talking fetuses — and briefly of unseen, hypothetical women who forever ruined their lives by aborting their pregnancies. (We hear their supposed voices in the show’s satirical song of female regret, “What Have I Done?,” which is performed by three male characters, channeling the popular idea of abortion as a source of everlasting anguish.)The creative team writes in a program note that “The Appointment” was “born of rage” at misogyny and paternalism. But in its previous New York outing, it was just possible to not quite pick up on the roiling fury beneath its surface — to come away thinking, perhaps, that it was deftly both-sidesing one of the culture wars’ most ferociously fought arguments.It would be hard to get that impression now. Directed by Eva Steinmetz from a smartly updated script (the book’s lead writers are Yorke, Steinmetz, Scott R. Sheppard and Alex Bechtel; the music and lyrics are by Bechtel), this new iteration of “The Appointment” is still the farthest thing from a polemic, but it is sharper, neater and more deliberate.In a run coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion until the Supreme Court struck it down last June, the show lands with more urgency than it used to. In one switched-out lyric from the anthemic “Tuesday Song,” a bracingly self-possessed Louise used to sing, with the other clinic patients, that activists’ screaming about abortion has “nothing to do with me.” It does now.None of which is to say that “The Appointment,” whose nutso musical numbers are choreographed by Melanie Cotton, is bummer theater. On a set by Oona Curley, with costumes by Rebecca Kanach and lighting by Masha Tsimring, it’s as unhinged as it always was, and as determined as ever to make the audience squirm — like when a long metal hook more than once appears from the wings, menacing the fetuses. By the way, there is also a hose.Distasteful? Arguably. But is it as unsettling as the ease with which a few of the female fetuses, looking for daddies in an interactive section of the performance, coax some men in the audience into opening their mouths when they should keep them shut? Arguably not. A tip: When they ask you to rate the hotness of one of them on a scale from 1 to 10, remember that she’s meant to be a fetus, not a grown woman — and that a woman is a person. So either way, what are you thinking, rating her?The AppointmentThrough Feb. 4 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Wanda Sykes Kicks Off ‘Daily Show’ Stint by Panning a Eulogy From Trump

    Sykes ribbed Donald Trump for forgetting a Black woman he met several times and who supported him at rallies, “setting the Black race back 50 years.”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.‘Tone-Def Comedy Jam’Wanda Sykes started her weeklong stint as host of “The Daily Show” with a look at former President Donald Trump’s awkward eulogy during a memorial for an unwavering supporters who died recently. The service was for Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway, one of two sisters who Sykes noted “were always showing up at his rallies, praising him on TV, setting the Black race back 50 years.”“You know those two. Trump held meetings with them, he’d invite them to the Oval Office, he would point at them and say, ‘See, Black people love me!’” — WANDA SYKESIn his speech, Trump said he recalled Diamond but didn’t remember Silk, who asked the former President to eulogize her sister.“I mean, come on — to say you know Diamond but don’t know Silk is wild, because they are always together. That’s like saying, ‘I know Bert, but I never heard of this Ernie fellow.’” — WANDA SYKES“If you just learned about Silk, I’m going to go ahead and say you didn’t know much about Diamond. That’s like saying, ‘I’m a lifelong fan of Garfunkel, but who is this Simon I’m just hearing about? Did they do anything together?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Knowing Trump, he probably only has room for one Black woman in his brain at a time. If he turns on the TV right now, he’ll be like, ‘Wow, Diamond’s hosting “The Daily Show”!’” — WANDA SYKES“Trump appeared before a sitting room-only crowd. One hundred fifty mourners gathered to hear him speak about their beloved Diamond — and he almost did. He almost spoke about her.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was more of a ‘me-logy’ than a eulogy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This speech had all the sincerity and grace you could possibly expect from a man who buried the mother of his children at the 16th hole of his golf course. And the crazy thing is, I bet he thinks it went great. I bet he feels like he just won a Soul Train Award.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was a tone-def comedy jam.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Does Not Spark Joy Edition)“On Friday, the F.B.I. spent 13 hours searching President Biden’s house in Wilmington, Del., and they found more classified documents. You know what? At this point, just let us know when you stop finding them, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLON“As if the documents weren’t crazy enough, they also found the script for the last season of ‘Stranger Things.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The Justice Department also took handwritten notes from when Biden was vice president. One was a piece of paper addressed to Obama that just said, ‘Do you like me? Check yes or no.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s crazy. First Trump, now Biden. Today, just to be safe, Obama burned his house down.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s interesting how Biden and Trump have handled their situations differently. Biden has new documents found every week, while Trump went for the Netflix-style, binge-all-at-once release.” — JIMMY FALLON“I mean, come on, the man has been in public office for 238 years. I bet you most of the [expletive] he has isn’t even classified anymore. You read his notes and it’s like, ‘Keep an eye on this Hitler guy!’” — WANDA SYKES“Those notes are ancient. One of them was, ‘Find out who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Most of them were Post-it notes that say ‘Remember: Return classified documents.’” — JAMES CORDEN“How could America be $31 trillion in debt and, apparently, no one in the executive branch has ever purchased a shredder?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Apparently, all politicians just hoard classified material. I’m starting to wonder how Jimmy Carter insulates all those Habitats for Humanity.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“At this point, the F.B.I. is just decluttering Biden’s house for him. They’re like Marie Kondo going around his rooms like, ‘This list of spies does not spark joy.’” — WANDA SYKESThe Bits Worth WatchingFreddie Gibbs performed “Blackest in the Room” and “Feel No Pain” with Anderson .Paak on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe longtime couple and “Seriously Red” co-stars Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale will appear on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutThe trauma of Lakecia Benjamin’s car crash anchors “Phoenix,” a labyrinthine set of arrangements.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesThe saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin turned a broken jaw from a car accident into inspiration for her new album, “Phoenix.” More

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    in Theater

    ‘Sugar Daddy’ Review: The Grief Comes Out in Laughs

    In his show about mourning his boyfriend, the comedian Sam Morrison confronts overwhelming loss with punch lines and panache.In some cultures, keening over a casket promises cathartic release. For the writer and performer Sam Morrison, a self-identified “anxious, asthmatic, gay, diabetic Jew,” vocalizing his pain means barreling through punch lines at high speed, pumping the brakes every so often to split his heart open, in the solo show “Sugar Daddy,” now running at Soho Playhouse.Morrison, who at 28 calls himself “an old queen” by New York standards, admits that the recent death of his boyfriend of three years is all he can think about. Well, that and one other thing.“Sad gay men are objectively just the horniest people in the world,” Morrison says, citing a conversation with his therapist who assured him the combination of feelings is totally natural.Indeed, sex fuels much of Morrison’s observational humor throughout the 65-minute show, in bits that point to the absurdity of attraction to skinny people (“We’re always shivering and getting kidnapped!”), sex between straight people (“The creepiest part is that they only do it in private?”) and dirty talk near a partner’s rear end (“I don’t wanna get any words stuck up there!”).Morrison’s blue humor might seem almost juvenile, but he tells us it’s at least partly his way of facing an overwhelming loss. “Grief is disgusting,” Morrison says, and it erupts in unexpected combinations of impulses and bodily fluids. His partner, Jonathan, who was 26 years his senior and whom he calls “the hottest daddy” in Provincetown, where they met, died from Covid-19. (Based on audible guffaws and sniffles in the intimate venue, an older generation of gay men, who experienced the untimely deaths of loved ones to a different virus, may relate to Morrison on an especially personal level.) Candid details from Morrison’s relationship — Jonathan’s big belly laugh, the secret language they developed during quarantine — underline the absence it leaves behind.Amid a sometimes frenzied array of tangents, two confrontations anchor Morrison’s progress through mourning: the time he was mugged but refused to hand over his phone because his pictures of Jonathan were saved on it, and when he was chased by a hungry flock of gulls seeking the “gay little raisins” Morrison had pulled out to fix his blood sugar levels after he was crying on the beach. Both anecdotes, which Morrison weaves into a sort of narrative throughline, connect him to Jonathan in ways he’s found useful in trying to move forward.The quicksilver shifts from vulnerable sincerity, a tremble of heartache in Morrison’s voice, to arch sass and polished panache are remarkably fast and furious. Under the direction of Ryan Cunningham, Morrison’s favored rhythm is one of sustained escalation, his energy rising like the shriek of a teapot until it’s eventually deflected into a non sequitur. Set to boil, remove from heat, repeat. The crosscuts are familiar tools for comedians facing the unthinkable, even if Morrison often uses them to look away. Still, he is exceptionally present throughout, whether leaning into his self-ascribed signifiers — gay, millennial, Jewish — or describing the turmoil he appears to grapple with in real time.“Sugar Daddy” is a kind of group therapy, Morrison says; the only way he knows how to get through his experience is to talk about it. Turning his tragedy into comedy doesn’t mean it makes any more sense. But if joking can make grief less sacred and more profane, what’s a bit of laughter between tears?Sugar DaddyThrough Feb. 17 at SoHo Playhouse, Manhattan; sohoplayhouse.com. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More