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    ‘United States v. Gupta’ Review: Father’s Trial, Daughter’s Song

    Deepali Gupta offers a meandering and muddled take on the trial of Rajat Gupta, a former head of McKinsey & Company.“The problem with exposition is, why would you want a map when you’re trying to get lost?” asks Deepali Gupta near the start of “United States v. Gupta.”Lost is certainly how one feels at several points of this meandering production about the trial and conviction for insider trading of Rajat Gupta — Deepali’s father and a former head of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Over the course of its three hours, what is billed as a “musical tragedy” attempts to use Rajat’s trial as a dramatic trampoline for other topics: Deepali’s involuntary commitment in a psychiatric ward, the legacy of her grandfather (a freedom fighter and journalist), and the biases of business reporters.Confusion is immediately sown when Deepali tells us, by way of introduction, “I am writing a play, and I am making an appeal. The appeal is a play. I am appealing to your humanity. I am appealing to you. I am trying to make your humanity seem appealing.” The last line throws us back on our heels: Why is it our humanity that needs to be upholstered into something appealing?This question is never answered. And confusion reigns throughout the performance. Though based on an actual trial, characters’ identities are collapsed or otherwise destabilized. Arti Gollapudi plays all three of Deepali’s older sisters, for example, differing mainly by degrees of uptightness. To further complicate matters, Deepali addresses each of them as “Didi,” an honorific of endearment, so that it’s impossible to tell exactly which sister she’s seated next to while they watch their father’s trial.As the musical lurches from topic to topic — the show, directed by Caitlin Sullivan, is seasick with non sequiturs — it continually defers judgment about her father. It ends on the biggest unresolved question of all: whether Rajat Gupta was “a good man.” The jury has by then made its decision, but Deepali, a songwriter and performance artist, primes us to reconsider. When she sings, about a map of India, “how malleable are our borders, how permeable are our boundaries,” she could by hymning the boundary-free nature of not just her own existence, but her father’s, encouraging us to see him as a fallible being.Genre-wise, the play is also at war with itself. Despite its billing as a musical tragedy, it struggles to become either of those things. None of the tunes stuck out as particularly memorable, and many could be safely excised, including a nonsensical duet about SweeTarts sung by Deepali and one of her sisters.The inclination of “Gupta” toward digression merely distracts from the main point, which becomes increasingly muddled as the work inches along. By the end, the show is stuck somewhere between takedown and tribute, between reflecting on what a daughter stands to inherit from her father’s convictions, in both senses of the word, and ceding space to the patriarch to tell his own story. “Gupta” would have benefited, no question, from a map, but even more from a compass.United States v. GuptaThrough Nov. 28 at Jack, Brooklyn; jackny.org. Running time: 3 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    Danielle Brooks and Sam Jay on Confidence and ‘The Color Purple’

    Two creative people in two different fields in one wide-ranging conversation. This time: the actress and the comedian.Viewers first saw the actress Danielle Brooks as Taystee, the smartest and funniest of the prisoners on “Orange Is the New Black,” the incarceration dramedy that began in 2013 and ran for seven seasons on Netflix. This month, she’ll appear in “The Color Purple,” the second film adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, this one based on the 2005 Broadway musical it inspired. Brooks’s character, Sofia, forced to work a grueling job as a maid for a white political family in early 1900s Georgia, was portrayed by Oprah Winfrey in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation; Brooks, 34, a Juilliard School-trained actress who was raised in South Carolina, played her in the musical’s 2015 revival. That production was Brooks’s Broadway debut; last year, she starred alongside Samuel L. Jackson in a revival of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” (1990).The comedian Sam Jay, who grew up in Boston and whose humor Brooks has long admired, recently released her first HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Jay, 41, spent years doing stand-up in Los Angeles before joining the writers’ room of “Saturday Night Live” in 2017. She left the show after three seasons for two series, “Pause With Sam Jay” (2021) and “Bust Down” (2022), both of which she helped create and starred in, and which highlight her frank, anecdotal style. This past October, the two gathered in a photo studio in downtown Manhattan to discuss acting, impostor syndrome and learning the importance of asking for what they need.T: Many stage shows that perform well are rumored to get adaptations that never materialize — but this one did, and quickly. Is that just the power of the film’s producer Oprah Winfrey?Danielle Brooks: I think for Oprah it’s making sure the story continues to have a life — that it lives through generations.Sam Jay: You shot in Georgia, right? I always wonder about Black people shooting these period films where they have to go back to being downtrodden, sweaty Black. How do you snap out of that and then just, like, go chill at Checkers?D.B.: It was tough but at times cool because you’re in it. It’s the difference between doing it on a stage versus on an actual plantation. It did get real at times: All I could think about was how many of my people were hung from those trees. I had the responsibility of making sure I told this very beloved story as honestly as I could to represent those people who aren’t here.Brooks and Corey Hawkins in the forthcoming film adaptation of “The Color Purple.”Eli Ade/Waner Bros.S.J.: Are they going to let the main characters Shug and Celie be gayer? Because they’re gay as hell in the book, and they really skipped over that in the first movie. When I read the book … it wasn’t just some crush; they were together.D.B.: You’re going to be satisfied. You get that, which I was happy about.S.J.: I feel like that was a part of the story Walker was trying to tell.D.B.: I got to meet her on set, and my close friend Corey Hawkins, who plays Harpo [Sofia’s husband], took a video of it, which was great because for me it starts with her. My whole pop-off — my Broadway career — started through her book.S.J.: These Broadway runs. …D.B.: It’s crazy. I imagine there was a lot of preparation before doing your HBO special, though, too. Do you remember how many shows you did before that?S.J.: I did somewhere around 300 shows for a year and a half. I was maybe three or four months into touring when I bumped into Chris Rock. We had dinner and he was like, “I don’t do less than 250 shows before filming.” So I immediately called my agent and got more on the books. Then I’m feeling myself because I’m, like, 20 shows away from my 250 and Chris goes, “Yeah, 50 more shows. I’m not telling you to do anything I wouldn’t do!” But I watch that special now and think, “Ah, growth.”D.B.: That’s how I feel with “The Color Purple.” When I did the Broadway show, I had so much anxiety and was going to therapy because I felt like an impostor. Cut to five years later, doing the movie, I felt such comfort. I might have done 500 shows, now that I think about it. One year, eight shows a week — someone do the math — but I felt more confident, worthy enough to portray this character.S.J.: Confidence, I’ve come to feel, is just knowledge. The more information you have, the more confident you are. When I look at my special, I can tell I was free.D.B.: I always thought you were free, every time I’ve watched you. I’m pretty picky about comedians; I don’t laugh at a lot of stuff. I’m the person in the audience the comedians make fun of, like, “Look at this bitch not laughing,” and then I’m still not laughing.S.J.: I think only you know what you’re hiding. In real life, I’m very silly and physical when I’m talking but, for some reason, when I’m onstage, I’m like, “You ain’t no clown! You don’t need to be doing all that flailing around.” It’s dumb because it’s comedy, but it was really me just being afraid to let that side out.D.B.: Did you ever feel, when you were starting out, that there was a comedian you wanted to style yourself to be like?Jay’s 2023 HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me.” Courtesy of HBOS.J.: I don’t think I wanted to be like anyone, but you get ideas from others. Chris Rock was the first comic I saw who made sense to me. I grew up in a “Def Comedy Jam” era, with Black and white comedy being very separate. I love that era, but that’s not how my brain works. I’m not good at roasting. I’d seen George Carlin, too, and that seemed very white. But Chris was this hybrid I thought was cool.D.B.: I feel like some people won’t give you the real — where you think, “I can’t believe they just said that” — but also make you examine why you think the way you do. That’s so important in any medium, and the point of what we do, so we can see ourselves. Comedy’s always been that easier pill to swallow, for the truth. So when somebody can do that, not just make you laugh but question why you think about, you know, disabled people in some way, or why you don’t like to use the N-word, I find it important. What I’ve always enjoyed is that you don’t hold back. In a way, I can be guarded, but you’re very, “No, let’s talk about it.”S.J.: It comes from a kind of twisted place of my mom passing away [in 1998, from lupus] and me accepting the idea of mortality, that you don’t live forever. I moved out when I was 16 — I’ve had no parent longer than I’ve had a parent. I sometimes don’t remember my mother’s face, but I remember how she made me feel. That’s all that remains. I remember the lessons she taught. So it’s just about trying to be intentional in every interaction.D.B.: I think that’s the same for me … being more guarded because my mother is a minister. She’s very much, “Be careful what you do; what you say is going to affect you till you die.” I love my mom, I respect her 100 percent, but I have to live for me because it’s my life. But I want to hear about your experience booking “S.N.L.” I want to be on that show so bad!S.J.: I get this call from my manager, “Will you audition for ‘S.N.L.’ tomorrow?” I’m like, “Do they really want me? I’m not doing a character.” I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. I audition, then get a call saying, “We know you auditioned for the cast but how would you like to come be a writer?” I hang up and I’m like, “Damn, OK, too ugly for TV.” But I needed to step into something new at that point in my career. I’m all about going toward things that you’re afraid of, so I said yeah.Brooks (center) as Sofia in the 2015 Broadway revival of “The Color Purple.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesD.B.: Do you ask for what you need when you’re doing a show, or do you settle a bit?S.J.: I’m going to ask for what I need.D.B.: I think about a lot of women in comedy who aren’t matching up to what men are making or getting, in terms of perks. It’s just not happening. I was watching Luenell’s comedy show, and she was talking about being on a plane with comedians, and the men are flying first class and she’s in coach.S.J.: At first, I was absolutely scared to ask. I didn’t know what was OK.D.B.: You do have a core group of people that you can go to where you can say, “Let’s be real: How much do you make on this?”S.J.: I wish it was stronger, but I do feel like I got a couple of people where we try to be pretty transparent about that stuff. That’s the age-old trick where you have a 9-to-5 and they’re like, “You guys aren’t allowed to talk about this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, so you can keep us all poor.”D.B.: That’s been one of the best parts of having a friend group in the industry, our transparency. We’re not gonna brag about our contracts, but if you want to know, we’ll lay it out so we can come up together. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s what drives me crazy: when you find out someone had a personal chef or a trainer, and you’re like, “Nobody told me that was a possibility, and I needed it more than they did.”S.J.: I think working behind the scenes, working on “S.N.L.,” knowing the lengths they’ll go to make sure the talent is OK, now when I’m being the talent, I’m like, “Do that for me.” It sometimes feels bitchy, but that’s just a stigma in our heads as women.D.B.: There are a lot of ways we should be given more respect. I think about hair and makeup: Why is it so much to ask for someone who can actually do my hair, rather than teaching somebody to do it? And why is it so wrong to ask for somebody who can do my face rather than having to come to them with the products I use?S.J.: The ask, at its core, is coming from a place of having to build up the confidence to do this work. That’s the thing that gets misconstrued when Black people say they want Black people in these spaces. The reverse racism crowd sees that as wanting everything to be all Black, when, no, it’s because we know we need this stuff.D.B.: I don’t want to go to a costume fitting and have to give them a list of shops and places to get my clothes. On “The Color Purple,” our hair and makeup departments were phenomenal — the wigs matched; the lace was lacing.S.J.: You know “The Color Purple” is coming correct.T: How do you work comedy into your performance of Sofia, who’s one of the most visibly oppressed, but also most joyous, characters in the film?D.B.: Sometimes, when people go through so much, they don’t want to dwell on that; they’re longing for joy and laughter. She’s somebody who tries to stop generational curses, whether that be through an abusive marriage or abusive parents. She’s trying to bring her community to the right path. She might not have all the skills to do so — she might use her fists or her mouth — but, at her core, she’s not looking for a fight. She’s looking to have a great day.This interview has been edited and condensed.Danielle Brooks: Fashion: ObyDezign. Hair: Tish Celestine at La Belle Boutique, NYC. Makeup: Renee Sanganoo using Nars at the Only AgencySam Jay: Hair and makeup: Merrell Hollis More

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    in Television

    A Hallmark Christmas Movie Costume Designer Shares His Secrets

    Keith Nielsen, who oversaw costumes for four Hallmark Christmas movies out this year, shares his approach to dressing festively. (It does not involve ugly sweaters.)Several years ago, Keith Nielsen was feeling less than cheerful when a friend told him about an internship opportunity with the costume department of the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle.”After graduating from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla., in 2015, he had hoped to find a job that merged his interests in fashion design and entertainment. When he couldn’t, he started working in retail. He said he had begun to feel depressed about his career by the time his friend mentioned the internship.His only experience in costuming had been on student films, but Mr. Nielsen, who said his grandmother had taught him to sew, got the internship. “On the ‘Mozart’ set, I listened and learned,” he said.Mr. Nielsen, now 30, worked on the show through its final season, rising from an intern to a costume coordinator. Afterward, he started to get more costuming jobs, including for productions at the Westchester Broadway Theater, now closed, and for the TV movie “My Adventures With Santa,” which was released in 2019.The movie tapped into Mr. Nielsen’s longtime fondness for Christmas, he said, and since then, he has been hired as the costume designer for about a dozen TV Christmas movies.This year, he oversaw costumes for four films: “Mystic Christmas,” a romance set in Mystic, Conn.; “Where Are You Christmas?,” a largely black-and-white movie that imagines a world without the holiday; “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” which was filmed at a castle in Scotland; and “A Biltmore Christmas,” which was filmed at Biltmore House in Asheville, N.C. All were for the Hallmark Channel.In “A Biltmore Christmas,” the actress Bethany Joy Lenz, left, wears a reworked Carolina Herrera gown. Hallmark MediaWorking with the theater helped prepare him to take on films, he said, because he learned how to better manage fittings and deadlines while becoming more familiar with outfits from different historical periods.“Keith has a deep understanding of fashion, culture and history, and an uncanny taste and style, especially for period pieces,” said Dustin Rikert, the director of “A Merry Scottish Christmas.” Mr. Rikert also worked with Mr. Nielsen on “Next Stop, Christmas,” which was broadcast in 2021. Costumes Mr. Nielsen created for that movie included the outfits worn by a time-traveling train conductor played by Christopher Lloyd.The director John Putch, who worked with Mr. Nielsen on “A Biltmore Christmas” and on “A Holiday Spectacular,” a 2022 movie featuring the Radio City Rockettes, noted his love of details. “Keith is into the shoelaces and socks people don’t see,” Mr. Putch said.Mr. Nielsen, who lives in Manchester, Conn., said many of his costume ideas originate from what he jokingly described as “my 12-year-old gay-boy mind.” (He declined to provide specific wardrobe budgets for films he has worked on as a costume designer.) In the edited interview below, he discussed the aesthetic influences that have inspired his work and the ways he has conjured the holiday spirit through clothes.Christopher Lloyd, left, and Keith Nielsen on the set of “Next Stop, Christmas.”via Keith NielsenHow do you source costumes?I read a script about four times and let my imagination run. Many holiday films are made in three weeks or fewer, so I often only have a couple of days to get fittings done.When I was costuming for theater, I started seeing old Broadway shows and going to warehouses that I still use. The vendor Right to the Moon Alice is where I get vintage items. I also get them from Ann Roth, an Oscar-winning costume designer, who has amazing pieces at her warehouse in Pennsylvania.Hallmark likes color and saturation. To get that freshness on camera, sometimes I recreate a garment so it doesn’t look like it has been sitting in a closet for 70 years.Do you ever buy clothes off the rack?I shop at outlets and online. I like J. Crew, Banana Republic and, for suits and coats, Brooks Brothers. Kate Spade has bags in bright reds and greens. I don’t like ugly Christmas sweaters.One costume in “A Biltmore Christmas” started as a Carolina Herrera gown that was bought from the RealReal. We had several fittings to re-drape the skirt, add a double-tulle layer and create a gathered bust that draped around the back. When I turn an existing garment into something else, I call it Frankenstein-ing.What has inspired your approach to costuming?I am a sap and love nostalgia and old Hollywood. Bill Travilla’s costumes for Marilyn Monroe are some of my favorites, especially those for “How to Marry a Millionaire.” I also like Arianne Phillips, who has designed costumes for film and for Madonna. I admire her breadth of work. I never want to get pigeonholed.How do locations like Biltmore House influence your process?I walked through the mansion to get ideas from the space. I remember looking at the colors of the wood paneling and of the limestone. Window shades are kept at a certain level and rooms are kept dimly lit to protect the things inside from light. It’s very romantic and cozy, and I wanted wardrobes that communicated warmth and coziness using colors besides red and green.To create a gown and a kilt worn by the stars of “A Merry Scottish Christmas,” I pulled together a bunch of tartans that went with the tapestries, candles and dark wood at the castle. We settled on MacDonald of Glencoe, a tartan with holiday-like jewel tones. The pattern was digitally printed on the fabric used to make the gown, and the kilt was made with a traditional wool tartan.What are some challenges with costuming holiday films?It’s the little things. All clothing sizes have changed: Vintage shoes are narrower than shoes are today, jackets fit differently, and girdles are gone. It’s hard to find people to do embroidery and beading.But I like classic and timeless looks because Christmas movies are watched over and over. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Thanksgiving Specials and Holiday Movies

    The Macy’s Day Parade, an annual dog show and a Friends marathon air on Thanksgiving. And Christmas movies are here, including “Love Actually” and “The Holiday.”Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Nov. 20-Nov. 26. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES AT KANSAS CITY CHIEFS 8:15 p.m. on ESPN. While millions will be watching when the teams of the brothers Jason and Travis Kelce meet on the field, some eyes will be on the stands looking for Taylor Swift’s parents who it is rumored were coming to meet the Kelce family for the first time. (Maybe it’s time for Donna Kelce to lend the Swift family her half-Eagles, half-Chiefs jersey.) It’s unlikely that Swift will attend because she is performing in Rio on Monday, but because the Swift family are Eagles fans, they could still show up.TuesdayJude Law and Cameron Diaz in “The Holiday.”Simon Mein/Columbia PicturesTHE HOLIDAY (2006) 6 p.m. on AMC. I am thrilled to announce it’s time to watch this movie ad nauseam. The story follows Amanda (Cameron Diaz), who, after a bad breakup, decides to go to England for the holidays. Meanwhile Iris (Kate Winslet) is heartbroken from unrequited love and lists her house on a home exchange website. The two swap houses, and both end up finding love: Amanda with Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law) and Iris with a retired movie producer (Eli Wallach)— in a friend way, don’t worry! Jack Black is also somehow in the mix. The whole movie is unabashedly charming, goofy and so cozy.WednesdayCOUNTDOWN TO MACY’S THANKSGIVING PARADE 8 p.m. on NBC. While we prep our pumpkin pies or run into people we went to high school with at our hometown bars, workers in Midtown Manhattan are closing off roads and enlisting their highest voltage air pumps to prepare for the annual parade. This show gives a behind-the-scenes look at this year’s floats and a back story for each of them.LOVE ACTUALLY (2003) 9 p.m. on AMC. Following a voice-over from Hugh Grant saying “if you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around,” this movie starts five weeks before Christmas, and for that reason it has always been my and my mom’s holiday tradition to watch it during the week of Thanksgiving. (It also marks the timing of our annual fight about why I don’t like the Colin Firth story line and she does.) The movie follows different narrative threads — all of which are of course connected in one way or another — and features a star-studded cast, including Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson and Keira Knightley.ThursdayThe Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2022.Jeenah Moon/Associated Press97TH ANNUAL MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE starting at 8:30 a.m. on NBC. Cher, Brandy and Jon Batiste are a few of the artists set to perform this year, alongside balloons, floats, marching bands and performance groups.NATIONAL DOG SHOW 12 p.m. on NBC. The National Dog Show took place in Philadelphia this past weekend but is being broadcast after the parade festivities wind down. This year, the German shepherd K9 Rom will be honored for its help in the search for the escaped inmate Danelo Cavalcante.FRIENDS THANKSGIVING EPISODES starting at 11 a.m. on TBS. Some of the best episodes of TV shows are the ones in which Thanksgiving is the centerpiece. Specifically, I am thinking of the “Gossip Girl” episode with Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say” playing over dinner-table drama and the “Gilmore Girls” episode with the mother-daughter duo going to four dinners. But if I had to choose a themed-episode favorite, it would be “Friends,” the one where they all play football to relive Monica and Ross’s glory of the Geller Family Cup. Other episodes in this marathon include “The One With Chandler in a Box,” “The One With the Rumor” and “The One With Ross’s Sandwich.”FridayFrom left: James Stewart, Donna Reed and Thomas Mitchell in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”AP Photo/FilesIT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) 9 p.m. on E! It’s Christmas time, and George Bailey (James Stewart) is not feeling his best. His guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers) shows him what life would have looked like without any of his contributions. “For a turkey dinner, with Christmas trimmings, is precisely what’s cooking at the end of this quaint and engaging modern parable on virtue being its own reward,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times.SaturdayBYRON ALLEN PRESENTS THEGRIO AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. For a second year, this award show is honoring Black excellence, with the help of the hosts Sheryl Underwood and Roy Wood Jr. Mariah Carey is set to receive the Music Icon Award, and Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy and Don Cheadle will also be taking awards home. Boyz II Men, Jennifer Hudson, Patti LaBelle and Smokey Robinson are set to preform.SundayTHE GREAT CHRISTMAS LIGHT FIGHT 10 p.m. on ABC. Another year, another season of this show that features people who are just really great at decorating their houses for Christmas. The first episode prepares you for the extra fun and creative light displays that are sure to be featured this season, with a look back at past year’s displays and competitions. More

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    ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Review: Beloved Film Gets Anime Treatment

    Not quite a reboot or a sequel, this anime series brings back the cast of the beloved “Scott Pilgrim” movie but lands without the same charm.Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers in the Netflix series “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixDid you know that at some point in the ’90s there were two separate, very different Sonic the Hedgehog TV series running simultaneously? “And the same guy played Sonic in both shows,” Scott Pilgrim, the doofy 23-year-old layabout of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” shares, unprompted, to his love interest, Ramona Flowers. “Isn’t that wild? The same guy playing two different versions of the same guy??”Totally wild. It’s almost like how the same guy (Michael Cera) has now played two different versions of this same guy (Scott Pilgrim) — first in Edgar Wright’s damn-near-perfect 2010 film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and now in this underwhelming Netflix anime adaptation, both based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beloved graphic novel series.In the books and in the film, Scott discovers that Ramona, a girl he’s been seeing in his dreams (because of a convenient subspace highway that runs through his head, of course) is real, but he can’t date her until he defeats her seven deadly exes in epic video-game-style faceoffs.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” isn’t a reboot or a sequel; it begins almost identically to the film but takes a sharp turn at the end of the first episode that sets it up as essentially an alternate-reality scenario. Here, Ramona and her exes take center stage, and though the series is still set, like the film, in a Toronto from “not too long ago,” this new story feels more grown up, often at the expense of its humor.The film, which condensed the six-book series into a svelte 112 minutes of addictive original songs and millennial- and Gen X-friendly references, more baldly satirized hipster culture and the cliché ways in which young adults sabotage their relationships and fail to hold themselves accountable for their knuckle-headed decisions.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” directed by Abel Góngora, is more dutiful in its depiction of toxic relationship behaviors and more generous in redeeming its characters — even its antagonists — through their own arcs of personal growth.The band Sex Bob-Omb in “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixToo bad those are also the blandest story lines. There are some intriguing new reveals and romantic pairings, along with jamming music from Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb (original songs by Anamanaguchi), but the bulk of the eight-episode series feels like a filler arc or, to use an anime term, OVAs (original video animations).The jokes are either wholly lackluster or slightly tweaked and watered-down versions of what appeared in the movie. The pacing lags too, and though most of the film’s stars return to voice their animated counterparts — including Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman — the performances often land like bad English dubs, with any emotiveness muted and intonation flatlined.Anime is a cozy fit for O’Malley’s work. But for as much as “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is conversant in the medium’s visual motifs, gags and gestures, it doesn’t fully take advantage of the absurdity that the format allows. Or at least not until the ending; in its last two episodes, the series finally exhibits the kind of imagination one would expect from a story featuring superpowered vegans and spying robots.So I won’t say “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” completely fails to launch, because it offers a wholesome sense of closure for fans of the books and of the film. But the series never fully succeeds either. The characters may have grown, but in this incarnation, the story itself is stuck in a state of arrested development. More

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    Qui Nguyen Was Done Writing Plays. His Family Pulled Him Back In.

    With “Poor Yella Rednecks,” the writer continues to tell his Vietnamese American family’s immigrant story. Maybe one day his parents will even see the shows.Eight years ago, Qui Nguyen was at a low point. “I decided that my writing life had not amounted to much, and I felt I needed to concentrate on my family and my kids,” he said during a recent video conversation. “I was going to hang it up.” The new play he was working on, he added, was “a sort of swan song.”That play, “Vietgone,” was indeed a turning point for Nguyen. Because — plot twist! — it was a hit.Inspired by Nguyen’s parents, Quang and Tong, and their burgeoning relationship as Vietnamese immigrants in Arkansas in the mid-1970s, the play premiered at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., in October 2015 and ran at Manhattan Theater Club the next fall. Since then, “Vietgone” has been produced all over North America.Around the time of the show’s early success, Nguyen moved to Los Angeles from New York, landing jobs at Marvel Studios and Disney, for which he co-wrote “Raya and the Last Dragon,” and wrote and co-directed “Strange World.” (He still works as a screenwriter and director for Disney in Los Angeles.)He has since revisited the story of his parents, and his irrepressible grandmother Huong, in “Poor Yella Rednecks,” which is running through Dec. 3 at Manhattan Theater Club. (It premiered at South Coast in 2019.) “Everyone’s like, ‘It’s a follow-up,’ but I own the fact that it’s a sequel,” Nguyen said, laughing.Ben Levin and Maureen Sebastian as Nguyen’s parents in “Poor Yella Rednecks” at Manhattan Theater Club, where it is scheduled to run through Dec. 3.Richard Termine for The New York TimesSet in 1980, the family saga picks up with Tong and Quang (played by Maureen Sebastian and Ben Levin) hitting a rough patch. “It’s their second love story, kind of something I had to go through with my own wife,” Nguyen said, adding that he has been commissioned to write a third installment, and that he hopes to eventually have five plays in the cycle.“I was convinced to not put ‘Vietgone 2’ on this one because people would be intimidated that they didn’t see the first one,” he said. “But in all honesty it’s ‘Vietgone 1,’ ‘Vietgone 2,’ ‘Vietgone 3,’ ‘4’ and ‘5.’” (Newcomers can rest assured that “Poor Yella Rednecks” works perfectly fine as a stand-alone.)“He’s taken probably the darkest moments of his parents’ marriage and turned them into beautifully comic scenes,” the director May Adrales said on the phone. “And I know he’s taken some from his own personal life and his own relationships,” she continued, adding that he “took some of those scenarios and would write a romantic-comedy version. That is why it’s so personal, but also it just demonstrates his own genius of craft to create that distance.”Nguyen’s distinctive style is marked by fluency in various emotional tones and pop-cultural vernaculars. As Adrales sees it, Nguyen is “taking a genre that’s very American, the immigrant story, and I feel like he’s completely renewed it.”In his review for The New York Times, Naveen Kumar described “Poor Yella Rednecks” as an “expletive-filled fusion of hip-hop and martial arts with the soapy twists and turns of addictive serial television.” (This summer Nguyen was featured in the PBS documentary series “Southern Storytellers” alongside the likes of Jesmyn Ward, Mary Steenburgen, Lyle Lovett and Jericho Brown.)“I think that often when people think of Asian American artists, you expect everyone to wear a lot of red and talk about dragons and pray to Buddha statues,” Nguyen said. “When I grew up, it was also about ‘Spider-Man’ and hip-hop, and those things that grew out of the ’80s and ’90s that were part of my childhood.” (Nguyen, who is 47, gives his age as “old enough to remember a time before cellphones.”)All of those influences were evident in the kapow-boom-blam! spectacles Nguyen wrote throughout the 2000s for the New York-based company Vampire Cowboys. (It’s the rare, if not only, theater group to have had a booth at Comic Con.)“He writes these insane fever dreams,” said Sebastian, whose previous Nguyen roles include a badass Shakespearean heroine in “Living Dead in Denmark” (2006), a space pilot in “Fight Girl Battle World” (2008) and a postapocalyptic warrior in “Soul Samurai” (2009). “You’re reading it on the page and you’re like, ‘There’s no possibility that this is stageable.’”She continued: “It’s such a testament to his belief in the ability of theater and in all of these people he is collecting as his artistic family and community.”Nguyen was a co-writer of the 2021 Disney film “Raya and the Last Dragon.”Disney +, via Associated PressHis 2011 play “She Kills Monsters” debuted at the Flea Theater in Manhattan, and is performed regularly in high schools and colleges.Joan MarcusIf one thing ties together Nguyen’s life and work, it’s a predilection for natural and chosen families. For starters, he remains loyal to his collaborators, working regularly with the same actors. Not only have Sebastian, Quan, Jon Hoche and Paco Tolson appeared in both “Vietgone” and “Poor Yella Rednecks,” but Adrales has also directed both stagings.When asked for an example that she felt illustrated her relationship with Nguyen, Sebastian recalled the time when she had to pull out of the New York production of “Vietgone” for personal and professional reasons. Nguyen was supportive. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about me or this show,’” Sebastian wrote me in a follow-up text message. “‘All I want is for you to have the life that makes you happy, to have your career and your family grow, for all your dreams to come true.’ And here we are today, still making art, still full of love and respect and admiration for one another. Still each other’s ride or die.”This loyalty and generosity of spirit are also reflected in the diversity found in his work, in which he allocates powerhouse leading roles to those too often relegated to supporting or sidekick status in the theater, be they women, people of color, queer folks or Dungeons & Dragons-loving geeks. All of them drive his play “She Kills Monsters,” which has become a perennial favorite in high schools and colleges in the years since its premiere in 2011.That popularity did not prevent “She Kills Monsters” from getting caught up in the culture wars roiling schools, with a planned production in Tennessee canceled because of its gay content. Nguyen sounded a little baffled by the kerfuffle. “It’s a play about connection and finding connection, and yet people are trying to create ways to create division out of it,” he said. “It’s definitely a weird time.”The need to connect continues to inspire him, including with the very people who gave him the prime material for the “Vietgone” project: his parents — who still haven’t seen or read the plays. “They don’t know if they were emotionally ready to tackle those things again,” Nguyen said. “But they’re so happy that those stories are out there, because they know that the reason I wrote them is for my kids, my nieces, and for kids that are like them.”Now that his parents are too old to easily leave Arkansas, where they still live, Nguyen has thought of a way to return the stories where they started, via a documentary, “The Family Vietgone,” that he and his younger brother have been working on. “I can make a movie,” he said, “and bring it to them and go, ‘Look — this is what I made.’” More

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    ‘Arcadia’ Review: Artistic Ambition Gets Thrown Into Chaos

    Bedlam’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s time-traveling mind-bender of a play is a meditation on uncertainty.If even commonplace matters of everyday life — weather, traffic, disease — can defy scientific expectations, what hope could there be in predicting human behavior? With “Arcadia,” his 1993 play, Tom Stoppard set out to explore the science of this uncertainty and how it can disrupt our understanding of history. A new staging presented by Bedlam makes a valiant effort to adapt Stoppard’s cerebral probes into chaos theory, Newtonian law, thermodynamics and metaphysics for a 2023 audience, but the result is a muddled one. And that may just demonstrate Stoppard’s frustrating but brilliant point.Act 1 introduces us to the play’s complicated narrative mechanics, as we jump back and forth between the Regency Period of the early 1800s and the early 1990s. The staging of the 1990s years feels even closer to our own when two primary characters — the independent-minded author Hannah (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and one of her love interests, the logic-driven mathematician Valentine (Mike Labbadia) — pull out smartphones and sleek laptops.Stoppard sets the play in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands of England, but Eric Tucker, the director, has his actors drop the British accents. So when Hannah and Valentine enter an academic arms race with a smarmy Byron scholar named Bernard (Ian Zafir) who values poetry above all other subjects, they spew hard consonants and short vowels. The North American Englishness of it all makes it slightly easier to hold on to Stoppard’s words.Even in a space as physically intimate as the West End Theater (located on the second floor of a century-old church, which provides an aptly haunting atmosphere), the production feels cold, caught up in its own profundity at the expense of our comprehension. The Bedlam company’s acting is void of real thrill so the bits of Stoppard’s playful wordplay and humor we do catch fall flat in both centuries.There are two exceptions: the luminous Caroline Grogan as Thomasina, a preternaturally wise student, and the stormy Shaun Taylor-Corbett as Septimus, her tenacious tutor. Together, they find themselves on the brink of a major discovery that Valentine will investigate in the 1990s. The pair find a seductive chemistry that blossoms as Septimus opens Thomasina’s mind to entropic (and erotic) possibilities.In Act 2, the eras blur. Timelines that were previously distinct are now stacked on top of one another. After intermission, we’re ushered back into the theater only to discover that Tucker has brazenly swapped the actors’ playing area for our seating area. By doing so, Tucker fulfills Bedlam’s mission statement to “reinvigorate traditional forms” and “collapse aesthetic distance.” But he’s also honoring one of Stoppard’s main provocations — that the unknowability of the past meets the unknowability of the here and now.ArcadiaThrough Dec. 23 at the West End Theater, Manhattan; bedlam.org. Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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    Big Apple Circus Review: A Show That Bends Over Backward for You

    The extraordinary within the everyday: A holiday season rite returns with aerialists, trapeze acts, funny clowns (really!) and cotton candy too.If confetti supplies have plummeted, if a spangle shortage now afflicts Manhattan, blame a tent at the southwestern corner of Lincoln Center. Yes, the Big Apple Circus has returned and for a little over a month New York will glimmer more brightly.In recent years, a return has been less certain. In 2016, after operating as a nonprofit for nearly 40 years, the original outfit shut down and filed for bankruptcy. An affiliate of a corporate restructuring firm bought it in 2017, then switched out its management and character several times. In 2021, it was sold again, to a corporation that counts the famed aerialist Nik Wallenda as a minority owner, and became a bit more death-defying.The German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli has given up using live animals but in one routine three performers pretended to be trained polar bears.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThis season, Big Apple has imported the German troupe Circus Theater Roncalli, which is mostly a cause for rejoicing. Roncalli stands as a skillful and endearing example of the form, a company steeped in circus classics, yet capable in most if not all ways, of moving with the times.It is sad that New York can no longer support a circus of its own and that Big Apple has become an intellectual property asset rather than a group enmeshed in the life of the city. But there’s nothing like an aerial balance act — or two, as is the case in “Circus Theater Roncalli: Journey to the Rainbow” — to make audiences forget all of that. Besides, this is New York. Who is from here anyway? Call it sequin diplomacy.Last weekend the mood in the tent was giddy and rapturous, with the younger spectators revved up on cotton candy and the older ones excited perhaps by the sight of at least four prestige TV stars sitting near the ring. A clown meandered amid the rows as an orchestra played frisky versions of classical and popular songs.Iryna Galenchyk’s aerial act with her partner is a wonder of strength and grace.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe Roncalli company is steeped in circus classics, with acts like the Kirichenko acrobatic group.Ye Fan for The New York TimesThe show proper opens with Noel Aguilar’s fizzy juggling act, which began with batons and continued with Ping-Pong balls. (Ever caught a kernel of popcorn in your mouth? Imagine that, but in time to the music.) The finale involved straw hats, thrown like Frisbees. Aguilar dropped the odd baton and missed the occasional hat, which made the routine more impressive, because it showed what it took to excel.He ceded the stage to Andrey Romanovsky’s rubber leg contortionist act, in which Romanovsky skipped rope while bent over backward. He was replaced by a tightrope walker (the tightropes were, thankfully, near to the ground) and then by an acrobatics act in which the performers were dressed like members of Marie Antoinette’s court. They gave way to Iryna Galenchyk and Vladyslav Drobinko, whose romantic paired aerial act is a wonder of strength and grace. Throughout there were appearances by four clowns, all of whom were legitimately funny, a circus rarity. One, Paquin Jr., had great success with a routine that may have sacrificed a Cabbage Patch doll.The gift of the circus, wherever it’s from, our critic writes, is that it gives a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday.Ye Fan for The New York TimesRoncalli has given up using live animals (a sensible and respectable choice for any circus, though I do miss the Big Apple’s former dog and cat acts). But the second half began with a puzzling routine in which three performers in fur suits pretended to be trained polar bears. This was followed by a bicycle act and a sequence in which three gold-painted performers balanced atop one another, like statues come to life. No less singular, if much more hectic, was Emma Phillips’s foot juggling routine, in which she made an end table and a couple of antimacassars revolve atop her toes. A steampunk bubble routine delighted the children; a trapeze act, featuring Christoph Gobet and Julian Kaiser balancing, impossibly, foot to foot, made their mothers gasp.This is the gift of the circus, wherever it’s from: a glimpse of the extraordinary within the everyday, a vision of what time, tenacity and a heedless approach to muscle strain can achieve. And cotton candy, too? What glitter. What joy.Big Apple CircusThrough Jan. 1 at Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center, Manhattan; bigapplecircus.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More