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    Tales That Crackle With Vitality, With or Without a Puppeteer

    La MaMa Puppet Festival and other stage works this fall highlight the power of storytelling through puppetry.In a crisp white gallery space on Great Jones Street, in Manhattan’s East Village, a large wooden box contains a meticulous mise-en-scène: a midcentury roadside motel room constructed at puppet scale, which means it’s half of human scale. Standing on a step built into the outside of the box, spectators can gaze down into the installation, a time-capsule environment called “Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin.It has just one puppet inside — a motionless woman in an armchair in the corner, dressed with almost ostentatious modesty, one dark strand of hair hanging loose from her ponytail, a crucifix dangling from the chain around her neck. On the tabletop beside her, the key to Room 15 lies next to an envelope spilling $20 bills. On one of the double beds, the rust-orange spread is rumpled; outside the door to the bathroom, there is water in the sink. And on the desk, near the room phone and a stamped envelope, a letter is balled up.“Motel,” by the master puppet artist Dan Hurlin, freezes an anonymous American moment. It can be viewed at La MaMa Galleria through Nov. 18.Zach HymanOrdinarily, nothing seems more lifeless than a puppet without a puppeteer. But in freezing an anonymous American moment from a decade that might as easily be the 1970s as the 2020s, “Motel” absolutely crackles with an intriguing, unsettling vitality.The installation, on view through Nov. 12 at La MaMa Galleria, is a standout at this year’s La MaMa Puppet Festival — for the fastidious detail of Hurlin’s motel-room re-creation (wall-mounted bottle opener; wood-grain-patterned paneling; lampshade gone cockeyed; Bible, of course) but also because it poses a challenge beyond puppetry’s usual ask that we conspire in the illusion. Hurlin and his sound designer, the superb Dan Moses Schreier, are inviting us to take in their clues and envision a story as well.From the clock radio on the bedside stand, we hear intermittent voices giving and eliciting testimony, but they are from different nation-rocking scandals: Watergate and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. What decade is the puppet woman stuck in? Is she in danger or distress? Perhaps on the run? And why does her prim, princess-sleeved dress seem from a different wardrobe than the clothes hanging up?Dogs bark, crickets chirp, cars zoom past — all in Schreier’s subtle soundscape — and we peer ever more closely at the drab little room, imagining what trouble might have brought her here, and what all might be going on out there.***Over at La MaMa proper, on nearby East Fourth Street, my favorite festival performance of last weekend was Tom Lee’s mesmerizing “Sounding the Resonant Path,” upstairs at the Ellen Stewart Theater. (Its brief run has ended, I regret to say.)The principal character is a puppet called the Woodcutter. Entering with an ax slung over one plaid-shirted shoulder, he walks slowly and deliberately along a curving wooden track, ostensibly alone. Never mind the puppeteer (Lee) seated just behind him, dressed in black and scooting along on a small, wheeled box. That is part of the Japanese kuruma ningyo style, a relative of bunraku.This charming, funny Woodcutter fells trees to carve and shape; in his studio, we see him transform blocks of wood into art. (Eventually, we also see him carrying an actual flaming torch, which is one way of getting us to worry about a puppet’s mortality, even if that is not the point.)Solitary and self-sufficient, the Woodcutter is possessed of the ineffable quality — a kind of projectability — that can make puppets profound and delicate vessels for embodying human vulnerability. His is the microcosmic life at the center of the show’s macrocosmic evocations.Because what “Sounding the Resonant Path” sets out to do is briefly, bountifully recap all of our planetary history. Its inspiration is the August 1977 launch of the Voyager 2 space probe, which carried the golden record of images, speech and music meant to explain Earth to any extraterrestrial life.Maria Camia’s ambitious musical, “The Healing Shipment,” features extraterrestrial puppets whose torsos frame the faces of the puppeteers inside. Richard TermineThis show’s version includes minimal speech but many intricate projections (by Chris Carcione) and shadow puppets (by Linda Wingerter), as well as live music (by Ralph Samuelson, Perry Yung, Julian Kytasty and Yukio Tsuji) whose bandura, drums and haunting shakuhachi flute reach in and grab you by the soul. To mimic exquisitely the deep, shivery sound of rushing water, the show uses the “Rain Making Machine,” a kinetic artwork by La MaMa’s longtime resident set designer Jun Maeda, who died of Covid in April 2020 and to whom the production is dedicated.The cavernous Ellen Stewart Theater is an excellent space for contemplating vastness — of space, of time — but Lee and his Woodcutter do it especially affectingly, under an impossibly huge, star-pricked sky. (Lighting is by Federico Restrepo.) There is, at show’s end, a clear and lingering consciousness of being minuscule in the universe, and terribly, beautifully human.***Puppet-wise, New York is having a strong fall. Up at City Center, in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of Qui Nguyen’s “Poor Yella Rednecks,” winsome child-size puppets (by David Valentine) play a principal character named Little Man — more than one being necessary to pull off a comic action sequence in particular.Later this month, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the venerable Handspring Puppet Company — known for “War Horse” and Little Amal — is slated to return with a puppet adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Life & Times of Michael K.”And there is the rest of the La MaMa festival, part of the point of which is to nurture puppet artists at different stages of their careers.Last weekend I saw two other shows there whose runs have already ended. One was an ambitious puppet musical, Maria Camia’s “The Healing Shipment,” whose puppet design was a lot of fun: humans with Smurf-blue skin and shocking white hair; extraterrestrials whose bright yellow torsos framed the faces of the puppeteers inside. The plot, though — involving potato spaceships and intergenerational time travel — was overly complicated and insufficiently interesting. The other was Charlotte Lily Gaspard’s “Mia M.I.A.,” a work-in-progress shadow-puppet musical with some very clever 3-D puppets. Coincidentally, it also had a space-travel theme, making the shows three for three on that.Of all the elements for puppet pieces to have in common — outer space, really? Makes a person want to hunker down in some retro motel room and listen to the radio.La MaMa Puppet FestivalThrough Nov. 18 at La MaMa and La MaMa Galleria, Manhattan; lamama.org. More

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    ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

    At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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    Late Night Mocks the GOP Debate

    Kimmel called the five candidates in the latest G.O.P. face-off “a Who’s Who of who has no chance to beat Donald Trump.”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-Heated DebateThe third Republican debate aired on Wednesday night without the participation of the front-runner, former President Donald Trump.Jimmy Kimmel predicted that no one would tune in, saying, “The GOP ‘dopefuls’ were just happy to be on television.”“Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott — it’s a Who’s Who of who has no chance to beat Donald Trump.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was quite a night. There were five candidates onstage, three moderators asking questions, and two people watching at home.” — JIMMY FALLON“Putting the Republican debate on opposite the C.M.A. awards — it makes no sense. It’s like putting lasagna up against a Swedish meatball.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But for these five Republicans, the stakes were higher than the lifts in a pair of Ron DeSantis’s boots.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Whatever you think about Trump, Republican debates are kind of meaningless without him. It’s like a football game without Taylor Swift.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Surprising Election Results Edition)“Well, guys, yesterday was Election Day, and despite some recent polls that show former President Trump leading President Biden, Democrats had a surprisingly strong night. Yep, Republicans were like, ‘How is that possible?’ and Democrats were like, ‘No, seriously, how is that possible?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Democrats had a strong night in Republican-leaning states like Kentucky, Ohio and Virginia. It’s odd — it’s like hearing BTS swept every category at tonight’s Country Music Awards.” — JIMMY FALLON“You’re telling me Trump, the guy who stocked the Supreme Court with ’80s movie villains with the explicit goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, is leading the polls in Ohio, where voters just overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to protect abortion rights? This makes so little sense, even Steve Kornacki’s big board last night said ‘I give up.’” — SETH MEYERS“Yep, yesterday Americans went to the polls, and today we’re learning a lot about the new ballot measures each state approved. They’re pretty interesting. For instance, Ohio voted to legalize marijuana. Meanwhile, Indiana voted to enjoy the contact high from Ohio.” — JIMMY FALLON“The fact is, abortion limits have become such a losing issue that some conservatives have purportedly decided the problem isn’t pro-life policies but the phrase ‘pro-life.’ They’re looking to rebrand it but, personally, I think they should be forced to carry this phrase to term.” — SARAH SILVERMAN, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Bits Worth WatchingThe Grammy-winning Americana artist Margo Price, on Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” talked about writing her album “Strays” while on mushrooms.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightHilary Duff will chat with Seth Meyers about her new children’s book, “My Little Sweet Boy,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutMs. Hill, center, with members of the Rollettes, at a dance rehearsal in North Hollywood.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe champion dancer and choreographer Chelsie Hill has changed lives and shaped careers with the Rollettes, a Los Angeles-based dance team for women who use wheelchairs. More

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    ‘Watch Night’ Review: For Spacious Skies, for Rancorous Waves of Hate

    Conceived in part by Bill T. Jones, this multigenre work at the Perelman Performing Arts Center is interested in homegrown prejudice, but lacks dramatic focus.Entering the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s auditorium, you quickly notice detritus that looks as if it has been blown in from a bewildering protest: A few small American flags here, color copies of a Greetings From Hollywood postcard there, wrinkled fliers everywhere. Some of them are imprinted with the text of the Second Amendment, others a rallying cry: “We fight fascists.” Among the most eye-catching is an ad for N.R.A. memberships, with its promise of “$5,000 Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.”But what about intentional deaths? “Watch Night,” a new multigenre hybrid show, is interested in those, specifically the ones fueled by homegrown prejudice.Inspired, or maybe wrenched into existence, by the massacres at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, this Perelman center commission was conceived by the choreographer and director Bill T. Jones and the poet and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, with a score by Tamar-kali.Joseph often draws directly from the news in his art: His collaboration with the composer Carlos Simon, “brea(d)th,” which the Minnesota Orchestra premiered in May, was informed by the life and death of George Floyd. He wrote the libretto for “We Shall Not Be Moved” (2017), an opera inspired by the police bombing in 1985 of a Philadelphia house occupied by Black activists, with an artistic team that included Jones and Lauren Whitehead, the “Watch Night” dramaturg. Unfortunately, those experiences have not helped focus this new production.The central figure in “Watch Night” is an ambitious Black journalist, Josh (Brandon Michael Nase). “American rage is my beat,” he says early on, “and man, business is boomin.’” Josh, who sounds almost grimly excited by the professional opportunities this anger could create, dreams of finding a story “ready-made for Hollywood.”Kevin Csolak as the Wolf, who orchestrates a shooting in a Black church.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe maintains that stance of studied disaffection in the face of a pair of shootings: one in a Black church, orchestrated by a man nicknamed the Wolf (Kevin Csolak), the other a copycat rampage in a synagogue. Josh, whose mother is Jewish, finds himself involved in conversations about the issues roiling American society at large, and confronts people including his brother, Saul (Arri Lawton Simon).Much of the show consists of characters debating — sometimes amicably, often less so — contrasting philosophies of life and belief: Saul and Josh, who straddle two heritages; the church’s pastor (the excellent baritone Sola Fadiran) and the synagogue’s rabbi (Brian Golub). But the creative team struggles to musicalize and dramatize arguments about, say, forgiveness and repentance.Despite its weighty themes, “Watch Night” is strangely bereft of affecting tension. It would seem impossible that a plot point involving a congregant from the church, Shayla (Danyel Fulton), serving as a guard in the prison holding the Wolf could be unaffecting, but it is.What is most surprising about the production, besides its overreliance on perfunctory ensemble dance, is the awkwardness of Jones’s staging. The Perelman’s adaptable space has been configured so that the audience is split in two, with the halves facing each other. Whenever the music is in an operatic mode, the text is projected along the sides of the stage at an angle that makes it difficult to read while watching the actors. Select sentences and words are also projected to maximize their impact, but the two screens’ visual potential still feels underused. (Adam Rigg did the scenic design; Lucy Mackinnon handled the projections.)A scene from “Watch Night,” with choreography by its director, Bill T. Jones.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe performers often walk up and down the aisles amid the audience, an immersive move that makes them hard to see if they are in your section — a sizable portion of viewers will have a tough time catching a crucial scene toward the end. How can we expect focus from a piece that struggles to exert control over our gaze?Then again, it often feels as if this indecision is embedded in the very fabric of “Watch Night.” In his program note, Joseph says that the new show “doesn’t code ‘switch,’ it code ‘surfs’” among disciplines and styles. There again it comes up short, including musically.The bassist Corey Schutzer and his often jazzy lines drive the eight-piece orchestra led by Adam Rothenberg. But Tamar-kali — whose “Sea Island Symphony: Red Rice, Cotton and Indigo” premiered this summer at Lincoln Center — mostly sticks to a limited palette. (One of the few times your ears may prick up is when she nods to Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.”) The score feels as if it were paddling in place, never catching, let alone boldly surfing a wave that might transport us.Watch NightThrough Nov. 18 at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; pacnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    ‘Sleep No More’ to Close in January

    The Off Broadway production opened at the McKittrick Hotel in 2011, and helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater.After more than a decade of performances, “Sleep No More” — the immersive, Hitchcockian riff on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” — will close the doors of its cargo elevator for good when it plays its final performance on Jan. 28.Rising production costs drove the decision to close, said Jonathan Hochwald, a producer, who also cited an unwillingness to raise ticket prices commensurately. “It’s an enormous undertaking with hundreds of employees,” he said.Created by the English theater company Punchdrunk, “Sleep No More” had a short run in London in 2003 and a longer one in Brookline, Mass., in 2009, in partnership with the American Repertory Theater. The success of that outing encouraged the newly formed commercial production company Emursive to bring it to New York. Emursive found an ideal space: adjoining warehouses in Chelsea that had previously housed nightclubs such as Twilo, Home and Bed. Its 100,000 square feet were reimagined as the McKittrick Hotel. “Sleep No More” began performances there in March 2011, pausing for the pandemic, then reopening two years later, its sold-out performances driven by word of mouth.Reviewing the show in 2011 for The New York Times, Ben Brantley described it as a “movable orgy” and “a voyeur’s delight, with all the creepy, shameful pleasures that entails.”“None of us ever imagined we’d be here talking about the show in 2023 — it was only on sale for six weeks at first,” Felix Barrett, artistic director of Punchdrunk and a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” said on Wednesday. “Above all it was the audiences in New York who embraced our show and made it such a success.”Though it is hardly New York’s longest-running immersive theater event (that honor most likely belongs to “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding”), “Sleep No More” helped to alter and expand the landscape of immersive theater in New York, encouraging new possibilities for design, environment and participation.Moody, dark and decadent, the wordless show attracted a legion of super fans, some of whom saw it dozens of times. Not all of those masked fans behaved appropriately. In 2018 Buzzfeed published an exposé in which performers and staffers detailed multiple instances of sexual misconduct. The postpandemic iteration addressed this, advising attendees to “please give your fellow patrons and the residents a bit of breathing room and keep a respectful distance.”When it closes in January, the show will have played 5,000 performances in its New York City incarnation, serving two million audience members, Hochwald and his producing partner, Arthur Karpati, estimated. For now, the producers plan to continue the McKittrick’s other late-night shows and its bars will remain open, but they are uncertain if they will host another major show. “We want more than anything to finish up strong and to leave a great legacy,” Hochwald said. More

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    ‘The Buccaneers’ Arrives With More Arrivistes

    This Apple TV+ drama joins HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” back for its second season, in portraying the late 19th-century collision of old money and new.A newly moneyed woman in Gilded Age New York is desperate to gain the acceptance of the aristocracy. So she schemes to get the ultimate symbol of old money approval: a box at the exclusive Academy of Music. When she is denied, she helps spearhead the construction of a new see-and-be-seen cultural playground, the Metropolitan Opera House. Take that, aristocracy.Welcome to the second season of HBO’s opulent drama “The Gilded Age,” a series laden with emblematic showdowns between the gaudy arrivistes and the idle drawing-room class. By chance, “The Gilded Age,” which returned last week, is back just ahead of “The Buccaneers,” a new series on Apple TV+ that is set amid the same late 19th-century collision of old money and new, robber barons and debutante balls, gold diggers and status obsession.“The Buccaneers,” which premieres Wednesday, sends its wealthy but not sufficiently connected young ladies, their frocks and their deeply insecure parents all the way to London, skipping the middleman of old American money and going right to the source in search of marriageable dukes and lords. As you might imagine, culture clashes and broken hearts ensue.Donna Murphy as Mrs. Astor, left, and Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell, based on real women like Alva Vanderbilt, in “The Gilded Age.”Barbara Nitke/HBOTV’s Gilded Age dramas are somehow both alluring and repellent. It’s fun to watch ugly Americans make like combative peacocks. And the social dynamics seem to resonate in the 21st century, even if the details feel exotic and unattainable.“Hierarchy of classes is something that people seem to be more preoccupied with right now than at other times in the past,” said Esther Crain, the author of the lavishly illustrated “The Gilded Age in New York” and creator of the historical website Ephemeral New York, in a phone interview. “There’s this vast gulf between the very rich and everyone else, with a vanishing middle class. This really echoes the Gilded Age.”The “Gilded Age” opera house showdown echoes a pitched battle from the end of Season 1, in which Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the Academy of Music snub victim, hosts a buzzy ball at her palatial home for her teen daughter. She invites her daughter’s friend, whose mother, Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), is the unofficial gatekeeper of the old-money elite. But then the gatekeeper snubs the social climber, who subsequently disinvites the gatekeeper’s daughter. The chess game is on, and the children are the pawns.In her book, Crain details the historical events behind both the music hall duel and the dance dust-up. In real life, it was Alva Vanderbilt who hosted a “fancy dress” masquerade ball in 1883, and who snubbed Mrs. Astor’s daughter, Caroline, prompting Mrs. Astor to show contrition to her nouveau riche rival. The showdown was seen as a major victory for new money over old.In actual late 19th-century New York, Alva Vanderbilt was a new-money upstart.Library of CongressCaroline Schermerhorn Astor represented the old guard of New York society.Wikimedia CommonsThe new rich, based in the Fifth Avenue mansions of Manhattan, were largely a product of the Civil War and new fortunes made in the railroad, copper, steel and other industries. (Bertha’s husband, George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, is a railroad tycoon who finds himself dealing with labor issues in Season 2.)Unlike the old-money aristocracy who traced their wealth to their European ancestors, the new rich thrived in industry and flaunted their wealth, much to the old rich’s disgust and chagrin.“They thought, ‘We’re Americans, we’re the new guys, we’ve got something new to sell in this world, and we have a place here,’” said the “Gilded Age” creator Julian Fellowes in a video interview from his home in London. “For me, the 1870s and 1880s was when modern America found itself. The new people building their palaces up and down Fifth Avenue were doing it the American way. This was an American culture — a new way of being rich, a new way of being successful.”Of course, the new rich could also be reckless and dangerous. In Season 1 of “The Gilded Age,” George, who Fellowes modeled on the railroad magnate Jay Gould, drives a corrupt alderman to suicide. He lives not just to defeat his opponents, but to crush them and their families. For him and his ilk, capitalism is a blood sport.Alisha Boe and Josh Dylan in “The Buccaneers,” inspired by real-life “dollar princesses” who married into titled European families.Apple TV+The games are a little different (if only slightly less brutal) in “The Buccaneers,” which is based on an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton. Looked down upon by the New York aristocracy and seeking suitable husbands, five young nouveau riche women high-tail it to London, where they and their financial resources are coveted by title-rich but cash-poor families. Nan (Kristine Froseth) is courted by a sensitive duke. Conchita (Alisha Boe) has a frisky marriage with a lord, whose parents are monstrous, anti-American snobs. All have romantic escapades that are, in many ways, brazenly transactional.“The girls’ mothers are coming over to London in order to effectively sell their girls into the aristocracy,” Katherine Jakeways, the series’s creator, said in a video interview from her London home. “And the aristocracy are welcoming them with open arms because they’ve got roofs to mend.”Added Beth Willis, an executive producer, from her home in Scotland: “How lonely that would be for so many of them. In America they might speak up a bit more at the dining table. They sometimes had their own money. And to come over to England and find these freezing cold houses with roofs literally falling in and being treated like a cash point must have just been awful.”Here, too, there is historical precedent. In one example, the socialite Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the shipping-and-railroad Vanderbilt family, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, becoming perhaps the best known of what were called the “dollar princesses.”“Some of these marriages were arranged and didn’t end happily, but others did end happily,” said Hannah Greig, a historical consultant for “The Buccaneers.” “Sometimes the origins of the marriage were forgotten, and it became a love story. History offers lots of examples that you can draw on, for all of the different experiences that we see in ‘The Buccaneers.’”Both series include characters representative of people who existed in Gilded Age society, even if they were under-acknowledged at the time. In “The Buccaneers,” Mabel (Josie Totah) is torn between a marriage of convenience, to a man, and a romance of passion, with her friend Conchita’s new sister-in-law (Mia Threapleton). In “The Gilded Age,” the old-money Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) carries on a passionate affair with John Adams, a scion of the presidential dynasty, all the while plotting his own marriage of convenience (and wealth) with the Russells’ debutante daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). (In a refreshing twist, the most avid gold diggers in both series are men.)Denée Benton stars in “The Gilded Age” as a member of New York’s Black elite, working with the journalist T. Thomas Fortune, played by Sullivan Jones.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the central characters in “The Gilded Age” is Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a representative of 19th-century New York’s Black elite. At odds with her tradition-minded druggist father, Peggy goes to work for the real-life pioneering Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) and blazes her own trail, even as she faces down racism in her everyday life.Peggy’s story line gives the series a chance to look at issues of inequality that festered beneath the surface of the Gilded Age.“This season especially we see questions about the direction of Black America,” said Erica Dunbar, a Rutgers University history professor and “Gilded Age” historical consultant, in a video interview. “It’s a theme that still exists. What is the best way to move forward for a group of people who have already been marginalized or oppressed for hundreds of years at this point?”It all unfolds against a bloodless but volatile civil war between those who have been rich a long time and their freshly minted competition. The aristocracy’s view of the barbarians at the gate can be summed up by Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has no interest in letting the newbies crash the party: “You shut the door, they come in the window.”But this is a fight Agnes won’t win. She can lock her windows, but the Metropolitan Opera House is coming soon. Despite the pitched battles of yore, if there’s one thing we’ve learned since it’s that money is money. And those who have the most generally have the upper hand, no matter the source of their riches. More

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    ‘The OA’ Creators Are Back With a Murder Mystery

    “A Murder at the End of the World” resembles other luxe murder shows. But the mark of the creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, is clear in its idiosyncratic tone and themes.The filmmakers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have what they call a “garden.” It’s not an actual garden, however. It is what Batmanglij described in a recent interview as a “garden of ideas that exists between us.”“Some of those seedlings we’ve been cultivating for years, since our early days of sitting on skateboards in one of our bedrooms in Silver Lake and talking to each other,” he said last month, sharing a booth with Marling in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. “We were ready to cut one of those blooms and plant it.”The latest product of that garden is their new series, “A Murder at the End of the World,” premiering with two installments Nov. 14 on FX on Hulu. The seven-episode show has a conventional, almost trendy hook: It is a murder mystery set at a remote Icelandic luxury retreat for some of the world’s most influential people, details reminiscent of buzzy recent films and shows like “Glass Onion” and “The White Lotus.” But with its time-jumping structure, uniquely eerie tone and warnings about artificial intelligence and climate change, it is also unmistakably the work of the idiosyncratic creators behind “The OA,” “Sound of My Voice” and “The East.”However even they were surprised by the protagonist they ended up with, a Gen-Z amateur detective named Darby Hart, played by Emma Corrin (“The Crown”). A true-crime author who grew up trying to crack cold cases on internet forums, Darby and her sleuth skills are tested when a guest ends up dead at a gathering hosted by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen) and his former coder wife (Marling), where a remarkably advanced A.I. named Ray (Edoardo Ballerini) serves as an assistant to the guests.“All of a sudden this outlier poppy in the corner, Darby, showed up, and said, ‘I represent the times,’” Batmanglij said.In “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin plays a young true-crime author trying to solve a murder. (With Harris Dickinson.)Chris Saunders/FXMarling, 41, and Batmanglij, 42, talk in metaphors and big ideas. This makes sense if you’ve seen their body of work, which includes surreal sagas about grand topics, among them the afterlife and the end of the world, often featuring characters who consider themselves soothsayers.They have been planting their seeds for decades. They met as students at Georgetown in 2001 and started collaborating a couple of years later when Batmanglij invited Marling, then a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs, to participate in a 48-hour film festival, making a short film over the course of one weekend.The experience convinced Marling, the class valedictorian who was a double major in economics and art (with a focus on photography), to leave her business ambitions behind. “We had found this profound space together,” she said. “We basically have been telling stories in one way or another much in that fashion ever since.”Their first co-written feature, “Sound of My Voice,” was directed by Batmanglij and featured Marling, her long blond hair giving her an ethereal look, as a mysterious cult leader who claims to be from the future. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 alongside “Another Earth,” which Marling also starred in and co-wrote with another Georgetown friend of theirs, Mike Cahill. Both films sold and Marling was the de facto star of that year’s festival. But after their Sundance success and despite bigger offers from Hollywood, she and her cohorts opted to recommit to their indie mission.“We had this instinct of not doing those things, like not playing the girlfriend of the movie star in this sort of empty action film,” Marling said. “And to instead be like, ‘No, let’s keep telling our stories. Let’s keep getting better at telling them.’”Marling and Batmanglij followed up “Sound of My Voice” with “The East,” starring Marling and Alexander Skarsgard, about a woman who goes undercover with an anarchist group committing acts of eco-terrorism.“The OA” only lasted two seasons on Netflix but it built a devoted following.JoJo Whilden/NetflixTheir biggest platform yet came in 2016 when their series “The OA” debuted on Netflix. Marling played a formerly blind woman who arrives home, after a mysterious disappearance, having regained her sight and calling herself “original angel.” She tells the story of her life — which involves Russian aristocracy and a mad scientist experimenting on people with near death experiences — to a group of high schoolers and a teacher, showing them “movements” that can supposedly help them jump dimensions. In the even more ambitious second season, which debuted in 2019, there were plot lines about tree internet and a mind-reading octopus.Critics found the series fascinating and flawed, but it had a passionate following. When Netflix canceled the show after the second season, fans started a hashtag campaign and one even staged a hunger strike outside Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles.“It had scope and ambition and was, by design, not the lowest-budget project around,” said Cindy Holland, who was the streamer’s vice president of original content at the time. “It became clear that it was going to be unsustainable as an ongoing project in that form at Netflix at the time, and it was a fairly sad experience for all of us, including the audience.”Marling said she sees the unexpected end of the series now as almost prophetic. “‘The OA’’s cancellation was a harbinger for a transformation for something that was afoot in the industry,” she said.“The space had been disrupted, a bunch of creativity and market energy had rushed into that space,” she continued. “But now it was going to calcify or solidify into something that in many ways was a broken business model and much worse than what had been before.”“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” Marling said of how she and Batmanglij develop their ideas.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesShe and Batmanglij are still convinced they will finish the story of “The OA” at some point, in some form, but they decided to move on to what would become “A Murder at the End of the World.” The pair wrote the episodes — some together, some separately, some with other writers — and took turns directing. The show’s themes seemed to get only more relevant as they were making it.“It was really eerie, actually, to see with this one the number of things that when we had set out to write it four years ago it was science fiction,” Marling said. “When we talked about any of this stuff with people, we had to explain what is a deep fake, what is an A.I. assistant, what’s a large language model — how does that work? And then by the time we were editing it, to see everything come to pass.”In an interview, John Landgraf, the chairman of FX networks, called the show a “Russian nesting doll of an idea” — a comparison Netflix also used regarding “The OA.”“There was a very rigorous depiction of technology and the physical world,” he said, explaining that the concept appealed to him because it promised a “very grounded, well-researched depiction that nevertheless had a very big set of abstract and imagistic and emotional ideas attached to it.”While fear of the apocalypse hangs over much of the Marling and Batmanglij canon, including “A Murder at the End of the World,” their work rarely feels dystopian.There is also a twinkly-eyed belief in the good of humanity lurking underneath the techno-terrors, and the need to pay attention to feeling over just data.“A Murder at the End of the World” takes place largely at a tech mogul’s remote Iceland gathering for influential people.Chris Saunders/FX“They want to be putting positive ideas out into the world,” said Alex DiGerlando, the series’s production designer and longtime collaborator. He said this optimism manifests in various ways on set — any time they are met with a potentially disheartening scenario, he said, they find a way to see the bright side.Among the roadblocks they hit while filming “A Murder at the End of the World” were supply shortages, Covid outbreaks and disruptive storms. Marling got hypothermia during their monthlong shoot in Iceland. (The hotel’s interiors were built on a soundstage in New Jersey.)“I was kind of blown away, to be honest, by how indefatigable they were,” Landgraf said. “They just literally did not, would not quit on anything until it was the very, very best they could possibly make it.”Marling said that the intensity of her and Batmanglij’s commitment takes root even before they share their ideas with anyone else.“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” she said. “It has a floor and a door, and we can open the door and invite people in.”Floors, doors, gardens — Marling and Batmanglij might mix metaphors, but what’s clear is that they see their stories as tangible objects that they nurture together with a willingness to embrace the unexpected.“We don’t have a favorite plant or tree or seed or sapling in the garden,” Batmanglij said. “We treat them all with so much love because sometimes it’s the one that you don’t water at all that starts blooming.” More

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    Jimmy Fallon Pokes Fun at the Republican Debate’s Lackluster Lineup

    Fallon joked that “tomorrow at 9 p.m., CBS has ‘The Amazing Race,’ and NBC has the opposite.”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.The Not-So-Amazing RaceThe third Republican presidential debate will air on NBC on Wednesday night, live from Miami.Jimmy Fallon joked that tomorrow at 9 p.m., “The Amazing Race” will play on CBS while “NBC has the opposite.”“Five nonviable candidates will assemble onstage for no good reason at all — none of them will be president.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis. What a lineup. It’s like if all the Avengers were Hawkeye.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Most of the pressure is on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will be in front of a home crowd and is reportedly determined to finally break away from the pack. In fact, sources inside his camp say he’s planning to wear his extra-tall Gene Simmons KISS boots.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The debate is at Miami-Dade County Center for the Performing Arts. Yep, for performing arts, because pretending you have a shot when you’re polling at 1 percent, well, that’s acting.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bye-Bye, WeWork Edition)“The co-working space company WeWork filed yesterday for bankruptcy. Wait a minute — again? You already went out of business. I watched a whole mini-series about how you went out of business. And you were still in business? Oh, my God, Trump’s going to win again, isn’t he?” — SETH MEYERS“WeWork went from a $47 billion company to bankruptcy. Somewhere out there, Elon Musk is going, ‘Ooh, challenge accepted!’” — SARAH SILVERMAN“You know what? Maybe this is an opportunity. America has a homelessness crisis, and WeWork has all of the empty building space. You see where I’m going with this, right? We need to give the WeWork guy another $100 billion to solve homelessness.” — SARAH SILVERMANThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel took audience questions for People’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2023 then unveiled him on Tuesday’s show.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe comedian Leslie Jones will sit down with her friend Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutSyreeta Singleton, the showrunner for “Rap Sh!t.” “The music industry is at a really interesting place right now because it really does feel like it’s social-media driven,” Singleton said, “and you got to fake it ’til you make it.”Phylicia J.L. Munn for The New York TimesThe showrunner Syreeta Singleton took her “Rap Sh!t” stars on the road for the Max comedy’s second season, premiering Thursday. More